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you thought you would. >> i think that's perfectly true. each book feels like my last book, and then i think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm. >> kroft: david cornwell is not a functioning alcoholic, but he's created a stableful of imperfect characters over the year as john la carreé, a name e does not answer. to it's an abstraction that exists in his writing studio and on the cover of his books, like a spy's name on a phoney passport. >> looking after la carreé, keeping myself young, keeping the critical nature of life whizzing in my head, that's being la carreé. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm bill whitaker. >> i'm anderson cooper. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes."

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>> whitaker: federal and local authorities nationwide now consider heroin to be the biggest drug epidemic in the country. not methamphetamines or cocaine, but heroin. dealers, connected to mexican drug cartels, are making huge profits pushing their poison into suburbs and small towns across the country. it's basic economics: the dealers are going where the money is. and they're cultivating a broad set of consumers: high school students, college athletes, teachers and professionals. heroin is showing up everywhere, in places like columbus, ohio. the area has long been viewed as so typically middle american

that, for years, many companies have gone there to test new products. a few years ago, when we started reporting this story, we went to the columbus suburbs to see how heroin is taking hold in the heartland. i'm sitting here looking at you, and you look young, and fresh. you're the... you're the girl next door. and you were addicted to heroin. >> hannah morris: i mean, obviously, it's very flattering that you say, like, i don't look like a junkie. but even miss america could be a junkie. i mean, anybody can be a junkie. >> whitaker: hannah morris is in college now. she says she's been clean for more than two years, but in high school, she was using heroin. hannah lives outside columbus, in the upper middle-class suburb of worthington. her parents are professionals. the median income here is $87,000 a year. before she got hooked on heroin, hannah thought it was just another party drug.

how did you get to those depths? what was the path you took? >> morris: it started with weed, and it was fun, and i got the good weed. went to... oh, my gosh, i went to pills, and it was still fun-- you know, percocet, xanax, vicodin, all that kind of stuff. and then, yeah, heroin. i started smoking it at first. >> whitaker: so you were what, 15? >> morris: yeah. and i was like, "oh, my gosh, that was amazing." >> whitaker: you remember it even now? >> morris: oh, yeah. let's say i've never done a drug in my life. i would normally be happiness at a six or a seven, at a scale out of ten, you know. and then you take heroin and you're automatically at a 26. and you're like, "i want that again." >> whitaker: hannah says the heroin was so addictive that, rather quickly, she and several other students went from smoking it at parties to shooting it up at high school. >> morris: like, doing it at school in the bathroom. >> whitaker: a syringe? >> morris: a syringe. i would have it in my purse, all ready to go. >> whitaker: jenna morrison has been off heroin for more than

she comes from a town that is smaller and more rural than hannah's. jenna says her addiction started with legal opiates-- pain pills you can get with a prescription. chemically, they're almost identical to heroin. >> jenna morrison: i got on pain pills pretty bad when i was probably between 15 and 16. >> whitaker: and the heroin came... >> morrison: when i was 18. >> whitaker: was it an easy transition from the pain pills to heroin? >> morrison: very, because i didn't realize at the time that heroin is an opiate. i didn't know that that was the same thing as the pills that i was using. >> whitaker: why were you using all these drugs? >> morrison: i'm in a small town. there was nothing to do. and i was hanging out with older people. so, that was our way of having fun, partying. >> mike dewine: this is the worst drug epidemic i've seen in... in my lifetime. >> whitaker: mike dewine is the attorney general of ohio. he's a former u.s. senator, coss

we met him at a state crime lab outside columbus. >> dewine: it's in every single county. it's in our cities, but it's also in our wealthier suburbs. it's in our small towns. there is no place in ohio where you can hide from it. >> whitaker: it's that pervasive? >> dewine: there is no place in ohio where you couldn't have it delivered to you in 15, 20 minutes. >> morris: i can text and say, "hey, do you have this?" we can meet. they would bring it to my house, leave it under the mat. it's pretty easy to get. >> whitaker: full service. >> morris: uh-huh, yeah. to me, it was easier to get than weed or cocaine. definitely easier. >> whitaker: dealers with connections to the mexican cartels sell heroin everywhere, even in this department store parking lot outside columbus. >> he'll be coming out of that car right there. >> whitaker: our cameras captured the purchase of this heroin by an undercover police informant. what is this? >> so this is a couple types of heroin that s

