with le carre, with smiley, you're... you can't fuss too much and mess with the molecules there's a d.n.a. at work here and i am, i think, inevitably going to arrive at the same destinations. not all of them, but the same destination that guinness arrived at. >> rose: what do you mean by destination? >> well, there are just... there are just certain character trait that smiley has that you... that you can't mess with. just for the sake of making it modern and different. so that was a dragon i had to slay. >> rose: i thought that also in terms of reading about you that you had to understand that george smiley is a classic character in the same way hamlet is a classic character and therefore in someone that is a classic character it lends itself to different interpretations because it will be performed by so many different actors. >> but there's a motor. it's like a little wheel that's in smiley. it's his running condition. there's a melancholy. there's a... there's a disenchantment. he's a disillusioned romantic. there's a

it did feature the stuff from a john le carre novel. apart from the more traditional types of espionage, today's spies are just as often students, researchers, business people, or operators of front companies. they seek not only state secrets, but trade secrets from corporations and universities, such as research and development, intellectual property, and insider information. consider the recent case of a naturalized u.s. citizen from india. for 18 years, he was an engineer at no. 0 grumman, the defense contractor that built the stealth bomber, one of our nation's most important strategic assets -- an engineer at no. full grumman -- nor folk -- norfolk grumman. he sold highly classified information about the stealth technology to several nations, including china, and also made six covert trips to china to assist them in development of stealth technology for their cruise missiles. partnerships again were essential in finding and stopping him before he could further damage national security. together with the air force, u.s. customs, irs

it sounds a bit like le carré, but it's also kind of dangerous.mean, how did you get this mission? - well, i'd always had a passionate feeling that tyranny of whatever sort, left or right, was unjust and immoral, and it hurts me to think that people suffer under some form of despotism, that they're arrested and tortured for their views or their religious views or just how they want to live. and i had the feeling in the late 1980s that the soviet union was going to come to an end, that communism would be over--i think i was a little bit ahead of the curve on that--and it mattered what would replace it, because it doesn't follow that if one tyranny falls it's necessarily going to be an improvement, so it was very important that people have access to the ideas of liberty, of constitutional government, of limited government, of freedom of speech, of free market economy, of the rule of law, of toleration. and i moved to austria and worked with friends there and began bringing books, photocopiers, fax machines, which were very important because the kgb