'An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?' Roy Bland asks George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). 'Scott Fitzgerald,' Smiley replies. The aphorism, or at any rate Bland's paraphrase, applies just as well to a double-agent. Or to any spy: Smiley and his kind perpetrate all sorts of illegal, immoral and anti-democratic acts in the name of democracy - theft, blackmail, extortion, kidnapping, murder. Their activities are defensible only on the grounds that the end, to paraphrase the 17th-century Jesuit theologian Hermann Busenbaum, justifies the means.

LRB 3 November 2005 | PDF Download