60 Minutes - 01/28/2018: The Leaning Tower of San Francisco, Le Carré

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

San Francisco's leaning tower of lawsuits; and, an ex-British spy on leading a "double life" as a famous author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. When the fog rolls in over San Francisco, the skyscrapers live up to the name. Among them, the Millennium Tower, 58 stories of opulence. Opened in 2009, it was the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi. Though priced in the millions, inventory moved quickly, attracting tech barons, bankers, and San Francisco football hero Joe Montana. Yet for all its curb appeal, the building has one major fundamental problem. It's sinking into mud and tilting toward its neighbors. Almost every interview you've given over the last 10 years, you've told them that

it was the last one. The last one. It always is. Well, I take the fact that you're still giving interviews, you're aging better than you thought you would. I think that's perfectly true. Each book feels like my last book, and then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm. David Cornwell's not a functioning alcoholic, but he's created a stable full of imperfect characters over the years, as John Le Carre, a name he does not answer to. It's an abstraction that exists in his writing studio and on the cover of his books, like a spy's name on a phony passport. Looking after Le Carre and keeping myself young, keeping the critical nature of life whizzing in my head, that's being Le Carre. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on this special edition of 60 Minutes. Tonight, John Wertheim, executive editor of Sports Illustrated, on assignment for 60 Minutes. It's a story as old as cities themselves. Prosperity comes to town and triggers a building boom. In modern San Francisco, rows of skyscrapers have begun lining the downtown streets and recasting the skyline, monuments to the triumph of the tech sector. Leading this wave, the Millennium Tower. 58 stories of opulence, it opened in 2009 to great acclaim,

then the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi. Though priced in the millions, the inventory of posh apartments moved quickly. Yet for all its curb appeal, the building has quite literally one fundamental problem. It's sinking into mud and tilting toward its neighbors. Engineering doesn't often make for rollicking mystery, but San Francisco is captivated by the tale of the Leaning Tower

and the lawsuits it spawned. As we first reported this past fall, it's a story positioned, albeit at an angle, somewhere between civic scandal and civic curiosity, an illustration of what can happen when zeal for development overtakes common sense. When the fog rolls in over San Francisco, the skyscrapers live up to the name. The Transamerica Pyramid, long the gem of this skyline, now dwarfed, quaint as a cable car. The new Salesforce Tower stands as the tallest building in town.

Nearby, Facebook just took out the city's largest lease on this building. And across the way, the Millennium Tower at 301 Mission Street. 645 feet of reinforced concrete wrapped in glass. Inside, the $550 million construction, as advertised, lavish condominiums flush with amenities, attracting tech barons and venture capitalists. San Francisco royalty, former 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, bought here. It's a wonderful location. So did Jerry and Pat Dodson. Eight years ago, they paid $2.1 million for a two-bedroom

and planned to live out their retirement enjoying the sweeping view from the 42nd floor. Everything I had read indicated that it was the best building in San Francisco. It had won numerous awards. It had particularly won awards for construction, which was very important if you're thinking of moving into a high-rise. Initially, no buyer's remorse? No, not at all. I mean, in fact, buyer euphoria. One feature the Doddsons hadn't counted on?

These devices are what? They're stress gauges. Dozens of stress gauges dot the walls of the Millennium Tower's basement. They measure, in millimeters, the slow growth of cracks along the columns that rise up from the building's foundation. There's enough of them, a spider web of cracks, that you have to be concerned about what's going on underneath. These cracks are one of the only visual clues that there's anything profoundly wrong here. These are the rounds you do now. Yeah, I've been told by structural and geotechnical

engineers that I should be watching. Both an engineer and a lawyer, Dodson makes daily rounds of the basement looking for signs of deterioration. It's a routine he's kept since the homeowners association called a meeting of residents in May of 2016. They just said we should be there and made a sign in which alerted us at that time that there was something serious. So what was the nature of that meeting? It was the first time we were told that the building was sinking and was tilting.

Engineers have tracked sinking here since the day the foundation was poured in 2006. Nothing unusual about that. Here's what is unusual. Their data shows the Millennium Tower sinking 17 inches so far and tilting 14 inches to the northwest.

