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favour of Moscow Centre and command of the Stasi, Hans-Dieter Mundt, alias source Windfall, claimed he had no option but to present himself as even more fervent than Fiedler in the business of cleansing the utopian German Democratic Republic of spies, saboteurs and other lackeys of bourgeois imperialism.
We are the six Windfalls, as Connie Sachs, our latest recruit, has dubbed us: Control, Smiley, Jim Prideaux, Connie, myself and Millie our near-silent partner. Jim Prideaux is just returned from yet another undercover run, this time to Budapest, where he has brought off a rare treff with our most precious asset Windfall. Connie Sachs, in her early twenties already the unchallenged wunderkind of research
‘So do we or do we not believe,’ he demands through his fluttering fingertips, ‘that we’re still getting the best material out of Herr bloody Mundt? Is it second pickings? Is it chickenfeed? Is it smoke? And is he leading us up the garden path? George?’
Jim Prideaux, after reluctantly taking the cigarette from his lips: ‘Mundt says Moscow cut him out of the loop. They told Fiedler. They didn’t tell Mundt. And Fiedler kept it to himself.’
‘So we don’t believe the opposition has turned Mundt back on us,’ Control drones on irritably. ‘He’s still ours. Well, he bloody well should be. We can toss him to the wolves any time we feel like it. He’s power mad. He wants to be Moscow Centre’s golden boy. Well, we want him to be Moscow’s golden boy. And our golden boy too. So our interests are mutual. But Herr Josef bloody Fiedler is blocking his way. And our way. Fiedler suspects Mundt is ours, and he is. So Fiedler’s out to expose him and
Herr Josef Fiedler – a saintly man, we are told, by Stasi standards, a true believer in the cause and a Jew to boot – thinks that his esteemed colleague Hans-Dieter Mundt, unreformed Nazi, is the running dog of British Intelligence. And he’s not all wrong, is he?’
George and I think we may have found an answer, you see. But George can’t stomach it. Well, I can. I’ve arranged to see your friend Alec Leamas tomorrow. Test the water with him. See what he feels about it all, now he’s lost his network to the Mundt–Fiedler shooting club. A fellow in his position might welcome a chance to finish his career on an up-note. Don’t you agree?’
know the truth from your elbows.
‘Yes. Entirely. Solely. For the continued successful outcome of Operation Windfall. Its preservation. As a necessary and urgent adjunct,’ he replies, and we sip our apple juice and watch the people come and go
in the sunshine. ‘Also at the specific request of Control, I may add,’ he goes on, either as a further inducement or to pass the buck. ‘He actually proposed your name: that young Guillam fellow. Singled you out.’
Gold,’ he concedes, as if I have dragged the name out of him. ‘First name Elizabeth. Liz to her friends.’ I too take my time. I’m drinking apple juice on a sunny afternoon with a tubby gentleman in a Panama hat. Nobody is hurrying. ‘And when I’ve acquired her trust, as you put it, what do I do then?’ ‘Why, you come and tell me, of course,’ he snaps, as if suddenly all the hesitation in him has been replaced by anger.
‘Just a
‘So a standard double-agent disinformation operation.’
I am substantially taller than George. But what struck me was the aridity of his voice, which reminded me of our meeting in the police house just hours after he had struck his devil’s pact with Mundt.
‘Alec Leamas is a professional, as you are, Peter, and as I am. If Control hasn’t invited him to read the fine print of his mission, so much the better for Alec and for us. He can’t misstep and he can’t betray. If his mission succeeds in ways he has not anticipated, he will not feel deceived. He will feel he has accomplished what was required of him.’ ‘But Mundt’s ours, George! He’s our joe – he’s Windfall!’ ‘Thank you. Hans-Dieter Mundt is an agent of this Service. And as such he must be protected at all costs from those who correctly suspect him of being what he is, and dream only of putting
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‘So let’s kick off with the first day of live action, this one. No hint of who actually asked Special Branch to put its dogs on to Alec. Just, at the request of Box – Box, I gather, being police-speak for the Circus in those days. Yes?’
‘Because the two Services didn’t like each other.’
‘So the grand plan was working. The beasts of the forest were starting to sniff at your tethered goat. As represented by our well-dressed thirty-year-old man of effeminate appearance. Yes?’
‘When it came to planting Alec on the opposition, Smiley played second fiddle.’
‘So, great rejoicing all round. Hurrah, they’ve taken the bait.’
‘They wanted a moment when Alec burned his last bridge. He’d come out of prison, be on his uppers, have no way back.’
Urged your poor broken friend to even greater depths of depravity.
But you didn’t.
untruthfully, and again I wait. Alec has decided to mimic Control’s donnish bray: ‘I want you to get rid of Mundt for me, Alec. Make the world a better place. Are you up for that, old man? Course I’m bloody up for it.
Bastard killed Riemeck, didn’t he? Killed half my bloody network. Had a go at George too, a year or two back. Can’t have that, can we, Pierrot?’
The odious and corrupt counter-revolutionary agitator Leamas was a known degenerate, a drunken bourgeois opportunist, liar, womanizer, thug, obsessed by money and a hatred of progress.
The woman who called herself Elizabeth Gold was a political simpleton of pro-Israel sympathies, brainwashed by the British Secret Service, besotted by her older lover and lured wide-eyed into a web of Western intrigue.
impostor Leamas had made a full confession of his crimes, the woman Gold had treacherously assisted him in his escape, and paid the full price for her duplicity.
And a closing word of congratulation to that fearless guardian of Democratic Sociali...
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shoot her down as she made ...
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He makes a whole mouthful of Mundt’s time as a pseudo-diplomat in England which, according to Fiedler, was when he was picked up and turned by the forces of reactionary imperialism, alias the Circus.
Then we have a list of all the shocking State secrets Mundt has allegedly sold to his Western masters for his thirty pieces of silver, and it’s all going down a storm with the tribunal’s judges. Until what?’
When Alec Leamas was sent off on his mission to shaft Mundt at any price, who did he believe was the anonymous source who was providing the Circus with all its lovely Windfall material?’
Alec Leamas sets out on his fatal voyage he has taken it into his fuddled head that Josef Fiedler is the vital source he is protecting, which is why the odious Hans-Dieter Mundt has to be eliminated?’
Alec was emphatically not so cleared. He knew there was an East German super-source, or bunch of sources, with the generic name Windfall. He
voice. ‘Well, if you were Windfall cleared, and Alec Leamas wasn’t Windfall cleared, what did you know that Alec wasn’t allowed to know?
nobody’s dying except of old age. I’m clinging for dear life to a great untenable lie I promised I’d never betray, and it’s sinking under my weight. But Tabitha has no mercy:
Then we got the prisoners’ dramatic escape,
and a nationwide hunt for them.
‘What I’m asking you is: when did you know, in your own mind, that Mundt’s triumphant vindication was not the fuck-up it was made out to be, but a grand-scale intelligence coup in disguise? And that Liz Gold was the necessary catalyst that made
And I got to wondering about that peculiar Swiss ornithologist who turned out to be an undercover member of the Circus’s domestic security arm.
No death certificate for Tulip. Well, we know the poor girl hadn’t landed officially, but not many doctors like putting their names to a bogus death certificate, even Circus doctors.’
‘So my reading is: Mundt was sent over to murder Tulip.
He murdered her, but the good Lord wasn’t on his side and he got caught.
Nobody reckoned on Liz and Alec getting shot. That would have been Mundt’s big idea:
shoot the messengers and get a better night’s sleep.
Star Chamber done its business than Hans-Dieter was summoned to a power conference in Moscow, never to be seen again. So goodbye to any last
hopes that he might get his nose under the wire at Centre, and tell us who the Circus traitor was. Presumably Bill Haydon had got there ahead of
‘If I was allowed to argue that Windfall was not the cock-up of all time but a fiendishly clever operation that was wildly productive of top-grade intelligence and only went off the rails at the last minute, I
‘You find me the evidence, I’ll find you the judge. The vultures are gathering as we speak. If you don’t show up for the hearing, the
