James Smith on the impact of the SOE on post-war spy fiction
As Guy Woodward’s last post suggested, a mooted collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and John le Carré on a film addressing treachery and deception in the SOE remains one of the most tantalizing unfulfilled projects in modern cinema. The SOE however remained a constant point of interest in le Carré’s writings (as explored in more detail here), and appears to have inspired a series of plots, character names and myths which informed various novels.
Over five decades, the ghostly legacy of the SOE can be felt on various occasions across his fictional corpus. The Looking Glass War (1965) seems to take its main plot line from a prior SOE operation: in this early novel the SOE is reimagined as the sleepy ‘Department’, a shadow of its glorious wartime Baker Street iteration and limping on in the alien context of the Cold War. It has also been suggested that the SOE and SIS veteran David Smiley was the source for the name of le Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley, and there is an ironic reference to the SOE’s official historian M.R.D. Foot in A Perfect Spy (1986). In the late novel A Legacy of Spies (2017), Peter Guillam is said to be the son of a SOE member who died in the war. And le Carré’s memoir The Pigeon Tunnel (2016) suggests that legends about the SOE form part of the institutional mythology passed on to new recruits into British intelligence.
While the SOE is only occasionally directly named by le Carré, it can be seen silently to underpin so much of his work, and forms a fascinating example of how the SOE shaped later developments of spy fiction long after the agency was disbanded in 1946.
James Smith explores the influence of the SOE on John le Carré’s writings, and on The Looking Glass War in particular in ‘John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War: imagining the Special Operations Executive – Secret Intelligence Service rivalry as post-war counterfactual history’, Intelligence and National Security 38.2 (2023).