Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (The Karla Trilogy, #1)

by John Le Carré

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR, RICH MAN, POOR MAN, BEGGARMAN, THIEF. Small children’s fortune-telling rhyme used when counting cherry stones, waistcoat buttons, daisy petals, or the seeds of the Timothy grass. —from the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes

I was determined to describe something that in those days was still new to my readers and perhaps, despite all the press revelations about the penetration of our secret services, still is even now: namely, the inside-out logic of a double-agent operation, and the sheer scale of the mayhem that can be visited on an enemy service when its intelligence-gathering efforts fall under the control of its opponent.

The art of the game—best described in J. C. Masterman’s account of the British double-cross system operated against Germany in wartime—is therefore a balancing act between what is good for the double agent in his role as loyal member of his service, and what is good for your own side in its unrelenting efforts to pervert that service to the point where it is doing more harm to the country that employs it than good; or, as Smiley has it, where it has been pulled inside out. Such an abject state of affairs was certainly reached by SIS in the high days of Blake and Philby, just as it was self-inflicted on the CIA by the paranoid influence of Angleton himself, who, in the aftermath of discovering that he had been eating out of the hand of the KGB’s most successful double agent, spent the rest of his life trying to prove that the Agency, like SIS, was being controlled by Moscow; and that its occasional successes were consequently no more than sweeteners tossed to it by the fiendish manipulators of the KGB. Angleton was wrong, but his effect on the CIA was as disastrous as if he had been right. Both services would have done much less damage to their countries, moral and financial, if they had simply been disbanded.

I knew, if you like, that Philby had taken a road that was dangerously open to myself, though I had resisted it. I knew that he represented one of the—thank God, unrealised—possibilities of my nature.

I thought perhaps I had. Then one day, I received a letter from a reader, referring me to page 240 of Francis Bacon’s Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh, published in 1641: As for his secret Spialls, which he did imploy both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practices and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it: Hee had such Moles perpectually working and casting to undermine him.

The other bits of jargon—lamplighter, scalp-hunter, baby-sitter, honey trap and the rest—were all invented, but they too, I am told, have at least in part since been adopted by the professionals.

How do I remember the book now, sixteen years on? Partly, I suppose, for the luck that followed it—the exposure of Blunt, the TV series, Alec Guinness triumphant as George Smiley, not to mention the marvellous direction and casting.

And I remember Connie Sachs, too, my Circus researcher, an archetype for the last generation of secret service vestals—clever, unhappy ladies of the English upper classes, who, having joined the service in the war, stayed on to fight the peace, making a kind of granary of their extraordinary memories for us young turks to plunder.

It is odd, in these altered days, to discover that Tinker Tailor is already an historical novel, but I don’t think that makes it irrelevant, and I hope you have as much pleasure with it as I do myself, when I dip into it. JOHN LE CARRÉ July 1991

Spikely did not, so Jim seized a crayon and drew a globe. To the west, America, he said, full of greedy fools fouling up their inheritance. To the east, China-Russia; he drew no distinction: boiler suits, prison camps, and a damn long march to nowhere.

A mole is a deep-penetration agent so called because he burrows deep into the fabric of Western imperialism, in this case an Englishman. Moles are very precious to the Centre because of the many years it takes to place them, often fifteen or twenty. Most of the English moles were recruited by Karla before the war and came from the higher bourgeoisie, even aristocrats and nobles who were disgusted with their origins, and became secretly fanatic, much more fanatic than their working-class English comrades, who are slothful.

We can’t watch, or listen, or open mail. To do any one of those things would require the resources of Esterhase’s lamplighters, and Esterhase like anyone else must be suspect. We can’t interrogate; we can’t take steps to limit a particular person’s access to delicate secrets. To do any of these things would be to run the risk of alarming the mole. It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?” He made an awful stab at humour: “Mole, rather,” he said, in a confiding aside.

After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting.

“Burn the lot,” Ann had suggested helpfully, referring to his books. “Set fire to the house. But don’t rot.”

“I never heard of anyone yet who left the Circus without some unfinished business.”

what happens but that the assembled ghosts of his past—Lacon, Control, Karla, Alleline, Esterhase, Bland, and finally Bill Haydon himself—barge into his cell and cheerfully inform him, as they drag him back to this same garden, that everything he had been calling vanity is truth?

Eventually, by sauntering in and out of other people’s offices, he began to realise what everyone else had realised some weeks before. The Circus wasn’t just silent, it was frozen. Nothing was coming in, nothing was going out; not at the level on which Guillam moved, anyhow. Inside the building, people in authority had gone to earth, and when pay day came round there were no buff envelopes in the pigeon-holes because, according to Mary, the housekeepers had not received the usual monthly authority to issue them.

“After the Prideaux fiasco,” Bill had reputedly fumed, “we’ll have no more damned private armies, no more left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”

Toby Esterhase would put the dogs on his own mother if it bought him a pat on the back from Alleline.

“Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye, world. You’re the last, George, you and Bill. And filthy Percy a bit.”

“If it’s bad, don’t come back. Promise? I’m an old leopard and I’m too old to change my spots. I want to remember you all as you were. Lovely, lovely boys.”

He was back on the top floor of the Circus, in his own plain office with the Oxford prints, just as he had left it a year ago. Beyond his door lay the low-ceilinged anteroom where Control’s grey-haired ladies, the mothers, softly typed and answered telephones; while here in the hotel an undiscovered genius along the corridor night and day tapped patiently at an old machine. At the anteroom’s far end—in Mrs. Pope Graham’s world there was a bathroom there, and a warning not to use it—stood the blank door that led to Control’s sanctuary: an alley of a place, with old steel cupboards and old red books, a smell of sweet dust and jasmine tea.

This mental transposition was so complete in Smiley that when his phone rang—the extension was an extra, payable in cash—he had to give himself time to remember where he was.

For these sounds also belonged to his past, and in Cambridge Circus were heard by the fifth floor only.

After home leave and a couple of weeks’ briefing, he was moved to India, where his agents seemed to regard him as the reincarnation of the British Raj. He preached loyalty to them, paid them next to nothing, and—when it suited him—sold them down the river.

The Circus was in the doldrums and there was loose talk of scrapping the existing outfit entirely and starting elsewhere with a new one. Failures in that world occur traditionally in series, but this had been an exceptionally long run. Product had slumped; more and more of it had turned out to be suspect. In the places where it mattered, Control’s hand was none too strong.

And later, as his hateful illness began creeping over him: “I refuse to bequeath my life’s work to a parade horse. I’m too vain to be flattered, too old to be ambitious, and I’m ugly as a crab. Percy’s quite the other way and there are enough witty men in Whitehall to prefer his sort to mine.”

Lacon, not yet convinced, to the Treasury through his odious master, the Minister, on whose behalf his submissions were invariably made: Even allowing that this is necessary, the reading-room will have to be extensively rebuilt. 1. Will you authorise cost? 2. If so, the cost should seem to be borne by the Admiralty. Department will covertly reimburse. 3. There is also the question of extra janitors, a further expense . . .

It shone already like a beacon everywhere: Percy is heading for the top table and Control might already be dead.

Every week the Circus processed dozens of unsolicited so-called Soviet documents. Most were straight pedlar material. A few were deliberate plants by allies with an axe to grind; a few more were Russian chicken-feed. Very rarely, one turned out to be sound, but usually after it had been rejected.

And it was true, Smiley conceded, that Bill in his time had fiddled with substantial pieces of history; had proposed all sorts of grand designs for restoring England to influence and greatness—like Rupert Brooke, he seldom spoke of Britain. But Smiley, in his rare moments of objectivity, could remember few that ever got off the ground.

“Ah, stop flirting around. Of course he is. I’ve got a source up there—one of the mothers, didn’t you know? Tells me indiscretions for chocolate. Control’s been toiling through personal dossiers of old Circus folk heroes, sniffing out the dirt, who was pink, who was a queen. Half of them are under the earth already. Making a study of all our failures. Can you imagine? And for why? Because we’ve got a success on our hands. He’s mad, George. He’s got the big itch: senile paranoia, take my word for it. Ann ever tell you about wicked Uncle Fry? Thought the servants were bugging the roses to find out where he’d hidden his money. Get away from him, George. Death’s a bore. Cut the cord, move down a few floors. Join the proles.”

So what happened? Did she break off the affair? Did Haydon? Why did she never speak of it? Did it matter, anyway—one among so many? He gave up. Like the Cheshire cat, the face of Bill Haydon seemed to recede as soon as he advanced upon it, leaving only the smile behind. But he knew that somehow Bill had hurt her deeply, which was the sin of sins.

