The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

“‘I mean, you’ve got to compare method with method, and ideal with ideal. I would say that since the war, our methods—ours and those of the opposition—have become much the same. I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?’ He laughed quietly to himself. ‘That would never do,’ he said.”

John le Carré explores the Cold War in a nuanced way, and while he was never sympathetic with communism or the Soviet state, he was insistent that the sins of one side did not excuse the sins of the other. Here Control admits that in terms of tactics, the two sides are much the same. He tries to justify it by stating that the West’s ideals are superior, but Control seems to be repeating a cliché rather than declaring a firm belief.

“Some said he made a mistake in Berlin, and that was why his network had been rolled up; no one quite knew. All agreed that he had been treated with unusual harshness, even by a personnel department not famed for its philanthropy. They would point to him covertly as he went by, as men will point to an athlete of the past, and say: ‘That’s Leamas. He made a mistake in Berlin. Pathetic the way he’s let himself go.’”

One of the paradoxes of Leamas’s mission is that he has to make himself forgotten in a memorable way. His descent into irritability and addiction must be conspicuous enough to draw attention, repellant enough to push people away, and yet not so obnoxious as to make it worthy of lasting memory. It is a key example of how deception thrives on the fundamental truths of human character, such as the tendency for pity to give way to contempt.

“There’s some poison in your mind, some hate. You’re a fanatic, Alec, I know you are, but I don’t know what about. You’re a fanatic who doesn’t want to convert people, and that’s a dangerous thing. You’re like a man who’s…sworn vengeance or something.”

Leamas repeatedly insists that there is no higher motive or ideal driving him, and while that may be true, he still draws upon a kind of fanaticism to carry out a mission that demands enormous sacrifices without any obvious benefits. Leamas probably harbors a grudge against Mundt to some extent, but the mission for him is mainly an end unto itself, and so the deceptions he must undertake on its behalf seep into his mind.

“It was said in court later, and not contested by the defense, that the grocer had two injuries—a fractured cheekbone from the first blow and a dislocated jaw from the second. The coverage in the daily press was adequate, but not overelaborate.”

As with his decline and ultimate dismissal from the Circus, Leamas’s incarceration is deliberate and planned out. By pleading no contest, he ensures time behind bars but for a time short enough for the grievance of his fall from grace to still be fresh. Leamas has the skills to hurt or even kill someone, and he must use those skills without telegraphing the assault as anything more than the outburst of a pathetic man. It must be noteworthy but not at all suspicious. 

“Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes, he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion.”

Ashe is an unlikely Soviet spy. He is loud and indiscreet, with wildly implausible cover stories. He enjoys the finer things in life more one would expect from someone purportedly committed to the abolition of class privilege. He certainly lacks the professionalism of someone like Leamas, but with this description, Leamas captures the reason why the Soviets would use someone like Ashe to lure him in. Ashe offers nothing of his own, only the ability to satisfy his contact, and so he can provide whatever inducement a person might need in order to defect.

“Kiever opened up a little on the second [bottle of wine]: he’d just come back from a tour of West Germany and France. France was in a hell of a mess, de Gaulle was on the way out, and God alone knew what would happen then. With a hundred thousand demoralized colons returning from Algeria he reckoned fascism was in the cards.”

The author provides few explicit clues that Ashe and Kiever are Communists, but with enough alcohol, Kiever repeats Marxist-Leninist propaganda that capitalism must lead to fascism, which must then lead to revolution. The year before the book’s publication, France had granted independence to Algeria after a gruesome eight-year war, and many Europeans in Algeria had begun to flee to France. Kiever’s belief that this will lead to the collapse of the French state and the downfall of its great anti-fascist hero, Charles de Gaulle, reveals his political convictions.

“Peters had seen it before. He had seen it, even in men who had undergone a complete ideological reversal, who in the secret hours of the night had found a new creed, and alone, compelled by the internal power of their convictions, had betrayed their calling, their families, their countries. Even they, filled as they were with new zeal and new hope, had to struggle with the stigma of treachery; even they wrestled with the almost physical anguish of saying that which they had been trained never, never to reveal.”

