Le Carre: 'The Russians are here'

"I was laughed at, in a way, when the Cold War ended and the wall came down," he told Today presenter Justin Webb. "'Poor old Le Carre, what will become of him? Nobody's spying anymore.'

"The reality is, the budgets have never been bigger, the recruitment has never been more wholesale."

Today's Russian threat, he says, comes from the oceans of illegally-acquired cash flooding out of the country and into banks around the world, including the UK.

"Huge quantities of black money, Russian money, have been kicking around in London for a long time," he asserts. "We chose to ignore it because Russia is, in many ways, a totally criminalized state. We have to bear that in mind. And it is a rich one."

This cash, he believes, helped bolster the UK's banking system during the recent financial meltdown - an intervention happily ignored by those in the know.

"The whole nature of big banking is about looking away," he says.

[ ... ]

"The whole anti-terror threat has been terribly useful to politicians," he says. "It has been a way of manipulating us, it has been a way of giving police excessive powers, which they then misuse, I think we've got to draw back from that."

Arguing for a restoration of civil liberties, le Carre warns against the insidious power of what some in the United States term the "deep state".

"We have so many people who are indoctrinated, who are admitted to the secrets of state, and we have the people outside the circle.  ...

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