The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
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| The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | |
|---|---|
 Cover for the Victor Gollancz first edition |
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| Author | John le Carré |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | George Smiley |
| Genre(s) | Spy Novel |
| Publisher | Victor Gollancz & Pan |
| Publication date | September, 1963 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
| Pages | 256 pages (Hardback edition) & 240 pages (Paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-575-00149-6 (Hardback edition) & ISBN 0-330-20107-7 (Paperback edition) |
| Preceded by | A Murder of Quality |
| Followed by | The Looking-Glass War |
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) by John le Carré is a Cold War spy novel famous for its intricate plot and its portrait of the West's espionage methods as inconsistent with Western values. In 1965, Martin Ritt directed a cinematic adaptation, with Richard Burton as protagonist Alec Leamas, British secret agent.
The novel received excellent reviews and was a best selling book; in 2006, Publishers Weekly named it "best spy novel of all-time". [1] [2]
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is set in a time of heightened East-West tensions during the Cold War.
As a sequel to Call for the Dead, it builds upon a key element of its predecessor. In the earlier book, Hans-Dieter Mundt is an agent of the Abteilung, the East German Secret Service, doing the dirty, thug jobs in England for the East German Steel Mission who escapes to East Germany when unmasked. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Mundt is no longer a low-ranking field agent but has risen high in the Abteilung for his successful counter-intelligence against British spies.
[edit] Plot summary
The East Berlin office of the Circus under British spy Alec Leamas has not been doing well. In the opening sequence, Leamas’s best and last double agent, Karl Riemeck, is gunned down at the last moment by Mundt’s men as he attempts to defect to West Berlin.
With no agents left in East Germany in any network, (Mundt had destroyed every agent of Leamas), Leamas is recalled to England in disgrace by Control, the head of The Circus after Maston, who asks Leamas to stay out “in the cold” for one last mission: to "turn" (defect) and provide false information to the Communists which would implicate Mundt as a British double agent — which Mundt's second in command, Fiedler, a Jew, already suspects him of being -- and would result in Mundt being executed by his own service. Control tells Leamas that Fiedler would be the best man to take down Mundt. George Smiley and his former assistant Peter Guillam brief Leamas for his crucial mission; Control tells Leamas that Smiley had not returned to the Circus after the events of Call for the Dead due to his qualms about the ethics of Circus operations.
To make the East Germans believe him ripe for defection, Leamas is sacked from the Circus with a pittance of a pension (rumored to be due to theft) and gets a miserable job in a run-down local library but loses even that job while drinking a lot. While at the library, Leamas works with an innocent young Jewish woman named Liz Gold, who is the secretary of her local cell in the Communist Party of Britain. Despite Liz's political beliefs, they develop an intimate relationship and become deeply committed. Before taking the "final plunge" into Control's scheme, Leamas makes Liz promise not to look for him, no matter what she may hear, and says goodbye to her. Leamas also tells Control to leave her alone, and Control agrees. Leamas then assaults a grocer as part of the plan and lands in jail.
After jail, Leamas is approached by an East German "recruiter" in England, taken to Holland and then to East Germany, encountering higher and higher echelons of the East German Intelligence Service. During his debriefing, he drops casual hints that point to payoffs having been made by the British to a covert double agent, while pretending not to see the implications. Meanwhile, back in England, Smiley and Guillam show up at Liz Gold's apartment, claim to be "friends of Alec's," question her about Leamas, and offer her financial help.
In East Germany, Leamas is introduced to Fiedler himself. They have many conversations in a hut in a forest clearing, where Fiedler seeks conclusive proof against Mundt and engages in ideological and philosophical discussions with the pragmatic Leamas. Fiedler, as observed by Leamas, seems content to live in Mundt's shadow, but is relatively young and quite brilliant. Leamas sees Fiedler as sympathetic: a Jew who had spent World War II in exile in Canada and an idealist about Communism who worries about the morality of his acts. By contrast, Leamas sees Mundt as a brutal and opportunistic mercenary, who had been a young Nazi before 1945, who had joined the Communists simply because they were the new bosses, and who was still anti-Semitic. Leamas believes helping Fiedler to destroy Mundt to be a worthy act. Around this time, Liz Gold is invited to East Germany for a Communist Party information exchange.
The power struggle within the Abteilung comes into the open when Mundt's men arrest and torture both Fiedler and Leamas. However, the leadership of the East German regime intervenes. Fiedler had applied for a warrant to arrest Mundt on the same day that Fiedler and Leamas were arrested by Mundt. Fiedler and Leamas are released, and both Fiedler and Mundt are summoned to present their respective cases to a tribunal convened in camera at the East German provincial town of Görlitz.
At the trial, Leamas documents a series of secret payments made to bank accounts that Fiedler matches to the movements of Mundt. Fiedler also shows that Riemeck passed information to Leamas that he shouldn't have been able to access; but that Mundt could have. Fiedler also presents to the Tribunal a number of other proofs which pointed to Mundt being a double agent. He claims that Mundt was actually captured during his work in England and allowed to "escape" only after he agreed to work for the British.
