Enemy of the State (1998)

Yesterday afternoon the CBC aired a 2010 interview with the late John Le Carré. As always when listening to John Le Carré, I hang on every word. 

During the interview Le Carré told a story (the same story that ends his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, 2016) of a locked safe that he and his MI6 colleagues believed might hold the answer to every security question ever pondered. When the day finally came for the safe to be opened, all it contained were the pants of Adolph Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess -- who, in 1941, is said to have flown solo to Scotland to meet with the British monarchy to negotiate a separate peace and, after crashing his plane, was captured and held in detention until his suicide in 1987 (at the age of 93!).

But it was Le Carré's incredulity as to why Hess's pants were held that had me wondering if a) expressions of incredulity were part of Le Carré's training (one of his super powers) and, if true, b) whether the smokescreen that his incredulity contributed to remains part of a larger mission to have us believe that Hess's mission was not in fact a defection.

After dinner I sat down to watch another of my recent DVDs, this one from a box passed on to me from a friend. The film was Enemy of the State (1998), the story of a DC lawyer caught up in overlapping intrigues that have him on the run, and eventually under the care of an uncared for and self-exiled NSA agent. Heavy bugged by the current NSA regime, the lawyer, in an effort to get away, begins to shed his personal effects -- the last of them being his pants.