MOVIES : The Man Who Made a Spy Ordinary : John le Carre wrote the book on Cold War espionage with a popular character named George Smiley, then The Wall fell

How a mellow-voiced officer in the British Foreign Office named David Cornwell became John le Carre he says he no longer remembers at all. It is French for “the square,” as in the village square, which is no help at all, except that it does have a slightly exotic Continental ring.

The thing was that Foreign Office staff were not allowed to publish under their own names and that Cornwell had begun to write fiction in his spare time. A publisher had accepted his first novel, “Call for the Dead,” and, by inspirations lost to history, John le Carre became the author, or vice versa.

The novel introduced, in a fairly minor capacity, an FO investigator named George Smiley, whom the author characterized as a “breathtakingly ordinary” man, but who has become perhaps the best-known spy in modern times in books and television series, among them “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Smiley’s People.”

Then, as in most of the books that followed, Cornwell’s theme was Cold War espionage, and the author revealed a knowledge of spycraft that could in some part, at least, only have come from firsthand knowledge. In Los Angeles recently for the premiere of “The Russia House,” adapted by Tom Stoppard from the le Carre novel, Cornwell admitted that in his time he had been “a minor spook,” which is about as much as he has ever said on the subject.

“As the Cold War was ending, the critics were keen to say that it would be the end of all of us who wrote about the Cold War. The truth is it came as a blessed relief. The Cold War and I were sick of each other. The change came into my life at a perfect time,” Cornwell says.

(It seems peculiar to write Cornwell. But, unlike film stars who bury their old names when they take on the new, the author continues to answer more readily to “David” than to “John.”)

He had sensed the changes that were coming and was impatient to regard the later world. He had also, from the beginning, been less interested in the ideological conflict as such than in the private lives of the spies of any persuasion, and most especially in the impact of their livelihoods on the personalities.

Le Carre’s newest book, “The Secret Pilgrim,” due in mid-January, is a kind of farewell tour by George Smiley, now retired but fetched back to the British equivalent of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to pass along his wisdom to a new generation of spies in training. He has been invited by the book’s narrator, Ned, who also figured in “The Russia House” (played by James Fox in the film).

The novel is a kind of spiritual autobiography of Ned, “disturbing and almost poetic,” as Cornwell says. Ned has put together fragments of love, brief affairs, in lieu of the great love he had forgotten how to give, or receive. Facing retirement himself, Ned will have to relearn how to live.

Smiley’s reminiscences and observations trigger memories in Ned of past capers and the novel becomes a linked series of stories, almost novella length. Cornwell says some of the stories are whole-cloth fabrications, others adapted from realities he knew or heard about. An ironic and moving story centering on a pair of cuff links and an uncommon kindness by a senior spook, he says, did take place in the life of a late head of MI6. A source who had observed the Khymer Rouge at close hand gave Cornwell the material for the longest of the stories. The book is having a first printing of 350,000 copies.

The stories are severally engrossing, but the larger interest of the book is that, through both Ned and Smiley, Cornwell himself is having an incisive and eloquent say about the geopolitical world we live in. Smiley, via Ned, quotes Horace Walpole: “The world is a comedy to those who think . . . a tragedy to those that feel.”

Cornwell did his first writing at dawn before the day’s work, during lunches taken at his desk, on his lap while commuting. The huge success of his third novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” enabled him to take the plunge and go to writing full-time.

“ ‘Spy’ was written in real anger, in outrage.” He was in Berlin as the Wall went up, and it symbolized for him the way the world “was locked into something obscene and degenerate.” In “The Secret Pilgrim,” Ned comments on being in Berlin since The Wall came down, and remembers a small memorial the East Germans had built on their side to remember those killed trying to get over the Wall to the West.

“When the Wall came down--hacked to pieces, sold,” Ned says, “the memorial came down with it, which strikes me as an appropriate comment on the fickleness of human constancy.”

It was six months before Cornwell realized what a life-changing success “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” would be. When it was abundantly clear, he and his family lived on Crete for a year, and then in Vienna, where they leased Herbert von Karajan’s house. His success has built upon success. “The Russia House” sold 550,000 copies in hard cover, remarkable for a suspenseful but essentially quiet and ambiguous study set in the first thawing days of glasnost .

“ ‘The Russia House’ is already an historical movie,” Cornwell says. “It proves that you can’t second-guess history. This is the decade of answered prayers. The balance of terror we all lived under for so long will never come back.”

Cornwell was writing the novel in 1987--”writing in the death throes of that age. When you think of it, we’d all been living for 30 years under the threat of mutual extinction. Now there’s hardly been time for a sigh of relief.”

He is immeasurably pleased with the Fred Schepisi-Tom Stoppard film of “Russia House.” Two of Stoppard’s plays, Cornwell notes wryly, were parodies of the George Smiley series, notably “Hapgood,” with its dizzying convolutions and it’s “Who’s-on-our-side?” betrayals and counter-betrayals.