>> whitaker: attorney general mike dewine's staffers say the mexican heroin can be cheap-- $10 a hit or less. some of it is cut with other drugs that make it even more powerful and deadly. and dealers keep inventing new ways to outwit law enforcement. and what do you have here? >> these are actually tablets. so they are pressed to look like a actual prescription tablet, but they contain heroin. >> whitaker: heroin in pill form. >> that look like pills, correct. >> whitaker: this... this is new. >> very new. we've only seen a few cases in the lab. >> whitaker: and something else mike dewine says is new since his days as a county prosecutor; heroin has lost its stigma as a poisonous, back alley drug. >> dewine: there's no psychological barrier anymore that stops a young person or an older person from taking heroin. >> whitaker: so, who is the typical heroin user in ohio today? >> dewine: anybody watching today, this show. it could be your family.

there's no typical person. it just has permeated every segment of society in ohio. >> whitaker: even the well-to- do town of pickerington, 30 minutes outside of columbus. tyler campbell was a star of the high school football team. he went on to play division one at the university of akron. for tyler, heroin wasn't a party drug. his parents, wayne and christy campbell, say his heroin habit grew from his addiction to opiate painkillers, prescribed legally after he injured his shoulder. what were the pills? >> christy campbell: it was vicodin. >> wayne campbell: vicodin. he had 60 vicodin for his shoulder surgery. >> whitaker: that's a normal prescription? >> wayne campbell: for that procedure. >> whitaker: it's easy for kids to sell their excess pills. they're popular recreational drugs in high schools and colleges, so much in demand that one pill can cost up to $80. pill addicts like tyler often switch to heroin because it's a cheaper opiate with a bigger high.

tyler was in and out of rehab four times. the night he came home the last time, he couldn't fight the uncontrollable urge that is heroin addiction. he shot up in his bedroom and died of a heroin overdose. he wasn't the only addict on his college football team. >> wayne campbell: unfortunately, the quarterback died four months after tyler, in 2011, same situation. >> christy campbell: same-- accidental overdose. >> first of all, if you don't talk about it, right? >> whitaker: after tyler died, the campbells met many families whose children were heroin addicts in the suburbs of columbus. like tyler, most got hooked on pills first. started with pain pills? >> absolutely. >> whitaker: t.j. and heidi riggs' daughter died of a heroin overdose. marin was a high school basketball player and captain of her golf team. lea heidman and brian malone's daughter alyssa died of an overdose in 2015. brenda stewart has two sons in recovery. tracy morrison is jenna morr

second daughter who is also a recovering addict. rob brandt's son was an addict. >> rob brandt: he battled it through high school. >> whitaker: he says his son robby got hooked on pain pills prescribed by a dentist after his wisdom teeth were removed. he was in training with the national guard, hoping to serve in afghanistan. >> brandt: and when he came home, he met up with an old friend that he used to buy and sell prescription medications with, and that old friend introduced him to heroin. and we did the... we did rehab, we did relapse, we did rehab, and he got clean. but the drug called his name again and... and he said yes, and that was the last time, and he passed from an accidental overdose. >> whitaker: for many of these parents, the hardest thing to accept was losing their children after they thought they'd finally beaten the addiction. >> lea heidman: she passed away the day after st. patrick's day. and she posted on st. patrick's day a picture of her on her laptop, studying, doing

for me, not even a single drink. i'm staying in and i'm... and i'm working." and the next day she used, and that was the last time she used. >> tracy morrison: i am a nurse... >> whitaker: tracy morrison, jenna's mother, trained to be a nurse more than 30 years ago. she says the medical profession must bear some responsibility for the heroin epidemic. she says doctors over-prescribe pain medications. >> tracy morrison: i graduated in the '80s. i was a nursing director when we decided to swing the pendulum, from not treating pain to treating everybody's pain. i was a part of that. and at that time, i had no idea that we were addicting people. >> whitaker: in 2014, three quarters of a billion pain pills were prescribed by doctors in ohio-- nearly 65 pills for every man, woman and child in the state. how did you respond when your

