A Legacy of Spies recap

Peter Guillam, long retired to a farm in Brittany, is summoned to London by the modern Service. The children of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, who died at the Berlin Wall decades earlier, are suing, and a parliamentary committee wants an account of the operations that killed them. Questioned by the Service's lawyer Bunny and its historian Laura, and confronted with files he helped to write and to weed, Guillam recalls the Berlin operations of the fifties and sixties: the East German network, and its best source, a woman code-named Tulip, the wife of a Stasi officer, whom Guillam helped to exfiltrate through Prague and with whom he fell in love. Tulip was murdered soon after reaching England, and the Circus buried it, because her killer was Mundt, the East German operations chief who was also the Circus's own agent. Everything that followed, including the operation that destroyed Leamas and Liz Gold, existed to keep Mundt in place. Threatened by Leamas's son and set up as the Service's scapegoat, Guillam finally tracks down George Smiley in Freiburg and hears him account for it all.

Previously: Alec Leamas, head of the Circus's Berlin station in the early nineteen sixties, lost his last agent at a checkpoint and was sent by Control on a final operation. He played out a public ruin into drink, debt and prison, was recruited by East German talent-spotters and taken East, where his information was used by Jens Fiedler, the East German counter-intelligence chief, to accuse his own operations chief, Hans-Dieter Mundt, of working for London. At a secret tribunal, Mundt's advocate produced Liz Gold, a young London librarian who had become Leamas's lover and had been brought East on a party exchange, and her truthful evidence exposed Leamas's defection as a British operation. Fiedler was destroyed and Mundt cleared. Mundt then released Leamas and Liz, because Mundt was in fact the Circus's own agent and the whole operation had been designed to protect him by removing the one man closing in on him. At the Wall, Liz was shot by the guards and Leamas climbed back down to die beside her. Peter Guillam was a junior officer in the Circus at the time, and George Smiley was Control's closest colleague.

Peter Guillam, long retired from the Circus, lives on his mother's farm in Brittany with Catherine, who works the land, and her daughter. A letter from the Service he served for forty years asks him, in terms he cannot refuse, to come to London. He is received in a glass building on the river by Bunny, a Service lawyer, and Laura, its in-house historian, and told what has happened: the children of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold are bringing a civil action over the deaths of their parents at the Berlin Wall, and a parliamentary committee is preparing to examine the operations that led to them. The Service wants an account of two old operations, Mayflower and Windfall, before it is given one by somebody else. Guillam is required to read documents he helped to create, some of which he knows to be false and some of which are missing, and to explain them under questioning by people who were not born when the events occurred.

Through the files and Guillam's own memory, the Berlin story is reassembled. In the years when the Wall was going up, the Circus was running an East German network from West Berlin, with Alec Leamas in charge of the field work and Control and Smiley directing from London. The network's best material came from a woman code-named Tulip: Doris Gamp, the wife of a Stasi officer, who offered herself to the West out of conviction and photographed documents from inside her husband's service. Her product was so good that London built a special handling arrangement around it. Guillam, then a young officer, was drawn into her case. It becomes clear from the surviving papers that only Control and Smiley knew what the material was really being used for, and that Leamas and Guillam were being told a version of the operation designed to keep them convincing rather than informed.

Tulip's position becomes untenable and she has to be brought out. Guillam escorts her through Czechoslovakia on a difficult exfiltration, sleeping in safe rooms and moving on false papers, and in the course of it they become lovers; she leaves her young son behind. She is landed in England and housed at a Circus safe house in the country, kept from the world and impatient at being idle. Within a short time she is dead, killed at the house, and the Circus disposes of the matter without a police enquiry and without telling the agents who had risked their lives for her. Guillam was told a story about it that he half believed at the time. The modern Service's researchers have found the gaps in that story, and their questions are directed at what Guillam knew, what he wrote and what he later removed from the file.

The pressure on Guillam comes from two directions. In London, Bunny and Laura shift from asking him to explain the past to preparing him to carry it: the Service means to settle the claim and needs a name to attach to the deaths, and the men who gave the orders are dead. Outside the building, Christoph Leamas, Alec's son, a criminal with nothing to lose, follows Guillam and demands money with threats, while Karen Gold, Liz's daughter, wants only to know why her mother died. Guillam, cornered, works out and finally admits what the operations were for. Mundt, the East German operations chief, had been recruited by the Circus, and Tulip was killed by him because she could have exposed him; the Circus concealed her murder to protect its source. Windfall was built to defend that source, and Leamas and Liz Gold were sent into it without being told they were expendable.

Guillam gives the enquiry what he judges it is entitled to, refuses to invent what would suit it, and leaves London before the settlement is concluded, aware that the Service will arrange the record to protect itself whatever he says. He goes to Germany and, after some searching, finds George Smiley in a library in Freiburg: very old, still working, and entirely clear-eyed about what was done. Smiley confirms the whole of it. Mundt was theirs; Tulip died by his hand and the Circus buried it; Leamas and Liz Gold were used and lost in the same cause; and the men who ordered it understood the cost. Asked what it was for, Smiley answers that he served his country while he could believe in it, and that if there was a larger purpose behind the whole cold enterprise it was Europe. He offers Guillam no absolution and takes none for himself. Guillam returns to Brittany with the past finally spoken aloud and nothing about it undone.

The inquiry ends with the Service intending to settle: the claimants will be paid off, the record will be tidied, and the responsibility will rest where it can do the modern Service least harm, which means on Guillam and on men who are dead. Guillam, having told as much of the truth as he judges the dead can bear and having been threatened by Christoph Leamas along the way, leaves London rather than wait for the verdict, and goes to Germany to find Smiley. He finds him very old, in a library in Freiburg, still reading, unrepentant and precise. Smiley confirms what Guillam had worked out: Mundt was the Circus's agent, Windfall existed to protect him, Tulip died at his hands and the Circus concealed it, and Leamas and Liz Gold were expended in the same cause without being told. Asked what it was all for, Smiley says he did it for his service and his country while he believed in them, and that if there was a cause beyond that it was Europe. He offers no defence beyond the fact that the choices were made by men who knew what they cost. Guillam goes back to Brittany, the past acknowledged and nothing about it repaired.