Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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For the film based on the novel, see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film).
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  
First US edition cover
First US edition cover
Author(s) John le Carré
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Series George Smiley /
The Quest for Karla
Genre(s) Spy novel
Publisher Random House (USA) & Hodder & Stoughton (UK)
Publication date June 1974
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-394-49219-6 (hardback edition)
OCLC Number 867935
Dewey Decimal 823/.9/14
LC Classification PZ4.L4526 Ti3 PR6062.E33
Preceded by The Looking-Glass War
Followed by The Honourable Schoolboy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a 1974 British spy novel by John le Carré, featuring George Smiley. Smiley is a middle-aged, taciturn, perspicacious intelligence expert who has been forced to retire. He is recalled to hunt down a Soviet mole in the "Circus", the highest echelon of the Secret Intelligence Service. In keeping with le Carré's work, the narrative begins in medias res with the repatriation of a captured British spy. The background is supplied during the book through a series of flashbacks.

Contents

[edit] Chronology

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the first novel of the Karla Trilogy, the second and third novels being The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley's People (1979), later published in an omnibus edition as The Quest for Karla (1982). These are the fifth, sixth, and seventh Le Carré spy novels featuring George Smiley.

[edit] Title

Control, the Circus Chief, assigns the code names "Tinker", "Tailor", "Soldier", "Poorman" and "Beggarman" to the five senior intelligence officers under suspicion of being a Soviet mole, with the intention that should an agent called Prideaux uncover information about the identity of the mole he can relay it back using an easy-to-recall code the mole is unaware of. The names are derived from the English children's rhyme "Tinker, Tailor":

Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Sailor,
Rich Man, Poor Man,
Beggar Man, Thief.

The codename "Sailor" was not used as it sounded too much like "Tailor" and Control could not countenance the idea of Toby Esterhase as "Rich Man" so this was also dropped and Esterhase was codenamed "Poor Man" instead.

The code names are given in order of seniority within the "Witchcraft" operation's "Magic Circle" with George Smiley's "Beggarman" something of an afterthought, perhaps even as a smokescreen to the other suspects rather than truly under Control's suspicion.

[edit] Plot

Through a love affair with the wife of a Moscow Centre intelligence officer, British agent Ricki Tarr discovers that there may be a high-ranking Soviet mole, codenamed "Gerald", within the Circus. After going under cover to avoid Soviet agents, Tarr alerts his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, who in turn notifies Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service officer responsible for the Intelligence Services. Lacon enlists George Smiley, the retired former Deputy Head of the Service, to investigate. Smiley and Guillam must investigate without the knowledge of the Circus, which is headed by Percy Alleline and his deputies Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase, as any of these could be the mole.

Smiley suspects that "Gerald" was responsible for the failure of Operation Testify, a mission in Communist Czechoslovakia, the ostensible purpose of which was to meet with a defecting Czech Army general. Operation Testify ended with Circus agent Jim Prideaux shot in the back and tortured, and caused the disgrace and dismissal of Control, former head of Circus, who subsequently died. Prideaux, who survived and was repatriated and dismissed from the Circus, reveals to Smiley that Control suspected the mole's existence, and the true aim of Operation Testify was to discover the mole's identity. Prideaux reveals that the Moscow Centre personnel who interrogated him already knew this, and it becomes clear to Smiley that the operation was a trap set by Moscow Center to discredit Control and remove the threat to their mole 'Gerald'.

Percy Alleline, who was Control's rival, has risen to head the Circus as a result of seemingly top-grade Soviet intelligence from a source code-named "Merlin". The Merlin material is handled by a secret committee consisting of Alleline, Haydon, Bland, and Esterhase. Smiley's investigation leads him to believe that the "Merlin" source is false, and is being used by Moscow Centre to influence the leadership of the Circus. Cleverly, Moscow Centre has induced the Circus leadership to believe that "Merlin" maintains his cover in Moscow by feeding the Russians low-grade British intelligence, "chicken feed", from a false Circus mole. As a result, the leaders of the Circus suppress any rumours of a mole, thus protecting the actual mole.

Smiley contrives a trap for the real mole using a communication from Tarr, and "Gerald" is revealed to be Bill Haydon, a respected colleague and former friend who once had an affair with Smiley's now estranged wife. Haydon is arrested, and acknowledges he was recruited by Karla, the Moscow Centre spymaster. Percy Alleline is removed, and Smiley is appointed temporary head of Circus to deal with the fallout. Haydon is to be exchanged to the Soviet Union for several of the agents he betrayed, but is mysteriously killed while in custody, shortly before he was due to leave England. Though his killer is not explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied to be Prideaux, his old partner, whom he betrayed in Operation Testify.

[edit] Tradecraft jargon

The characters in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) use a great deal of jargon for matters specific to their trade. Examples are:

Tradecraft term Definition[1]
Agent An espionage agent or spy; a citizen who is recruited by a foreign government to spy on his own country. This term should not be confused with a member of an intelligence service who recruits spies; they are referred to as intelligence officers or more particularly case officers.
Babysitters Bodyguards.
Circus The in-house name for MI6, the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) which collect foreign intelligence. "Circus" refers to the (fictional) locale of the headquarters in Cambridge Circus, London.
The Competition MI5, the UK's internal counter-espionage and counter-terrorism service, whom the Circus also call "The Security Mob".
The Cousins The CIA in particular and the US intelligences services in general.
Ferrets Technicians who find and remove hidden microphones, cameras, etc.
Honey-trap A sexual blackmailing operation
Housekeepers The internal auditors and financial disciplinarians of the Circus.
Inquisitors Interrogators who debrief Circus intelligence officers and defectors.
Janitors The Circus headquarters operations staff, including those who watch doors and verify that people entering secure areas are authorised to do so.
Lamplighters A section which provides surveillance and couriers.
Lotus eater Someone who affects amnesia of past covert activities.
Mole An agent recruited long before he has access to secret material, who subsequently works his way into the target government organization. Le Carre has said this was a term actually used in the KGB; an equivalent term used in Western intelligence services was sleeper agent.[2]
Mothers Secretaries and trusted typists serving the senior officers of the Circus.
Nuts and Bolts The engineering department who develop and manufacture espionage devices.
Pavement Artists Members of surveillance teams who inconspicuously follow people in public.
Scalphunters Handle assassination, blackmail, burglary, kidnap, etc.; the section was sidelined after Control's dismissal.
Shoemakers Forgers of documents and the like.
Wranglers Radio signal analysts and cryptographers; it derives from the term Wrangler used of Cambridge University maths students.

The television adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy also uses the term "burrower" for a researcher recruited from a university, a term taken from the novel's immediate sequel The Honourable Schoolboy. Le Carre has said that most of these terms were his own invention and were not used in MI6.[2]

[edit] Background

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is John le Carré's novelisation of his experiences of the revelations in the 1950s and the 1960s which exposed the Cambridge Five traitors, among them Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and Kim Philby, as KGB moles employed by the SIS.

'Karla' is modelled after KGB Gen. Rem Krassilnikov, whose obituary in the New York Times newspaper reported that the CIA considered him as such. Moreover, skewing in favour of the latter, Smiley reports that Karla was trained by "Berg", Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, an NKVD intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1938.

'Bill Haydon' derives from Kim Philby, who, in the late 1950s, transcended SIS suspicions that he too might be a traitor, given his connection with the defector Guy Burgess, and continued as an SIS intelligence officer until defecting to the USSR in 1963. David Cornwell (John Le Carre) worked as an intelligence officer for the SIS (MI6) during Philby's tenure, and has said that Philby betrayed his identity to the Russians, which was a factor in the 1964 termination of his intelligence career.[3][4]

'Connie Sachs', the Circus's principal Russia researcher, is modelled upon Milicent Bagot.

[edit] Adaptations

[edit] Television

The opening titles of the 1979 television adaptation

In 1979, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was adapted to television as a seven-part series for the BBC, featuring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, of the SIS; the initial broadcast coincided with the British Government announcing that Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, was one of the Cambridge Five traitors. In the United States, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) broadcast it as part of its "Great Performances" series, introduced by the Canadian journalist Robert MacNeil, who explained the workings of SIS.

The main title credits feature a matryoshka doll progressively revealing a doll more irate than the previous, with the final doll being faceless, an allusion to Winston Churchill's describing Russia as "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma"; analogously, the literary George Smiley concludes that only Karla saw the last doll in the British traitor. The end credits music, an arrangement of Nunc dimittis ("Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace") from the Book of Common Prayer (1662), was composed by Geoffrey Burgon for organ, trumpet and treble; the score earned the Ivor Novello Award for 1979. The end credits appear over a stationary shot of Oxford University.

In the United States, subsequent syndicated broadcasts and DVD releases compressed the seven British episodes into six, in which scenes were shortened and the narrative sequence altered. In the British original, Smiley visits Connie Sachs before Peter Guillam's burglary of the Circus, while the US version reverses the sequence of these events.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Radio

In 1988, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatisation, by Rene Basilico, of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in seven weekly half-hour episodes, produced by John Fawcett-Wilson. It is available as a BBC audiobook in CD and audio cassette formats. Notably, Bernard Hepton portrays George Smiley. Nine years earlier, he had portrayed Toby Esterhase in the television adaption.

In 2009, BBC Radio 4 also broadcast new dramatisations, by Shaun McKenna, of the eight George Smiley novels by John le Carré, featuring Simon Russell Beale as Smiley. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was broadcast as three, one-hour episodes, from Sunday 29 November to Sunday 13 December 2009 in BBC Radio 4's Classic Serial slot. The producer was Steven Canny.[5]

[edit] Cinema

Main article: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film)

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson made a film adaptation in 2011 based on a screenplay by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan. The film was released in the UK and Ireland on 16 September 2011, and in the United States on 9 December 2011. It included a cameo appearance by John le Carré.

[edit] Cast

[edit] References

  1. ^ Le Carré, John; Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Judith Baughman (2004). Conversations with John le Carré. USA: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 33-34. ISBN 1578066697. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jxPWT_Lo5yQC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=lamplighters+scalphunters&source=bl&ots=1bndhjJmBC&sig=Xg515esVIbk73L3Xx1ldZ971kDg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6qPqToaFPOTE4gS4oPCCCQ&sqi=2&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=mole&f=false. 
  2. ^ a b interview with Le Carre in Melvyn Bragg The Listener:Read All About It, January 22, 1976 BBC1 reprinted in Le Carré, John; Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Judith Baughman (2004). Conversations with John le Carré. USA: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 33-34. ISBN 1578066697. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jxPWT_Lo5yQC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=lamplighters+scalphunters&source=bl&ots=1bndhjJmBC&sig=Xg515esVIbk73L3Xx1ldZ971kDg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6qPqToaFPOTE4gS4oPCCCQ&sqi=2&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=mole&f=false. 
  3. ^ Anthony, Andrew (1 November 2009). "Observer Profile: John le Carré: A man of great intelligence". Guardian News and Media. London. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/nov/01/profile-john-le-carre. Retrieved 4 March 2010. 
  4. ^ Le Carré betrayed by 'bad lot' spy Kim Philby, Channel 4 News. Retrieved 3 October 2010.
  5. ^ "The Complete Smiley". BBC Radio 4. 23 May 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/smiley-season. Retrieved 14 June 2009. 

[edit] External links

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