>> tracy morrison: well, they first told me they were using the pills, and how i found out they were using heroin was, i came home from work one day, made dinner, and i was yelling for my youngest daughter to come for dinner and she didn't. and i walked into her bedroom and her boyfriend was shooting her up. >> whitaker: you saw this? >> tracy morrison: i saw it. >> whitaker: what did you do? >> tracy morrison: dropped the plate of food. i dropped it. and i was hysterical. >> whitaker: tracy's daughter jenna is 26 now. she knows she's lucky to be alive. >> jenna morrison: in my addiction, i have been to rehab 17 times, and i had been to jail six or seven times. so every time i went to jail, i got out, went to rehab, came home and relapsed, and then did it all over again. >> whitaker: you overdosed, as well? >> morrison: uh-huh. >> whitaker: how many times? >> morrison: i only overdosed once, and i woke up in an ambulance.

>> whitaker: jenna would have died if emergency medical technicians hadn't injected her with naloxone hydrochloride, also called narcan. it quickly reverses the effects of opiates in the brain. >> so this is the kit... >> whitaker: the heroin problem in ohio is so big, families and friends of addicts-- not just health professionals-- are being taught to administer narcan, which is now available without a prescription. >> this is what it looks like. this is the little purple cap, actually is the medication. >> tracy morrison: this is a hurricane. >> whitaker: though she's a nurse, tracy morrison says, at first, she had no idea her daughters were addicts. neither did the other parents. but, they feel they missed all the signs and let their children down. do you feel guilty? >> every day. >> heidi riggs: you lost the battle, so you're always going to say, "is there something i could have done differently?" is... you know, did... why didn't i notice it when i had missing spoons? that it wasn't because, you know, they left cereal bowls upstairs. it was actually because, you know

shoot heroin. but who would have thought our children would ever do heroin? >> whitaker: all of these parents say they wanted to talk to us because too many other families are embarrassed, in denial about their kids' heroin use. these parents say the stigma and shame are compounding the epidemic. >> heidi riggs: no one was talking about that we had heroin in pickerington. and so, for us, we were totally shocked when it happened. and... but the struggle was the stigma. >> brenda stewart: never say, "not my child." >> yeah, right. >> brenda stewart: because you never know. it could end up being your child. >> brian malone: you never want to get that call. you never want to get that call. >> whitaker: the call you got? >> brian malone: the call you got, and we got the call. >> whitaker: today, heroin overdoses take the lives of at least 27 people in ohio every week. we were told many other heroin deaths go unreported. i'm sure there are some who would be watching this and would say, "heroin addicts are junkies and they broughts

themselves, so why should we care?" >> tracy morrison: because we don't throw diabetics who sit on the couch eating bonbons and smoke, and they weigh 300 pounds, in prison. we don't belittle them, and there's not a big stigma. we don't do that to people that chain smoke and develop lung cancer. it's a chronic, relapsing brain disease, period, amen, end of story, and we need to accept it, even if it makes people uncomfortable. and if people don't like that, i'm sorry. >> cbs money watch update sponsored by lincoln financial. you're in charge. >> quijano: good evening. the trading week begins with the dow and s&p at record highs. fedex, general mills, and the finish line report earnings this week. and the backlog of americans waiting to hear whether they qualify for disability benefits from social security now

onlle miion people. i'm elaine quijano, cbs news.

