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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Rupert Murdoch has been making money out of the combination of inflated female sex parts and puffed up Russia hatred for his entire life.  

He used to keep the two of them apart; there wasn’t as much money to be made out of the latter, at least not by the time the legal bills had been paid for libelously faking, Russia hating books Murdoch published, like Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People.   

However, with a woman nom-de-plumeously named Suleika Dawson – real name Sue Dawson  — Murdoch has now produced a breakthrough combination, a lady telling the story of her love affair with David Cornwell (lead image), aka John le Carré, and a chronicle through the bedroom peephole of British ingenuity in outsmarting the KGB.

The stroke of marketing genius at Harper Collins, Murdoch’s publishing house, was to think that the only exaggerated sex parts which would make a bestseller  were not those of the tall blonde Miss Dawson, but those of the tall ginger-pubic Le Carré’s.

Dawson gives the reader an introductory peep when the first thing she describes of Le Carré in clothes was his “enormous desert boots”.   Then with another discreet correlation, Dawson reveals Le Carré’s “huge workman’s hands”. Dawson’s introduces balls at page 21; they make a double-entendre at which she and he both laugh.  She then introduces the real thing – er, things – at page 87 (250 pages still to go) when Dawson says she “ducked down behind him and put an ice cube on his scrotum. Everything [sic] was just hanging there in free suspension… but he still didn’t flinch, though his testicles had definitely decided to come in from the cold.”

That was pre-coital in 1983. In 1999, post-coital, Le Carré says to Dawson on the living-room rug: “I remembered you liked big balls.”

In between there are years of full-frontal displays of the man’s pride in his parts. Once at a restaurant which Dawson is careful to name, along with its address, he says he can’t get up from their table because, he confides to her: “I have an erection”.

This is shortly after Dawson, who drops almost as many people’s names as restaurant, hotel and resort names, says she knows that Christopher Hitchens,  the deceased English writer, got “a third”. This isn’t a reference to Hitchens’s minuscule hands and feet, or their correlate inside his pants, but to his degree at Oxford. By comparison, Dawson reports bantering at a recording studio with Le Carré about “extra length” and “thickness.”

This is the foreplay, though. There’s a much longer, thicker secret which the book and Le Carré reveal about his spymasters at MI5 and MI6, and about the capacity of British intelligence compared to its rival, the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) and Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). This  secret explains for the first time why the British services fabricate stories like the Novichok attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018, and operations like the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines and the Crimean Bridge.

If you can hold yourself in for longer than Le Carré managed with Dawson, and also put on spectacles,  the secret will be exposed in a moment.  “I do worry sometimes,” he once said to her, “that you can’t properly see the full extent of my manhood when we are in bed.”

“I’m short sighted,” Dawson claims she said to reassure him.  

Dawson describes her acquaintance with Cornwell/Le Carré from September 1982 until August 1999. Dawson is proud of her — how to put this, staying and receiving power. “If you were to calculate the combined time David [Cornwell/Le Carré] spent with all his ‘other women’ it still wouldn’t amount to as long as we had together. Not even close.”

The more significant calculation Dawson didn’t think of is that not once in her 339-page account  did Le Carré speak to Dawson about, even mention the Soviet Union, Russia, the KGB, the SVR, or the business he had made a short, mediocre career out of at MI5 (1958-60) and MI6 (1960-64). If he ever met or knew a Russian, male or female, Dawson doesn’t know of it. Russia is mentioned  only twice in passing – once when Dawson says he downed Stolichnaya vodka “in one gulp like Cossacks”; and once when he displayed to her an “ultra-smart flat attaché case” made, according to Le Carré,  of “two-hundred-year-old Russian reindeer hide” salvaged from “an old shipwreck off the Cornish coast”.

Not even the “Moscow Rules” which Le Carré asked Dawson  to follow had anything to do with Moscow or Russia. Instead, “Moscow Rules” was the camouflage for the code of secrecy and concealment of his affair with Dawson from his wife, children, bookkeeper, and others capable, he thought, of exploiting their knowledge to his disadvantage. He wanted Dawson to believe he was still an MI6 professional — and he was, though she, and his readers, have entirely missed it.

In his life with Dawson,  Le Carré exhibited no understanding or interest in the Russian language, or in Russian  literature, music, culture, history, politics, character,  customs, jokes, or even sex. In point of fact, Le Carré was never trained or operated against the Russians. A German speaker from his university days, he operated against the Germans and never rose higher than a recruiter under vice-consul cover in Austria. The end of his four-year career in MI6 is also unmentioned and unexplained in the book. From what Le Carré says to Dawson, he was far more interested in making money out of selling spy plots in books, films, on the stage and television,  and in the promotions which introduced him to mix with and drop the names of money-making celebrities as he wanted to be himself.

The plots started with Moscow and KGB penetration of London. But they didn’t come to Le Carré from his own experience, or even from his restricted security clearance access to the MI6 files. He never had operational need to know. Instead, he was supplied the plots by his superiors at MI6, who arranged for him to act as their best advertisement.

