EVERY spy novel turns on the question of betrayal and in the work of John le Carre this is at the heart of every story. His brilliant evocation of the Cold War with its rivalries and tensions reflected in the endless struggle for strategic advantage gave rise to a highly convincing cast of characters.

Le Carre acknowledged the provenance in real life of many of the characteristics he assigned to his protagonists. His unscrupulous con man father appears in A Perfect Spy; the bizarre collection of upper-class state functionaries and arriviste bureaucrats who staff the upper reaches of the Circus are the product of his literary skill and scrupulous characterisation but for anyone with a passing connection with the Civil Service, the intelligence world or Britain’s military caste they possess an authenticity that is more than the product of imagination.

Herein lies the secret of le Carre’s success as an author. For the generations shaped by the Cold War he renders the opaque operations of a secret world — hitherto impenetrable to the ordinary citizen — understandable in human terms and gives us fully three-dimensional characters with faults and foibles. He divides them into the categories innocent and knowing with a generosity that is even-handed except in relation to what we might categorise as the authentic British left and the working class.

Some of his characters are unnervingly real. His post-1968 student milieu of European capitals — with its intrigues and betrayals — is peopled by declassed chancers and bourgeois rebels who emerge in later life having made their peace with the system.

I know from these days too many super revolutionaries who became corporate executives, ultra-left student leaders turned media mouthpieces for imperial war, hyper-Maoists who now sit in the Bundestag rebranded as pro-Nato Greens. It is salutary to see how radical students end up as Labour foreign ministers signing off on the Iraq war and arms exports to the land of Colombian death squads.

His claim to authenticity rested not only on his formidable skill as a writer — his plotting and characterisation rigorous and the final text the result of intensive research and constant editing — but on a real-life career as an intelligence officer.

After a public school education he saw out the 1940s studying foreign languages in Switzerland and joined the army’s Intelligence Corps interrogating people fleeing socialism. This he followed by a period teaching at Eton and as a student at Oxford where he combined academic work with spying on left-wing students, some of whom I know will be reading these lines.

Thus his entry into full-time service in the secret police was easily accomplished. The real-life David Cornwell spent this next part of his spying career in the distinctly unglamorous work of monitoring the Communist Party and handling the lost souls who betrayed their party comrades as informers in the service of MI5.

One of Cornwell’s duties was to attend the funerals of such class traitors among the party membership who died in the service of MI5. There may still be readers of the Morning Star who shared funereal meat and drink with the apprentice spook.

If not the most unsavoury instrument of class rule in Britain in the period when Cornwell was one of its functionaries (this distinction belongs to MI6 and the murderous imperial military and police forces in Ireland, Malaya and Kenya) MI5 was certainly one of the most active.

His mentor and, according to his account, one of the models for George Smiley of Tinker Soldier Sailor Spy fame, was counter-intelligence and infiltration officer John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, with whom he worked in the 1950s.

The conventional accounts of le Carre’s life and work which followed his death a few weeks ago barely record this interlude but it is worth reflecting on these times.

The lives of promising students were blighted. Recollect that a few years later the Civil Service was purged of anyone with Communist Party affiliations.

I knew one eminent Communist scientist whose loss of professional status and career precipitated a catastrophic mental decline and the destruction of a fine mind. A score of elected Communist trade union leaders were barred from meeting government officials, excluded from government premises and hounded by a witch hunt organised by civil service bosses, Catholic Action and the press.

The BBC personnel office included military officers tasked to ensure no-one with communist sympathies was employed or rose to positions of responsibility. I know more than one talented student activist who was offered a broadcast career if they would but drop their Communist Party membership.

We now have proof that the biggest firms in construction and industry ran a well financed intelligence gathering operation for decades which worked in close liaison with the police and other organs of the state to deny hundreds if not thousands of left-wing workers employment and suppress trade union militancy.

Cornwell’s secret police tasks were a subsidiary part of the switch from wartime alliance with the Soviet Union to an intense counterrevolutionary operation carried out throughout Europe and targeted against the emerging socialist bloc and every manifestation of working-class politics.

This included the infiltration of spies and saboteurs into eastern Europe and violent anti-communist operations with gangsters and mafia in every European country where communist parties had led anti-fascist resistance movements. This included assassinations, attempted in the case of the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti and successful in the case of Belgian communist leader Julien Lahaut.