A sickening notion had struck him: it seemed so neat and so horribly obvious that he could only wonder why it had come to him so late. Sand was Camilla’s husband. She was living a double life. Now whole new vistas of deceit opened before him. His friends, his loves, even the Circus itself; joined and re-formed in endless patterns of intrigue. A line of Mendel’s came back to him, dropped two nights ago as they drank beer in some glum suburban pub: “Cheer up, Peter, old son. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.” Tarr, he thought. That bastard Ricki Tarr.

“Tarr has not lied to us, Peter. Not in any material way. He has simply done what agents do the world over: he has failed to tell us the whole story. On the other hand, he has been rather clever.”

They had met at Crystal Palace, a van pick-up with Mendel driving. They drove to Barnsbury, straight into a car-body repair shop at the end of a cobbled alley full of children. There they were received with discreet rapture by an old German and his son, who had stripped the plates off the van almost before they got out of it and led them to a souped-up Vauxhall ready to drive out of the far end of the workshop. Mendel stayed behind with the Testify file, which Guillam had brought from Brixton in his night-bag; Smiley said, “Find the A12.”

Once they met an old man driving at twenty in the fast lane. As they overtook him on the inside, he veered wildly towards them, drunk or ill, or just terrified. And once, with no warning, they hit a fog wall; it seemed to fall on them from above. Guillam drove clean through it, afraid to brake because of black ice. Past Colchester they took small lanes. On the signposts were names like Little Horkesley, Wormingford, and Bures Green; then the signposts stopped and Guillam had a feeling of being nowhere at all.

“There’s a story that his father was in the Okhrana and later reappeared in the Cheka. I don’t think it’s true but it may be. There’s another that he worked as a kitchen boy on an armoured train against Japanese Occupation troops in the East. He is said to have learnt his tradecraft from Berg—to have been his ewe lamb, in fact—which is a bit like being taught music by . . . oh, name a great composer. So far as I am concerned, his career began in Spain in 1936, because that at least is documented. He posed as a White Russian journalist in the Franco cause and recruited a stable of German agents. It was a most intricate operation, and for a young man remarkable. He popped up next in the Soviet counter-offensive against Smolensk in the autumn of 1941 as an intelligence officer under Konev. He had the job of running networks of partisans behind the German lines. Along the way he discovered that his radio operator had been turned round and was transmitting radio messages to the enemy. He turned him back and from then on played a radio game which had them going in all directions.” That was another part of the legend, said Smiley: at Yelnya, thanks to Karla, the Germans shelled their own forward line.

“In ’48-odd, having served his country loyally, Karla did a spell in prison and later in Siberia. There was nothing personal about it. He simply happened to be in one of those sections of Red army intelligence which, in some purge or other, ceased to exist.”

“To sum it up, Karla was the proverbial cold-war orphan. He had left home to do a job abroad. The job had blown up in his face, but he couldn’t go back: home was more hostile than abroad. We had no powers of permanent arrest, so it was up to Karla to ask us for protection. I don’t think I had ever come across a clearer case for defection. I had only to convince him of the arrest of the San Francisco network—wave the press photographs and cuttings from my briefcase at him—talk to him a little about the unfriendly conspiracies of Brother Rudnev in Moscow, and cable the somewhat overworked inquisitors in Sarratt, and with any luck I’d make London by the weekend. I rather think I had tickets for Sadler’s Wells. It was Ann’s great year for ballet.” Yes, Guillam had heard about that, too: a twenty-year-old Welsh Apollo, the season’s wonder boy. They had been burning up London for months. The heat in the jail was appalling, Smiley continued. The cell had an iron table at the centre and iron cattle rings let into the wall.

“For some reason, it hurt an awful lot.” His eyes were still open but his gaze had fixed upon an inner world. The skin of his brow and cheeks was drawn smooth as if by the exertion of his memory; but nothing could conceal from Guillam the loneliness evoked by this one admission. “I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” Smiley went on, more lightly. “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of it?”

“What did Karla look like?” Guillam asked, treating the question as rhetorical. “Avuncular. Modest, and avuncular. He would have looked very well as a priest: the shabby, gnomic variety one sees in small Italian towns. Little wiry chap, with silvery hair and bright brown eyes and plenty of wrinkles. Or a schoolmaster, he could have been a schoolmaster: tough—whatever that means—and sagacious within the limits of his experience; but the small canvas, all the same. He made no other initial impression, except that his gaze was straight and it fixed on me from early in our talk. If you can call it a talk, seeing that he never uttered a word. Not one, the whole time we were together; not a syllable. Also it was stinking hot and I was travelled to death.”

