The author David Cornwall, more famously known by his pen name, John le Carré. Photo is being shared for the purposes of illustration only and will be removed if requested by the owner of the original photo; this site operates as a nonprofit clearinghouse for information on policy issues related to adoption and adoptee rights.
The great British novelist David Cornwall, known to world by the pen name John le Carré, died of complications from pneumonia on Dec. 12, 2020, at the age of 89.
Throughout my entire adult life, le Carré has been a frequent visitor to my thoughts as I have reflected upon my life as an adoptee.
I thought about him again this week, when my former work colleague told me they were an adoptee. This took me like a storm, because this former work associate never betrayed any signs of that status during our two years of closely working together during the pandemic.
This revelation struck me that they were, in my view, like me—part actor, part “mole.” Le Carré popularized that term to describe those who burrow deeply into another country’s intelligence services to serve another master.
I again realized that my former coworker, like me, was an accomplished master at hiding this most important aspect of their identity as we navigated our public worlds much the ways spies do, with hidden realities and public faces that never betray our true allegiances and actual identities.
Why le Carré matters to my adoptee persona
Foremost I remain a lifelong fan of le Carré because of his great skills as a writer.
I also admire him because we share a few core things in common and because of his ability to give shape to places of ambiguity that so perfectly matches my own worldview.
Prior to becoming a globally famous author, Le Carré once served in Britain’s intelligence services. He was recruited by a so-called talent scout while living outside of England. He was, in short, a British spy.
A native to the intelligence world, le Carré served in Britain’s MI6 and MI5 intelligence services before he became one of the most successful writers of the modern spy genre. His personal experience gave him an intimate understanding of world of spy craft.
After a short time in the service of Britain’s intelligence services, le Carré exposed it again and again in his written work that became celebrated works of fiction, TV adaptations, and films. He wrote 29 novels and books throughout an amazingly productive career. He was despised for his portrayal of intelligence services by some U.S. and British spy masters, but his work was also used by the former KGB to help educate its agents on the profession and the thinking of the USSR’s adversaries.
My affection for le Carré’s writing stems from being born into a world that oddly matches the spaces he painted with words for decades.
In my case, I am an adoptee, recruited to the service of adoption as an infant, with a fake birth certificate and new name and new family. (See my guide comparing le Carré’s spy craft jargon with my own adoption jargon for a quick comparison.)
As an adoptee, I betrayed my forced service to the world of adoption in 1989 when I found my biological family and original identity.
I created a jargon guide comparing terms used in the fictional writing of John le Carré and the world of adoption, with common terms I selected (my guide is not meant to be exhaustive). Here I compare the similarities of “agents” and “adoptees.” (Click on this image to see the full jargon guide.)
My final betrayal came later in my life as a writer, when I exposed the dark world of adoption few Americans wish to understand. Without trying to be like le Carré, I also realized after publishing my book that I had showed the world of adoption for what it was and is, as he did with spy craft.
The fantastic stories that poured from le Carré’s imagination frequently revealed the truth of human nature and the world of espionage. In my case, I relied on a foundation of facts to document adoption for what it truly is. My portrayal to many who cannot see past the façade of the U.S. adoption seems impossibly dystopian and even science fiction.
In telling the truth, I was a traitor to the fate I was selected to live throughout my life. So like le Carré, I was both an insider and outsider looking back in.
Le Carré’s influence spans throughout my life
I first read John le Carré’s masterful fiction on the murky, amoral, and duplicitous world of spy craft and espionage when I was traveling in Asia in the late 1980s.
It was good material for my long periods of doing nothing on trains and buses or in tourist cafes. It was the time and place to immerse myself in his universe. I came back to his writing several times since. I always connected to him as an author because he understood the complexities of deception and lies as fixtures in the human landscape, particularly the institutions empowered to do the dirty work of espionage and also organized crime.
Wrote one biographer on the famous writer: “Working in the intelligence services often involves pretending to be something other than what you really are; and pretending to be doing something other than what you are really doing. To paraphrase a line of David’s, spying is lying.”
Le Carré’s writing inspired one of the most memorable spy television series ever, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, from 1979, starring Alec Guinness and based on his 1974 novel of the same name. I first watched it when it aired on my local PBS station when I was still in teens living in St. Louis. I was mesmerized by it.
This wasn’t the world of sexual intrigue and James Bond fantasy entertainment. This was a grittier world, run by bureaucrats and laced with paranoia and dishonesty at every corner. It taught me a way of seeing and thinking too that matched my understanding of the world around me I already possessed.
Le Carré’s fictional but also honest portrayals of organizations whose mission is grounded in deception and lies naturally connected with me as an adoptee.
It is not coincidence that I have been an admirer of the work of John le Carré most of my adult life. We both understand the world of deception and conflicting allegiances.
I saw myself in that world.
The national adoption system that shaped every aspect of my life had falsified my identify, hid my past, lied to me at every step of my mission to find the truth about myself. That system engaged in duplicity that le Carré’s famous characters, spymaster George Smiley and arch Soviet rival Karla, would certainly respect for its astounding resiliency and power to fool all onlookers.
Two years ago, I wrote a note on my white board I would write a story about working in government, but almost like a classic le Carré mole. That mole had to operate in secret as they tried to reveal intelligence to those outside of the “Circus,” what le Carré’s characters referred to as their intelligence agency system.
I never followed through, because my idea was for a fictional story. I decided not to write that version of this story because of the nature of my work. My professional work required me to not share the secrets of my Circus and my circle of coworkers.
