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
Author	John le Carré
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
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 cinematically adapted The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 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 1 Plot introduction 2 Plot summary 3 Characters in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 4 Awards and nominations 5 Impact 6 Quotes 7 Footnotes

[edit] Plot introduction

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold occurs in the early 1960s, a time of heightened East–West politico-military tensions. Primarily in England and in East Germany, British spy Alec Leamas participates in the elaborate plot to kill Hans-Dieter Mundt, the spymaster of The Abteilung, the East German spy section; in German usage, The Abteilung (The Section) is an In-crowd usage by section members equal to the in-house British usage "The Circus".

As a sequel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold changes a key piece of the prior story told in Call for the Dead. In that first story, Hans-Dieter Mundt is an East German operative in Britain, doing the dirty, thug jobs; he also escapes the British in the story. In the interval to the second story, Mundt has risen high in the Abteilung for his successful counter-espionage against British spies in East Germany.

[edit] Plot summary

The West Berlin office of the Circus (the British spy agency, presumably MI6) under Leamas has not been doing well. In the opening sequence, Leamas's best double agent, Karl Riemeck, desperately attempts an undercover escape from East Berlin while posing as a worker, but is gunned down at the last moment. Mundt had previously taken out Leamas' other networks.

Leamas is recalled to England in disgrace by Control, the head of the Circus after Maston, and offered one last job: 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 result in Mundt being executed by his own service. Fiedler hates Mundt and this is well known in the Circus. This is also known to Mundt. Control rightly believes that Fiedler would be the best bet for them to execute Mundt as Fiedler was the only one who was a match for 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), gets a miserable job in a run-down local library, loses even that job while drinking a lot, assaults a grocer as part of the plan and lands in jail. During his work at the library, Leamas' co-worker is 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, sexual relationship and become deeply committed. Before taking the "final plunge" into jail, Leamas makes Liz promise not to look for him, no matter what she may hear and says goodbye to her. She reluctantly agrees. Leamas also tells Control to leave her alone, and Control agrees.

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 may 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 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, who sees Fiedler as sympathetic: a Jew who had spent WWII in exile in Canada, an idealist about Communism who worries about the morality of his acts. Fiedler seemed content to live in Mundt's shadow without the prospect of promotion. Fiedler was a rarity in the Abteilung. He took no part in it's intrigues. Even those who worked closely with him could not say where he stood in the power complex. Fiedler is described as a slim, neat man; quite young. Dark hair, brown eyes, and brilliant. 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.

The power struggle within the Abteilung comes into the open when Mundt's men arrest and torture both Fiedler and Leamas. During his arrest, Leamas is chained in a cell and was beaten up when he was unconscious. He also meets Mundt during his capture. However, the leadership of the East German regime intervenes. Fiedler had already applied for a civil warrant to arrest 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, near the Polish border. Around this time, Liz Gold is invited to East Germany for a Communist Party information exchange.

At the trial, on behalf of Fiedler, 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.

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. She also says that Leamas made her promise that she should not look for him when he went away and admits that Leamas said goodbye the night before he struck down the grocer. She tearfully states that she loves Leamas. 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, and that Fiedler had happened to be the man on the spot, although the court scoffs at this claim. In cross-examination, Fiedler simply asks how Mundt 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 the 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 the East is waiting, Leamas explains the whole operation, including the parts of which he was unaware until the end of the trial. The "fake" payments to Mundt that Leamas revealed to Fiedler were in fact real and, as Fiedler suspected, Mundt was a British double agent reporting to Smiley and Guillam. Leamas' defection had been planned by Control and Smiley to discredit Fiedler and to allow Mundt to remain in power, and they had placed Leamas and Liz as co-workers to provide Mundt with the means of discrediting Leamas. 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 about Fiedler says that Fiedler would be shot. Liz accompanies Leamas to the break in the wire fronting the Berlin Wall, where the two of them are to climb pylons placed in the wall and "escape" to West Berlin, obivously planned by Mundt.

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) asking, "The girl, where's the girl?" He sees her dead body and climbs back down the wall on the East German side to be next to her. He is killed by two or three more shots from the guards.

[edit] Characters in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

• Alec Leamas: A British field agent in charge of East German espionage.
• Hans-Dieter Mundt: Leader of the East German spy agency and Leamas's nemesis.
• Fiedler: East German spy, second in command to Mundt
• 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.^[3]

[edit] Impact

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 's portrayal of amoral Western agents and the moral equivalence of the East and the West was revolutionary in that time. ^[4] Prior to to this novel, Western intelligence agencies were widely viewed as promoting Western values. The primary example of such positive spy values were the James Bond novels, which presented author Ian Fleming's romantic public school fantasies of what a secret service should be. ^[5] In contrast, John le Carré "shocked readers by showing how the West and the East practiced the same tawdry tactics in the name of national security."^[6]

The world of Alec Leamas little resembles to that of James Bond. In Bond's world, sex and love are easy and romanticized; in Leamas's world, love is a real emotion, and real emotions might have disastrous consequences for everyone, and in Leamas's world, good does not have to triumph, problematic to some critics. ^[7] 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.

In the 1960s, some reviewers openly criticised 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."^[8] 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 a different cleavage.

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. ^[9] 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.

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." ^[3]

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.

[edit] Quotes

"It is the best spy story I have ever read." (Graham Greene) ^[10]

"Very disappointing. It was a relief to read a somewhat sophisticated spy-story after all that James Bond idiocy, and there are some well-thought out passages. But the whole plot from beginning to end is basically implausible, and the implausibility keeps on obtruding itself — at any rate, to anyone who has any real knowledge of the business!" (Kim Philby) ^[11]

"A topical and terrible story . . . he can communicate emotion, from sweating fear to despairing love, with terse and compassionate conviction. Above all, he can tell a tale. Formidable equipment for a rare and disturbing writer" (The Sunday Times)

[edit] Footnotes