Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
First US edition cover
Author	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 (1974), by John le Carré, is a spy novel featuring George Smiley, an aged, taciturn, and insightful spy recalled to service from forced retirement to hunt a Soviet mole working among the head officers of “The Circus”, the Secret Intelligence Service.

Contents 1 Title 2 Plot 3 Background 3.1 Tradecraft jargon 3.2 Historical influences 4 Adaptations 5 Television 5.1 Cast 6 Radio 6.1 Cast 6.2 Cast 7 Cinema 8 Satire of Le Carré 9 References 10 External links

[edit] Title

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), which were later published as The Quest for Karla (1982), an omnibus edition of the fifth, sixth, and seventh Le Carré books featuring George Smiley. In the story, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Spy are the code names assigned by Control, the Circus Chief, to the men who might be the traitor. The names derive from the children’s rhyme “Tinker, Tailor”.

[edit] Plot

Artistically, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré establishes the in medias res novel plot structure of his espionage œuvre, wherein the narrative begins at mid-story. The first chapter introduces Jim Prideaux, an SIS intelligence officer repatriated to England from Communist Czechoslovakia; the Circus found him employment as a languages master at a small private school for boys, where he is known for residing in a caravan, and for his Alvis vintage roadster.

Operation Testify

About a year before the events of the first chapter, Control, the aged Circus Chief, thinks that one of the five ranking Circus officers is a Soviet mole. When a disgruntled Czech general offers to reveal the mole's identity, Control privately launches Operation Testify, despatching the veteran Jim Prideaux to a rendezvous with the general at Brno, Czechoslovakia; Prideaux is ambushed and twice shot in the back.

The new Circus

In his London flat, George Smiley finds his former protégé, Peter Guillam, waiting for him; their conversation sketches the aftermath of Operation Testify: the disgraced Control died shortly after dismissal, and, for proposing that the ambushing of Prideaux signalled in-house treason at the Circus, Smiley, too, was sacked from the Circus. Consequently, Percy Alleline, Control’s politically ambitious arch-rival, succeeded Control as Circus Chief — because of the high operational failure rate during Control’s tenure, and because of “Source Merlin” a mysterious source of top-grade Soviet intelligence, dubbed “Witchcraft”, which Alleline had been providing to his political allies at Whitehall and in the military. Control suspected that the Soviet mole was one of the officers handling Source Merlin, either Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, or Toby Esterhase, the current leaders of the Circus — and, possibly, George Smiley.

Earlier, as part of the Operation Testify aftermath, Peter Guillam was demoted to being head of the “scalp-hunters”, the Circus’s assassination bureau. Now, Ricki Tarr, one such scalp-hunter, has surfaced after having disappeared in mid-operation, eight months earlier. Guillam drives Smiley to a meeting with Tarr and Oliver Lacon, the Permanent Undersecretary to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the intelligence services supervisor. In that debriefing, scalp-hunter Ricki Tarr reports that during his last assignment, he had a love affair with Irina (the official wife of a Moscow Centre intelligence officer), who told of a former lover who, in London, had been assistant to “Polyakov” — the Soviet cultural attaché who was the case officer handling “Gerald”, the high-rank mole at the Circus; and that Gerald was recruited by Karla, the Director of the Soviet Intelligence Service.

Discovering the mole

Lacon tasks Smiley with cleaning the stables of the Circus, to discover the mole via secret investigation; Guillam and former Special Branch Superintendent Mendel assist him. Gradually, they assemble the story by analysing files, interrogating witnesses, and trawling the memories of retired Circus spies, including his own. Smiley’s investigation is psychologically complicated by one of the mole suspects being Bill Haydon, a lover of Ann Smiley (the wife from whom George is estranged) during the time of Operation Testify.

In pursuing his investigation, Smiley first visits Connie Sachs, formerly the Circus’s head researcher, possessed of a phenomenal memory. In conversation, he confirms Irina’s story — that Cultural Attaché Polyakov’s true name is “Viktorov”. Connie recounts knowing that Karla recruited Viktorov as a special agent, but that “he simply disappeared off the face of the earth”; that circumstantial indications confirmed him as a “six cylinder Karla-trained hood”, yet did not establish a Viktorov–Polyakov identity connection; that there were signs Polyakov was running an English mole, and that the Circus denied her requests for further investigation, eventually leading to her forced retirement.

In reviewing files Guillam stole from the Circus, Smiley establishes that Witchcraft and Polyakov’s activities are related, and that Witchcraft and Gerald are of the same conspiracy. At dinner, Smiley relates to Guillam his knowledge of Karla’s history, of having met him after the Second World War (1939–45), when, after establishing an illegal agent network in the US, the Allies had captured and jailed Karla in Delhi, where Smiley attempted to persuade him to defect — given that capture usually meant execution upon returning to the USSR. In their interview, Smiley lent Karla his cigarette lighter (a gift from Ann), which Karla kept and took with him to Moscow; despite surviving that adventure, Smiley predicted that fanaticism would defeat Karla.

