A Legacy of Spies

by John Le Carré

‘Jackknife was Joint’s operation. Under Bill Haydon’s command. Haydon, then Alleline, Bland, Esterhase. Bill’s Boys, we called ’em. George was nowhere near it.’

‘Joint were forever conspiring to get Covert under their wing. George saw that as a power grab, and resisted. Strenuously.’

‘Where was our gallant Chief of Service in all this? Control, as we must call him.’ ‘Playing Covert and Joint off against each ot...

à trois

‘We talked treachery. In the large, not in detail, there was no point. Anyone who was a present or recent member of Joint was suspect by definition. So fifty, sixty people, all potential traitors within. We talked about who had the right sort of access to blow Jackknife, but

we knew that with Bill running

Joint, and Percy Alleline eating out of his hand, and Bland and Esterhase getting in on the act any way they could, all that any traitor had to do was show up at Joint’s free-for-all planning sessions, or sit around the senior officers’ bar and listen to Percy Alleline sounding off. Bill always said compartmentation was a b...

Operation Windfall. That’s in case the extra expenditure should ever be challenged by posterity. Control was very high-minded in such regards, whatever else he wasn’t. Name One was George Smiley. Name Two was Peter Guillam. You.’

‘George and Mendel went way back. George had worked with him on an earlier case. Liked the cut of his jib. Liked it that he wasn’t Circus. My breath of clean air, he called him.’

Peter Guillam personally, by one Christoph Leamas, sole heir of the late Alec, and one Karen Gold, spinster, sole daughter of the late Elizabeth or Liz. Did

cock-up

‘So here’s the bad news. It’s not just the offspring of the Windfall victims who are after our blood. Bunny was soft-pedalling out of kindness. There’s a bunch of attention-hungry MPs who want to use Windfall as an example of what happens when the surveillance society is allowed to run amok. They can’t get their hands on the real stuff, so give them history.’ And growing impatient at my silence: ‘I’m telling you, Pete. If we don’t have your total cooperation, this thing could—’

At first I thought I was going to get another of those odd silences, because he had turned away from me so that I couldn’t see his face. ‘I’m his bloody father, for Christ’s sake,’ he said.

How the devil, Christoph, son of Alec, litigant, purloiner of closed Stasi files, criminal with a record as long as your arm, did you find your way to Brittany?

And Christoph, my farouche fellow mourner and Alec’s son? What did you do? On one of your later visits to your father’s grave – I am assuming on no particular grounds that you made a few more, if only for research purposes – you happened to take another look in the condolence book,

Christoph is not without his talents, Peter. Perhaps the genes help.

MAYFLOWER, as Alec has arbitrarily christened him, at first refused to reveal his name, insisting the cassettes came

not from himself but from a ‘friend inside the Stasi’, whom he must protect. His own role was merely that of voluntary intermediary, he insisted, his motive not mercenary but ideological.

Mayflower produced a card from his pocket with the name Dr med. Karl Riemeck and the address of the Charité Hospital in East Berlin on one side, and on the back, an address in Köpenick, handwritten.

Alec is asking with some passion, I have to say, to be

allowed to develop Mayflower to the next stage without subjecting him to any of the usual searches and background checks which as things stand could not be conducted without the knowledge and assistance of Joint Steering.

Of much greater interest to him is the identity, access and motivation of the neurotic but extremely controlled female sub-source, codename Tulip.

Karl Riemeck

Georg Elser, the man who in 1939, without benefit of accomplice or confidant, had made, planted and detonated a bomb in the Munich beer cellar where minutes before the Führer had been addressing his faithful. ‘Only infernal luck

Dr Emmanuel Rapp.

Doris Gamp, alias Tulip, has arrived punctually for her second appointment, having cycled all the way to Köpenick with her son Gustav riding in a basket.

her husband Lothar

Emmanuel Rapp’s Petschaft and key, covertly taken by sub-source

how the devil did you know that Tulip knew my name?

then it’s a racing certainty that I will also have dropped in on my former employers to chew over the irksome historical lawsuit that Christoph and his newfound friend Karen Gold are bringing against the Service and its named officers, of whom I am

world. I did diamonds. I did gold. I did dope. I did guns a little. I did jail. Too much. Did I find my fortune? Did I fuck. Then I come home to little old Europe, and I find you. My goldmine. My dad’s best friend. His best comrade. And what did you do to your best comrade? You got him killed. That’s money, man. That’s real money.’ ‘I didn’t get your father killed.’ ‘Read the files, man. Read the Stasi files. They’re dynamite. You and George Smiley killed my father. Smiley was the ringleader. You were like his number-one gofer. You set my dad up, and you killed him.

‘One million euros. To me personally. No third parties involved. One million euros on the day the lawyers drop the lawsuit, and you never hear from me again. No lawyers, no human rights, no bullshit. You just bought the whole package. Why are you looking at me? You got a problem?’

Karen’s

‘Listen. I invented that fucking girl. She owes me. I did the work, I paid the people, I got the files. I went to her, I gave her the good news, told her where to find her mother’s grave.

‘You gonna want my bank details – okay, man? Here they are. And you tell this to your Government, man: one million euros on the day we withdraw, or we throw the fucking book at you.’

Lothar Quinz took home classified documents to obsess over during off-duty hours, his dreams of becoming a GDR ambassador abroad would be over.

At 1505 GMT, GDR radio announced a nationwide search for an unnamed female lackey of Fascist imperialism answering the following description. The description was of Tulip.

tell her what she knows but doesn’t want to hear: there’s no ID for him, they’ll pull us in and run a check on us, and if we don’t get rid of him, you’re fucked and so am I, and so is the good Dr Riemeck, because once they’ve got you and Gustav in their hands, they’ll squeeze his name out of you in five minutes.

Ormond, deputy Head of Station Prague, wife to Head of Station Jerry, is the

That it was all a put-up job? That she was a plant, a double, part of a high-stakes deception game? And that Peter Guillam, fool of fools, had slept with the enemy? –

‘I’m very sorry to inform you that sub-source Tulip, the lady you successfully exfiltrated from Czecho, was certified dead this morning.’

do?’ ‘She just hanged herself, son.

Hans-Dieter Mundt.

And now here’s the same Mundt sitting in the Submarine, a KGB-trained Stasi assassin pretending to be a Swiss ornithologist caught in a deer trap, while Doris who wished to be known only as Tulip is lying dead not fifty feet away from him.

Our ornithologist friend didn’t come quietly when he was released from that trap he walked into, put it that way.

‘There are certain useful conditions attached to the arrangement I have just made with Herr Mundt,’ he

goes on relentlessly. ‘The tape recording of our conversation, for example. His masters in Moscow and Berlin would not be impressed by it, we agreed. We also agreed that his work for us, capably managed by both sides, will advance him in his distinguished career in the Stasi. He will return to his comrades a conquering hero. The bigwigs in the Directorate will be pleased with him. Moscow Centre will be pleased

‘You, I and only the very fewest are owners of this extremely privileged information, Peter. As far as Joint Steering and the Service at large are concerned, we were greedy, we brought Tulip here too hastily, we paid no regard to her deeper feelings. In consequence she hanged herself.

Which is the version that must be trumpeted to Head Office and all out-stations. There must be no exceptions anywhere where Joint holds sway. And that, I am afraid, inevitably includes our friend Alec Leamas.’

Yet for all Mundt’s undoubted power – or maybe because of it – he had been unable to halt or even abate the relentless cull of Covert’s agents and sub-agents, as conducted by his rival Josef Fiedler.