Leamas’s handlers, whether Soviet or East German, evaluate the truth of his situation more in terms of psychology than fact. Peters has dealt with enough defectors that he sees Leamas as just the latest example, albeit one with more professional expertise. The task is thus more difficult, but for Peters, it remains the same – taking away the mental reserves that prevent the defector from not only telling everything they know, but remembering everything they know.

“‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ Leamas rejoined shortly; ‘of course I’d have known.’ This was the point he would stick to through thick and thin; it made them feel they knew better, gave credence to the rest of his information. ‘They will want to deduce in spite of you,’ Control had said. ‘We must give them the material and remain skeptical to their conclusions. Rely on their intelligence and conceit, on their suspicion of one another—that’s what we must do.’”

The success of Leamas’s mission depends on deft psychological manipulation. He must present evidence of an East German agent beyond his knowledge, and then express outrage once the evidence brings others to that conclusion. The outrage is made convincing by Leamas’s genuine belief that no such agent exists, while it is believable to his Soviet handlers insofar as they believe him too proud to see the truth right in front of his eyes.

“Control had done it—he was sure. The terms had been too generous; he’d known that all along. They didn’t throw money about like that for nothing—not unless they thought they might lose you. Money like that was a douceur for discomforts and dangers Control would not openly admit to. Money like that was a warning, Leamas had not heeded the warning.”

Word of Leamas’s public revelation as a defector marks the first turn of unexpected events, but Leamas is still confident that it is part of the plan. Control’s voice still echoes in his mind like a wise and confident mentor who has thought of every contingency. Leamas comes to believe that this sudden move was an opportunity to express unfeigned outrage at his interrogators, as well as to signal the value of Leamas’s information in their determination to get him back.

“The landlord was very kind about Alec; Mr. Leamas had paid his rent like a gentleman, right till the end, then there’d been a week or two owing and a chum of Mr. Leamas’s had dropped in and paid up handsome, no queries or nothing. He’d always said it of Mr. Leamas, always would, he was a gent. Not public school, mind, nothing arsy-tarsy but a real gent.”

In Chapter 2, the narrator notes that Leamas has the look of someone who is “not quite a gentleman” (19). It is striking when the landlord emphatically makes the opposite observation, and while it is easy to chalk up his charitable view of Leamas to being paid on time, it stands in marked contrast to the type of image Leamas had been working so hard to cultivate before his departure.

“‘Fiedler is the acolyte who one day will stab the high priest in the back. He’s the only man who’s a match for Mundt […] It has been our job,’ he declared, indicating Guillam and himself, ‘to give Fiedler the weapon with which to destroy Mundt. It will be yours, my dear Leamas, to encourage him to use it. Indirectly, of course, because you’ll never meet him. At least I certainly hope you won’t.’”

Bringing down Mundt is impossible without help from within the East German security services, and since the British have no more agents as far as Leamas knows, they will need to motivate one of them to move against Mundt on what he believes to be his own cognizance. Fiedler is perfect for this role, not only because he is Mundt’s deputy and has a spotless reputation, but also because he is the one prominent officer who hates Mundt more than he fears him, as he is the rare Jew to rise through the ranks but still has to serve under an antisemite and former Nazi.

“‘Then tell me what is your philosophy?’ ’Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Leamas snapped, and they walked on in silence for a while. But Fiedler was not to be put off. ‘If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?’ ‘Who the hell said they were?’ Leamas replied irritably.”

As a dedicated communist, Fiedler cannot understand why Leamas could work as a spy without some kind of motivation or higher cause. Fiedler is willing to deceive and harm others, but only so long as he understands himself to be serving the common good. He is sympathetic to other forms of ideals, or at least what he imagines them to be, but his conversations with Leamas only end up right back in the same place, with Fiedler’s puzzled curiosity and Leamas’s exasperation.

