In an interview on Global Security

Now you’ve got Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This is perhaps an odd choice for this list, but it’s just a brilliant book and I think fiction can explore human nature and the nature of government just as well as nonfiction.

I always thought it was about Communist Russia though. What can it tell us about today’s world?

Obviously, it’s a story about the dangers of authoritarian states, drawing parallels with Communism, but if you reread it today there is resonance. For example, Orwell talks about the perpetual war that exists between these three super-states and which drives the economy – that tallies with the long war against Islamo-fascism that the War on Terror became. And propaganda is very strong in the book and they have this concept of ‘blackwhite’, which is the ability to accept the ‘truth’ the Party puts out, however crazy it might seem. Also there’s the concept of the ‘unperson’ in the book, people who have been erased from history. This has parallels with extraordinary rendition and Guantanomo Bay where people were ‘disappeared’. Some of what he was saying back in the 40s has so much resonance now. Orwellian has come to mean the kind of surveillance state we live in today, with all the CCTV. It’s not a prophetic book but it’s a warning. The language of Newspeak has given us wonderful words, the language the government brings in to replace English in the book. The one I really like is ‘doublethink’ which is reality control and holding two completely contradictory beliefs in one’s mind at the same time and accepting both of them. It’s such a wonderful description of the way human psychology works, particularly when we’re duped into believing completely ludicrous things by governments.

In an interview on Political Satire

1984.

That’s satire more in the Roman mode. The usual definition of satire is humour used to a moral end for a moral purpose, and there’s certainly a moral purpose to 1984 but it’s not funny really. I mean there is a certain dark humour to rewriting history and things going down a memory hole.

It’s funny in the Russian sense of the word.

I like that. Believe me, I’ll steal that phrase.

I’ll see you in court.

It’s sort of like being popular in Japan.

1984?

It’s eerily predictive of the sort of video camera surveillance world that we now live in. It would be interesting to update 1984 and make all of the things that Orwell foresaw more annoying than dangerous. Well, some of them do get pretty dangerous, but things like television that looks back at you turns out to be a real pain in the ass more than an instrument of government control. We’ve come into the world of 1984 but it turns out to be 1984-Lite.

There’s something surrealist about the absolutely unspeakable horror of somebody’s imagination being actually slightly banal.

Sad in a way. Sad, but at the same time quite a relief. Sad, but a relief.

That’s also quite Russian. One more book. Evelyn Waugh.

In the case of Waugh I would actually say that Put Out More Flags is more directly politically satirical. It explores pretty well the European reaction to Communism and Fascism in the 1930s. It’s one of his six comic novels and it’s Ethiopia. Waugh was sent to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie and from that he spun three novels: Black Mischief, Scoop and Put Out More Flags. I suppose Put Out More Flags is the least known of his comic novels. There’s A Handful of Dust and…they’re like the Seven Dwarfs, I can never name all of them. The satire of Black Mischief involves a primitive society getting all sorts of modern ideas.

In an interview on the US Intelligence Services

Let’s end with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.

None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?

Nineteen Eighty-Four described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in Nineteen Eighty-Four was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, Enemies, is about.

But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.

Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.

Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.

During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals”. But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?

In the introduction to Enemies I point out that [US statesman] Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.

I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.

When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.