Woman Reading (is away exploring)'s Reviews > The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

4.5 ☆

The rich have eaten your future and your poor have given them the food.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is listed by GR as #3 in the George Smiley series. Since Smiley played a peripheral role, this can be read as a standalone. Indeed when this was published in 1963, it not unexpectedly catapulted le Carré into international fame.

Set in 1961 - 1962, this story's backdrop was highly politically charged. The Berlin Wall had been erected seemingly overnight in August 1961 in order to stop the outflow of people from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Despite its name, the GDR was Communist, an extension of the U.S.S.R. and not officially recognized as a country by the Allies. During this tense standoff, both sides were trying to gather intelligence about the other side.

Alec Leamas, the main protagonist, was the Deputy-Controller of Area, ie. the British head agent runner in Berlin. The story began with Leamas waiting for his most important spy, and also the last one alive, to escape the GDR. A CIA operative kept vigil with Leamas at the West Germany checkpoint by the Wall. The Wall was laced with barbwire and guarded by armed policemen on both sides. The police were authorized to shoot to kill, but they knew that gunfire had to be confined to their respective side of the Wall in order to avoid initiating a war. Leamas' night ended badly.

He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.

Leamas was nearing the cut-off age for field operations so he was not surprised when Control summoned him home to London, where the Secret Service was headquartered. During his debrief, Control revealed that Hans-Dieter Mundt was the likely one to blame for killing all of Leamas' spies in Germany. It isn't necessary but if you've read Call for the Dead #1, then you'll recall that Mundt was an assassin.

Mundt's appearance was fully consistent with his temperament. He looked an athlete. His young face had a hard clean line and a frightening directness; it was barren of humor or fantasy. ... Leamas found no difficulty in recalling that Mundt was a killer. There was a coldness about him, a rigorous self-sufficiency which perfectly equipped him for the business of murder.

Leamas had heard about Mundt's earlier activities in England. Freshly informed that Mundt had single-handedly dismantled Leamas' German network, Leamas hated Mundt. Control then asked Leamas whether he would undertake one last dangerous mission to topple Mundt, now a highly-placed figure in the Abteilung, the GDR intelligence system.

“We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean...one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold...d'you see what I mean?

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?”

Le Carré had demonstrated through his first two books that he could write elegantly. This third novel revealed an improved mastery of storytelling. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold began dramatically and slowly built up a greater sense of dread and suspense. I began to drag my feet in the last 15 percent, not because I had lost interest, but because this tale seemed so plausible during Cold War pressures that it fueled anxiety. All I can say is that this may be 60-year-old fiction, but it deserves its top placement in the classic espionage genre and remains quite a powerful story. The ending left me a bit speechless (view spoiler)[well, no, that's not true for I was repeatedly saying "holy moly" 😱. And I had this reaction despite getting a clue about the ending in another novel by le Carré. Its emotional devastation comes from the ruthlessness of those in leadership and their betrayals so that "the great moronic mass could sleep soundly in their beds." As le Carré had written in this book's Introduction -

The novel’s merit, then—or its offence, depending where you stood—was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: How far can we go in the rightful defence of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?

(hide spoiler)].

“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”