“It all held together, you see. Mundt escaped so easily from England; you told me yourself he did. And what did Guillam say to you? He said they didn’t want to catch him! Why not? I’ll tell you why—he was their man; they turned him, they caught him, don’t you see, and that was the price of his freedom—that and the money he was paid.”

This line is remarkable in that Fiedler is confirming the fictive premise of Leamas’s operation, while also stating something that is absolutely true, but of which Leamas is unaware. As the reader later learns, the precise details of Rolling Stone are fabricated, but Fiedler’s actual conclusion is totally correct. Fact and fiction have completely converged upon each other.

“But she doubted whether all the good Germans were on one side and all the bad ones on the other. And it was the bad ones who had killed her father. Perhaps that was why the Party had chosen her—as a generous act of reconciliation […] of course—that was the explanation. She was suddenly filled with a feeling of warmth and gratitude toward the Party. They really were decent people and she was proud and thankful to belong.”

This is the one and only mention of Liz’s father being a victim of the Holocaust, and it provides an important clue regarding her character and motivations. The Soviet Union had suffered terribly at Hitler’s hands and then played a key role in overthrowing the Third Reich, so they had credibility when they denounced the West (especially West Germany) as fascists. Losing her father to genocide at a young age also informs Liz’s utopian desire for world peace and that historical progress will ultimately resolve the world’s evils.

“It was part of Mundt’s extraordinary self-confidence, perhaps, that he did not speak unless he specifically wished to, that he was prepared to allow long silences to intervene rather than exchange pointless words. In this he differed from professional interrogators who set store by initiative, by the evocation of atmosphere and the exploitation of that psychological dependency of a prisoner upon his inquisitor. Mundt despised technique: he was a man of fact and action. Leamas preferred that.”

Mundt looms over most of the text with the force of his reputation, and even when he emerges in the flesh, he says very little, as his physicality and facial expressions are usually more than enough to get the message across. After his time with the talkative and ideologically committed Fiedler, Leamas can appreciate someone whose dedication to professionalism is an end unto itself, and ignores the conventions that might conceal the essential ugliness of their shared profession.

“Do you understand that? That long, long pain and all the time you say to yourself, ‘either I shall faint or I shall grow to bear the pain, nature will see to that; and the pain just increases like a violinist going up the E string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does—the pain’s like that, it rises and rises, and all that nature does is bring you on from note to note like a deaf child being taught to hear.”

One of the most memorable and evocative turns of phrase in the entire novel, it shows how no amount of ideology and training can fully shield someone from their basic vulnerabilities. Fiedler believes in the redemptive power of individual suffering to push history forward, and he has spent years in the shadowy battlefields of the Cold War. Even so, he is unprepared for Mundt’s form of cruelty, which has no logic other than the appeasement of his malice.

“And what about history—all the laws the Party proved? No, Alec was wrong: truth existed outside people, it was demonstrated in history, individuals must bow to it, be crushed by it if necessary. The Party was the vanguard of history, the spearpoint in the fight for peace…she went over the rubric a little uncertainly. She wished more people had come. Seven was so few. They looked so cross; cross and hungry.”

Liz’s trip to Germany is the most significant step she has taken as a British Communist, but it exacerbates some of her contradictory attitudes toward her affiliation. Her presence in a real Communist country proves her ideological commitment, that she is not just a hobbyist as Leamas says, but it also widens the gap between her hopes and reality. Giving a presentation on a hackneyed subject in an ugly building to an insultingly small crowd is an experience that is hard to reconcile with dreams of world progress.

“‘You must remember Mundt’s exceptional position: he had access to all the security files, could tap telephones, open letters, employ watchers; he could interrogate anyone with undisputed right, and had before him the detailed picture of their private life. Above all he could silence suspicion in a moment by turning against the people the very weapon’—Fiedler’s voice was trembling with fury—‘which was designed for their protection.’”