Let me ask you this. What do you think is going on? Why is this happening? What can be done about it? Once news got out, local politicians seized on the story. I don't know. And the very engineers celebrated for the building's design suddenly were being compelled to explain why the building was moving. If you'd like to speak, please do approach the mic. When the Millennium hearings opened to public comment,

it brought some livelier moments. I think what's needed here in the city by the bay, where everybody thinks everything's okay, but they might want to hear what I got to say. This, after all, being San Francisco, a city once described as 49 square miles surrounded by reality. Aaron Peskin has a certain vitality himself. A longtime city supervisor, he starts most days with a swim in the bay, then meets constituents at a North Beach coffee shop, where the Millennium Tower is a popular topic. Peskin is leading hearings into what is causing the trouble. You subpoenaed some of the engineers involved with Millennium Tower. Why?

We don't generally like to subpoena people. That power has not been used by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for some quarter of a century. 25 years, you've never issued a subpoena before. That's correct. When you got them in here, what did you learn? Their answers were less than satisfactory. Nobody has owned up to why this building is not performing. Some homeowners aren't waiting around to find out.

Andrew Falk and Frank Jernigan, who worked at Google when it was still a startup, got all the answers they needed when they rolled a marble across their floor. We didn't do it but once, and this is what we got. We were shocked when that thing stopped, turned around, and started rolling back, back to where the building is tilting. The northwest side. I thought, we don't know if this building's going to stand up in an earthquake. And so I became severely frightened of that. And we got out and we left. We left really most all of our belongings. We just left. The couple sold their apartment last year

and moved to a two-story home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. We sold it for approximately half of what it was valued at before this news came to light. You lost seven figures on the sale of this apartment. That's right. I would say we lost three to four million dollars. Speaking of astronomical figures, half a world away in a suburb of Amsterdam, San Francisco's sinking tower came across the radar of Peter Marinkovic, an engineer who works with the European Space Agency to track earthquakes. Using signals from a satellite 500 miles above the earth, Marinkovic measures ground movements around fault lines. In 2016, he happened to be studying the Bay Area when something caught his eye.

This is obviously downtown San Francisco. What do the green dots represent? Green dots represent stable. No displacement or no significant displacement. Stable structures. Stable structures, yeah. And the red dots? Few red dots means something's going down, something's settling, something's subsiding, something's sinking.

Did you know what it was? No. Had you heard of Millennium Tower before this? No. Ever been to San Francisco? No. What can you tell us about the rate of sinking? It's in a ballpark of between 1.5 to 2 inches a year.

1.5 to 2 inches a year? Yeah. And there's nothing to suggest the sinking and tilting are slowing down, much less stopping. But is it dangerous? As recently as this past summer, the city of San Francisco and its engineers asserted the building is safe even in the event of an earthquake. Even so, and this is a central theme to this saga, there are as many opinions about the trouble at the Millennium Tower as there are engineers in the Bay Area. There's a lot of things about this building

that are unprecedented. Jerry Cawthon, one of those local engineers, did not work on the tower, but has worked on nearby projects. Some sinking for buildings is acceptable, right? Some is. They actually anticipated that over the life of the building it would sink about four to five inches. That's like a hundred year life. This is double and triple that. Yeah, I don't think they, they obviously didn't anticipate anything like this close to it. By they, Cawthon means Millennium Partners, brand name developers with high-end skyscrapers all over the country. Cawthon says their big mistake was building Millennium Tower out of concrete instead of steel.

Concrete is often cheaper, and it's just as good, but it is a lot heavier, so you've got to design your foundation and your subsurface to support that higher weight. What lies beneath the surface at 301 Mission Street is critical to the story. It fell to Millennium's geotechnical engineers to analyze the ground below and design an appropriate foundation. They went with a foundation driven 80 feet deep into a layer of dense sand, and the city approved the plan. Larry Karp is a local geotechnical engineer. He did not work on the tower either, but specializes in Bay Area soil conditions. What is under the ground here? What is under the ground here at the surface is rubble from the 1906 earthquake. Brick and sand and debris, everything you can imagine is down here.

