Article: Watching an enemy within

Spy fiction used to explore the murky no man's land between rival superpowers, but now the threat to freedom lurks far closer to home. Henry Porter explains why he writes about the surveillance state

In the final pages of John Le Carre's Smiley's People, we are privy to George Smiley's thoughts as he watches Karla, the Head of the Thirteenth Directorate of Soviet Intelligence, cross a footbridge in Berlin to defect to the West. Smiley "looked across the river into the darkness again, an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite the striving, calling him a traitor also: mocking him yet at the same time ...

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