Smiley's Conspiracy
John LeCarré, Ian Fleming, and the Art of the Plausible
The words “conspiracy theory” get thrown around a lot. Some see conspiracy theories as the best explanation for our current world. Others use the term to dismiss uncomfortable evidence. (“Child trafficking is just a QAnon conspiracy theory!”) If we’re going to talk about the issue, we first must define what we’re talking about.
First, we have to acknowledge that conspiracies happen all the time. A few local businesses get together in a smoky back room and set price floors; a couple accountants and junior employees set up a scheme to embezzle money from clients; a politician takes an envelope full of money from a developer in exchange for pushing through the proper permits. People get arrested for conspiracies all the time, which suggests that many, perhaps most conspiracies are never brought to light.
Basic engineering theory shows that the more complex your mechanism, the more failure points you must deal with. A conspiracy that involves a few people who know and trust each other is relatively safe—though very few criminals are entirely trustworthy when they’re under an interrogation lamp. But as your conspiracy stretches out to hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of participants, preserving radio silence becomes increasingly difficult.
People have trouble keeping secrets. A conspiracy of three or four can vet its participants closely. A conspiracy of thousands is likely to include at least one incompetent idiot, informant, or loose-lipped jabberjaw. And once the genie gets out of the bottle, it’s very difficult to put him back. Every conspiracy is one leak away from exposure and every conspirator is a potential failure point.
That being said, there are certainly cases where large organizations successfully store and manage large quantities of secret information. The CIA, NKVD, and many other espionage agencies acquire data from many sources and use it to launch classified operations. They ensure secrecy by keeping information compartmentalized and shared on a “need to know” basis. Only a few people know the full scope of the operation; others know only that they have been assigned a task.
Yet even with all these precautions secret information regularly gets sold, published, or leaked to enemies. Daniel Ellsberg was so disgusted by America’s Vietnam policies that he leaked the Pentagon Papers. Pressed for money after a messy divorce, Aldrich Ames sold classified information to the Soviet Union between 1985 and his 1994 arrest. Jonathan Pollard provided classified information to Israel. Even the best espionage agencies struggle to keep a lid on their operations.
Still, while there are occasional leaks, these agencies as a general rule succeed in keeping their secret operations secret. So we must acknowledge that large organizations are indeed capable of pulling strings from the shadows. Conspiracy theories may seem unlikely, but we cannot dismiss them out of hand as impossible. Let’s step into the shadows for a moment and learn how professional spies do—and don’t do—covert operations.
“It’s a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not. You do live by rather different standards, don’t you? I mean you have to. I accept that. I’m not being judgmental. Our aims are the same after all, even if our methods are different…
I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British, We can’t expect you people to determine our policy for us, can we? We can only ask you to further it. Correct? Tricky one, that.”
Rather than chase after him, Smiley sat on a rusted swing seat and huddled himself more tightly in his coat, till finally Lacon stalked back and perched beside him. For a while they rocked together to the rhythm of the groaning springs. [1]
When we hear the word “spy,” we often imagine James Bond. He’s smooth, stylish, and seductive. Evil overlords, secret criminal organizations, and Korean assassins with razor blade bowler hat boomerangs are no match for 007. Her Majesty’s Secret Service knows it can count on Bond to take care of the worst crises.
There’s only one problem: Bond is a great action hero, but as a spy, he sucks.
The best spy is the one nobody notices. James Bond is about as subtle as his Savile Row tailored suits, British sports cars, and revolving door of supermodels hanging on his arm. He regularly gets involved in public fisticuffs, uses his real name, and is known to virtually every spy and criminal in the world. They call them “secret agents” for a reason. Bond is anything but.
David Cornwell, who wrote under the pen name “John Le Carré,” spent years in MI5 and MI6. He was finally able to retire from the trade when his 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became an international bestseller. George Smiley, his most well-remembered character, is a paunchy, unremarkable man who is more likely to be mistaken for an accountant than a spy. You wouldn’t remember Smiley fifteen minutes after you met him.
Fleming’s villains are easy to spot. SMERSH, SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Auric Goldfinger, and Dr. No are cartoonish bad guys. They possess few redeeming qualities and exist largely as foils for Bond. Readers never find themselves concerned about Bond’s ethics, nor does 007 ever have to worry about expense reports or political bickering between his superiors.
In le Carré’s world, everybody is compromised. Spies for every country recruit informants, manipulate assets, spread disinformation, and sacrifice individuals for larger objectives. One gets the sense that the principal difference between British, Soviet, and American spies is the flag they serve. Espionage is a profession like diplomacy or politics, with all the backbiting, deception, and bureaucratic infighting that entails.
