Anxious to regain its status as a Whitehall player, an outdated and out-of-fashion intelligence department conceives & launches a covert operation to penetrate the Iron Curtain. Unforgiving bureaucratic satire about the boys-school mentality of the secret world and its often costly games.
Among other things, the description of running an Agent (Fred Leiser) through the Iron Curtain at night remains one of the best I've seen.
On a larger scale, this is a story of the mounting bureaucratic infighting between a military intelligence operation and the emergent power of the "Circus", Control and George Smiley. Like most good LeCarre novels it is also a story of more primal human emotions and their impact, in this case, on espionage operations. Very much worth the read.
On a larger scale, this is a story of the mounting bureaucratic infighting between a military intelligence operation and the emergent power of the "Circus", Control and George Smiley. Like most good LeCarre novels it is also a story of more primal human emotions and their impact, in this case, on espionage operations. Very much worth the read.
Cold War spy tale set between English spys and the Germans.
Long on the recruitment and training of a spy, in this one he comes in from the cold in a different manner. No fluff, straightforward prose; read easily at a single sitting (320 pages).
