![]() ![]() “I’m just a salesman,” he says uncomprehendingly over lunch, when he finally twigs these two are not, in fact, from the Department of Trade. In fact, it’s Greville’s sheer unlikeliness as a spy that convinces Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan’s MI6 and CIA agents he’s exactly the type to be able to slip under the Soviets’ radar. He’s a classic Hitchcockian “wrong man” type in every respect but one: he’s actually the right one after all. ![]() Wynne is played by Benedict Cumberbatch as an unassuming, companionable, unthreateningly suave, almost Robert Donat-like figure. But here, director Dominic Cooke and screenwriter Tom O’Connor provide the straighter, based-on-a-true-story version. This operation would later inspire Le Carré’s 1989 novel The Russia House, which became a film the following year with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. Wynne’s contact was Oleg Penkovsky, a high-ranking Soviet officer whose leaks were later credited with helping to alter the course of the Cold War itself. It’s the tale of Greville Wynne, a salesman who was enlisted by MI6 in 1960 to smuggle secrets from Moscow to London, using his business trips to the USSR as cover. The Courier tells another true spy story with the ring of fiction. Did the Cold War ever really end, or was it just temporarily put on ice? The news this week that a 57-year-old British man had been arrested in Berlin for allegedly passing documents to Russian intelligence felt like a draught blowing in from the pages of a John le Carré novel – and Le Carré, himself a former intelligence officer, knew well the grey-moralled shadow-world of which he wrote.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |