Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 1974 spy novel by the author and former secret intelligence officer John le Carré. It follows the endeavours of the taciturn, ageing spymaster George Smiley to uncover a Soviet mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service. The novel has received critical acclaim for its complex social commentary—and, at the time, relevance, following the defection of Kim Philby. It was followed by The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977 and Smiley's People in 1979. The three novels together make up the "Karla Trilogy", named after Smiley's long-time nemesis Karla, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence and the trilogy's overarching antagonist.
The novel has been adapted into both a television series and a film, and remains a staple of the spy fiction genre. In 2022, the novel was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Plot
Background
As the tension of the Cold War is peaking in 1973, George Smiley, former senior official in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, is living unhappily in forced retirement, following the failure of an operation codenamed Testify in Czechoslovakia, which ended in the capture and torture of agent Jim Prideaux. Control, chief of the Circus, had suspected that one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus was a Soviet mole, and had assigned them code names for Prideaux to relay back to the Circus, derived from the English children's rhyme "Tinker, Tailor":Tinker, tailor,
soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man,
beggarman, thief.
The failure resulted in the dismissal of Control, Smiley, and allies such as Connie Sachs and Jerry Westerby, and their replacement by a new guard consisting of Percy Alleline, Toby Esterhase, Bill Haydon, and Roy Bland. Control has since died, and Smiley's former protégé, Peter Guillam, has been demoted to the "scalphunters".
Guillam unexpectedly approaches Smiley and takes him to the house of Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon, the civil servant who oversees the Circus. There, they meet Ricki Tarr, an agent recently declared persona non grata due to suspicion that he has defected. Tarr defends himself by explaining that he was informed of a Soviet mole at the highest level of the Circus – codenamed Gerald – by Irina, the wife of a trade delegate, while in Hong Kong. Irina claimed that the mole, Gerald, reports to a Soviet official stationed at the embassy in London called Polyakov. Shortly after Tarr relayed this to the Circus, Irina was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union, leading Tarr to suspect that the mole was real, and now knew his identity. Tarr went into hiding, resurfacing to contact Guillam.
Lacon reasons that neither Smiley nor Guillam can be the mole, due to their respective dismissal and demotion, and so requests that Smiley investigate the presence of the mole in total secrecy to avoid another PR scandal for both the Government and the Circus. Smiley cautiously agrees, and forms a team consisting of himself, Guillam, Tarr, and retired Scotland Yard Inspector Mendel. Smiley is also given access to Circus documents, and begins by examining Alleline's restructuring, discovering the ousting of Jerry Westerby and Connie Sachs, as well as slush fund payments to Jim Prideaux.
Smiley begins the hunt
Smiley visits Sachs, discovering that she confronted Alleline about her discovery that Polyakov was actually a Soviet Colonel called Gregor Viktorov, but he ordered her to drop the subject. She also mentions rumours of a secret Soviet facility for training moles, and makes allusions to Prideaux and Bill Haydon's relationship being more than just platonic friendship.Smiley examines Operation Witchcraft, an operation in which Soviet intelligence was obtained through a key source known as "Merlin", which was treated with suspicion by both Smiley and Control. Alleline obtained ministerial support to circumvent Control's authority, and his post-Testify promotion supporters Haydon, Esterhase, and Bland have sponsored it. Smiley also learns that this "Magic Circle" has obtained a safe house somewhere in London where they obtain information from a Merlin emissary posted in London under a diplomatic cover, who – Smiley concludes – is Polyakov himself.
Smiley suspects that the Circus does not realise the flow of information is going the other way, with the mole "Gerald" passing important British secrets in return for low-grade Soviet material, which would make "Witchcraft" simply a cover for the mole.
Karla
Smiley also discovers that the log from the night Tarr reported in from Hong Kong has been removed, and Guillam starts to suffer from paranoia as a result of their operation. Smiley tells Guillam that he suspects a Soviet intelligence officer named Karla is linked in some way to the operation, and reveals what he knows about him. Karla is believed to have followed his father into espionage, getting his start during the Spanish Civil War, posing as a White Russian émigré in the forces of General Francisco Franco, recruiting foreign, mainly German, operatives. After this, the Circus lost track of Karla, but he resurfaced during Operation Barbarossa, directing partisan operations behind German lines. Smiley explains his belief that somewhere in the gap between these two conflicts, Karla travelled to England and recruited Gerald.Smiley points out that Karla is fiercely loyal to both the Soviet Union and communism, highlighting Karla's current rank despite his internment in a gulag by the Stalinist regime. He reveals that Karla turned down an offer from Smiley in India to defect, even though his return to the Soviet Union in 1955 was to face a likely execution, after Smiley worked with American authorities to disrupt Karla's efforts to establish a clandestine radio transmitter for agents in San Francisco. During his attempt to obtain Karla's defection, Smiley plied him with cigarettes and promises that they could get Karla's family out to the West safely. Smiley suspects that this only revealed his own weakness, his love for his unfaithful wife, Ann. Smiley offered Karla his lighter, a present from Ann, to light a cigarette, but Karla rose and left with it.
Merlin and Testify
Smiley suspects a link between Merlin and the botched Operation Testify. Sam Collins, who was the duty officer that night, tells Smiley that Control ordered him to relay the report of the Czech operation only to him, but that when he did so, Control froze up, and that Bill Haydon's sudden arrival was the only reason the hierarchy did not fall apart that night. Smiley then visits Max, a Czech operative who served as a legman for Prideaux on the operation, who tells Smiley that Prideaux gave him instructions to leave Czechoslovakia any way he could if Prideaux did not surface at the rendezvous at the appointed time. Smiley next visits Jerry Westerby, who tells Smiley about the trip to Prague when a young army conscript insisted that the Soviets were in the woods waiting for Prideaux a full day before he was ambushed.Finally, Smiley tracks down Prideaux, who tells him Control believed there was a mole in the Circus and had whittled it down to five men, Alleline, Haydon, Bland, Esterhase, and Smiley himself. Prideaux's orders were to obtain the identity from a defector in Czech intelligence who knew. He tells Smiley he almost did not make the rendezvous with Max because he noticed he was being tailed, and that when he arrived to meet the defector, he was ambushed, taking two bullets to his right shoulder. During his captivity, both Polyakov and Karla interrogated him, focusing solely on the extent and status of Control's investigation. Prideaux suggests that the Czech defector was a plant, contrived by Karla to engineer Control's downfall through Testify's failure, all conceived to protect the mole.
Catching the mole
Smiley confronts Toby Esterhase, stating that he is aware that Esterhase has been posing as a Soviet mole, with Polyakov as his handler, to provide cover for Merlin's emissary, Polyakov. Smiley compels Esterhase into revealing the location of the safe house by making him realise that not only is there a real Soviet mole embedded in the SIS, but also that Polyakov has not been "turned" to work in British interest, pretending to run the "mole" Esterhase, and in fact remains Karla's agent. Tarr is sent to Paris, where he passes a coded message to Alleline about "information crucial to the well-being of the Service". This triggers an emergency meeting between Gerald and Polyakov at the safe house, where Smiley and Guillam are lying in wait.Haydon is revealed to be the mole, and his interrogation reveals that he had been recruited several decades ago by Karla and became a full-fledged Soviet spy partly for political reasons, partly in frustration at Britain's rapidly declining influence on the world stage, particularly on account of the failings at Suez. He is expected to be exchanged with the Soviet Union for several of the agents he betrayed, but is killed shortly before he is due to leave England. Although the identity of his killer is not explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied to be Prideaux, due to the method of execution echoing the way he euthanises an injured owl earlier in the book, Prideaux's implied threat to execute a driver in Czechoslovakia in the same way that Haydon is killed, and a sense Smiley has of someone with Prideaux's background observing some of his later interrogations. Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus to deal with the fallout, and is still head at the start of the second book of The Karla Trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy.
Background
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the fifth of le Carré's spy novels to feature the character of George Smiley and the fictionalised intelligence agency of "the Circus." Two of the characters, Peter Guillam and Inspector Mendel, first appeared in Call for the Dead, while Control appeared in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. With Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carré returned to the world of spy fiction after his non-espionage novel, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, was panned by critics.When Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was published in 1974, revelations exposing the presence of Soviet double agents in Britain were still fresh in public memory. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby, later known as members of the Cambridge Five, had been exposed as KGB spies. The five had risen to very senior positions in the British diplomatic service.
John le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, worked as an intelligence officer for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and early 1960s. Senior SIS officer Kim Philby's defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, and the consequent compromising of British agents, was a factor in the 1964 termination of Cornwell's intelligence career. Le Carré also drew from the paranoid atmosphere created by CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who after Philby's defection became convinced that other moles were operating at the highest levels of Western intelligence agencies.
The title alludes to the nursery rhyme and counting game Tinker Tailor.
After le Carré donated his papers to the Bodleian Library, its director, Richard Ovenden, wrote that the drafts of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy "show a deep process of collaboration with his wife, Jane."