You have to go 200 feet below the Millennium Tower through layers of history in the ground, below landfill from the time of the gold rush, sand, mud, and clay, to reach solid rock, or bedrock. Karp says the fact that the tower's foundation isn't anchored in bedrock, well, that's a problem. For a big, heavy building, a concrete building, those foundations have to go deeper. For a building like this, they have to go to bedrock. Otherwise, he says, the structure will sink into less sturdy layers of sand and mud. And because it doesn't sink or settle uniformly, you get tilting. Look at the whole line.

Karp told us he can see the tilt from the middle of Mission Street a few blocks away. We couldn't see it, so we asked Jerry Cawthon if he could. No, it's very hard to see. It's not enough of a tilt to see. This is not like the Leaning Tower piece. And there it is, the inevitable comparison to that greatest engineering gaffe of them all. Not the landmark any present-day developer wants to be associated with. Millennium Partners declined our request for an on-camera interview, but pointed out their tower was built to code. They blamed their neighbors, specifically construction of the Transbay Terminal, San Francisco's answer to Grand Central Station, right next door. Transbay declined an on-camera

interview, too, but told us Millennium had already sunk 10 inches before work began on their project. And right on cue, here come the lawyers. Lawyers for Millennium Partners, for the Transbay terminal next door, for the tower's structural engineers and geotechnical engineers, for the architect and the builder, for the homeowners association, and for the city, and yes, even for Joe Montana. There are 20 parties to various Millennium Tower lawsuits and counting. It takes a half an hour just to take attendance of the lawyers in the courtroom. I mean, literally.

That's a lot of billable hours. A lot of billable hours. Courtrooms, circus aside, we asked Aaron Peskin, the city supervisor, simply, what's going on here? Everybody is afraid to tell the truth, because if we get to the bottom of this, they are worried that it is going to in some way slow down the building boom that is happening in San Francisco. Time is money in construction, and we don't want to stop this frenzy. Absolutely. Absolutely. This drama has hardly had a chilling effect.

Everywhere you look in downtown San Francisco, they're building another skyscraper. And the latest must-have amenity for all these new constructions, bedrock. In what might be the first act of building-on-building bullying, tech giant Salesforce stuck it to Millennium via Twitter. Bedrock, baby. You think that was in reference to what's going on across the street? I don't think it was in reference.

I know it was in reference because I know the people who built that building. The city still doesn't require all skyscrapers to go to Bedrock, but it has made some changes to prevent another tower from leaning. More review of foundations for new tall buildings, for one. As for the Millennium Tower, on this, almost everyone agrees. It needs to be fixed. What do we do with a tilting, sinking building? I've heard freeze the ground.

In perpetuity, freeze the ground. Perpetually freeze the ground? Perpetually freeze the ground. They've talked freeze the ground. Perpetually freeze the ground. They've talked about removing 20 stories from the top of it to reduce its weight. What do you think of that? Lopping off the top 20 stories. Sure that sounds like a horrible mess. I think more likely the surest way is to get it on piles to rock.

Bedrock. There may be no avoiding it. The parties are in mediation debating just how to drill down to bedrock under an existing skyscraper with a thousand people living upstairs. And then there's the indelicate question, who pays for all this? I am hopeful that the city and Millennium and the homeowners association will implement a fix in the near term and fight about the money later. But time's ticking.

Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The name David Cornwell is probably unfamiliar to most of you, but he's an interesting person to talk to in these days of alleged political conspiracies, espionage, and a rekindling of

the Cold War. He's an expert on secrets, a former spy himself, and the author of two dozen books, virtually all of them bestsellers, written under the pen name John Le Carre. Among them are The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Little Drummer Girl, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Constant Gardener, and The Night Manager, all of which have been made into films. He's not just a popular writer of thrillers, he's a novelist of some standing, often compared to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, and Somerset Maugham. Cornwell has been living this double life for more than 50 years now and rarely gives television interviews. But last September, upon the publication of his 24th

novel, A Legacy of Spies, we were invited to spend a few days with this literary lion in winter. To find his natural habitat, you must journey six hours from London, to a farmland and down one-lane country roads lined with hedgerow and blackthorn, to a corner of England so remote it's known as Land's End. Here, nestled on a cliff in Cornwall, you will find John Le Carre's safe house. So this is where you escaped to? Yeah. It was as far from London as I could get, reasonably. I guess the other thing to say about this place, which is very important to me, is that the Cornish don't give a damn for celebrity. If they even know what I do, they haven't read it, or if they have read it, they make a point

of not being impressed by it. And that is enormously soothing. Yes. Not a head turns in the street when I walk by. It's here, in the home he fashioned out of three derelict cottages more than 40 years ago, that he weaves together the threads of memory, experience and research into his tales of intrigue. The solitude is a stimulation. You've said many times that you don't like giving interviews. Yeah, I think that's true. And then I defect from that position. It's very clear that almost every interview you've given over the last 10 years, you've told them that this is the last

one. It always is. Well, I take the fact that you're still giving interviews that you're aging better than you thought you would. I think that's perfectly true. Each book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm. David Cornwell's not a functioning alcoholic, but he's created a stable full of imperfect characters over the years as John Le Carre, a name he does not answer to. It's an abstraction that exists in his writing studio

and on the cover of his books, like a spy's name on a phony passport. John Le Carre is sort of a cover. It's a separate identity in a way, and you can look after it. And looking after Le Carre and keeping myself young, keeping the child in me alive, keeping the critical nature of life whizzing in my head. That's being Le Carre. Is there any space between David and John? Yes, I think a lot, really. David tries to be a good dad and a regular guy with difficulty, many flaws. And John takes off into the ether.

He's the man of imagination. And I can take John for a walk, let him loose on the cliffs, and he has a good time, and he populates the empty cliffs with the people of his imagination, and then I come back and help with the washing up. Le Carre was created by Cornwell in 1961, out of necessity, not choice. It happened during his first career as a spy for British intelligence, both at home and abroad. To satisfy a creative urge, he began writing fiction on his commute to work and during lunchtime. Why did you need a pen name? Well, a hard practical reason. I was still in secret harness, as you might say. I wrote my first three books from inside the intelligence world. The books had to be approved by my masters and were, but a condition was I had to choose a pen name. So I went to my publisher.

His publisher preferred short and snappy. Cornwell wanted something interesting, mysterious, and French. I've told many lies about how it came about because I truly don't clearly remember. But I think I wanted architecturally a name in three parts. And I thought the acute accent at the end, these were eye-catching things. So instead of trying to look like everybody else, I tried to look a bit different as a name.

And then somebody who is Carré as a gentleman is not quite a gentleman. That suits me fine. That attitude doesn't just suit Cornwell, it actually defines him. He has the wealth, the education and the bearing of a polished patrician, but he'll never be part of the English upper class, which he abhors. Plus, he has the pedigree of a rogue. I mean, you must realize that I'm an upstart. I do come originally from a working-class family. I went kind of from

working class to middle class to criminal class, which was finally my father's condition. I had to invent myself as a gentleman, a pseudo-gentleman. So it's a good American story of self-invention. He was five years old when his mother Olive deserted the family, leaving him and his older brother Tony under the chaotic charge of their father Ronnie, a colorful, charismatic con man and crook. If there remains one great conundrum in my life, it is my father, who seems to me to inspire also some of the worst or best characters in me. He had a wonderful brain. Everybody who worked for him was in awe of his intellect. But if there

was a bent way of doing something, he took it. A rich vein of material for you to mine. Wonderful, wonderful, rich vein of material, and very painful. Runny ran with a fast crowd, celebrities, sportsmen, and mobsters. They were racehorses at Ascot and trips to San Moritz. They lived either as millionaires or paupers. One week a chauffeured Bentley, the next on the run from bill collectors or worse. He'd done quite a lot of jail, and he spent some years of his life on the run in late middle age. So it was a mess, just a bloody mess. But surviving it, it was also a privilege to be part of it in some strange way. It taught you a lot about life, lowered your expectations, raised them in other ways. What did you learn?

