A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré Page A

Steering was no more than a bunch of top players drafted from each of the main services, and charged with improving cooperation between them in the wake of a string of near-miss terror plots on German soil. After a gestation period of six months—thus the official version—its recommendations would be passed to the twin power centers of German intelligence, the Ministry of the Interior and the Office of the Chancellor, for their consideration, and that would be pretty well that.
    Or not. For in reality, Joint Steering’s remit was of earth-shaking significance: no less than the creation of a brand-new system of command-and-control covering all major and minor intelligence services and, untypically of the Federal German system until now, presided over by a new-style intelligence coordinator—czar—with unprecedented powers.
    Who then would this awesome new coordinator be?
    No one doubted that he would be selected from the shadowy ranks of Joint Steering itself. But from which faction? With Germany’s political stability caught in the limbo of a capricious coalition, which way would he lean? What allegiances, what agenda would the coordinator bring to his formidable task? What promises had he to keep? And whose voice exactly would he be listening to when he wielded his new broom?
    Would the Federal Police, for example, continue to outstrip the beleaguered protectors in their long-running power battle for primacy in the field of domestic intelligence? Would the Federal Foreign Intelligence Service remain the only body authorized to operate covertly abroad? And if so, would it finally purge itself of the dead wood of ex-soldiers and quasi-diplomats who cluttered its overseas stations? Fine men, all, when it came to defending German embassies in times of civil riot, no doubt, but a lot less adept at the nuanced business of recruiting and running undercover networks.
    No wonder then if, infected by the mood of suspicion and anxiety that swept through the entire German intelligence community, relations between the mysterious interlopers from Berlin and their reluctant Hamburg hosts were at best frigid, effecting even the smallest aspects of their daily intercourse; or that the interest aroused by Issa’s appearance on one side of the courtyard should not necessarily be reciprocated on the other. Without the imaginative—some said over imaginative—eye of the Unit’s volatile Günther Bachmann, indeed, the surreptitious arrival of the man who called himself Issa might never have been spotted at all.
     
    And this Günther Bachmann fellow from Berlin—who was he, exactly when he was at home?
    If there are people in the world for whom espionage was ever the only possible calling, Bachmann was such a person. The polyglot offspring of a string of mixed marriages contracted by a flamboyant German-Ukrainian woman, and reputedly the only officer of his service not to possess an academic qualification beyond summary expulsion from his secondary school, Bachmann had by the age of thirty run away to sea, trekked the Hindu Kush, been imprisoned in Colombia and written a thousand-page unpublishable novel.
    Yet somehow, in the course of notching up these improbable experiences, he had discovered both his nationhood and his true calling: first as the occasional agent of some far-flung German outpost, then as a covert overseas official without diplomatic rank; in Warsaw for his Polish; in Aden, Beirut, Baghdad and Mogadishu for his Arabic; and in Berlin for his sins, while he cooled his heels after fathering a near-epic scandal of which only the sketchiest outlines had ever reached the gossip mill: excessive zeal, said the rumors; a blackmail attempt too far; a suicide, a German ambassador hastily recalled.
    Then cautiously, under yet another name, back to Beirut, to do once more what he had always done better than anyone, if not necessarily according to the book—but since when had “the book” been necessary equipment in