The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1963

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-7

Chapters 8-14

Chapters 15-20

Chapters 21-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Tension Between Belief and Fact

The tension between belief and fact arises from the nature of espionage, which relies on the art of deceit—The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the first of many novels in which John le Carré explores the idea of deception and its complex relationship to the truth. Someone’s beliefs point to a truth about their own character, even if specific facts fail to bear out those beliefs in key instances, or they have been brought to a broadly correct conclusion through false or incomplete facts. Leamas’s mission requires him to establish that Mundt is a double agent for the British without knowing that Mundt really is a double agent. For all of Leamas’s cynicism, he does not believe that the Circus would sacrifice so many lives to protect an asset. Aside from moral considerations, Leamas is a proud man, and he is confident that, as station head, he would have been told if Mundt was working for the British.

Furthermore, there is a strong hint of truth to Leamas’s decline even though it is part of his operational cover. He was already a gruff man, prone to heavy drinking, and extremely resistant to emotional intimacy. Even if punching the grocer is part of the act, it cuts him off from the Circus and leaves him with meager employment opportunities after he is released from prison. The success of his cover story depends at least as much on the truth of Leamas’s character and the sincerity of his beliefs as the matching of bank records with Mundt’s travels.

Once Leamas has crossed over, he believes that each successive step of his mission is safely in the hands of Control. Leamas is of course correct in this supposition, except he underestimated the sheer extent of Control’s arrangement, in which he is merely a pawn. Fiedler is in fact the right access point to Mundt, but because his Jewishness and ambition make him easy to discredit. Leamas’s relationship with Liz, honest to the extent that Leamas can show affection for another person, was engineered by the Circus to later implicate him. The serendipitous fact that Liz is a member of the Communist Party and wants to visit East Germany makes her the last piece of the puzzle. By the end, belief and fact have completely separated, as Leamas realizes that the Circus’s overarching goal is the protection of Mundt rather than defeating him, and it turns out that Leamas’s return is a welcome bonus and not an operational priority.

Moral Equivalence in the Cold War

During the Cold War, both sides regularly represented themselves as the defenders of freedom and justice against merciless forces bent on world domination. Since there was no direct military conflict between them, stories of secret agents enabled both sides to dramatize the conflict and illustrate its moral importance. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the first of many novels in which John le Carré took a sledgehammer to the notion of the Cold War as a battle of good and evil. Almost immediately after establishing Mundt as an antagonist who has trespassed conventional limits by killing enemy agents, Control plainly admits to Leamas that “we do disagreeable things […] we occasionally do very wicked things” (23), while offering the unconvincing caveat that their actions are “defensive” and that the superiority of Western ideals is beyond dispute. Leamas is too much of a cynic to bother arguing with Control, merely thinking to himself that “it’s like working for a bloody clergyman” (24). Leamas’s lack of faith in Western values makes him a plausible defector, especially with someone like Peters, whom he instantly regards as a practitioner of comparable skill rather than the agent of a rival ideology.

Leamas’s meetings with Fiedler complicate his cynical worldview. Fiedler is a true believer who sees himself as an agent of historical progress, and to Leamas’s befuddlement, he believes British agents to be similarly compelled by their own ideals. He even cites a passage from the Gospel of Saint John, that “it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many” (143), pointing out the similarity to the communist ethic of placing the common good over that of individuals. Leamas can readily dismiss Control’s feeble rationalizations, but Fielder’s convictions prompt Leamas to issue his own feeble clichés about how little he cares for such moral questions. Once Leamas has realized the full extent of London’s plot, suddenly his amoral view is insufficient to address the magnitude of the crime that the British and East Germans have committed. It is up to Liz to point out the injustice, particularly concerning the suffering of innocent people. Whereas Leamas holds the West and Soviets equal in their unsentimental realism, Liz sees them as equally wicked, as the consequences of their actions wipe out the greater good that they are purportedly serving. There may be meaningful moral differences between democracy and communism, but one is not going to find them in the world of espionage.

The Individual and the Common Good

Fiedler identifies the major difference between communist and “Christian” civilization. According to him, the latter “believe[s] in the sanctity of human life” (144), and therefore prioritizes the individual, whereas communism regards individualism as chief among the “bourgeois sensibilities” that will have to be eliminated “in the process of rationalizing society” (143). Yet even as he points out this fundamental difference, Fiedler notices some compatibility between Stalin’s brazenly cynical quotation that “half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy” and Jesus’s sacrifice for humankind in the Bible (143). The human mind more readily understands the sadness of a single death, but logically accepts the periodic need to sacrifice a few to the needs of the many.

The novel ultimately confounds Fiedler’s analysis in two ways. First, the Western countries prove perfectly capable of sacrificing individuals to the common good when they see the necessity. Second, Fiedler’s own state does equate the common good with the advance of the socialist revolution. Fiedler may have a certain respect for his adversaries, but he is a Cold War absolutist who sees the two sides as locked in a zero-sum competition. He accepts Leamas’s help only because it serves the greater end of overthrowing Mundt. Yet the East German Party ultimately vindicates Mundt, and not obviously because they regard him as innocent. Even without Rolling Stone, there is ample evidence that Mundt’s shoot-first tactics are designed to cover his tracks. Mundt’s supposed uncovering of Liz’s financial assistance would require such astonishing levels of foresight and tactical acumen that the help of British Intelligence offers a much simpler and more plausible explanation. Yet Mundt was able to slip the noose, and Leamas suggests it is because the two Cold War adversaries are to a large degree partners as well as enemies. The Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous year brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, and afterward the West and the Soviet Union undertook efforts to avoid such instances in the future. Ironically, Mundt is acceptable because he is a double agent who has killed his would-be accusers. As a British agent, he will not provoke undue hostility with the West, and by removing the British network from Germany, he has defanged the closest thing to a combat force in the country where a potential World War III was most likely to break out. Leamas lumps communists and capitalists together as “the poor sods who try to keep the preachers [the true believers of either ideology] from blowing each other sky high” (247). Fiedler may be more noble, but upholding his ideals would require East Germany to resume Cold War conflict, which has become unacceptably dangerous. The cynics are keeping the peace.