Sponsorship of armed guerilla warfare in the Ukraine, secret armed Nato networks (code named Gladio) in each of these countries and, of course, the routine blacklisting of militants went along with the surveillance and subversion of the peace movement.

What is interesting is that despite his professional preoccupation with the British left John le Carre displays little or no insight into the life and work, characters and thinking of the thousands of working-class activists whose political project he was subverting, little understanding of motivation which moved working people into activity against capitalist exploitation and colonial plunder, for peace and socialism.

It is a highly symptomatic absence that is highlighted rather than negated by his unconvincing portrayal of a party branch secretary played in the 1965 film, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, by Claire Bloom.

The book was a deserved success because it spoke to the truth that espionage work is itself a constant interplay of moral contradiction, unresolved and unresolvable ethical dilemmas and necessarily entails betrayal and deceit.

The film evokes le Carre’s compelling plot with superb direction and acting and if the ending plays to ludicrous representation of the purpose and reality of the Berlin Wall the scenes set in the East German courtroom give some sense that the justice systems in socialist countries were governed not only by a defence of proletarian power but also with evidence and truth.

In this sense the plot and characterisations were genuinely subversive of Cold War representations but amid the drama and tension there is little sense that much intelligence work consists of long hours of watchful boredom rather than high excitement.

Cornwell left internal security work to serve the imperial state in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) firstly in Bonn and later in Hamburg. Britain’s foreign intelligence service in this period was closely involved in the brutal suppression of colonial revolt and, in collaboration with the US intelligence apparatus, in subverting the Iranian government of Mossadegh and in the nationwide bloodletting when Indonesian communists were massacred by prototypical jihadis co-ordinated by MI6 and the CIA.

But from 1960 for four years Cornwell worked in these two cities where the foreign operations of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security (MfS or Stasi) were most advanced and successful.

John le Carre’s fictional works play on the theme of a moral equivalence between the spy organisations of the two antagonistic social systems but there is little which takes real account of the symmetries that characterised this East-West confrontation on German soil.

The CIA-sponsored West German intelligence organisation with which Cornwell worked with in these years was still led and staffed by the Nazis who carried out these same functions under Hitler. Meanwhile his adversaries leading the GDR’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung, the MfS Main Directorate, were International Brigade veterans and anti-Nazi resistance fighters.

We know little of his actual work in Germany but the story has it that his MI5 career ended with Kim Philby’s wholesale exposure of Western intelligence operations against the socialist countries.

George Smiley, the quiet hero of le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy story operates with quiet discretion, a formidable intellect and attention to detail to unmask the traitor at the heart of his fictional Circus.

Smiley is a compelling hero precisely because he deploys psychological insight and emotional intelligence of a rare order and thus inspires loyalty from some and an antagonism grounded in fear and envy from others.

It is his human vulnerability that enables him to account for and discount the class signifiers that prevented his Circus colleagues from seeing the Soviet spy in their number and confronted with his bourgeois wife’s infidelity with the Soviet spy, set aside his own anguish and focus on the evidence.

The real-life Philby was a traitor not to his nation but from within his class and to his class. His passage from anti-Nazi spy under cover as pro-Nazi Times journalist in the Spanish civil war to head of the anti-Soviet section of British intelligence was marked with brilliant success in the fight against fascism and in defence of working-class power.

The emotional damage and physical toll of these years of tension themselves would be a worthy subject for le Carre’s imaginative pen. Instead le Carre offers us the final defection of the fictional Soviet adversary, Karla, who comes over to the capitalist West in an analogy of Soviet socialism’s ultimate betrayal.

This turn at the closing decade of the 20th century allowed le Carre to focus his gaze on the real-life functioning of the capitalist system, the defence of which he devoted the early part of his life.

“Neither Moscow nor Washington” might be the summary of his mature political alignment as a bourgeois liberal while his redemptive condemnation of Blair’s mendacity and the Iraq war showed how he came to see British complicity in imperialism’s wars and depredations as a threat to the moral order.

The final paradox of his life is that he understood with great clarity the corrupting character of corporate capitalist wealth without grasping the more profound truth that only the working-class in power can effect a permanent end to the class antagonism that made his literary work such a compelling picture of our times.

The fictional George Smiley, for all his emotional complexity and sensitivity to the moral disorder of his world, was a loyal servant of the class to which he could be never quite admitted.

Quite who the real person was behind the John le Carre we knew through his literary work remains still a mystery.

Nick Wright blogs at www.21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.