Soldier Spy

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How that sense of Christian service could be corrupted into the most mendacious and reckless behaviour was something I was preoccupied with throughout the telling of the story. Along the way, Agent Sonya is fascinating as a window on to a set of convictions relatively common at this time among communists. During his attempt to obtain Karla's defection, Smiley plied him to defect with cigarettes and promises that they could get Karla's family out to the West safely. Haydon is revealed to be the mole, and his interrogation reveals that he had been recruited several decades ago by Karla and became a full-fledged Soviet spy partly for political reasons, partly in frustration at Britain's rapidly declining influence on the world stage, particularly on account of the failings at Suez. He wears thick, round glasses (Le Carré does not describe the style or nature of the spectacle frames) and tends to clean the lenses on the 'fat' end of his tie while contemplating something of great significance; the gesture is ubiquitous enough that other characters consider it to be something of a trademark.

Smiley describes him as modest and avuncular, Mediterranean in look and that he resembled a priest or schoolmaster. In The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing wrote that “any communist in the west who stayed in the party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth”. Jared Harris was cast but had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; he was replaced by Toby Jones.

In his foreword to the 1991 edition, Le Carré discloses that he may have been under the impression "mole" was "current KGB jargon" during his brief stint as an intelligence officer but that he can no longer say for certain; it is possible he actually invented the term himself.

Smiley cautiously agrees, and forms a team consisting of himself, Guillam, Tarr, and retired Scotland Yard Inspector Mendel. They are like the extended interrogations in Line of Duty, except the tension is more drawn out and there are more gaps the viewer is encouraged to fill. Karla's ultimate fate is revealed in 2017's A Legacy of Spies, in which Jim Prideaux recounts to Guillam that, following his debriefing, Smiley arranged for Karla to teach Russian at a university in Latin America. The events which take place in Czechoslovakia in the novel were moved to Hungary, because of the country's 20% rebate for film productions.

During the events of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Esterhase has a son at Westminster and a daughter at medical school. When Smiley confronts Esterhase about Operation Witchcraft, he states that Esterhase was a "wanted man" at the time of his recruitment and implies that Esterhase is still a fugitive. In 1979, the debate over Tinker Tailor’s complexity continued into the Guardian’s letters pages, with the counterpoint to the Larry Grayson position being articulated by a Dr Graham Nicholls, who made the case that “People love being mystified”. During Smiley's attempt to salvage Control's career and maintain control of the Circus, Esterhase is one of the first people Smiley appeals to, citing their past friendship; Esterhase demurs, citing Control's habit of allowing younger personnel to mistreat him. Speaking in general about the nature of interrogations, Smiley says that sometimes they are "communions between damaged souls.

Bernard Hepton played Esterhase in the BBC television dramatisations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People. It’s an appealing story, well suited to Ben Macintyre, the popular author of fast-paced books about mid-century spies.

Over the next decade, Kuczynski had three children with three different men and moved to the Soviet Union, Switzerland, London and rural Oxfordshire, spying relentlessly and brilliantly in all of them.

Among the rumours are that his father was a professional intelligence officer, first for the Czarist Okhrana and later for the Bolshevist Cheka; that as a boy Karla worked as a kitchen boy on a train in occupied Siberia during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 (putting his birth somewhere in the late 19th century); and that he was trained in espionage by "Berg" (a possible reference to an alias used by Alexander Orlov), which Smiley compares to "being taught music by a great composer. Guillam is half-French and half-English, and comes from a family that has worked for The Circus (le Carre's name for MI6) for generations. In 1948, Karla was snagged in one of Stalin's random purges of the Soviet military and intelligence organisations and sent to prison in Siberia. He discovered that his radio operator was a double agent for the Germans and so fed him false information that confused the Germans.The secret service seeks to dispense with that humanity, the consensus on high being that humane virtues have outlasted whatever limited usefulness they might have had. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes.