The Little Drummer Girl takes us back to 1979 and stays there. The protagonist’s scalding experiences undercover in Ireland were turned into traumatic memories of missions in Iraq. The BBC’s previous le Carré adaptation, The Night Manager, was updated from its original setting in the early 1990s to something like the present. He is Khalil, an accomplished and highly intelligent bomb-maker, dedicated to the murder of prominent Jews in western Europe at the end of the 1970s. The target of all the machinations of his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, now made into a glossy BBC six-part adaptation, is certainly as ingenious and elusive as any of his previous masterminds. If spooks were to be like the apparent blunderers of the GRU, le Carré’s entire oeuvre would be doomed. It is also because his every novel takes it as axiomatic that those with covert purposes (Russian spies, British spies, terrorists) have to be brilliantly cunning at hiding themselves. This is not just because he is an old secret service hand himself, with some professional appreciation of the skill at avoiding surveillance that any decent agent must develop. He was surely shaking his head in dismay as he watched their later avowals of their touristic interest in Salisbury Cathedral on Russian TV. D avid Cornwell, or John le Carré, as we usually call him, must have been wincing as he viewed the CCTV stills of those two Russian visitors to Salisbury.
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