The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré is a classic espionage novel. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré A local out to stop Alden Pyle confronts Fowler, “Sooner or later, one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.” At the end the novel, Thomas Fowler says of Alden Pyle, “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused…I won’t be involved.” Not much later comes the French collapse at Dienbienphu.
The Quiet American unpacks the growing American involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s. Pyle is out to convert Vietnam though methods learned from an academic textbook. Fowler talks about the futility of interference in the affairs of a Vietnam emerging from French colonial rule and the mindless enthusiasm of a young idealistic American who is an undercover CIA agent, Alden Pyle. In The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s most famous novel, we see the timeless strategic debate over America’s role in the world told through the eyes of a seasoned but cynical British journalist, Thomas Fowler. The books recommended below are remarkable novels that pose similar choices as to how fictional characters (but in fact real people) confront challenges on missions in foreign countries and the impact these missions could have domestically and even globally. In both Iran and the Philippines, we worked with moderate civil society, unsuccessfully in Tehran, with considerable success in Manila.įiction is an excellent way to illuminate the challenges, the dangers, the impact of real issues on real people and how diplomacy and intelligence operatives work. Minister and later acting ambassador to Manila where I once again encountered the split between a Ferdinand Marcos authoritarian government and the assassinations by a communist guerrilla group, the New People’s Army. I monitored these developments in the mid-1970s as a member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff and was struck by the murky choice between the Shah’s government regime and the menace of a fundamentalist Islamist regime. Night in Tehran, my debut novel, deals with the fall of the Shah of Iran and the successor regime of ayatollahs which has become our dangerous adversary for over forty years. Fiction affords a superb platform to explore such themes. This world is marked by officials of intelligence, courage and others who may be personally flawed, who often face high personal risks and choices marked by moral ambiguity. I have been tutored through real world experience on how diplomacy and intelligence operatives work.
I actively dealt with issues in Europe, Asia and the Mideast, with Latin America and Asia, focusing on national security and arms control issues and negotiated with the then-Soviet Union. State Department, has quite naturally drawn me to espionage fiction writing. My 27-year career as a diplomat in countries around the world, and the U.S.
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