'It was as if the whole of my life had prepared me for this moment'

Although he has hinted at a past as a spy, author John Le Carre finally admitted to his espionage involvement in a recent documentary

Author Le Carre: I really was a spy

(CNN) -- Bestselling espionage-thriller writer John Le Carre has admitted he was a longtime agent of Britain's intelligence services, according to a report in the Times of London.

"I really believed at last that I had found a cause I could serve," Le Carre, 69, says in a TV documentary, "The Secret Centre," scheduled to air on Britain's BBC2 network Tuesday night. "I also longed for the dignity which great secrecy confers upon you."

Le Carre, whose real name is David Cornwell, is the author of a series of bestsellers, including "The Russia House," "The Honourable Schoolboy," "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," and "Smiley's People." His latest work, just out in the United States, is "The Constant Gardener."

In the past, he has admitted spending "a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence" and that "nothing I write is authentic."

However, in the documentary he says he based his first hit novel, 1964's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," on his experiences in Berlin when the Berlin Wall was being built. After staying up for 48 hours straight, "helping out where (he) could" during that tense time, he returned to his house and started writing, Le Carre says.

"I was tremendously high and in five days I wrote huge, overlong versions of what became 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' " he recalls, adding that he later cut the work to 55,000 words. "I think I'd had one of those moments of literary maturity, a moment when material and subject come together and you feel, 'Yeah, this one's really right.' "

His career as a spy began while he was attending the University of Berne in Switzerland, he said. The jobs were minor, little more than handling packages, he says, "but I trolleyed off thinking I was the greatest spy in the world."

He continued spying when he returned to England to attend Oxford University. This time his target was fellow students.

The Cold War prompted the scrutiny, he says. "There was a conviction then that the Russians, the Soviets and their allies would be recruiting from the ranks of middle-class Oxford undergraduates in the late '40s in the same way that they had done in the '30s at Cambridge. ... So the requirement, however painful it was, was to try to find out who was in the play of Soviet recruiters."

Despite the difficult life of a spy -- the deception, the housebreaking, the flexible ideas of morality -- Le Carre says he enjoyed it immensely.

It was, in fact, practically a calling.

"I think when the option (of joining the intelligence services) was presented to me it was immensely attractive," he says. "It was as if the whole of my life had prepared me for this moment. It was entering the priesthood."

And what of his contacts, whom Le Carre double-crossed as part of the job?

"It felt like betrayal, but it had a voluptuous quality, as it did for my character (in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold')," he says. "This was a necessary sacrifice of morality and that is a very important component of what makes people spy, what attracts them."

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