The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Peters sits Leamas down for another day of debriefing. Peters asks about Leamas’s time in the Banking Division after he left Berlin, the last phase of his Circus career as he began to soil his own reputation in preparation for the mission. Leamas insists that in arranging payments for agents in the field, he never knew who they were, but he provides a list of the payments he can remember. Leamas then talks about an operation called Rolling Stone, which involved Leamas traveling to European capitals and leaving large sums of money in banks, presumably for agents to withdraw later. Peters is fascinated, especially when Leamas tells him that agents would use a fake passport to withdraw their money, but probably traveled to the country legally, with their own passports. Leamas can provide few details on who the payments were for, but he tells Peters the aliases he used while traveling, and the false names for the agents. Peters wonders if one of the agents was German due to having a German alias, but Leamas insists that he would have known about any German agent and that the Circus would never have kept him out of the loop. Peters remarks on Leamas’s pride.

Leamas takes a walk as he waits for Peters to return, thinking about Liz and how she helped him appreciate the small beauties of everyday life. Peters arrives in the afternoon and tells Leamas that the police in England are looking for him. He is now at the mercy of his hosts, although he does not want to travel across the Iron Curtain for fear that he will never leave again. Leamas asks that after his debriefing, they give him a Scandinavian passport and enough money to live on. Peters agrees to put the idea to his superiors. They head to the airport and fly to Berlin.

Liz is hanging on to fading memories of Leamas. She visited his apartment once, and his landlord thought Leamas a good man despite his flaws. Liz thinks often about the fact that he said goodbye to her the day before he attacked the grocer, suggesting that the latter action was not as impulsive as it seemed. Fellow Communist Party members talked about the incident, although they did not know that Liz and Leamas were involved. They interpreted Leamas’s violence as a revolutionary act against an oppressive capitalist system that pushed people to the brink.

Two men come to Liz’s apartment. They claim to be policemen but Liz is skeptical. They know about Liz and Leamas’s relationship, and she insists that no one else knew, not even Miss Crail from the library. She tells the men about how Leamas said goodbye to her the night before his arrest, and they inform her that Leamas named her next of kin, despite his having two children. They tell her to contact them with any more information, and she pleads with them to tell her where Leamas is. They only say that he’s abroad, and that, as his friends, they will take care of her. One of them leaves a card behind, revealing his name to be George Smiley.

Leamas, in transit back to Germany with Peters, thinks about an earlier time when he had sped to meet up with Riemeck and nearly crashed into a car full of children. He also thinks about Control’s advice to him to make his interrogators work for their information. Leamas and Peters find a parking lot and get into an old Mercedes, crossing into the Eastern section of Berlin and driving further into East Germany to meet Fiedler, a Jewish deputy of Mundt rumored to be resentful of his antisemitic superior. Control identified Fiedler as key to their plot to destroy Mundt. They arrive at a farmhouse, and Fiedler arrives soon after. Fiedler immediately tells Leamas that Peters lied about Leamas going deeper into the Communist bloc; they needed a Soviet agent to get Leamas to East Germany, but since he is a fugitive, they can take him no further without risking a diplomatic incident. Leamas is furious, but there is an implication that his rage is manufactured, that he knew this would be part of the plan. Fiedler wonders how Leamas can be angry when he knows that spies do unethical things for higher ends all the time. He then orders Leamas to tell him what he withheld from Peters. The interrogation begins the next morning, and Fiedler again insists that Leamas has not told all he knows about Rolling Stone. Fiedler asks him several details about the operation, including who had access to the relevant file and what section of the Circus handled it. Leamas occasionally stumbles on details, reiterating that he was drinking heavily at the time and so his memory is flawed. Leamas then seems to suddenly remember that Peter Guillam brought up the Rolling Stone file, even though his purview was research on the East German economy. Fiedler concludes that Guillam must have been running an agent that Leamas did not know about, and Leamas angrily responds that he would have known.

On a walk outdoors, Fiedler asks Leamas about the Circus’s philosophy, and when Leamas says they mostly don’t have one, Fiedler wonders how can they morally justify their actions. He especially wonders how a Christian society can justify the taking of life when they believe that everyone has a soul. Turning back to Rolling Stone, Leamas continues to report exactly what he did while begging ignorance about the operation as a whole. Fiedler believes they can find the identity of the double agent by determining if money from the accounts was withdrawn, which would pinpoint the agent’s location at that moment. He suggests Leamas write letters to the banks to find out about any withdrawal. Leamas is angry about having to do more work, but Fiedler promises to see what he can do to release Leamas from further responsibilities. Leamas thinks about how most deceivers have a moment where they can take off the mask, but not spies. The isolation of the spy is so profound that the only way to deal with it is to blur the illusion and the reality until they become impossible to disentangle.

Leamas signs off on letters to two banks asking if someone made a withdrawal on the Rolling Stones accounts. While they wait for a response, Fiedler continues to press Leamas for more information and makes a reference to Liz. When Leamas furiously tells Fiedler to leave her alone, Fielder warns him that it may be too late. On another walk, they talk about Mundt, how he managed to escape England despite having killed people and nearly killing George Smiley. Leamas observes that there was never a full effort to apprehend him. Fiedler admits to liking Leamas and wonders why he defected. A week later, Fiedler arrives in great distress, making only a brief and inconclusive mention of the Copenhagen bank to which Leamas wrote. Fiedler talks again about Mundt, how he has always preferred to kill people rather than extract information from them, and Fiedler realizes that Mundt kills those who know too much, especially about himself. Fiedler mentions again how the Circus let Mundt go, and he concludes it was because Mundt is their agent. Leamas again refuses to accept that the Circus could have run such a high-profile agent in East Germany without his knowledge, but as proof, Fiedler reveals that the money in Copenhagen was withdrawn at the exact time that Mundt was there to meet an American agent.