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>> kroft: the name david cornwell is probably unfamiliar to most of you, but he's an interesting person to talk to in these days of alleged political conspiracies, espionage, and a rekindling of the cold war. he is an expert on secrets, a former spy himself, and the th

virtually all of them best sellers, written under the pen name of john le carré. among them are "the spy who came in from the cold," "the little drummer girl," "tinker tailor soldier spy," "the constant gardner" and "the night manager," all of which have been made into films. he is not just a popular writer of thrillers, he is a novelist of some standing, often compared to graham greene, joseph conrad, and somerset maugham. cornwell has been living this double life for more than 50 years now, and rarely gives television interviews, but upon the publication of his 24th novel, "a legacy of spies," we were invited to spend a few days with this literary lion in winter. to find his natural habitat, you must journey six hours from london, through farmland and down one-lane country roads lined with hedgerow and blackthorn, to a corner of england so remote it's known as land's end.

here, nestled on a cliff in cornwall, you will find john le carré's safe-house. so this is where you escape to? >> john le carré: yeah. it was as far from london as i could get reasonably. i guess the other thing to say about this place, which is very important to me, is that the cornish don't give a damn for celebrity. ( laughs ) if they even know what i do, they haven't read it. or if they have read it, they make a point of not being impressed by it. and that-- that is enormously soothing. not a head turns in the street when i walk by. ( laughs ) >> kroft: it's here, in the home he fashioned out of three derelict cottages more than 40 years ago, that he weaves together the threads of memory, experience, and research into his tales of intrigue. the solitude is his stimulation. you said many times that you don't like giving interviews. >> le carré: yeah, i think that's true.

and then i defect from that position. ( laughs ) >> kroft: it's very clear that almost every interview you've given over the last ten years, you've told them that it-- >> le carré: it was the last one. >> kroft: this was going-- the last one. >> le carré: it always is. >> kroft: well, i take the fact that you're still giving interviews, that you're aging better than you thought you would. >> le carré: i think that's perfectly true. each book feels like my last book. and then i think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm. >> kroft: david cornwell's not a functioning alcoholic, but he's created a stable full of imperfect characters over the years as john le carré, a name he does not answer to. it's an abstraction that exists in his writing studio, and on the cover of his books, like a spy's name on a phony passport. john le carré is sort of a cover. >> le carré: it's a separate identity, in a way. and you can look after it. and looking after le carré and keeping myself young, keeping the child in me alive-- keeping a critical nature of life

being le carré. >> kroft: is there any space between david and john? >> le carré: yes, i think a lot really. david tries to be a good dad and a regular guy with difficulty, many flaws. and-- and john takes off into the ether. he's-- the man of imagination. and-- i can take john for a walk, let him loose on the cliffs. ( laughs ) and he has a good time and he populates the empty cliffs with the people of his imagination. and then i come back and help with the washing up. >> kroft: le carré was created by cornwell in 1961, out of necessity, not choice. it happened during his first career as a spy for british intelligence, both at home and abroad. to satisfy a creative urge, he began writing fiction on his commute to work and during lunchtime.

why did you need a pen name? >> le carré: ah, well, a hard, practical reason. i was still in secret harness, as you might say. i wrote my first three books from inside the intelligence world. the books had to be approved by my masters, and were. but a condition was, i had to choose a pen name. so i went to my publisher. >> kroft: his publisher preferred short and snappy. cornwell wanted something interesting, mysterious and french. >> le carré: i've told many lies about how it came about, because i truly don't clearly remember. but i think i wanted, architecturally, a name in three, in three parts. and i thought the acute accent at the end, these were eye- catching things. so instead of trying to look like everybody else, i tried to look a bit different, as a name. and-- then-- somebody who is carré, as a gentleman, is not quite a gentleman. ( laughs ) that suits me fine. ( laughs )

>> kroft: that attitude doesn't just suit cornwell, it actually defines him. he has the wealth, the education, and the bearing of a polished patrician, but he'll never be part of the english upper class-- which he abhors. plus, he has the pedigree of a rogue. >> le carré: i mean, you must realize that i'm an upstart. i do come originally from a working class family. i went kind of from working class to middle class to-- to criminal class, which was finally my father's condition. and i had to invent myself as a gentleman, a pseudo-gentleman. so-- it's a good american story of self-invention. >> kroft: he was five years old years when his mother olive deserted the family, leaving him and his older brother, tony, under the chaotic charge of their father ronnie, a colorful, charismatic con man and crook. >> le carré: if there remains one great conundrum in my life, it is my father-- who seems to

of the worst or best characters in me. he had a wonderful brain. everybody who worked for him was in awe of his intellect. but if there was a bent way of doing something, he took it. >> kroft: a rich vein of material for you to mine. >> le carré: wonderful. wonderful, rich vein of material. and very painful. >> kroft: ronnie ran with a fast crowd; celebrities, sportsmen, and mobsters. there were racehorses at ascot and trips to san moritz. they lived either as millionaires or paupers. one week, a chauffeured bentley; the next, on the run from bill collectors, or worse. >> le carré: he'd done quite a lot of jail. and he spent some years of his life on the run in late middle age. so it was a mess, just a bloody mess. but that-- surviving it-- it was also a privilege to be part of it, in some strange way. lo taught you a lot about life,

raised them in other ways. >> kroft: what did you learn? >> le carré: i learned, i think, to understand the wideness, the width, of the spectrum of human behavior. and-- i guess i learned the-- the perils of charm, which he exercised ruthlessly with huge success. and i learned about the insecurity of the world. that everything is transient, even our money, our future, our lives, our children, everything. he was always an excellent student, and by the time he graduated from oxford with a degree in modern languages, he'd already learned from his father some of the prerequisites of a career in espionage: lying, manipulation and deception. when he was approached by a recruiter for the british secret service, it seemed like a seamless transition. when it comes to recruiting people for the secret world,

for is pretty much what i had. i was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. i had a bit of larceny. i understood larceny. i understood the natural criminality in people-- because it was-- it was all around me. and i have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. once i found that identity, it took root in me. it exactly- it gelled with the world that i'd known in the past. >> kroft: he began in london, running agents, keeping tabs on subversives and spies, and learning the trade craft. he moved to the foreign branch, mi-6, at the height of the cold war, posing as a young diplomat at the british embassy in west germany, just as the berlin wall was going up. what were you doing when you were working for mi-6? >> le carré: in germany, i never talk about that. >> kroft: you can't. >> le carré: no. i would never be comfortable talking about it.

with most people-- who've been in that world. it is simply anathema. >> kroft: whatever david cornwell's duties were, john le carré found time to write a novel about a washed-up spy named alec leamas, who is sent on a dangerous mission across the wall and betrayed by his bosses. >> le carré: my memory is that i wrote it very fast, the story. but i had no idea where i was going at first. and it just flowed. and i think you get a break like that once in your writing life. i, i really believe-- nothing else came to me so naturally, so fast. >> kroft: you had to show it to... >> le carré: i then showed it to-- >> kroft: ...the service. >> le carré: my department. and there was a bit of a loud silence. and then, actually, as was a kind of sporting decency almost, my-- my service said, "okay, go ahead and publish it." but i think they had no idea, any more than i did, that it would become a sensation.

>> kroft: "the spy who came in from the cold" was the publishing event of 1963. the book spent 34 weeks as number one on the bestseller list, and was made into an acclaimed motion picture starring richard burton and claire bloom. both the novel and the film served as grey, gritty antidotes to the fantastical world of james bond, and were accepted by critics and the public as an authentic portrayal of the scruffy business of espionage. >> alec leamus: what the hell do you think spies are? moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of god or karl marx? they're not. they're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me. little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and indians to brighten their rotten little lives. do you think they sit like monks in a cell balancing right against wrong? >> kroft: the book would make john le carré a famous and much- in-demand author, but for

intelligence knew who and where he was, and it did not want to blow cornwell's cover in germany. people didn't know it was you. >> le carré: no, they didn't, until the "sunday times" blew the whistle. and then-- the whole investigation of my person, as you might say, came up. was i a spook? was i not a spook? and i, out of loyalty to my service and out of some sense of privacy, went on insisting that i'd had no intelligence experience, until it became absurd. ( laughs ) and it became absurd largely-- >> kroft: i did... >> le carré: --largely with my colleagues. ( laughs ) and my superior officers were either boasting or complaining to anybody who would listen that-- that i'd written the book. >> kroft: spooks are generally wary of unscripted publicity, so he and the agency eventually agreed to part ways, allowing him, and le carré, to concentrate full time on fiction, not unlike his father, ronnie. you have mused, on at least one

much of a difference between what you do for a living and what he did. >> le carré: well, i think that's kind of me. ( laughs ) >> kroft: what were you talking about specifically? >> le carré: well, i was saying that i live off my wits, as he did. i look around, i collect bits of people. i assemble them. i pitch a story. i sell it. he, as a con man, does much the same. i do it on the page, and he does it with human material. but what that doesn't take account of is what happens to the human material. ( laughs ) >> kroft: you've said-- and i don't know what the context was, but i've seen this quoted a number of times. you said, "i'm a liar, born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living." >> le carré: yeah. all of that's true.

confession. but these days, i tell the truth. >> kroft: when we come back, we'll visit two of le carré's favorite inventions: the london circus, and george smiley-- who both reappear after an absence of nearly 30 years in his new book, "a legacy of spies." plus, a walk through his writing studio, and his thoughts about today's world. >> this cbs sports update is brought to you by ford. i'm james brown with scores from the nfl today. the patriots totaled 555 yards of offense in their win. the ravens d forced five turn yoifers to down the browns. tampa bay scored 20 points off of turnovers to win their opening game. the chiefs move to 2-0. arizona wins behind phil dawson's 30-yard game-winning field goal in o.t.

first time since '02. for more game news, go to cbssports.com. ♪ let's go! ♪ mom! slow down! for the ones who keep pushing. always unstoppable.

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>> kroft: for the most part, the novels of david cornwell, written under the name john le carré, are about spies and espionage. that's the subject matter, anyway, and the setting. but they're also about human nature and behavior; about honor, ambition, careerism and conflicting loyalties that could apply to any profession. it's a way of writing large about the small world of secret intelligence services that cornwell was a part of-- and not a bad way, he says, to take

health. >> le carré: you feel that you've got a hand somehow on the subconscious of the nation. you feel you know what the greatest anxieties are and the greatest ambitions are. >> kroft: in le carré's world, the headquarters of the british intelligence services existed some years ago in an imaginary building off the theatre district in central london. >> london station couldn't be in better hands! >> kroft: as portrayed in his books and the movies about them, this den of spies was a drab bureaucracy populated by eccentric characters working in a long-neglected victorian pile of bricks called the circus. >> about time someone oiled this thing, isn't it? we keep asking! >> kroft: it was not exactly an accurate description of the real thing, cornwell says, but it was credible. >> le carré: it was an abstraction from reality. >> kroft: was it known as "the circus" to the people who were... ? >> le carré: no, no, no. it wasn't.

imagination? >> le carré: i lifted the building, body and soul, as you might say, replanted it in cambridge circus-- different part of london, and it was known by the shorthand as "the circus." and what better name for a community of performing-- ( laughs ) --performing spies, than the circus? >> kroft: there were scalp hunters, lamplighters, honey traps and moles. all of this came from your imagination? >> le carré: yes. i mean, something always sparks the imagination, and mine was sparked and took off, and i thought, "this is-- this is a kind of half-dream world which i can inform from experience." and it fits. >> kroft: people who work there recognize it? >> le carré: it isn't as if they recognize this operation or that operation. what they recognize is the smell, and the authenticity of, i hope, of the life that we led.

>> le carré: secret service headquarters was down on the right-hand side. >> kroft: in london, cornwell took us on a cab ride to see the actual building where he worked, and that used to house mi-6 headquarters. >> le carré: and it was dusty and smelly and it smelled of, sort of, nescafe and fags. people smoked. everybody seemed to smoke. lot of alcohol. a lot of alcohol. >> kroft: it's now an office building, not far from buckingham palace. >> kroft: there much security-- >> le carré: there was no security at all. i mean, none. none that was visible. you walked in and out once you were a familiar face. and it was, "good morning, mr. cornwell." good morning, this. hallo, bill. and when you came back from abroad, it was always, "welcome back, sir." >> kroft: but nobody searched the bags going in and out? >> le carré: no. i, i-- i never knew of anyone being stopped and searched. >> kroft: there would be a price paid for the complacency, when mi-6's most notorious double agent, the cambridge-educated spy kim philby, waltzed out the door with some of britain's most

valuable secrets and handed them over to the soviet union. the incident was an inspiration for cornwell's most memorable success, "tinker tailor soldier spy." the book and this bbc adaptation are about the search for a russian mole at the highest level of the circus... >> we have a rotten apple, and the maggots are eating at the circus. >> kroft: ...conducted by le carré's portly spymaster and favorite character, george smiley. >> le carré: it's a very close bond. george smiley is my secret sharer, my companion. and i think that, because i'm given to exaggerated emotions at times, smiley moderates me as a writer. >> kroft: the character, played by alec guinness in this bbc version, is about as close as le carré gets to a hero. at best, middle-aged, a hapless cuckold, he is measured,

his job. what do you like best about smiley? >> le carré: i think how he toughs it out. >> kroft: survivor. >> le carré: more than that. he does a good job. >> tidy up! >> le carré: and much of it is distasteful to him. but he has a sense of duty. and he has a sense of moral obligation and a sense of balance. >> george, you won! >> le carré: he's made a lot of compromises with life. >> did i? yes, yes, i suppose i did. >> le carré: and it's actually his greatest operational weapon, is his humanity. >> kroft: it been nearly 30 years since smiley and his old circus performers have appeared in a le carré novel, but some of them are back for the new one: "a legacy of spies," and unceremoniously called to account at the gleaming new mi-6

headquarters, for the sins, failures and betrayals committed decades earlier in "the spy who came in from the cold." >> kroft: this struck me as something you've been wanting to do for a while. >> le carré: well, it is. in the first place, the characters never left me. in some curious way, particularly smiley, they became-- even if i wasn't writing about them-- they became quite conscious companions, at times, in my imagination. and what i wanted to do at this stage, this point of closure in the smiley saga now 50, 60 years on, was have the present interrogate the past about what we did then in the cold war, in the name of freedom. and was it worth it. and it was with this very mood very much that i concluded the book and the search for george smiley, which for me was some kind of search for truth. >> kroft: what he loves best about writing is the privacy of it.

every day sometime, after 7:00 a.m., he climbs the steps to his studio and begins putting pen to paper. >> le carré: and this is my workroom. if there are family crises and things like that, i edit them out until midday. this is from "legacy." and this is peter guillam, the central figure, who is narrating. i have two visions simultaneously. the first, of george, that's george smiley; and alec, that's alec leamas; huddled head to head in the chilly conservatory. in bywater street. rare use of an adjective by me. >> kroft: most of the material comes from notebooks he's filled on long walks or epic research trips he's taken to capture the feel and smell of faraway place he puts his characters. >> le carré: this is all the very raw material. >> kroft: these notes were jotted down in kenya while he was writing "the constant gardner." >> le carré: these are things i saw. batons. a panga from somewhere. "the man lies in the recovery pose, bathed in blood from the head down, dead orng

in nairobi, murder is one of the few industries that that live up to expectation." >> kroft: there are no computers involved in this process. he edits with scissors and a stapler... >> le carré: and that's the extract. >> kroft: ...and hands the good bits off to his personal typist and copy editor, jane cornwell, his wife of 45 years. she is also chief operating officer of his life and various enterprises. >> le carré: like all writers, i've lived a messy, untidy life, inevitably so, and she's been wonderfully supportive. and it's always, go to jane if you need to get to david, because she's got her feet on the ground. god knows where he's got his feet. >> kroft: cornwell has been writing as john le carré for so long, no one could tell us how many millions of books he's sold over the last five and a half decades. they've been printed in 43 different languages. how do you think of yourself as a writer? >> le carré: wow.

