John le Carré, the master of British spy stories, may have died last December, aged 89. But the dastardly world of double agents he relished in exposing lives on.
A British man has been arrested in Germany on suspicion of spying for Russia. German federal prosecutors allege that the man — named only as ‘David S’ and said to work at the British Embassy in Berlin — passed documents to Russian intelligence ‘at least once’ in return for an ‘unknown amount’ of money.
Berlin was the epicentre of le Carré’s world of espionage. He served as a spy in Germany himself and his breakout hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is set in Berlin. His novel is also about that figure beloved of thriller-writers and the reading public — the double agent, as this figure at the British Embassy in Berlin is alleged to be.
The British in particular have a strange approach to double agents.
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