In the good old days of intelligence, at least according to Gunther Bachmann, head of the Foreign Acquisition Unit of the Hamburg branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or the domestic intelligence unit, one used to have agents in the field. Ideally your agents were individuals from the other side who you had, by what ever means at your disposal, turned to spy on themselves. However, when America entered the game with its War On Terror, all bets were off and the focus was on results, not information. Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth no matter what the cost to future investment in preventing such incidents from occurring.
So when the stateless and homeless Russian-speaking Chechnyan named Issa Karpov appears on the streets of Hamburg, Bachmann knows that what he sees as an opportunity for a double agent, others will see as a chance for an arrest to make it look like they are doing something. If he wants to win his way he must ensure that Issa is pushed in the right direction, and for that Gunther needs the help of the two people who will be least inclined to do anything of the sort.
Annabelle Richter is a young lawyer working for an agency that does its best to prevent people from being deported back to whatever prison cell they escaped from before landing in Germany as refugees. It's her job to try and keep Issa from being thrown on the first plane to Russia, as he has definitely entered the country illegally. Not even the most liberal of judges thinks well of being smuggled into Hamburg via a cargo container on a freighter originally bound for Copenhagen, and bribing a truck driver with Russian Mafia money to finish your journey.
It's the Mafia money that brings Bachmann's third piece onto the board, Tommy Brue, proprietor of a privately owned British family bank headquartered in Hamburg, Brue Freres. It turns out that Tommy's esteemed papa, at the behest of British intelligence back in the waning days of the Cold War, had established private accounts for high ranking Russian officers to launder their ill gotten gains from running heroin, girls, and whatever. So little Issa, devout Muslim, is the bastard child and only heir of one Colonel Karpov who had settled sizeable sums of money in Tommy's bank in the good old days, and has now come to claim his inheritance - sort of.
Article comments
1 - Fred
As a long-time fan of Le Carré, "A Most Wanted Man" was a looked-forward to reading. In general it lived up to expectation, although Le Carré's cynicism is a little too obvious, and his "Intelligence" characters largely caricatures. One annoyance of the edition I read was that it was published in the US (a large print edition by Center Point) and translated, for some odd reason, into US English. No big deal, except that one of the British intelligence operatives has a business card with US spellings (an unlikely scenario from the very British Le Carré ).