storyteller. so we're sitting in front of a fire. i want to keep you in your chair. i want to interest you. i want you to want to turn the page. but i don't really think too much about the posterity, and i certainly don't join the literary argument about where i stand. am i a quality novelist? am i a popular novelist? am i a thriller writer? to me, if i'd gone to sea, i'd have written about the sea. if i'd gone into stockbroking, i'd have written about the stockbroking world. >> kroft: you've turned down literary honors. you've turned down a knighthood. >> le carré: yes. >> kroft: why? >> le carré: in my own country, i'm so suspicious of the literary world that i don't want its accolades. and least of all do i want to be called a commander of the british empire or any other thing of the british empire. i find it emetic. >> kroft: and why do you feel that way? >> le carré: i don't want to posture as somebody who's been honored by the state and must therefore somehow conform with the state. and i don't want to wear the armor.

>> kroft: your writing partner, george smiley, had this to say on the subject: "the privately educated englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth. no one will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skillfully, or find it harder to confess that he's been a damned fool. no one acts braver when he's frightened stiff, or happier when he's miserable. and nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than an extrovert englishman or woman." >> le carré: yeah. i think that's very good. ( laughter ) >> kroft: you like that graph. >> le carré: i like that, yes i do. >> kroft: do you consider yourself an englishman? >> le carré: what kind of englishman at the moment? yes, of course, i'm born and bred english. i'm english to the core. my england would be the one that recognizes its place in the european union. that jingoistic england that is trying to march us out of the e.u., that is an england i don't want to know.

cornwell has no use for president donald trump and his nationalistic agenda which he calls alarming and contagious, and he worries about the ambitions of russian president vladimir putin. >> le carré: i think today's spooks working on the russian front-- british spooks-- would tell you that it's just as bad as it was in the cold war. putin sees everything in terms of conspiracy, and his grip on the russian populace is so strong that he has resorted to all the old systems that he was familiar with. so, we're right back to where we were in the cold war, with the added mission that putin has given to himself to erode decent democracy wherever he sees it. >> kroft: so much has changed the world of espionage, since you first began. i mean, you have the introduction now of cyber war. you have-- computer hacking. you have all of this stuff. you-- >> le carré: yeah. >> kroft: you wonder, is it

secrets at all? and do we need spies? any human spies? >> le carré: i think probably, in many ways, more than ever. in some ways, the techniques of intelligence and the techniques of maintaining secrets have gone backwards. if you and i are going to enter into a conspiracy now, we don't do it through the ether. we don't do it by computer. we exchange notes. we either hand each other notes-- we keep paper again. paper is back in. secondly, you very, very often need an agent on the spot who is going to deliver the piece of paper, the code number, the simple clue to it all. >> kroft: mostly right now, david cornwell and john le carée are recovering from, celebrating and lamenting publication of this last novel, strange as that may seem. you said the most depressing time in your life is when you've finished a book? >> le carres

yes. >> kroft: which is what you're going through right now? >> le carré: which is exactly what i'm going through right now. thank you for lightening my load. ( laughs ) yeah, it's a feeling of-- you've depleted everything you've-- you've been working on. it's done. it's out there. and then out of the ashes of the last book, so to speak, comes the phoenix of the new one, and then life's okay again. but the-- the depression that overtakes me when i've turned in a book, i must confess is real and deep. >> kroft: do you have an idea for the next book? >> le carré: absolutely. i can't wait to get to it. >> la carreé reads la carree. >> what do you think spies are? priests, saints and martyrs? >> on 60minutesovertime.com, sponsored by prevnar13.

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