“As it was, the next thing I knew, I was talking about Ann.” He left no time for Guillam’s muffled exclamation. “Oh, not about my Ann, not in as many words. About his Ann. I assumed he had one. I had asked myself—lazily, no doubt—what would a man think of in such a situation, what would I? And my mind came up with a subjective answer: his woman. Is it called ‘projection’ or ‘substitution’? I detest those terms but I’m sure one of them applies. I exchanged my predicament for his, that is the point, and as I now realise I began to conduct an interrogation with myself—he didn’t speak, can you imagine? There were certain externals, it is true, to which I pinned the approach. He looked connubial; he looked like half a union; he looked too complete to be alone in all his life. Then there was his passport, describing Gerstmann as married; and it is a habit in all of us to make our cover stories, our assumed personae, at least parallel with the reality.” He lapsed again into a moment of reflection. “I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children . . . Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when the...

I believed, you see, that I had seen something in his face that was superior to mere dogma, not realising that it was my own reflection. I had convinced myself that Gerstmann ultimately was accessible to ordinary human arguments coming from a man of his own age and profession and—well, durability. I didn’t promise him wealth and women and Cadillacs and cheap butter; I accepted that he had no use for those things. I had the wit by then, at least, to steer clear of the topic of his wife. I didn’t make speeches to him about freedom—whatever that means—or the essential goodwill of the West; besides, they were not favourable days for selling that story, and I was in no clear ideological state myself. I took the line of kinship. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re getting to be old men, and we’ve spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war.

But now your own side is going to shoot you.

Did he not believe, for example, that the political generality was meaningless? That only the particular in life had value for him now? That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery? And that therefore his life, the saving of it from yet another meaningless firing squad, was more important—morally, ethically more important—than the sense of duty, or obligation, or commitment, or whatever it was that kept him on this present path of self-destruction? Did it not occur to him to question—after all the travels of his life—to question the integrity of a system that proposed cold-bloodedly to shoot him down for misdemeanours he had never committed? I begged him—yes, I did beseech him, I’m afraid; we were on the way to the airport and he still had not addressed a word to me—I begged him to consider whether he really believed; whether faith in the system he had served was honestly possible to him at this moment.” For a while now, Smiley sat silent.

“So there we are. When the plane arrived, I climbed aboard with him and flew part of the distance: in those days it wasn’t all jet. He was slipping away from me and I couldn’t do anything to stop him. I’d given up talking but I was there if he wanted to change his mind. He didn’t. He would rather die than give me what I wanted; he would rather die than disown the political system to which he was committed. The last I saw of him, so far as I know, was his expressionless face framed in the cabin window of the aeroplane, watching me walk down the gangway. A couple of very Russian-looking thugs had joined us and were sitting in the seats behind him, and there was really no point in my staying. I flew home, and Control said: ‘Well, I hope to God they do shoot him,’ and restored me with a cup of tea. That filthy China stuff he drinks, lemon jasmine or whatever; he sends out for it to that grocer’s round the corner. I mean he used to. Then he sent me on three months’ leave without the option. I like you to have doubts,’ he said. ‘It tells me where you stand. But don’t make a cult of them or you’ll be a bore.’ It was a warning. I heeded it. And he told me to stop thinking about the Americans so much; he assured me that he barely gave them a thought.”

“Did Karla ever really think of staying?” “I’m sure it never crossed his mind,” said Smiley with disgust.

The episode had one other result, said Smiley. Since his San Francisco experience, Karla had never once touched illegal radio. He cut it right out of his handwriting. “Embassy links are a different matter. But in the field his agents aren’t allowed to go near it. And he still has Ann’s cigarette lighter.” “Yours,” Guillam corrected him. “Yes. Yes, mine. Of course. Tell me,” he continued, as the waiter took away his money, “was Tarr referring to anyone in particular when he made that unpleasant reference to Ann?” “I’m afraid he was. Yes.”

“Look, I’m not quite there myself, Peter,” Smiley said quietly. “But nearly I am. Karla’s pulled the Circus inside out; that much I understand, so do you. But there’s a last clever knot, and I can’t undo it. Though I mean to. And if you want a sermon, Karla is not fireproof, because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”