He kept details about his activities in intelligence organizations until his death: Who is John le Carré?

The relations of the author, who died at the age of 89, with the espionage organization of which he was once a part and with his former colleagues, as well as their attitude towards the author, were always complex.

Le Carre, the author of books including The Delegate, The Traitor, and The Gardener, stated that the Cold War discourse that determined the framework of his previous books was replaced by anti-Islamism.

Born in 1931, John le Carre began working for the secret services while studying German in Switzerland in the 1940s.

A former Ministry of Foreign Affairs employee, le Carre became known worldwide with his book 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold', which he wrote in 1963.

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was an English author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. "A sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, due to his strong disapproval of Brexit, he took out Irish citizenship, which was possible due to his having an Irish grandparent.

A number of other books written by the author after this book became cornerstones of the spy novel genre.

According to some critics, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union were not good for Le Carre. The demise of the Cold War, which provided an exciting framework for his novels, was to the author's detriment.

However, le Carre disagrees; In his interview with the BBC in 2013, he said that the "fight against terrorism" discourse provided him with a new ground and became his "savior".

Le Carre also said he was of the view that Islam had been "demonized" by fundamentalists on both sides and portrayed as a great enemy, like Soviet communism.

The author's bestselling books have been translated into dozens of languages and 12 of them have been adapted for television, cinema, or radio.

Who is John Le Carre?

John Le Carre was born on 19 October 1931 in Dorset, England. He began his formal education at St Andrew's Preparatory School and continued at Sherborne School. From 1948 until 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Berne. He then attended Lincoln College in Oxford and graduated in 1956.

John Le Carre, who taught at Eton College for two years, left Eton in 1959. For the next five years, he worked for the British Foreign Office. He first served as second secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn, then was transferred to Hamburg for political service as consul. He wrote his first novel in 1961.

He spied

Writers often draw inspiration from their experiences, but le Carré's experiences within the intelligence agencies were "secret" and remain confidential today. Therefore, it is very difficult to know where reality ends and fiction begins in his novels, and he was well aware of how valuable the mystery this created was.

His years working in the UK's domestic and foreign intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, may have been the inspiration for his writings, but le Carré preferred to keep the facts tightly secret.

The main feature of the period during which the author, whose real name is David Cornwell, worked in the British intelligence agencies, was that it was a gloomy and turbulent period.

This was a period when moles were revealed one after another within the intelligence organizations.

"I had just completed my training when George Blake, a very old and valued member of the intelligence community, was exposed as a Russian agent," John le Carré later recalled.