Smiley then retraces the history of Operation Testify; from interviewing Sam Collins (the night duty officer when the Czechs ambushed Jim Prideaux), and reporter Jerry Westerby (and occasional Circus intelligence officer), he establishes that it was a Russian, not a Czechoslovak, ambush. Finally, he interviews Jim Prideaux, who details the ambush, his capture, and subsequent interrogation; his descriptions identify Karla and Polyakov as two of his interrogators, keen to ascertain to what degree Control had identified their Circus mole; and that they possessed very detailed knowledge of his mission briefing by Control: “They knew the brand of the bloody sherry, man”. Upon repatriation from Czechoslovakia, the Circus gave Jim a generous severance — and Toby Esterhase’s strongly-worded order to forget the matter.

Armed with facts, George Smiley attacks; knowing that Toby Esterhase is not the mole, Smiley explains to him the shape of Karla’s “very clever knot”: Source Merlin is non-existent, a phantom Gerald introduced to the Circus hierarchy, as means of allowing the second-rate Percy Alleline to replace Control as head of the Circus, thus a perfect cover. The Circus leaders believe Polyakov is Source Merlin’s London representative, the perfect conduit for supplying them with Witchcraft, but, because he is a Moscow Centre officer, the Circus need to pretend he is running an English mole, via worthless “chickenfeed” intelligence. Therefore, any indication of a Soviet mole in the Circus also is perceived as illusory, hence the Circus’s leaders, themselves, ruthlessly suppress discovery — witness the sackings of Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby, and Jim Prideaux.

Esterhase tells Smiley enough about the procedures for meeting Polyakov to lay the trap: from Paris, scalp-hunter Ricki Tarr transmits an urgent message to Alleline, meant to force an emergency meeting between Polyakov and the mole. At the meeting safe-house, Smiley and Guillam lie in wait, where Bill Haydon reveals himself to be the mole, established with his personal appearance and with tape recordings. In the event, the humiliated Percy Alleline, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase, agree to George Smiley’s recommendation of negotiating with Karla to exchange Bill Haydon for Circus secret agents imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain — who otherwise might be killed upon Haydon’s exposure as the Soviet mole in the Circus.

Before departing for the USSR, Bill Haydon invites Smiley to hear a self-serving explanation of his betrayals, including why he became a Soviet mole, that Operation Testify was a trap lain because Karla and Haydon saw that Control was close to discovering the mole. Operation Testify was meant to fail and so discredit Control and provoke his dismissal, that Witchcraft was meant to propel the second-rate Percy Alleline to become chief of the Circus. Moreover, Haydon also tells Smiley, somewhat ashamed, that he knew the operation’s time, because Jim Prideaux visited him before departing for Czechoslovakia — and to warn him — because their friendship dated from university, having been best friends and, possibly, lovers. In the event, Bill Haydon is found dead, of a broken neck, and the spy-exchange deal with Karla collapses.

Aftermath

To politically contain the disaster of a Soviet mole among the leaders of the British Secret Service, George Smiley is appointed (temporary) head of the Circus. Personally, he is preparing to tell Ann about Bill Haydon’s treachery. Elsewhere, in hope of living a “normal” life, Jim Prideaux returns, as a languages master, to the school for boys.

[edit] Background

[edit] Tradecraft jargon

The fictional authenticity of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) is established via the characters’ jargon; examples are:

Tradecraft term	Definition
Agent	An external, free-lance man or woman recruited to spy for the Circus and provide information and services; Circus staff are referred to as intelligence officers.
Burrowers	The Circus’s researchers, usually intellectuals, recruited at university.
Circus	The in-house name for MI6, the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) who collect foreign intelligence. “Circus” refers to the SIS’s London locale at Cambridge Circus.
The Competition	MI5, the internal UK counter-espionage and counter-terrorism security service, whom the Circus often call “The Security Mob”.
The Cousins	The CIA in particular, and the US intelligences services, in general.
Ferrets	Technicians responsible for finding and removing hidden microphones, cameras, et cetera.
Housekeepers	The internal auditors, and disciplinarians, of the Circus.
Janitors	The HQ operations staff
Lamplighters	The Lamplighter section controls surveillance and couriers.
Mothers	Secretaries and trusted typists serving the head of the Circus.
Nuts and Bolts	The engineering department who develop and manufacture espionage devices.
Pavement Artists	Circus officers who inconspicuously follow people in public.
Scalphunters	The section handling assassination, counter-espionage, burglaries, kidnappings, et cetera, that was sidelined after Control’s dismissal.
Shoemakers	The forgery section of the Circus.
Babysitters	The bodyguard section of the Circus.
Wranglers	Radio signal analysts and cryptographers; the name derives from Wrangler maths students.

[edit] Historical influences

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) is John le Carré’s novelistic treatment of his experience of the revelations, in the 1950s and the 1960s, exposing the Cambridge Five traitors — among them Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby — as KGB moles employed in SIS.

Bill Haydon derives from Kim Philby, who, in the late 1950s, transcended SIS suspicions that he, too, might be a traitor, given his nexus with the defector Guy Burgess, and continued as an SIS intelligence officer until his defection to the USSR in 1963.

Connie Sachs, the Circus’s principal researcher is modelled after Millicent Bagot.

George Smiley is modelled after Maurice Oldfield, an SIS chief.

Karla is modelled either after Markus Wolf, chief of the HVA, the “Main Reconnaissance Administration” of the MfS (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) of East Germany; or after KGB Gen. Rem Krassilnikov, whose obituary in the New York Times newspaper reported that the CIA considered him as such. Moreover, Smiley reports that Karla was trained by “Berg”, Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, a KGB intelligence officer who defected to the West.

[edit] Adaptations

[edit] Television

In 1979, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) was adapted to television as a seven-part series for the BBC, featuring Alec Guiness as George Smiley, of the SIS; the initial broadcast coincided with the Government announcing that Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, was one of the Cambridge Five traitors. In the US, the PBS network broadcast it, as a Great Performances programme introduced by the Canadian journalist Robert MacNeil, who explained the workings of SIS.

The 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 Bill Haydon. The closing credits music, an arrangement of the Nunc dimittis prayer 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.

In the US, subsequent syndicated broadcasts compressed the seven British episodes to six American episodes (the current US DVD version), wherein scenes were shortened, and the narrative sequence altered; in the British original, Smiley visits Connie Sachs before Peter Guillam's burglary of the Circus, the US version reverses the sequence of those simultaneous events.

[edit] Cast

George Smiley — Alec Guinness Peter Guillam — Michael Jayston Oliver Lacon — Anthony Bate Toby Esterhase — Bernard Hepton Bill Haydon — Ian Richardson Jim Prideaux — Ian Bannen Ricki Tarr — Hywel Bennett Percy Alleline — Michael Aldridge Roy Bland — Terence Rigby Control — Alexander Knox Mendel — George Sewell Connie Sachs — Beryl Reid Jerry Westerby — Joss Ackland Ann Smiley — Siân Phillips Roddy Martindale — Nigel Stock Karla — Patrick Stewart

Sam Collins — John Standing Tufty Thessinger — Thorley Walters Molly Purcell — Mandy Cuthbert Alwyn — Warren Clarke Irina — Susan Kodicek Fawn — Alec Sabin Boris — Hilary Minster Polyakov — George Pravda “Jumbo” Roach — Duncan Jones Mrs Pope Graham — Pauline Letts Headmaster — John Wells Lauder Strickland — Frank Moorey Bryant — Frank Compton Alisa Brimley — Marjorie Hogan Paul Skordeno — Joe Praml

[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.

[edit] Cast

George Smiley — Bernard Hepton Percy Alleline — James Grout Toby Esterhase — Charles Kay Roy Bland — William Simons Bill Haydon — Edward de Souza Peter Guillam — Douglas Blackwell Ricky Tarr — Christian Rodska Connie Sachs — Rosemary Leach Control — Alan MacNaughtan Lady Ann Smiley — Sarah Lawson Jim Prideaux — Dennis Lill

Oliver Lacon — John Quayle Roddy Martindale — John Savident Irina — Valentina Yakunina Mendel — John Bennett Mrs Pope–Graham — Ann Lynn Jerry Westerby — David Calder Max Kodicek — Stephen Greif Sam Collins — Terrence Hardiman Lauder Strickland — Alex Norton Steve McElvor — Tenniel Evans Ben (the Paris cypher-clark) — Stephen Tompkinson

In 2009, BBC Radio 4 broadcast new dramatisations, by Shaun McKenna, of the eight George Smiley novels by John le Carré, featuring Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley, of the SIS. 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.^[1]

[edit] Cast

George Smiley — Simon Russell Beale Percy Alleline — Bill Paterson Toby Esterhase — Sam Dale Roy Bland — David Hargreaves Bill Haydon — Michael Feast Peter Guillam — Ewan Bailey Ricky Tarr — Jamie Foreman Connie Sachs — Maggie Steed Control — John Rowe Ann Smiley — Anna Chancellor Jim Prideaux — Allan Ball

Oliver Lacon — Alex Jennings Roddy Martindale — Philip Fox Irina — Vera Filatova Mendel — Kenneth Cranham Sam Collins — Nicholas Boulton Magyar — Peter Majer Bill Roach — Ryan Watson Karla — Philip Fox Polyakov — Stephen Greif Mrs McCraig — Kate Layden

[edit] Cinema

In June 2008, The Guardian newspaper reported that Peter Morgan and John le Carré were writing a cinematic adaptation of the novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), for Working Title Films and to be directed by Tomas Alfredson, director of Let the Right One In (2008).^[2][3]

[edit] Satire of Le Carré

The Seventh Man, by Graeme Garden, satirises the writing style, plots, and jargon-heavy dialogue of the novelist John le Carré.^[4]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the Internet Movie Database
• Encyclopedia of Television
• British Film Institute Screen Online (TV series)