In Mundt's defense, his attorney calls a surprise witness: an unsuspecting Liz Gold. Although she doesn't want to testify against Leamas, she admits that her lease was paid off by George Smiley after his visit to her. She also admits that Leamas made her promise that she should not look for him when he went away and that Leamas said goodbye the night before he struck the grocer. Leamas realizes that the game is up and the operation was blown. He offers to tell all in return for Liz's freedom. He admits that he was recruited by Control to frame Mundt. He adds that Fiedler had nothing to do with it, although the court scoffs at this claim. In cross-examination, Fiedler simply asks Mundt how he knew that someone had paid off Liz's lease, because Fiedler insists that Liz would never have talked about it. Mundt hesitates before answering; ("a second too long, Leamas thought"); and then, and only then, as the trial is halted and Fiedler is arrested, does Leamas understand the true nature of Control and Smiley's operation.
Liz is sent to a holding cell but soon covertly put in a car containing Leamas by Mundt. During their drive to Berlin, where an exit route from East Berlin is waiting, Leamas explains the whole operation, including the parts of which he was unaware until the end of the trial. The fake payments, were in fact, real and Mundt was a double agent reporting to Smiley and Guillam. The operation was directed against Fiedler, not Mundt as Leamas was led to believe, because Fielder was very close to unmasking Mundt as a British double agent. Fiedler was too powerful for Mundt to eliminate alone; therefore, Control and Smiley decided to do it for him. Control and Smiley had placed Leamas and Liz as co-workers to provide Mundt with the means of discrediting Leamas and thus discrediting Fiedler. By falling in love, Leamas and Liz had "made it easy" for them. Liz is horrified that British Intelligence would have planned the death of an intelligent, considerate and thoughtful man like Fiedler to protect the despicable Mundt. Fiedler's fate is not revealed but Leamas, in answer to Liz's question, says that he probably would be shot.
Despite her disgust, Liz accompanies Leamas to the break in the wire fronting in the Berlin Wall, where the two of them are to climb pitons placed in the wall and "escape" to West Berlin. In the last chapter, entitled "In from the Cold," after Leamas climbs to the top of the Berlin Wall and reaches down to pull Liz the rest of the way up, East German spotlights suddenly shine on them, and three or four shots ring out. Liz's fingers slip from Leamas' grasp, and she falls. Leamas hears Smiley's voice (on the Western side) saying, "Jump, Alec! Jump, man!"He sees her dead body and climbs back down the wall on the East German side to be next to her. Leamas is then killed by two or three more shots from the guards.
[edit] Impact
The book was seen as revolutionary at the time of its publication. Western Intelligence agencies were widely viewed as promoting Western values. This view was mainly propagated by the James Bond novels presenting romantic fantasies about what a Secret Service should be. In contrast, Le Carre shocked readers by showing how intelligence agencies on both sides practiced the same tawdry tactics in the name of national security.
The world of Alec Leamas resembles little of James Bond’s world. In Bond's world, loveless sex and danger are easy and romanticized; in Leamas's world, love is a real emotion, and real emotions might have disastrous consequences for everyone. Also in Leamas's world, good does not have to triumph, which proved problematic to some critics. [3]
In the 1960s, some reviewers openly criticized Alec Leamas's resultant defeatism. For example, The Times said "the hero must triumph over his enemies as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story."[4] This commentary, however, is written from a Cold War point of view, where the two sides are the "Good" West and the "Bad" East, implying that having the story end with the British agent killed by Communist border guards means that it ends a victory for the Bad. However, the hints in the book — Leamas's personal qualms about his role in the plot, and the qualms of Smiley and Fiedler about their roles — point to Le Carré seeing quite a different division.
Leamas’s description about spies and the intelligence world in general to Liz during the drive to the Berlin Wall gives a picture altogether different from the Bond novels: It paints a grim picture about spies and the intelligence world - the risks and the utter disregard for human lives:
“There's only one law in this game," Leamas retorted. "Mundt is their man; he gives them what they need. That's easy enough to understand, isn't it? Leninism--the expediency of temporary alliances. What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs? I'd have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me." [5]
Leamas points out that the operation against Fiedler cannot be defended morally, but it had to be carried out. Despite his revulsion, he had no option but to sit back and watch:
People who play this game take risks. Fielder lost and Mundt won. London won--that's the point. It was a foul, foul operation. But it's paid off, and that's the only rule.[6]
In Hans-Dieter Mundt, John le Carré created a true villain: a cruel, mercenary killer who enjoyed killing, and who so hated Jews, he might have betrayed his Western controllers, and had Liz Gold killed before she could return to the West; nevertheless, as Alec cynically tells Liz on the drive enroute to Berlin Wall, Mundt's survival was more important to British intelligence than his own, or Fiedler’s or anyone else’s.
Mundt orchestrated Liz Gold's death (the detailed instructions to Leamas about how to climb the wall), but why Mundt had the border guards kill her is unclear: Mundt is an anti-Semite, who might independently have decided to betray his Western handlers. Another reason is that he is a British double-agent with an operational need to kill Liz, who knew too much and might have talked to fellow Communists back home, or, possibly, the media, thus blowing Mundt's cover despite this elaborate operation.
Smiley's last question to Leamas (about Liz's whereabouts) indicates that Mundt acted without Smiley's knowledge, but that does not absolve the British from responsibility. It would be consistent with Control's ruthless and secretive character, as depicted in the book, to decide that Liz Gold should be killed in a way which would not in any way implicate the British government, and to conceal this part of the operation from the scrupulous Smiley. [7] By contrast, Leamas' death is unplanned and necessary only when he climbed down the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall; any other border guard action would have cast suspicion on Mundt.
The novel also misleads readers, by changing a key plot element of its predecessor, Call for the Dead. In that first story's events, Hans-Dieter Mundt escaped capture by Smiley and Guillam and returned to East Germany. Control reinforces that version in his opening talk with Leamas, and Leamas repeatedly tells others the story of how Mundt got away, consistently with the way it was told in Call for the Dead. Thus, readers, like Leamas, do not suspect that Mundt was captured at the time of the Fennan affair and is now a British double agent, until the final plot twist in the trial. The change's effect is the reader's empathy with Alec Leamas, including experiencing his shock at the falsity of that version of events.
For her part, Margaret Compton contrasts the ending of the present book with that of Call for the Dead: "Le Carré's debut book ends with Smiley feeling deeply guilty about having killed Dieter Frey, the idealistic East German spy who had been Smiley's agent and friend (and in effect, adopted son) during the Second World War. Smiley bitterly reflects that Dieter had remembered their friendship and kept faithful to it - while he, Smiley, forgot it and gave precedence to his ruthless Cold War loyalty. Leamas in the end of 'Return from the Cold' makes the diametrically opposite moral choice, renouncing his loyalty to Britain and to the Circus and keeping faith with Liz to the bitter end, even to letting himself be killed at her side - after she had earlier kept faith with him in the court room and let herself be disgraced as a Communist by openly proclaiming her love for him. A dispassionate and careful reader of Le Carré's oeuvre can have little doubt that - though the writer clearly liked Smiley and brought him back again and again, until the very end of the Cold War - for the creator of both of them, Leamas' conduct stands on a higher moral level". [8]
In placing this novel on its all-time top 100, Time focuses on the cost of the Cold War to agents such as Leamas, calling the novel "a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he's forgotten how to tell the truth." [9]
[edit] Characters
- Alec Leamas: A British field agent in charge of East German espionage.
- Hans-Dieter Mundt: Leader of the East German Secret Service, the Abteilung.
- Fiedler: East German spy, and Mundt's deputy.
- Liz Gold: English librarian and member of the Communist Party.
- Control: Head of British Intelligence
- George Smiley: British spy, supposedly retired.
- Peter Guillam: British spy.
- Karl Riemeck: East German bureaucrat turned British spy.
[edit] Awards and nominations
Le Carré's book won a 1963 Gold Dagger award from the British Crime Writers Association for Best Crime Novel. Two years later the US edition was awarded the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Mystery Novel. It was the first work to win the award for Best Novel from both mystery writing organizations. Screenwriters Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper, who adapted the book for the 1965 movie, received an Edgar the following year for Best Motion Picture Screenplay for an American movie.
In 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dagger Awards, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was awarded the "Dagger of Daggers," a one-time only award given to the Golden Dagger winner regarded as the stand-out among all fifty winners over the history of CWA. Also that year, the novel was selected as one of the "All-TIME 100 Novels" by TIME Magazine.[9]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ "Publishers Weekly list". top 15 spy novels. http://www.crimefictionblog.com/2006/09/top_15_spy_nove.html.
- ^ "Publishers Weekly list". spy vs spy vs spy. http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/09/spy-vs-spy-vs-spy.html.
- ^ See, e.g., Barley, Tony. Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré. Open University Press, 1986, p. 22.
- ^ The Times, September 13, 1968.
- ^ Chapter 25, Page 95
- ^ Chapter 25, Page 94
- ^ Ronald K. Firman, "Mirrors behind Mirrors behind Mirrors - Imagined Spies and Real Nightmares", Ch. 3, p. 97. Note that Control had no compunctions about lying, because he promised Leamas that he would not use Liz as part of the planned operation, despite the fact that he knew that Liz was integral to it.
- ^ Margaret Compton, "Is Common Human Decency a Scarce Commodity in Popular Literature?" in Theodore Brown (ed.) "Essays on Moral Philosophy and Literature", 1972
- ^ a b Grossman, Lev. All-TIME 100 Novels, TIME Magazine, 2005. Retrieved 29 Oct. 2007.