I learned, I think, to understand the wideness, the width of the spectrum of human behavior. And I guess I learned the perils of charm, which he exercised ruthlessly with huge success. And I learned about the insecurity of the world, that everything is transient, even our money, our future, our lives, our children, everything. He was always an excellent student, and by the time he graduated from Oxford with a degree in modern languages, he'd already learned from his father some of the prerequisites of a career in espionage, lying, manipulation, and deception. When he was approached by a recruiter for the British Secret Service, it seemed like a seamless transition. When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood

larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people because it was all around me and I've no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I'd found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly, it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past. He began in London, running agents, keeping tabs on subversives and spies, and learning the tradecraft. He moved to the foreign branch, MI6, at the height of the Cold War, posing as a young diplomat at the British Embassy in West Germany, just as the Berlin Wall was going up.

What were you doing when you were working for MI6? In Germany, I never talk about that. You can't? No. I would never be comfortable talking about it, and I think you'd find that with most people who've been in that world. It is simply anathema. Whatever David Cornwell's duties were, John Le Carre found time to write a novel about a washed-up spy named Alec Lemus, who was sent on a dangerous mission across

the wall and betrayed by his bosses. My memory is that I wrote it very fast, the story, that I had no idea where I was going at first, and it just flowed. And I think you get a break like that once in your writing life. I really believe nothing else came to me so naturally, so fast. You had to show it to... I then showed it to my department, and there was a bit of a loud silence. And then, actually, it was kind of sporting decency almost. My service said, okay, go ahead and publish it. But I think they had no idea, any more than I did, that it would

become a sensation. The spy who came In From the Cold was the publishing event of 1963. The book spent 34 weeks as number one on the bestseller list and was made into an acclaimed motion picture starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. We've got a man coming over tonight. Both the novel and the film served as gray, gritty antidotes to the fantastical world of James Bond. He'll bluff his way through. He's got papers, if the papers are any good. And were accepted by critics and the public as an authentic portrayal of the scruffy business of espionage. What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy,

squalid bastards like me. Little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell balancing right against wrong? The book would make John le Carre a famous and much in demand author. But for months, only British intelligence knew who and where he was, and it did not want to blow Cornwell's cover in Germany. People didn't know it was you? No, they didn't, until the Sunday Times blew the whistle. And then the whole investigation of my person, as you might say, came up. Was I a spook? Was I not a spook? And I, out of loyalty to my service and out of some sense of privacy,

went on insisting that I'd had no intelligence experience until it became absurd. And it became absurd largely because my colleagues and my superior officers were either boasting or complaining to anybody who would listen that I'd written the book. Spooks are generally wary of unscripted publicity, so he and the agency eventually agreed to part ways, allowing him and Le Carre to concentrate full-time on fiction,

not unlike his father Ronnie. You have mused on at least one occasion about whether there's much of a difference between what you do for a living and what he did. Well, I think that's kind of me. What were you talking about specifically? Well, I was saying that I live off my wits, as he did. I look around. I collect bits of people, I assemble them, I pitch a story,

I sell it. He, as a con man, does much the same. I do it on the page, and he does it with human material. But what that doesn't take account of is what happens to the human material. You've said, and I don't know what the context was, but I've seen this quote a number of times. You said, I'm a liar, born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living. Yeah, all of that's true. Actually, it's a dreadful confession, but these days I tell the truth. For the most part, the novels of David Cornwell, written under the name John Le Carre, are about spies and espionage. That's the subject matter, anyway, and the setting. But they're also about human nature and behavior, about honor, ambition. are about spies and espionage. That's the subject matter anyway, and the setting.

But they're also about human nature and behavior, about honor, ambition, careerism, and conflicting loyalties that could apply to any profession. It's a way of writing large about the small world of secret intelligence services that Cornwell was part of, and not a bad way, he says, to take measure of a nation's political health. You feel that you've got a hand somehow on the subconscious of the nation. You feel you know what the greatest anxieties are and the greatest ambitions are.

In Le Carre's world, the headquarters of the British intelligence services existed some years ago in an imaginary building off the theatre district in central London. London Station couldn't be in better hands. As portrayed in his books and the movies about them, this den of spies was a drab bureaucracy populated by eccentric characters working in a long-neglected Victorian pile of bricks called the circus. That sounds like an oil thing, doesn't it? We keep asking. It was not exactly an accurate description of the real thing, Cornwell says, but it was credible. It was an abstraction from reality.

Was it known as the circus to the people who worked there? No, it wasn't. That comes from your imagination. I lifted the building, body and soul, as you might say, replanted it in Cambridge Circus, different part of London, and it was known by the shorthand as the circus. And what better name for a community of performing spies than the circus. There were scalp hunters, lamplighters, honey traps, and moles. All of this came from your imagination.

Yes, I mean, something always sparks the imagination, and mine was sparked and took off, and I thought this is a kind of half-dream world which I can inform from experience. And it fits. People who work there recognize it. It isn't as if they recognize this operation or that operation. What they recognize is the smell

and the authenticity of, I hope, of the life that we led. Secret Service headquarters is down on the right-hand side. In London, Cornwell took us on a cab ride to see the actual building where he worked and that used to house MI6 headquarters. And it was dusty and smelly, and it smelled of sort of Nescafe and fags. People smoked. Everybody seemed to smoke.

A lot of alcohol. A lot of alcohol. It's now an office building not far from Buckingham Palace. Was there much security? There was no security at all. I mean, none. None that was visible. You walked in and out once you were a familiar face. And it was, good morning, Mr. Cornwall. Good morning. Hello, Bell. Hello, sir. And when you came back from abroad, it was always welcome back, sir. But nobody searched the bags going in and out? No. I never knew of anyone being stopped and searched. There would be a price paid for the complacency

when MI6's most notorious double agent, the Cambridge-educated spy Kim Philby, waltzed out the door with some of Britain's most valuable secrets and handed them over to the Soviet Union. The incident was an inspiration for Cornwell's most memorable success, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. The book and this BBC adaptation are about the search for a Russian mole at the highest level of the circus. We've a rotten apple, and the maggots are eating up the circus. Conducted by Le Carre's portly spymaster and favorite character, George Smiley.

It's a very close bond. George Smiley is my secret sharer, my companion. And I think that because I'm given to exaggerated emotions at times, Smiley moderates me as a writer. The character, played by Alec Guinness in this BBC version, is about as close as Le Carre gets to a hero. At best middle-aged, a hapless cuckold, he is measured, sensible, clever, and devoted to his job. What do you like best about Smiley? I think how he toughs it out. Survivor? More than that. He does a good job. And much of it is distasteful to him but he has a sense of duty and he has a sense of moral obligation and a sense of balance george you won he's made a lot of compromises with life and it's actually yes

yes i suppose i did his greatest operational weapon is his humanity. It's been nearly 30 years since Smiley and his old circus performers have appeared in a Le Carre novel. But some of them are back for the new one, A Legacy of Spies, and unceremoniously called to account at the gleaming new MI6 headquarters for the sins, failures, and betrayals committed decades earlier in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. This struck me as something you've been wanting to do for a while. Well, it is. In the first place, the characters never left me. In some curious way, particularly Smiley, they became, even if I wasn't writing about them, they became quite conscious companions at times in my imagination.

And what I wanted to do at this stage, this point of closure in the Smiley saga, now 50, 60 years on, was have the present interrogate the past about what we did then in the Cold War in the name of freedom and was it worth it. And it was in this mood, very much, that I concluded the book and the search for George Smiley, which for me was some kind of search for truth. In The Spy Who Came In From The Cold... What he loves best about writing is the privacy of it.

Every day, sometime after 7am., he climbs the steps to his studio and begins putting pen to paper. And this is my workroom. If there are family crises and things like that, I edit them out until midday. This is from Legacy, and this is Peter Gwilym, the central figure, who's narrating. I have two visions simultaneously. The first of George, as George Smiley, and Alec, that's Alec Lemus, huddled head-to-head in the chilly conservatory in Bywater Street. Rare use of an adjective by me.

