Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
It is 1973, at the height of the Cold War. George Smiley, former deputy chief of the Circus, has been living in unhappy retirement for a year after an operation in Czechoslovakia, code-named Testify, ended in disaster with the capture of agent Jim Prideaux and resulted in the dismissals of Smiley and his superior, Control. Smiley is unexpectedly approached by Peter Guillam, a former colleague, and Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service officer responsible for overseeing the Intelligence Services, to hear Ricki Tarr, a British agent now in hiding, tell of the existence of a Soviet mole, code-named Gerald and handled by Moscow Centre's Colonel Polyakov. When Tarr cabled the information to London, his contact was immediately and forcibly returned to Moscow and Tarr went on the run to escape Soviet agents.
Smiley accepts Lacon's request to investigate in total secrecy, since all senior Circus staff are suspects. He soon focuses on the details of British intelligence's best Soviet source, code-named Merlin, which Control had deemed suspicious from the start. Merlin had been developed and vigorously sponsored by four ambitious senior Circus men, led by Percy Alleline, who wanted to oust Control and had rallied Circus overseers in Whitehall to their cause at the time of Testify. Gerald must be one of these four: Alleline himself, a vain and politically skilled Scot who took over as Chief from Control; Roy Bland, a gifted if boorish intellectual of humble origins; Toby Esterhase, a self-serving Hungarian refugee hungry for promotion; or Bill Haydon, an aristocratic polymath and a Circus legend who once had an affair with Smiley's now-separated wife Ann.
Working through Circus documents surreptitiously provided by Lacon and Guillam, Smiley discovers that Merlin is not one source but several and that the operation has an ultra-secret London end: a safe house where Alleline and his inner circle personally collect information from a Merlin emissary posted in London under diplomatic cover. Eventually, Smiley realizes the truth: the Merlin emissary is none other than Polyakov himself and that the actual flow of information goes the other way, with Gerald passing actual British secrets while receiving fake and worthless Soviet material.
Smiley suspects a link between Merlin and the botched Operation Testify, whose details Control had hidden from him at the time. He tracks down Prideaux and all other Circus participants and confirms the connection. Control had independently concluded the existence of a mole and mounted Testify to learn his identity from an aspiring defector in Czech intelligence privy to the information. Polyakov and Karla, Moscow Centre's spymaster and Smiley's nemesis, were both present at Prideaux's interrogation which focused exclusively on the extent and status of Control's investigations. The Czech defector was a plant, engineered by Karla to provoke Control's demise through Testify's failure and so protect the mole.
Smiley traps Esterhase, whose deep involvement in Merlin has made him vulnerable, forcing him into revealing the location of the safe house. Tarr is sent to Paris where he sends a coded message to Alleline about "information crucial to the well-being of the Service". This triggers a "crash" (i.e., "emergency") meeting between Gerald and Polyakov at the safe house where Smiley and Guillam are lying in wait. Haydon is revealed to be the mole.
Haydon's interrogation reveals that he was 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. He is expected to be exchanged with the Soviet Union for several of the agents he betrayed but is killed shortly before he is due to leave England. Although the identity of his killer is not explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied to be Prideaux. Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus to deal with the fallout. Smiley visits Ann in an attempt to salvage their relationship.
=== Title ===
Control, chief of the Circus, suspects one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus to be a long-standing Soviet mole and assigns code names with the intention that should his agent Jim Prideaux uncover information about the identity of the mole, Prideaux can relay it back to the Circus using a simple, easy-to-recall codename. The names are derived from the English children's rhyme "Tinker, Tailor":
Alleline was "Tinker", Haydon was "Tailor", Bland was "Soldier", Toby Esterhase was "Poor Man", and George Smiley was "Beggarman" ("sailor" was not used due to its similar sound to "tailor".)
murder