A Delicate Truth
Paperback cover
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| Author | John le Carré |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
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Publication date
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25 April 2013 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | Our Kind of Traitor |
A Delicate Truth is a 2013 spy novel by John le Carré. Set in 2008 and 2011, the book features a British/American covert mission in Gibraltar and the subsequent consequences for two British civil servants.
Le Carré describes this as not only his most British novel but also his most autobiographical work in years. The author told The Daily Telegraph that he has based two of the book's characters on himself. Le Carré sees Toby Bell as "the thirty-something rising star of Her Majesty's Foreign Service ... the striving ambitious fellow I fancy myself to have been at much the same age." – whereas Sir Christopher ("Kit") Probyn is "a retired Foreign Office civil servant, who lives in rural Cornwall." – the author has "lived in a clifftop house outside St Buryan, near Land's End, for more than 40 years."
The novel may be loosely based on Operation Flavius, the 1988 operation during which three members of the Provisional IRA were shot dead by the British SAS in Gibraltar.
In 2008 a civil servant in the Foreign Office, known by his alias "Paul Anderson", is recruited by a Foreign Office junior minister, Fergus Quinn, to take part in an operation code-named Wildlife. Paul goes to Gibraltar and joins a small team of British Special Forces. The covert operation which is directed by Quinn and an employee of "security contractors" Ethical Outcomes named Elliot is compromised when Quinn and Elliot insist that the soldiers raid an abandoned house where, despite the absence of proof, they assume a high-ranking jihadist is hiding and insist that the operation was a success.
Quinn's newly appointed Private Secretary, Toby Bell, becomes suspicious of his secretive nature and his close ties with Jay Crispin, the founder of Ethical Outcomes. Bell sees Quinn with Crispin during diplomatic trips to Brussels, Prague, and Berlin, and learns that the two met during Quinn's time at Harvard. Bell learns that Quinn was saved from scandal after it was discovered that Crispin was found running a privatised spy shop within the Ministry of Defence. Bell learns that Quinn and Crispin are still secretly meeting in London. Against all the rules, Bell makes a recording of a meeting on Operation Wildlife.
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