Espionage agencies have budgets. Those budgets may be classified, but they are still audited. Spies in the field are often pulled from assignments because the higher-ups no longer feel the intelligence justifies the expense. They are also prone to infighting. Agents jockey for position, obstruct rivals, and occasionally sacrifice old friends in pursuit of career advancement. They behave like bureaucratic institutions, not like comic book teams.
Spies do not have unlimited funds for superweapons and race cars. They do not have a blank check to break the law or assassinate citizens. These operations carry enormous political, legal, and financial risks. Someone has to justify the costs, approve the expenditure, and answer uncomfortable questions if things go wrong. Any “license to kill” comes with many terms and conditions, and most spies will go through their entire career without using a weapon.
Any secret bureaucratic operation will be bound by these constraints. This is not to say that there are never rogue operations, cover-ups, misappropriation of funds, or overreach. But those actions will be kept as limited in scope as possible and involve as few participants as possible. The more sensitive the operation and the greater the risk of exposure, the smaller the circle tends to be.
This does not conclusively disprove the existence of large-scale conspiracies involving thousands of people. But it suggests that most secret operations are far more cautious, compartmentalized, and limited in scope. Many conspiracy theories assume unlimited budgets, flawless coordination, and perfect secrecy. These visions of vast all-powerful conspiracies owe more to James Bond than George Smiley.
Let’s see what George Smiley would have to say about staging the Sandy Hook shooting.
First, he would want to know what the operation required. How many men will be on the ground for the staging? Where did you hire the crisis actors? Will you be using child crisis actors or dummies? Each has advantages and disadvantages. Have the local police been briefed on this, or are you going to be using police actors? How closely have you vetted the people involved, keeping in mind the consequences of an unauthorized disclosure? (NDAs are for corporations; espionage agencies aren’t going to rely on a signature and a promise).
Smiley would be asking many hard questions about the size of the operation. Every participant who knows the truth must be trusted to remain silent indefinitely. That means every participant is a potential failure point. He would want to know why a supposedly competent organization is choosing a method that creates so many opportunities for exposure. And being Smiley, he might even note that it would be considerably easier to send in a single shooter, then terminate him with extreme prejudice.
Intelligence officers spend their careers reducing risks, limiting participants, and compartmentalizing information. The larger the operation, the less it resembles a CIA black op and the more it resembles a Hollywood screenplay.
Smiley would then ask what exactly the agency has to gain from this fake shooting. When told that it is an operation to promote federal gun control laws, he’d mutter something about the bloody Americans and their guns. Then he would ask if there weren’t simpler ways to get that message across. Put a few billboards on the side of the road; run ads on the telly; work with a charismatic politician on a moving speech to be televised at the next convention. He might conclude by noting the team needs a public relations firm, not an intelligence agency.
He would not necessarily regard the staged shooting as immoral; Smiley has spent his career surrounded by misdirection, disinformation, manipulation and outright lies. But he would regard it as something he finds even more distasteful: sloppy, poorly constructed, and unnecessary. A competent intelligence officer looks for the simplest, most reliable path. This staged shooting maximizes costs, risks, and opportunities for exposure. It achieves nothing that could not be accomplished by less dramatic means.
Covert operations are expensive and risky. Secrecy is difficult to maintain. Smiley would rather use his limited resources to necessary intelligence work. This whole operation would strike him as a comedy of errors.
Again, this does not rule out an agency going rogue and doing something remarkably stupid. Never underestimate an organization’s capacity for collective foolishness. But this particular plot isn’t even something out of a James Bond movie. It’s Dr. Evil plotting world domination with Number 2, Frau Farbissina, and Fat Bastard. It would require a covert operations team to violate all the basic principles of intelligence work, from compartmentalized information and limited exposure to clear objectives and efficient use of resources.
The tradecraft of espionage favors simplicity. The tradecraft of conspiracy theory often relies on ever-growing circles of influence. The participants in the Sandy Hook staged shooting have remained silent because they fear for their lives and their families. This means they are being watched by enforcement officials who know the hoax and are willing to take extreme measures to keep it silent. And, presumably, somebody is watching over those officials.
The news media has gone along with the hoax because journalists are controlled by government handlers. But the news media regularly issues stories that are unflattering to the government. And while Alex Jones was ultimately sued due to what Sandy Hook deniers call lawfare and others call libel, he “exposed the truth” for years before he was dragged to court.
The Hunter Biden laptop and Trump’s visits to Epstein Island have been widely publicized. Efforts to suppress the first failed miserably; the second remains a popular topic on social media. If the government apparatus couldn’t keep a lid on these embarrassing stories, are we to assume they kept an operation the size of Sandy Hook under wraps for almost fifteen years?
George Smiley spends Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy looking for a single mole in “the Circus” (a fictionalized MI6). He narrows his list of possible moles as the story progresses; his circle of guilt grows smaller with each bit of information he gathers. Ultimately, he finds the mole because he is seeking a precise goal, not a chart listing the friends and family of every prospective Russian agent on British soil.
Conspiracy theories more frequently act through a process of agglutination. Instead of concentrating on a single guilty party or organization, the conspiracy grows to include other events. A disputed election is linked to the pandemic; the pandemic is linked to secret societies, intelligence agencies, and global financial institutions. The ideal is a single “Great Conspiracy” that accounts for everything from chemtrails and COVID death shots to Sandy Hook and the fake moon landing.
These theories are attractive because they provide the semblance of structure. A world filled with competing interests, accidental events, bureaucratic failures, and unpunished crimes is frightening and uncertain. Reducing every problem to a single cause makes the world feel like a simpler place.
But the world is not a simple place. George Smiley solves mysteries by eliminating contradictions. The Great Conspiracy responds to contradictions by absorbing new events, new enemies, and new assumptions. And what started as an attempt to explain the world ultimately becomes a way of explaining everything—and therefore explains nothing at all.
Smiley’s methods lead to unpleasant truths, but they provide the Circus with options. A mole can be arrested. An agent can be recruited. A compromised operation can be abandoned, repaired, or concealed behind a plausible alibi. Smiley’s purpose is not merely to understand the world but to act within it.
The Great Conspiracy gives believers a malevolent Demiurge who controls every aspect of modern life. He prints money, programs minds, and stages the events that the unenlightened mistake for reality. Yet where the Gnostics believed escape was possible through spiritual awakening, the Great Conspiracy offers no path to liberation. It gives believers nothing but the satisfaction of knowing that the Demiurge exists. It tells them they live in the Matrix but offers no Neo.
This is the paradox at the heart of the Great Conspiracy. Believers imagine themselves empowered by hidden knowledge, yet each new revelation only further cements the Conspiracy’s ultimate power. The more comprehensive the conspiracy becomes, the less room remains for meaningful action. Smiley’s discoveries create choices. The Great Conspiracy eliminates them.
My objection is not to conspiracies. Conspiracies happen every day. Neither do I doubt that powerful people lie. Everybody lies. Powerful people have more incentive to do so than most, and greater resources to broadcast their lies and silence inconvenient truths. Many falsehoods have been accepted as facts until exposed. Many conspiracies were dismissed as rumors or paranoia until facts and evidence came to light.
I object to the belief that a single, hidden force controls every significant event in our lives. There’s a difference between “powerful” and “omnipotent.” Tycoons, oligarchs, governments, and corporations all compete and pursue conflicting interests. They feud; they undermine rivals; they struggle for advantage. They are embarrassed by scandals, exposed by whistleblowers, and thwarted by competitors. Like every individual and every institution, they are limited by ambition and error.
Many believe that Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is the correct one. That’s a misreading. Many innocent people have spent decades in prison because juries believed a simple, compelling, and incorrect accusation. It is entirely possible that there is more going on behind the scenes than we suspect. But while the simplest answer may not be correct, it’s generally the best place to start.
We also hear that “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” That’s another misreading. Extraordinary claims require the same sort of evidence as ordinary ones; evidence that can be examined, tested, and verified. If someone tells you the sun sets in the west, you can look toward the horizon at dusk and see whether the claim is true . If you’re told the world is secretly ruled by shapeshifting reptilian aliens, you are entitled to ask what evidence led the claimant to that conclusion.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that we cannot find proof of a conspiracy does not mean that no conspiracy exists. A competent covert operation will take careful steps to ensure plausible deniability. There have been many conspiracies that only came to light years later.
But absence of evidence is not proof of a cover-up, either. A lack of proof may mean somebody concealed the truth, but it may also mean that the original claim was invalid. If every failure to find evidence is treated as evidence, then the theory becomes impossible to test. If you find evidence, it’s proof of a conspiracy; if you find no evidence, it’s proof of a very skillful conspiracy.
The world is full of conspiracies. It is not governed by one. Skepticism not only requires us to question official narratives. It also demands that we question our own.
[1] John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. London: Book Club Associates, 1975. 73.