Smiley would struggle in this chaotic spying game

If the KGB had succeeded in bagging a tiny percentage of those who say they were approached, there would have been no need to lavish billions of roubles on a post-war security apparatus. The Soviets would merely have had to call a staff meeting of turncoats for 9am one Monday and Blighty would have fallen.

Among those who might have been in the KGB’s sights, we learned this week, was David Cameron. In Russia for the first visit by a British prime minister in six years, Mr Cameron had a fascinating tale to tell.

Dateline: a beach on the Black Sea coast, 1985. A young Cameron is visiting Russia in his gap year. Two Russians take him for a bite and ask him about life in England. Once at university, Mr Cameron relates the incident to his tutor, who speculates the men were out to recruit him as a spy. Cripes, as that most gentlemanly of spies, George Smiley, would never say.

Mr Cameron’s anecdote was an attempt to lighten the atmosphere during a fairly fraught visit. The Prime Minister was abroad to open more doors for British businesses.

Last year, UK exports to Russia were up 51%, to £3.45 billion. With 140 million consumers, Russia is a prime economic target for any trading nation, and that’s before one considers all that oil and gas.

Yet, as potential partners go, Russia remains the bear with a hangover from the Soviet ways of doing things. Sir Anthony Brenton, British ambassador from 2004-2008, summed it up in a newspaper article: “Russia’s ruling elite has become immovable and predatory, elections are fixed, corruption is on a par with Nigeria, the legal system is pliable, and the police and security agencies untouchable.”

Mr Cameron did raise the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London but, like Basil Fawlty and the war, he didn’t get away with it. It was a firm “Nyet” to any suggestion of extraditing the chief suspect.

How would John le Carre’s sublime creation, now born again on the cinema screen with the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, approach the new Russia?

With caution and maximum discretion: same as the spying game approached anything in the Cold War era.

The Cold War security services were very successful in keeping their business under wraps. While spectacular events happened – the outing of the Cambridge spies, the London murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov with a poison-tipped umbrella – the cloak of secrecy was kept tightly fastened.

Contrast this with today. What, for instance, would Smiley think of a television programme being used as a recruiting device? When BBC1’s Spooks first aired, visits to MI5’s website went up to 10,000 a week. It’s a wonder any Spooks viewer would want to join MI5 or MI6 given the mortality rate among the fictional agents. From assault by deep fat fryer to death by car bomb, few make old bones.

The reality is that most of the vacancies advertised are administrative or language posts. Somehow, one doubts the agents now in the field arrived via online application forms.

If Spooks is to reality what black is to white, there is at least one area in which it is spot on about the spying game today – the degree to which chaos reigns. Smiley’s people worked in a world of nation states and established powers. Rogue countries aligned themselves accordingly and could thus be kept under control. As long as the big guns kept the nuclear weapons to themselves, a measure of uneasy calm prevailed. With the extent of nuclear proliferation today, the world is arguably at greater risk of war, accident or terrorist outrage.

Smiley’s people would have been at a similar loss with the explosion of people power, and its weapon of choice, the internet. Not that modern security services have shown themselves strong on this front. Which of them saw the Arab Spring coming? Who among them can reliably say where it is heading?

Today’s security services need to be active in two worlds – the physical one and the cyber one.

In the cyber world, anyone with an internet account can post a video on YouTube and cause havoc.

As Wikileaks has shown, a team of hackers can bag and publish diplomatic cables, military documents and any other information they can get their hands on.

Oh my giddy aunt, as once again George Smiley would not have said. It is this murky, fast-moving world, we are led to believe, that has forced western security services to adopt a more flexible approach to right and wrong. Documents now coming to light in Libya, for one, appear to show the extent to which the UK security services helped Gaddafi with dissidents abroad in return for intelligence and other favours.

Smiley would have recognised a grubby bargain when he saw one. He would not have been shocked. One of the most chilling things about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is how relevant it is to today. Now, as then, it’s about information and favours, obtaining them and exploiting them, by any means necessary.

In a post 9/11 world, western security services could be forgiven for feeling a certain invulnerability, even after the failure to prevent that calamity, or 7/7, not to mention their role in the weapons of mass destruction that never were. Their argument is that they walk the battlements so that you don’t have to. As for how they should be judged, don’t look at the mistakes, they argue, look at how many disasters have been prevented. How many? We will never know.

There are spiky questions to be asked about the balance between perceived risk and reality, whether our way of life is as much in peril from the workings of fanatical markets and environmental disaster as common or garden fanatics.

Ordinary citizens are adjusting themselves to this unpredictable, fairly terrifying world. The old certainties – jobs for life, safe banks, honest(ish) politicians – are disappearing. Trust in the security services, post Iraq, is going the same way. Yet the spying game will go on, will thrive even, in this atmosphere. In distrust, as any spy knows, you can always trust.