For years Cornwell could not get a visa to enter Russia. Suddenly he was not only there to watch the shooting of the movie, he is also being published there: a first printing of “Russia House” of 400,000. “They wanted to do 600,000 but they couldn’t get enough paper.”

Cornwell’s own favorite among his books is “The Perfect Spy,” with its extraordinary portrayal of the spy’s con-man/politician father, Rick. Rick was inspired by Cornwell’s own father, Ronnie, who was in and out of prison for various confidence tricks. But he was a charmer, perfectly enacted by the late Irish actor Ray McAnally on British television.

“The first time I met Ray, he said, ‘I’ll show you how Rick comes into a room. See if I’m right.’ ” Cornwell, demonstrating in the hotel dining room at lunchtime, stood up, smiled outrageously, stuck out a hand and waved at the room. “Everybody having a good time? Ah, let’s have a bottle of Champagne for every table.” Cornwell sat down again, bemused by the memory. “It was Ronnie/Rick. Absolutely.”

The book was a long time in the writing. “I finally saw that the only way to break the code was to make the son more wicked than the father. That was the Damascene light.”

His mother took off when Cornwell was 5, leaving him and a brother with their father, who turned them over to grandparents to raise. The grandparents read to him every night, a formative experience. “They were Nonconformists and they put a high degree of importance on rhetoric in their preachers and in their lives.” It gave Cornwell a love of reading aloud that has never left him.

Independently and each unaware the other was doing it, both brothers went in search of their mother. Cornwell was 21. Each found and visited her separately. “And,” Cornwell says with a sad smile at the vagaries of humankind, “she didn’t tell me my brother had been to see her, too.”

Cornwell insists that he is a terrible actor. He had one disastrous experience doing a bit in one of his films (innumerable takes doing what was presumably one of his own lines) and he swore it off forever.

Yet he has read frequently on the BBC, and his readings of his own work on audio cassettes are superb--better than the work of most professionals. It is undoubtedly a legacy from his grandparents. Previously he has read only abridgements of his work. But now he has recorded “The Secret Pilgrim” in its entirety. It will be released as four sets of cassettes, the first called “A Fledgling Spy” and doubtless containing the delicious story of the shoplifting royal visitor.

His second novel, “A Murder of Quality,” is being filmed by Thames Television, with Denholm Elliott playing a younger George Smiley and Glenda Jackson and Billie Whitelaw as ladies involved. It may be shown on television here and may also be released theatrically. (“The Secret Pilgrim,” incidentally, is dedicated to the first and unforgettable Smiley, Alec Guinness.)

Cornwell is presently working on a book with a Swiss officer who spent 18 years in prison for spying for Russia. He is now free, and Cornwell has been interviewing him.

Along with the other accouterments of success, Cornwell had an inquiry from the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary about the word mole , which he has been credited with adding to the language of spycraft. “A fan sent me a 17th-Century work in which the author used the word mole to describe someone who was burrowing into nests of intrigue. I wasn’t aware of it.” But there seems no doubt that in its modern use as describing a double agent, Cornwell coined it anew, for the trade and for the reading public.

He’d been intrigued, he said, by the Royal Commission report on a 1948 spy scandal called the Petroff Affair. “There were terms like the shoemaker , for a forger, the pianist --a radio operator, and so on. I carried it on a bit further, including talking about moles. What haven’t I done for the dignity of the common mole.”

The thawing of the Cold War has clearly not deprived John le Carre/David Cornwell of material. “We’ve been defining ourselves as anti-Communists for all these years,” Cornwell says. “Defined ourselves in terms of what we weren’t. Now we’re going to have to reconstruct ourselves. And we’re going to have to deal with real enemies much less inviting and heroic. Ecological, sociological, the misery of two-thirds of the world’s population. What did someone say? Having addressed ourselves to Communism for a half-century, now we have to address capitalism.”

But if some of Cornwell’s spies, like Ned, have along the way surrendered some if not all of their capacities to savor love and living, Cornwell has not. He continues to work hard but to celebrate life. “If you can’t enjoy this, now, what can you enjoy, ever?” he asks. What, indeed?

The Wit and Wisdom of George Smiley

In “The Secret Pilgrim,” George Smiley talks to a class of new spies on working in a post-Cold War world. As paraphrased by Ned, the book’s narrator:

“I’ll not bother you with the finer points of Smiley’s introductory tour of the globe. He gave them the Middle East, which was obviously on his mind, and he explored the limits of colonial power in supposedly post-colonialist times. He gave them the Third World and the Fourth World and posited a Fifth World, and pondered aloud whether human despair and poverty were the serious concern of any wealthy nation. He seemed pretty confident they weren’t. He scoffed at the idea that spying was a dying profession now that the Cold War had ended: with each new nation that came out of the ice, he said, with each new alignment, each rediscovery of old identities and passions, with each erosion of the old status quo, the spies would be working round the clock.”