He did, and so he was — Le Carré was a British disinformation operation. His fiction masqueraded as the truth for a strategic purpose — to control and repair the damage which Kim Philby had done to the reputation of British intelligence, especially in Washington.  Dawson calls Philby her lover’s “ageing  nemesis” and his “internalised double”, repeating the PR version that when Philby moved to Moscow in January 1963, completing his uninterrupted 29-year undercover career against the British, he exposed Cornwell’s cover.

According to the version Dawson has fabricated, “it is my own belief that David was always seen by his ‘fathers’ in the Service as their potential next ‘golden boy’, the most likely candidate among the new postwar generation of recruits to be their future ‘Kim’, never more so than in those troubling, doubt-ridden years when Philby’s own stellar career had begun to wobble. Nothing much less than that can account for David’s own drastic, almost visceral response to Philby’s sudden defection in ‘63 and the way he sought for years afterwards to mask its importance.”

Top: left -- Kim Philby at home in Moscow with his fourth wife, Rufina Pukhova. Right, David Cornwell/John Le Carré at home in Cornwall with his second wife, Jane Eustace. Bottom: the Philbys’ apartment home in Moscow; the Cornwells’ home at Tregiffian. Dawson says she hated Cornwall, and claims Le Carré did too. Their combined hatred for the county extends to every detail of the cliffs, sea, sky, stone, weather, flowers, trees, food, neighbours, walk paths, trains, roads,  etc., etc. Dawson even likens the county to the enemy: “It seemed to me…that [KGB double agent Guy] Burgess’s life in the USSR was something like David’s life in Cornwall, the bleak and inhospitable location where he took himself to evade capture and confinement.” Cornwell’s only public involvement in the county, according to Dawson,  was not on behalf of the Cornish independence movement or the Celtic (non-English)  history and language, but to protect what he said was his half-million pound investment in his home against re-sale depreciation by nearby property developers.  

In 1963 Dawson was an incontinent and illiterate toddler. All she ever knew about Philby was not from reading him but from what Le Carré told her.

It didn’t occur to Dawson that was more “Moscow Rules”.  There’s in fact no evidence that Cornwell’s  cover had been blown or that that had ended his MI6 career. Cornwell didn’t leave MI6 because he had been outed by Philby. He left by agreement with his superiors that his Le Carré (French for “the square”) cover would be to write the fiction that would resurrect their reputation for being the best, the cleverest, the most morally superior spies in the world —  especially at the counter-intelligence required to detect Russian operations. The more successful Le Carré would prove to be at this, the plan went,   the more effective the damage control operation by the Circus would prove to be.

And so it has turned out. At least in Le Carré’s Russian or “Karla of the KGB” trilogy.  After Le Carré moved on to write about Mossad and the PLO ( plot courtesy of a US Embassy lover informant) and the CIA in southeast Asia (plot from a French lover who managed a CIA airline), he loses his grip and the books their quality. The box office receipts started to dwindle.

What cannot dwindle, not for Cornwell/Le Carré, nor Dawson, nor publisher Murdoch, nor Adam Sisman, the authorized biographer, is the thickness, length, and “tangible authenticity” of British intelligence embodied in Le Carré, the books,  and in what he once told Dawson “only half-joking” was that there was “nothing like his staying power” (his emphasis). At least not until Sir Alexander Younger’s fabrication of Novichok, the Russian nerve agent which kills in less than two minutes and keeps on killing the reputation of Russia worldwide.

Left to right: Sue (Suleika) Dawson; Rupert Murdoch; Adam Sisman; Alexander Younger, MI6 chief 2014-2020, then adviser to Goldman Sachs. For more on Younger, click to read the backfile.

 “Now he is dead, perhaps we can get to know him better”, wrote the biographer Le Carré selected for himself, Adam Sisman.  He too misses the point. The fact is that knowing Le Carré means knowing nothing about the British secret operations against the Soviet Union, then against Russia – except that the British are too fixated on what’s inside their own pants to keep their eye on the real ball. That’s the Russian one.

 What Dawson has produced is truer than Novichok. By reporting in the four-letter word vernacular what Le Carré did to her on countless  occasions, as well as in the farmyard euphemism – “he drove himself into me like a ploughshare” – Dawson reveals that British warmakers against Russia suffer from penis envy. That’s the psychopathological condition in which the enemy must be fucked (Cornwell/Le Carré’s choice of verb) over and over and over again.

The enemy, Le Carré lets slip,  is also the Russian ally once capable of terrifying and defeating the British  and the Germans in the field. “They’re renowned for their donkey-knockers, these Greeks,” he told Dawson on holiday on Lesbos. As for the Germans, he repeatedly told Dawson, theirs are too small. “The Krauts love me” he claimed in evidence.

“David’s power”, Dawson’s book concluded, was in the combination of his penis and his “power to conjure tangible authenticity in his writing”.  

He knew,  but she didn’t,  that the latter depended on the MI6 cover stories he reproduced by fountain pen on paper; Cornwell did not learn to use a manual typewriter or a computer keyboard. The latter was the Le Carré deception operation; the former, he was convinced, was his potency inside Dawson. He also knew that she would not have welcomed it for as long – in inches and in years – unless she had been deceived by the Russia lie. That’s the one which millions of gullible readers have been fooled into thinking came in from the cold. It’s laughable.

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