Most of the material comes from notebooks he's filled on long walks or epic research trips he's taken to capture the feel and smell of faraway places he puts his characters. This is all the very raw material. These notes were jotted down in Kenya while he was writing The Constant Gardener. These are things I saw, batons, a panga from somewhere. The man lies in the recovery pose, bathed in blood from the head down, dead or going there. And Nairobi murder is one of the few industries that live up to expectation. There are no computers involved in this process.

He edits with scissors and the stapler. And that's the extract. And hands the good bits off to his personal typist and copy editor, Jane Cornwell, his wife of 45 years. She is also chief operating officer of his life and various enterprises. Like all writers, I've lived a messy, untidy life, inevitably so. And she's been wonderfully supportive. And it's always go to Jane if you need to get to David

because she's got her feet on the ground. God knows where he's got his feet. Cornwell has been writing as John Le Carre for so long, no one could tell us how many millions of books he's sold over the last five and a half decades. They've been printed in 43 different languages. How do you think of yourself as a writer? Wow. Storyteller. So we're sitting in front of a fire.

I want to keep you in your chair. I want to interest you. I want you to want to turn the page. But I don't really think too much about the posterity. And I certainly don't join the literary argument about where I stand. Am I a quality novelist? Am I a popular novelist? Am I a thriller writer? To me, if I'd gone to sea, I'd have written about the sea. If I'd gone into stockbroking, I'd have written about the stockbroking world. You've turned down literary honors. You've turned down a knighthood. Yes. Why? In my own country, I'm so suspicious of the literary world that I don't want its accolades. And least of all, do I want to be called a commander of the British Empire or any other thing of the British Empire.

I find it emetic. And why do you feel that way? I don't want to posture as somebody who's been honored by the state and must therefore somehow conform with the state. And I don't want to wear the armor. Your writing partner, George Smiley, had this to say on the subject. The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth. No one will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skillfully, or find it harder to confess that he's been a damn fool. No one acts braver when he's frightened stiff, or happier when he's miserable. And nobody can flatter you better when he hates you

than an extrovert Englishman or woman. Yeah, I think that's very good. You like that graph. I like that. Yes, I do. Do you consider yourself an Englishman? What kind of Englishman at the moment? Yes, of course, I'm born and bred English. I'm English to the core. My England would be the one that recognizes its place in the European Union. The jingoistic England that is trying to march us

out of the EU. That is an England I don't want to know. Like most Europeans, Cornwell has no use for President Donald Trump in his nationalistic agenda, which he calls alarming and contagious. And he worries about the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin. I think today's spooks working on the Russian front, British spooks, would tell you that it's just as bad as it was in the Cold War. Putin sees everything in terms of conspiracy, and his grip on the Russian populace is so strong that he has resorted to all the old systems that he was familiar with. So we're right back to where we were in the Cold War, with the added mission that Putin has given to himself to erode

decent democracy wherever he sees it. So much has changed in the world of espionage since you first began. I mean, you have the introduction now of cyber war, you have computer hacking, you have all of this stuff. You wonder, is it possible to keep any secrets at all? And do we need spies, any human spies? I think probably in many ways more than ever. In some ways, the techniques of intelligence and the techniques of maintaining secrets have gone backwards. If you and I are going to enter into a conspiracy now, we don't do it through the ether. We don't do it by computer. We exchange notes. We either hand each other notes. We keep paper again, papers back in. Secondly, you very, very often need an agent on the spot who is going to deliver

the piece of paper, the code number, the simple clue to it all. Mostly right now, David Cornwell and John Le Carre are recovering from, celebrating, and lamenting publication of this last novel, strange as that may seem. You said the most depressing time in your life is when you've finished a book. Yes, yes. Which is what you're going through right now. Which is exactly what I'm going through right now. Thank you for lightening my load.

Yeah, it's a feeling of you've depleted everything you've been working on. It's done. It's out there. And then out of the ashes of the last book, so to speak, comes the phoenix of the new one, and then life's okay again. But the depression that overtakes me when I've turned in a book, I must confess, is real and deep. Do you have an idea for the next book? Absolutely. I can't wait to get to it.

I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.