Smiley's People


Smiley's People is a spy novel by John le Carré, published in 1979. Featuring British master-spy George Smiley, it is the third and final novel of the "Karla Trilogy", following Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. George Smiley is called out of retirement to investigate the death of one of his old agents: a former Soviet general, the head of an Estonian émigré organisation based in London. Smiley learns the general had discovered information that will lead to a final confrontation with Smiley's nemesis, the Soviet spymaster Karla.
The character General Vladimir was partly modelled on Colonel Alfons Rebane, an Estonian émigré who led the Estonian portion of SIS's Operation Jungle in the 1950s. David Cornwell worked as an intelligence officer for both MI5 and the SIS.

Plot

Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova, a Soviet émigrée in Paris, is told by a Soviet agent calling himself "Kursky" that her daughter Alexandra, whom she was forced to leave behind, may be permitted to join her for "humanitarian reasons". Maria applies for French citizenship for her daughter, but time passes with no sign of Alexandra and no further contact with "Kursky". Realising she has been duped, Maria writes to General Vladimir, a former Soviet general and British agent, for help. Vladimir realises that Maria was used to provide a "legend", or false identity, for an unknown young woman, a ploy which KGB spymaster Karla has tried before. Vladimir also recognises that the operation is unofficial, because Karla used a blundering amateur agent instead of trained intelligence officers.
Vladimir contacts Toby Esterhase, his old handler and "postman" in the Circus, but Esterhase has left the service and refuses to be involved in Vladimir's plans. Nevertheless, Vladimir sends a confidant, Otto Leipzig, to interview Maria in Paris. From a photograph, Maria immediately identifies "Kursky". Vladimir then sends the son of an old friend to Hamburg to collect vital proof from Leipzig. He contacts the Circus again, invoking Moscow Rules and insisting on speaking to his former "vicar" or senior case officer, George Smiley, not realising that Smiley is also retired. The Circus personnel, unfamiliar with Vladimir, are skeptical and uncooperative. Meanwhile, Vladimir's activities are betrayed to Karla, probably by jealous members of Vladimir's émigré organisation. Vladimir is assassinated on Hampstead Heath, evidently by Moscow Centre agents, while on his way to meet an inexperienced handler from the Circus.
Circus head Saul Enderby and Civil Service undersecretary Oliver Lacon believe that Vladimir was merely an ex-agent seeking attention, and want to bury the matter quickly to protect the Circus from any scandal. They recall Smiley from his retirement in the hope that he will erase any links to the Circus. Unlike Enderby and Lacon, Smiley takes Vladimir's claims seriously and begins to investigate. He recovers a second letter sent to Vladimir by Maria, who is now being shadowed and fears for her life. Near the site where Vladimir was killed, he discovers Vladimir's half-empty packet of Gauloises cigarettes, containing the negative of a compromising photograph of Leipzig and another man with prostitutes. Smiley recalls that Leipzig had blackmailed a Soviet agent named Oleg Kirov to obtain information, and surmises that Kirov is probably the other man in the photograph. Meanwhile, Soviet agents bungle an attempt to kill Maria.
Smiley consults dying former Circus researcher Connie Sachs, who remembers some background information on Kirov, also known by the cover name "Kursky". Following Vladimir's logic that Karla was acting outside the system he himself devised, Connie also recounts rumours that Karla had a daughter by a mistress whom he had later sent to the Gulag when she turned against him. The daughter, Tatiana was mentally unstable and was confined to a mental institution.
Smiley flies to Hamburg and tracks down Claus Kretzschmar, an old associate of Leipzig and owner of the seedy night club where the photograph was taken. Kretzschmar gives him directions to Leipzig's houseboat in a gypsy encampment on the Baltic Sea near Lübeck, but Karla's agents have already tortured and killed Leipzig. Smiley's search of Leipzig's boat uncovers the torn half of a postcard hidden underwater in an old gym-shoe on a fishing-line, witnessed by several people. Smiley rushes to finish his work in Lübeck before East German police and Soviet agents close in on him.
He takes the postcard to Kretzschmar, who matches it to the other half and in exchange gives Smiley tape recordings made at the time the photograph of Leipzig and Kirov, and a photocopy of Maria's first letter to Vladimir. Smiley hastens to Paris, fearing for Maria's life. With help from his old colleague Peter Guillam, who is serving out his days in the British Embassy in Paris, Smiley gets Maria to safety. He also learns that Kirov has been summoned back to Moscow, and has probably been killed for his indiscretions.
Smiley returns to London and meets with Enderby. The transcribed tape of Kirov's confession to Leipzig shows that Karla is secretly diverting funds to a Swiss bank account and misappropriating other resources using a commercial attaché of the Soviet Embassy in Bern, named Grigoriev. The money is going to the care of Karla's daughter, who has been committed to an expensive Swiss psychiatric sanatorium under the faked citizenship papers of Maria's daughter. Smiley explains that if the Circus can obtain proof of this activity, they may have the information necessary to blackmail Karla and force him to either defect or be exposed. Enderby gives Smiley approval, as well as secret and deniable funding, to mount an operation to secure the evidence from Grigoriev and trap Karla.
Esterhase sets up a covert team in Bern to keep Grigoriev under observation, while Smiley visits his estranged wife, Lady Ann Sercomb, and makes a point of cutting relations with her before travelling to Bern. Smiley learns that, like Kirov, Grigoriev is untrained in spycraft. Esterhase's team soon gains evidence of his unofficial handling of funds for Karla and his affair with one of his secretaries. Although Grigoriev is normally accompanied everywhere by his wife, when he makes an informal trip by himself, Esterhase and his helpers take the opportunity to bundle him into a car. Smiley presents him with the choice of cooperating or being thrown to the mercy of Swiss authorities and, later, Karla. Grigoriev quickly confesses all he knows of the arrangements regarding "Alexandra's" care and the details of the visits he makes to her.
Smiley visits "Alexandra", who is being treated in an institution run by an order of nuns. Among her "symptoms" is her insistence that she is actually called Tatiana and is the daughter of a powerful man who can make people disappear but who does not actually exist. Smiley writes a letter to Karla, which Grigoriev passes on instead of his usual weekly report on "Alexandra"'s treatment. The letter details Karla's illegal activities and offers him defection to the West and protection for Tatiana, or to face destruction at the hands of his rivals in Moscow Centre.
In a final scene, Karla, posing as a labourer, defects using the Glienicke Bridge connecting East and West Berlin. Before crossing over into the waiting arms of Western agents, Karla stops and lights a cigarette. As he passes near Smiley he drops a gold cigarette lighter, a gift to George from Ann, that he purloined from Smiley twenty years earlier in a Delhi prison. Smiley does not pick up the lighter.

Characters

Television

Smiley's People was dramatized as a six-part miniseries for television for the BBC in 1982 as a sequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy the six-part UK version, which expands upon several important aspects of Smiley's objectives and Enderby's endorsement of these, and 2) the six-part PBS version in which much of the "back story" had been excised, for time.

Radio

In 2009–2011, 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 Smiley. Smiley's People was broadcast as three, one-hour episodes, from Thursday 20 October to Sunday 24 October 2011. The producer was Patrick Rayner.

Possible cinema version

Following the success of the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy film, Gary Oldman, who plays George Smiley in the film, said "I think they're whispering now that they might do Smiley's People." The cinema series would skip The Honourable Schoolboy, just as the BBC did in its serialisation of the "Karla Trilogy" in the early 1980s.