As an intelligence officer, Fiedler recognizes the value of having a double agent in a position that is both above suspicion and capable of eliminating the suspicions that do arise. Fielder may naïve in thinking that espionage can be conducted in the name of the public good, but he refuses to think of the Cold War as a violent game, and he insists that there is a moral value in the defense of a people and their way of life. Mundt has therefore committed not just a political crime against a ruling party, but a breach of trust with the people to whom he is ultimately responsible. It is an idealized representation of the espionage profession that ultimately does Fiedler no favors in the trial.

“For do you really suppose that all this time Comrade Mundt has been in ignorance of Fiedler’s fevered plotting? Do you really suppose that? For months he has been aware of the sickness in Fiedler’s mind. It was Comrade Mundt himself who authorized the approach that was made to Leamas in England: do you think he would have taken such an insane risk if he were himself to be implicated?”

As Leamas later realizes, the point of the trial was not so much to discredit Fiedler as to reinforce the impression of Mundt as all-knowing and all-seeing, and therefore capable of squashing any opposition. Of course, this reputation derives from his alliance with British Intelligence giving him so much information, but the genius of Mundt’s position is that he can eliminate anyone who might expose the truth behind his powers, and therefore maintain his reputation indefinitely.

“‘Leamas had done the one thing British Intelligence had never expected him to do: he had taken a girl and wept on her shoulder.’ Then Karden laughed quietly, as if it were all such a neat joke. ‘Just as Karl Riemeck did. He’s made the same mistake.’”

This devastating line is not entirely fair in its comparison. Riemeck leaked secrets to his mistress, while Leamas resolutely kept Liz out of his business, and her involvement was a result of London’s machinations and not Leamas’s indiscretions. The characterization sticks nonetheless, as Control took both men into his confidence before sending them to a fate of which they had no knowledge. It is also a worthy example of foreshadowing, given that the final chapter subjects Leamas to the same fate that befell Riemeck in the first chapter.

“‘You all know what kind of man Mundt is, and you put up with him because he’s good at his job. But’—he faltered for a second, then continued—‘but for God’s sake…enough people have got mixed up in all this without Fiedler’s head going into the basket. Fiedler’s all right, I tell you…ideologically sound, that’s the expression, isn’t it?’”

Leamas offers his confession as a way to spare Liz, who is obviously an innocent pawn of forces she barely comprehends. As he continues, he also realizes that Fiedler is innocent in a certain way—he is part of the espionage game and has taken on its risks, but he is not what Karden describes him to be. Fiedler, however, is an outlier, and the Soviet side is just as populated with cynics and criminals as the Western side. 

“They would shoot Fiedler; that’s what the woman said. Why did it have to be Fiedler—why not the old man who asked the questions, or the fair one in the front row between the soldiers, the one who smiled all the time? Whenever she turned around she had caught sight of his smooth, blond head and his smooth, cruel face smiling as if it were all a great joke. It comforted her that Leamas and Fiedler were on the same side.”

Toward the end of the novel, Liz emerges as its clear moral center. Leamas may be cooperating with Fiedler simply because his mission requires doing so, but Liz recognizes that Fiedler, while not exactly a saint, is operating on behalf of a profound sense of justice, while Mundt is a true villain. This makes Liz grateful that Leamas is trying to help the better man, even if he doesn’t realize it or would refuse to see himself as acting justly.

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what you were never, never to know, neither you nor I. Listen: Mundt is London’s man, their agent; they bought him when he was in England. We are witnessing the lousy end to a filthy, lousy operation to save Mundt’s skin. To save him from a clever little Jew in his own Department who had begun to suspect the truth. They made us kill him, do you see, kill the Jew. Now you know, and God help us both.”

The great irony of the novel is that the success of the operation depended primarily upon deceiving the person who thought he was the deceiver. Leamas’s ability to sell what he thinks is the fiction of Mundt being a double agent hinges on his not realizing that Mundt truly is a double agent. Even more consequentially, Leamas fully committed to the performance of a broke and disgruntled ex-spy.