Agent Running in the Field

by John le Carré

The illegitimate street-child of a Tbilisi prostitute of Jewish origin and a Georgian Orthodox priest is secretly nurtured in the Christian faith, then spotted by his Marxist teachers as an outstanding pupil. He grows a second head and becomes an instant convert to Marxism–Leninism. At sixteen he is again spotted, this time by the KGB, trained as an undercover agent and tasked with the infiltration of Christian counter-revolutionary elements in northern Ossetia. As a former Christian and perhaps a present one, he is well qualified for the task. Many of those he informs on are shot. In recognition of his good work he is appointed to the lowest ranks of the KGB where he earns himself a reputation for obedience and ‘summary justice’. This does not prevent him from attending night school in higher Marxist dialectic or acquiring foreign languages and thereby making himself eligible for intelligence work overseas. He is dispatched on foreign missions, lends a hand in ‘extra-legal measures’, euphemism for assassination. Before he becomes too sullied he is recalled to Moscow to be instructed in the gentler arts of fake diplomacy. As an espionage foot soldier under diplomatic cover he serves in the rezidenturas of Brussels, Berlin and Chicago, engages in field reconnaissance and counter-surveillance, services agents he never meets, fills and empties countless dead letter boxes and continues to participate in the ‘neutralization’ of real or imagined enemies of the Soviet state. None...