Smiley's People

Smiley's People

First edition
Author	John le Carré
Cover artist	Stephen Cornwell
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	George Smiley/The Quest for Karla
Genre	Spy novel
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton (UK) Random House (USA)
Publication date	November 1979
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	384 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	0-340-24704-5 (UK hardback edition) & ISBN 0-394-50843-2 (US hardback edition)
OCLC	6102346
Preceded by	The Honourable Schoolboy
Followed by	The Little Drummer Girl

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.^[1] 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.^[2] David Cornwell (John le Carré) worked as an intelligence officer for both MI5 and the SIS (MI6).

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. Maria applies for an exit permit from the Soviet Embassy for her daughter. After no further contact with "Kursky", Maria writes to General Vladimir, a former Soviet general and British agent for help. Vladimir realises that Maria was used to provide a false identity for an unknown young woman, a ploy associated with KGB spymaster Karla, and that this is probably an unofficial operation.

Vladimir contacts Toby Esterhase, his old handler in the Circus, but Esterhase has left and refuses to assist. Vladimir sends a confidant, Otto Leipzig, to Paris to interview Maria who identifies "Kursky" in a photograph. Vladimir contacts the Circus again, and insists on speaking to his former senior case officer, George Smiley, who is also retired. The Circus personnel are skeptical and uncooperative. Meanwhile, Vladimir is betrayed to Karla and assassinated on Hampstead Heath while on his way to meet a junior Circus contact.

Circus head Saul Enderby and Civil Service undersecretary Oliver Lacon want to bury the matter quickly to protect the Circus from scandal. They recall Smiley from his retirement to tidy the matter up. Smiley takes Vladimir's claims seriously and investigates. He recovers a second letter from Maria, who fears for her life. Near the site where Vladimir was killed, he discovers the negative of a compromising photograph of Leipzig and another man with prostitutes. Smiley consults dying former Circus researcher Connie Sachs, who identifies the second man as Oleg Kirov, also known by the cover name "Kursky". Connie also recounts rumours that Karla had a daughter by a mistress whom he had later sent to the Gulag. The daughter, Tatiana, was 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 night club where the photograph was taken. He finds that Leipzig has been murdered by Karla's agents. Kretzschmar gives Smiley tape recordings of Leipzig and Kirov. Smiley hastens to Paris where, with help from his old colleague Peter Guillam, he gets Maria to safety. He also learns that Kirov has been summoned back to Moscow, and has probably been killed for his indiscretions.

The transcribed tape of Kirov's confession to Leipzig shows that Karla is secretly diverting funds to a Swiss bank account using a commercial attaché named Grigoriev, of the Soviet Embassy in Bern. The money is used for 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 to Enderby that they may be able to blackmail Karla and force him to defect. Enderby authorizes Smiley to mount an operation to secure the evidence from Grigoriev.

Smiley and Esterhase set up a covert team in Bern to keep Grigoriev under observation. They soon obtain evidence of his unofficial handling of funds for Karla and his affair with one of his secretaries. Smiley presents him with the choice of cooperating or being thrown to the mercy of the 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. 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. 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 one of the bridge crossings between 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[]

• Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova – a Russian émigrée in Paris, mother of a girl, Alexandra Glikman, whom she left with the girl's father when she left the Soviet Union
• Oleg Kirov alias Oleg Kursky – an agent for Karla, deputed to find a suitable legend for Karla's daughter
• General Vladimir – Estonian émigré, former Soviet general, spied for the British for three years, since defected and later retired; real name, Voldemar
• Otto Leipzig – "The Magician," Estonian former dock-worker, freelance intelligence agent and occasional fraudster, who works with Vladimir to take down Kirov and Karla
• George Smiley – retired, former Acting Chief of British intelligence service "the Circus".
• Peter Guillam – Smiley's friend and former lieutenant, now head of the British Intelligence section in the Paris embassy
• Connie Sachs – retired former analyst and head of Moscow sphere of British intelligence; lives terminally ill in her Oxford "dacha"
• Hilary - Former Circus secretary and Connie Sachs' lover; suffered mental breakdown during Smiley's tenure as Chief
• Sir Oliver Lacon – Whitehall's Head Prefect to the intelligence service, aka Cabinet Office factotum
• Nigel Mostyn – young intelligence officer who took Vladimir's calls to the Circus
• Lauder Strickland - Circus fixer and seemingly Head of Personnel; organises the official cover-up of Vladimir's death.
• Karla – Chief of the Thirteenth Directorate within Soviet Intelligence. The Directorate is also known as the Karla Directorate.
• Sir Saul Enderby – Chief of The Circus.
• Sam Collins - Former Circus "hard man" and Southeast Asian hand; current Head of Operations and Enderby's underling
• William (Villem) Craven – son of a deceased friend of Vladimir, performs a courier job for Vladimir
• Mikhel – Vladimir's émigré friend and former aide-de-camp at the Free Baltic library in Bloomsbury
• Elvira – Mikhel's wife, probably Vladimir's lover
• Toby Esterhase – formerly head of the Circus's "Lamplighter" section, now a dubious art gallery owner. He resumes his former activities to organise the trapping of Grigoriev
• Claus Kretzschmar – Otto Leipzig's old associate, owner of a seedy night club in Hamburg where Kirov is set up in a “honey trap” as part of a blackmail scheme
• Grigoriev – Soviet bureaucrat in Bern who is drawn against his will into first, Karla's services, then Smiley's
• Krassky – Moscow courier who handles correspondence between Grigoriev and Karla
• Tatiana – Karla's schizophrenic daughter, usually referred to by her assumed identity, "Alexandra"
• Mother Felicity – mother superior of the facility in Thun where Alexandra/Tatiana is kept

Adaptations[]

Television[]

US DVD cover for the 1982 BBC series of Smiley's People.

Smiley's People was dramatized as a six-part serial for television for the BBC in 1982 as a sequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), again starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. The screenplay was written by John le Carré and John Hopkins^[3] and was directed by Simon Langton. Two versions of this series exist: 1) 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.^[4]

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.^[5]

References[]

External links[]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Smiley's People

• Smiley's People at IMDb