In my case, I knew more about the nature of my large system, the equivalency of Smiley’s Circus, than my handlers thought I knew. That was a byproduct of growing up as an adoptee. I hid this from everyone. None of my coworkers at the time knew my identity as an adoptee, except one who I trusted on this secret. Had I shared my past, I would have been treated with suspicion, as most adoptees are if they share this fact in a work setting.
The story I had storyboarded in my head remains unwritten, except in fragments now.
This promotional photo of John le Carré’s book Our Kind of Traitor is an excellent pairing of his creative work and the man who spent a life exploring deception and betrayal.
To be a mole and liar
Simply being an adoptee and working in a bureaucracy makes one a mole by default.
Adoptees, after all, are lifelong double agents.
We are early in life recruits to take on alternate identifies, as we try to reveal our hidden truths, all while maintaining a façade of loyalty to our “cover”/adoptive families, which many of us are not related to genetically or via any biological family connection.
All of us understand the nature of lies and deception.
Our lives and even vital records are products of these activities baked into the framework of U.S. and global adoption. Over decades, adoptees must, often in order to survive, learn how to fool those around them. Those deceived are family members, friends, employers, and even themselves. It becomes instinct.
So in le Carré I saw my adoptee identity with acute clarity.
In describing his identity, Le Carré said, “I’m a liar. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.” But le Carré also, through his gifts as a writer, shined a harsh light on the Circus, its faults, and its flawed members. He exposed it, without ever celebrating it.
As someone who has worked in government now for decades, I rarely talk about my hidden identity, even though I have revealed these details in my memoir about my life having had my identity changed. My book was my way to expose the corrosive nature of a system that promotes lies and deception routinely, to such a degree that those most harmed by it won’t even reveal its darkest secrets despite having that knowledge.
Like le Carré, I have had multiple names—three in fact, all with legal identity documents created by the Circus that controls my legal identity, the state of Michigan’s public health bureaucracy called the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Its records—my identity and life history files, that it refused to release to me, like countless thousands of Michigan-born adoptees—are more protected than U.S. national security documents of the Office of President of the United States.
My top-secret files include personal dossiers on my first year of my life. They were heavily redacted and released in limited form after many efforts to withhold them. The originals, whose content I will never truly know, are still locked in a safe file in a massive bureaucratic warehouse in Lansing, Michigan, that le Carré himself would appreciate.
After decades of fighting this bureaucracy for facts about my identity, I now have documentation that has pieced together my life in the secretive vital records files in Lansing.
They became the basis of several chapters of my book, focusing on these secret files. I may never truly know about others records still hidden in my adoption files by state law.
This is a Google images screenshot of how the author has been photographed over the years. This photo is being shared for the purposes of illustration only and will be removed if requested by the owners of the original photos shown here; this site operates as a nonprofit clearinghouse for information on policy issues related to adoption and adoptee rights.
Le Carré’s world without moral clarity and my world as an adoptee
One of the things I admire most about le Carré is his honest skepticism about institutions like his famous fictional Circus, and also his lifelong skepticism about the purity of ideologies, including of western democracies and also the left.
As The Guardian’s finely crafted Dec. 13, 2020 obituary on his life and meaning noted, “…he was not a natural fellow-traveller or much of a man of the left.” I too frequently find myself unable to find comfort there or embrace its modern and social-media charged language of liberation and its post-Marx reinvention to the modern political movements that have different shapes around the world.
Adoptee rights advocacy in the United States, as a loosely defined amalgamation of interest groups and the vast sea of persons shaped by adoption, is a collective movement that is not that different from other movements that have foundations in leftist and liberation thinking. Those in that world are, by default, defectors from the adoption system, and they are impossible to pigeonhole. There is no monolithic identity or even clearly defined national consensus what this space truly means.
Maybe I feel too close to le Carré’s world, where I see the fractured systems on all sides, even those who promote a vision of being “right” in a world where morals are constantly shifting. In the end, I have never truly found my place the adoptee rights world, thought I write about it often and promote reasons why reforms are needed to restore legal rights to millions of adoptees.
As I noted in my guide comparing le Carré’s jargon with my take on Adoption jargon, an “angry adoptee” may also be the adoptee “agent” who turns against the self-declared adoptee-led “opposition”: “Angry adoptees may also be adoptees who do not support other adoptee groups or ‘thought leaders’ or who don’t make public statements that align with trending adoptee advocacy ideas found in published writing and social media. They are often perceived as disloyal to the noble ‘rebellious cause,’ but still are not quite traitors.”
In the end, though, when you are recruited into the world of Adoption, you join a fellowship, similar to the way there is a camaraderie in the world of espionage.
In my view, le Carré could easily have been talking about being an adoptee instead of spies, in how we understand the rules of the world we live in and how we navigate it. In his interview with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air in 2017, a few years before his death, le Carré shared this assessment.
“You know, in the end—and it applies to doctors, scientists, and it applies to spies—people who are using the same techniques, developing the same techniques, who have the same attitude towards human beings, who put expediency and outcome over method, they are a brotherhood or a sisterhood or what you will,” le Carré said. “The moment you get together with—the moment I get together with some retired general from the Mossad, I find we understand each other very quickly. It’s a shared attitude that creates this masonry, and it’s very spooky. But – and it can also be profoundly disconcerting, but—because they make assumptions about me particularly, which are quite misplaced. But nevertheless, we are, in some spooky way, colleagues.”
Suggested articles on the life of John le Carré:
- Spying is Lying: How David Cornwell Became John Le Carré, by Adam Sisman
- Novelist John Le Carré reflects on his own ‘Legacy’ of spying, by NPR/Terry Gross
- John le Carré obituary, by The Guardian