The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold occurs during the heightened tensions that characterized the late 1950s and early 1960s Cold War, when a Warsaw Pact–NATO war sparked in Germany seemed likely. The story begins and concludes in Berlin, about a year after the completion of the Berlin Wall and around the time when double-agent Heinz Felfe was exposed and tried.[2]

In Call for the Dead, le Carré's debut novel, a key character is Hans-Dieter Mundt, an assassin of the Abteilung ("the Department"), the East German Secret Service, who is working under the pretext of being a member of a GDR trade delegation in London. When uncovered by agents George Smiley and Peter Guillam of the British intelligence service "the Circus" (which is led by "Control"), he escapes from England to East Germany before Smiley and Guillam can catch him. Two years later, at the time of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Mundt has risen from the field to the upper echelon of the Abteilung, because of his successful counter-intelligence operations against the spy networks of the British secret services. Characters and events from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold are reinvestigated in A Legacy of Spies, le Carré's 2017 novel centering on an aging Guillam.

The West Berlin office of the Circus is under the command of Station Head Alec Leamas, who served as an SOE operative during World War II and fought in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Norway.[3] It has just lost its last and best double agent, shot whilst defecting from East Berlin. With no operatives left, Leamas is recalled to London by Control, the Circus chief, who asks Leamas to stay "in the cold" for one last mission: to defect to the East Germans, and then to provide evidence to frame Abteilung head Hans-Dieter Mundt as a British double agent. Josef Fiedler (Mundt's deputy), who already suspects that Mundt is a double agent (according to Control), is targeted as a potentially useful adjunct for Leamas.

To bring Leamas to the East Germans' attention as a potential defector, the Circus sacks him, leaving him with only a small pension. He takes and loses a miserable job in a run-down library. There, he meets Liz Gold, who is the secretary of her local cell of the Communist Party, and they become lovers. Before taking the "final plunge" into Control's scheme, Leamas makes Liz promise not to look for him, no matter what she hears. Then, after Leamas initiates the mission by assaulting a local grocer in order to get himself arrested, he gets Control to agree to leave Liz alone.

After his release from jail, he is approached by an East German recruiter and taken abroad, first to the Netherlands, then to East Germany, en route meeting progressively higher echelons of the Abteilung, the East German intelligence service. During his debriefing, he drops casual hints about British payments to a double agent in the Abteilung. Meanwhile, retired British agent George Smiley, describing himself as an old friend of Leamas, appears at Liz's apartment to offer her financial help, while asking about her relationship with Leamas.

In East Germany, Leamas meets Fiedler. The two men engage in extended discussions about past events, in which Leamas's pragmatism is contrasted with Fiedler's idealism. Leamas observes that the young, brilliant Fiedler is concerned about the righteousness of his motivation and the morality of his actions. Mundt, on the other hand, is a brutal, opportunistic mercenary, a former Nazi who joined the Communists after the war out of expediency, and who remains an anti-Semite.

The power struggle within the Abteilung is exposed when Mundt orders Fiedler and Leamas arrested and tortured. The leaders of the East German régime intervene after learning that Fiedler had applied for an arrest warrant for Mundt that same day. Both Fiedler and Mundt are released, then summoned to present their cases to a tribunal convened in camera. At the trial, Leamas documents a series of secret bank account payments that Fiedler has matched to the movements of Mundt, while Fiedler presents other evidence implicating Mundt as a British agent.

Surprisingly, Liz, who had been invited to East Germany for a Communist Party information exchange, is called by Mundt's attorney as a witness and forced to testify at the tribunal. She admits that Smiley paid her apartment lease after visiting her, and that she promised Leamas that she would not look for him after he disappeared. She also admits that he had said good-bye to her the night before he assaulted the grocer. Realizing that his cover is blown, Leamas offers to tell all about his mission from Control to frame Mundt in exchange for Liz's freedom. But when Fiedler questions how Mundt learned about Liz, Leamas finally realizes the true nature of Control and Smiley's scheme. Then the tribunal halts the trial and arrests Fiedler.

Immediately after the trial, Mundt covertly releases Leamas and Liz and gives them a car to drive to Berlin. During the drive, Leamas explains everything to Liz: Mundt is, in fact, a British double agent reporting to Smiley, who is not actually retired. The target of Leamas's mission was Fiedler, not Mundt, because Fiedler was close to exposing Mundt. Leamas and Liz's intimate relationship unwittingly provided Mundt (and Smiley) with the means of discrediting Leamas, and in turn, Fiedler. Liz realizes to her horror that their actions have enabled the Circus to protect its asset, the despicable Mundt, at the expense of the thoughtful and idealistic Fiedler. Liz asks what will become of Fiedler; Leamas replies that he will most likely be executed.

Liz's love for Leamas overcomes her moral disgust, and she accompanies Leamas to a break in the wire fronting the Berlin Wall, through which they can climb the wall and escape to West Berlin. Leamas climbs to the top but, as he reaches down to help Liz, she is shot and killed by one of Mundt's operatives. She falls and, as Smiley calls out to Leamas from the other side of the wall, he hesitates. Then he climbs back down the East German side of the wall to be shot and killed too.

• Alec Leamas: A British field agent in charge of East German espionage
• Hans-Dieter Mundt: Leader of the East German Secret Service, the Abteilung
• Josef Fiedler: East German spy, and Mundt's deputy
• Liz Gold: English librarian and member of the Communist Party
• Control: Head of The Circus
• George Smiley: British spy, supposedly retired
• Peter Guillam: British spy
• Karl Riemeck: East German bureaucrat turned British spy

At its publication during the Cold War (1945–91), the moral presentation of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold rendered it a revolutionary espionage novel by showing the intelligence services of both the Eastern and Western nations as engaging in the same expedient amorality in the name of national security. Le Carré also presented his western spy as a morally burnt-out case.

The espionage world of Alec Leamas portrays love as a three-dimensional emotion that can have disastrous consequences for those involved. Good does not always vanquish evil in Leamas's world, a defeatist attitude that was criticised in The Times.[4][5]

Time magazine, while including The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in its top 100 novels list,[1] stated that the novel was "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."[6] The book also headed the Publishers Weekly's list of 15 top spy novels in 2006.[7]

Paramount Television and The Ink Factory—who had previously produced The Night Manager—are developing a limited series based on the novel, with Simon Beaufoy as the writer.[8] On 14 January 2017, AMC and the BBC joined with The Ink Factory for the series.[9]

Le Carré's book won a 1963 Gold Dagger award from the 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 award given to the Golden Dagger winner regarded as the stand-out among all fifty winners over the history of the Crime Writers' Association.

• Le Carré describes how he came to write the book (in an article published in The Guardian newspaper (April 2013) on the novel's 50th anniversary): "After a decade in the intelligence service, John le Carré's political disgust and personal confusion 'exploded' in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold."
• "Telecamera Spia". Retrieved Saturday, 29 October 2016