Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

For the film based on the novel, see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film).

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
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 in forced retirement. 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.

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.

Title

Control, the Circus Chief, assigns the code names "Tinker", "Tailor", "Soldier", "Poorman" and "Beggarman" to various 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". In the book, "Sailor" is not used as it sounds too much like "Tailor".

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 the kidnapping of a Czech Army general. Operation Testify ended with Circus agent Jim Prideaux shot in the back, and caused the disgrace and dismissal of Control, former head of Circus, who subsequently died. Prideaux, who survived and was repatriated but was then 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, and the Moscow Centre personnel who interrogated him already knew this.

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". 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 Circus. Cleverly, Moscow Centre has induced the Circus leadership to believe that "Merlin" maintains his cover in Moscow by feeding them 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 acknowledges he was recruited by Karla, the Moscow Centre spymaster. Haydon is to be exchanged for several of the agents he betrayed, but is killed shortly before he was due to leave England. Though his killer is not explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied to be Prideaux, whose motivation was revenge.

Smiley is appointed temporary head of Circus to deal with the fallout.

Background

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
Agent	An external free-lance person recruited to provide information and services; Circus staff are referred to as intelligence officers.
Babysitters	Bodyguards.
Circus	The in-house name for MI6, the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) who collect foreign intelligence. “Circus” refers to the Cambridge Circus London locale of the headquarters.
The Competition	MI5, the UK’s internal counter-espionage and counter-terrorism service, whom the Circus 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.
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.
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	Men and women spies 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; the name derives from Wrangler maths students.

The television adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy also uses the term "Burrowers" for a researcher recruited from a University, a term taken from the novel's immediate sequel The Honourable Schoolboy.

Historical influences

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, a KGB 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.

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

Adaptations

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 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 closing 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.

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.

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

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 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]

Cinema

Main article: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film)

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson made a film adaptation in 2011 in cinema 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 will be released in the United States on 9 December 2011. It included a cameo appearance by John le Carré.

Cast

• Gary Oldman as George Smiley
• Colin Firth as Bill Haydon
• Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr
• Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux
• Ciarán Hinds as Roy Bland
• Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam
• David Dencik as Toby Esterhase
• Stephen Graham as Jerry Westerby
• Simon McBurney as Oliver Lacon
• Toby Jones as Percy Alleline
• John Hurt as Control
• Svetlana Khodchenkova as Irina
• Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs
• Roger Lloyd-Pack as Mendel
• Christian McKay as Mackelvore
• Konstantin Khabenskiy as Polyakov

References

1. ^ "The Complete Smiley". BBC Radio 4. 23 May 2009. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/smiley-season. Retrieved 14 June 2009. 

External links

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