“What do you think the spies are?” Priests, saints, martyrs, monks in their cells weighing Good and Evil? Philosophers weighing the pros and cons? Moralists who measure everything they do against the trebuchet of the word of God or of Karl Marx? Error, they are a sordid procession of conceited fools, pathetic bastards, miserable bastards like me. Poor guys, drunks, fags, cuckolds, officials who foolishly play cowboys and Indians to light up their rotten little lives.exclaims George Smiley, one of the most famous spies in contemporary literature, in The Spy who came in from the cold, the novel which, in 1963, revealed John le Carré. Former agent of MI6, the British intelligence service, while he was secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn, Germany, the master of the contemporary spy novel, with Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, knows what he speaks…
This article is taken from “Special Edition Le Monde: The Spies” 2023. This special issue is on sale in kiosks or on the Internet by visiting the site of our shop.
However, these salaried liars, these followers of treason, these unscrupulous assassins, these serial dupers, these interloping plotters, these troubled individuals with fluctuating identities never cease to agitate the imagination and fantasies of readers. (trices) or spectators that we are. Novelists, film directors, screenwriters of television series seize with an appetite that never seems satisfied with the figure of the spy (more rarely the spy, let’s face it, apart from Modesty Blaise, the heroine of a comic strip by Peter O’Donnell, adapted for the cinema by Joseph Losey, or of Kléo, a recent German series), probably to embody the adventurer, often solitary, of the confused times that we have been living through since the end of the Cold War, the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the awakening of Russian imperialism…
Since antiquity, in the‘Iliad of Homer or‘Aeneid of Virgil, some soldiers in the shadows practice the adage: “The whole art of war is based on deception. »
The case is far from new. Since antiquity, in the‘Iliad of Homer or‘Aeneid of Virgil, a few soldiers in the shadows practice the adage of a Chinese general of the VIe century BC, Sun Tzu: “The whole art of war is based on deception. » Closer to us, in 1821, the American James Fenimore Cooper entitled his second novel The spy, where he tells the adventures of Harvey Birch, sent by George Washington to infiltrate the British army during the War of Independence, but whose real nature of the mission will not be discovered until his death. In 1841, in A dark affair, Honoré de Balzac is interested in an ex-spy named Malin, who has heard of a plot hatched against Napoleon by his former employer, Fouché, the Minister of the Interior, and who finds himself sequestered for not revealing such actions, then attributed to royalists.
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