Free The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré

Perhaps he had put out a few signals to that effect, without any great intention of seeing them through. And almost certainly he was working either for the KGB or the GRU , since it’s hard to imagine he would otherwise have enjoyed such freedom of movement. So for ‘cultural’, read ‘spy’. In short: just another Russian torn between love of country and the unrealizable dream of a freer life.
    Did he see me as a fellow spy? Another Schulz? If the KGB had done their homework, they could hardly have failed to spot me for what I was. I had never taken a Diplomatic Service exam, never attended one of those country-house jamborees where potential diplomats are allegedly tested for their social graces. I had never been on a Foreign Office course, or seen the inside of the Foreign Office’s headquarters in Whitehall. I had arrived in Bonn from nowhere, speaking indecently fluent German.
    And if all that wasn’t enough to mark me out as a spook, there were the hawk-eyed Foreign Service wives, who maintained as beady a watch on their husbands’ rivals for promotion, medals and eventual knighthoods as any KGB researcher. One look at my credentials and they knew they needn’t worry about me any more. I wasn’t family. I was a Friend, which is how respectable British foreign servants describe the spies they are reluctantly obliged to count among their number.

8
    A legacy
    The year is 2003. A bullet-proof, chauffeur-driven Mercedes picks me up at crack of dawn from my Munich hotel and drives me the half-dozen miles to the agreeable Bavarian town of Pullach, industries brewing, since lapsed, and spying, which is eternal. My appointment is for a working breakfast with Dr August Hanning, at that time reigning Präsident of the German Intelligence Service, the BND , and a sprinkling of his senior colleagues. From the guarded gateway we pass low buildings half hidden by trees and decked in camouflage netting to a pleasant white-painted country house more typical of Germany’s north than south. Dr Hanning stands waiting on the doorstep. We have a little time, he says. Would I care to take a look around the shop? Thank you, Dr Hanning, I would like to very much.
    During my foreign service in Bonn and Hamburg more than thirty years earlier, I had had no contact with the BND . I had not, as the jargon has it, been ‘declared’; least of all had I entered its fabled headquarters. But when the Berlin Wall came down – an event unforetold by any intelligence service – and the British Embassy in Bonn, to its amazement, was obliged to pack its bags and remove itself to Berlin, our Ambassador of the day bravely took it into his head to invite me to Bonn to celebrate the occasion. In the intervening years I had written a novel called A Small Town in Germany which spared neither the British Embassy nor the provisional Bonn government. In predicating – wrongly – a West German lurch to the far right, I had contrived a conspiracy between British diplomats andWest German officials which had led to the death of an Embassy employee bent on exposing an inconvenient truth.
    I was not therefore expecting to be anyone’s dream of the ideal person to be ringing down the curtain on the old Embassy, or welcoming in the new, but the British Ambassador, a most civilized man, preferred to think otherwise. Not content with having me deliver a (I hope) jolly address at the closing ceremony, he invited to his residence beside the Rhine every real-life counterpart of the fictional German officials that my novel had maligned, requiring of each of them, as the price of a fine dinner, a speech delivered in character.
    And Dr August Hanning, posing as the least attractive member of my fictional ensemble, had risen sportingly and wittily to the occasion. It was a gesture that I took gratefully to heart.

    We are in Pullach, it is more than a decade later, Germany is thoroughly reunited, and