Smiley's People recap

In Paris an ageing Russian emigree, Ostrakova, is approached by a Soviet official offering to release the daughter she left behind, and writes for help to General Vladimir, an old Estonian exile in London and a discarded Circus agent. Vladimir tries to reach his former case officer under Moscow rules and is shot dead on Hampstead Heath. Smiley, long retired, is sent to tidy the death away quietly, and instead follows the trail the old man left: a hidden negative, an emigre courier, a Hamburg confidence man named Otto Leipzig, and photographs and a tape recording of the Soviet official's indiscretions. Reassembling his old people, Connie Sachs, Toby Esterhase, Guillam and Mendel, and working outside the service, Smiley establishes that Karla, the head of Moscow Centre's special directorate, has been using Centre money and Centre officers to hide his mentally ill daughter in a Swiss clinic under a false identity. Everyone who learned of it has been killed. Smiley breaks the Soviet official who pays the clinic's bills, and uses the daughter to force Karla's defection. Karla crosses a Berlin bridge into the West, and Smiley takes no pleasure in it.

Previously: George Smiley spent his career in the Circus, Britain's secret intelligence service, and much of it against Karla, the head of Moscow Centre's special directorate. Karla recruited and ran Bill Haydon, who rose to the top of the Circus, betrayed its networks and its allies, wrecked the operation that left Jim Prideaux shot and imprisoned, and conducted an affair with Smiley's wife Ann on Karla's instructions to blunt Smiley's judgement. Brought back from retirement, Smiley identified and trapped Haydon and was left to rebuild the ruined service. Working backwards through what Haydon had suppressed, he then uncovered a Soviet payments operation in the Far East and traced it to Nelson Ko, an agent Karla had run inside China for twenty years; but the prize was taken over by the Americans and by Whitehall, the field man Jerry Westerby was killed, and Smiley was eased out of the chief's chair in favour of Saul Enderby. Smiley's marriage to Ann has not survived, and the two men's twenty-year contest has never been settled.

In Paris, Maria Ostrakova, an ageing Russian emigree, is approached in a cafe by a Soviet official who says her daughter Alexandra, left behind in Russia many years earlier, may be allowed to join her if she signs certain papers. The interview frightens her: the man knows too much about her history and too little about her daughter, and the arrangement smells of something other than compassion. She writes to General Vladimir, the leader of a Baltic emigre group in London whom she trusted long ago. Vladimir, an old Estonian long since dropped by the Circus, telephones his former service demanding to see the case officer he knew only by a work name, insists on meeting under Moscow rules, and says he has proof of something big. A young duty officer handles the call by the book. Before any meeting can take place, Vladimir is shot dead on Hampstead Heath at night, his face destroyed by the second bullet, and George Smiley is fetched out of retirement to identify the body.

Lacon of the Cabinet Office and the Circus administrator Strickland want the killing disposed of as an emigre quarrel with no British connection, and give Smiley an unofficial commission to make the loose ends disappear. Smiley does the opposite. Going over the old man's route and lodgings, he finds what the killers missed: a cigarette packet left in the classic manner with a photographic negative concealed in it, the proof Vladimir was carrying to his meeting. He interviews the young duty officer, who repeats the old man's words; and Mikhel, the deputy at the emigre library, whose account is fluent and incomplete. He learns that Vladimir had recently sent a young Estonian courier abroad. The service, meanwhile, formally wants nothing to do with any of it, which leaves Smiley free to work alone.

The courier, a lorry driver named Villem, admits to a run to Hamburg where a stranger passed him an envelope on a train. Smiley goes to Norfolk to see Connie Sachs, dying and drinking in the country, who identifies the men in the story: Otto Leipzig, a Baltic adventurer and part-time agent who had worked with Vladimir for years, and Oleg Kirov, a Soviet official whose career and postings make no sense unless he was doing something outside embassy work. Connie also confirms whose directorate Kirov belonged to. In Hamburg, Smiley finds that Leipzig has been murdered, but recovers from Leipzig's associate Kretzschmar what the operation was for: a compromising photograph and a tape on which Kirov, drunk and boastful, describes having been ordered to find a suitable emigre identity for a girl, a piece of work no intelligence service would ever run in that way.

Smiley recruits his own people rather than the Circus's: Toby Esterhase, now selling pictures in the West End, brings a surveillance team; Peter Guillam helps from Paris; Mendel does the London work. In Paris, Ostrakova, who has been living in fear since the approach, is run down in the street and badly hurt, and survives; Smiley finds her and hears her account of Kirov's proposition and of the daughter she has not seen since infancy. The pattern is now clear. Kirov was building a false identity in the West for a young woman, using an emigree mother as the cover story, and everyone who came near the secret has been killed: Kirov himself recalled to Moscow and shot, then Vladimir and Leipzig. The operation was not run by Moscow Centre as an institution but by one man inside it, using its resources for a purpose of his own, and the trail leads to Switzerland.

In Bern, Toby's team identifies the man who does the paying: Grigoriev, the Soviet embassy's commercial counsellor, a fussy, unhappy official who makes regular private journeys to a discreet clinic in the countryside and hands over large sums in cash. In the clinic is a disturbed young Russian woman, registered under a name and a nationality that are not hers, who does not know who is responsible for her. Smiley has the watchers document every movement, then has Grigoriev taken quietly and confronted in a safe flat with what has been observed: the money, the false papers, his mistress, and the certainty that his own service would treat all of it as a capital matter. Grigoriev, terrified and relieved to be able to speak, begins to explain who ordered him to do it and why.

Grigoriev's account completes the case: the girl in the clinic is Karla's own daughter, mentally ill, taken out of Russia under an invented identity and kept in Switzerland with money stolen from Moscow Centre's operational funds. It is the one act for which Karla's own service would destroy him, and it is why Kirov, Vladimir and Leipzig died and why Ostrakova was to have died. Smiley sends Karla the choice through the channel Karla himself built: come over, or be exposed to Moscow. Then he waits in Berlin. On a winter night Karla walks across the bridge into the West, a small, ordinary man carrying nothing, and as he passes Smiley he drops the cigarette lighter that Smiley had given him twenty years earlier in an Indian jail. Smiley has won by doing exactly what his opponent would have done, using a sick girl and a frightened official as instruments, and he leaves the bridge with no sense of triumph at all.

Grigoriev, broken by Toby's team and questioned by Smiley in a Bern safe flat, gives up the whole arrangement: the girl in the clinic is Karla's daughter, mentally ill, smuggled out of Russia under a false identity and a false nationality, and maintained in Switzerland with money embezzled from Moscow Centre's operational funds. Kirov was ordered to build the legend, talked too much to Otto Leipzig, and was recalled and shot; Vladimir, Leipzig and very nearly Ostrakova were killed to bury the same secret. Smiley now has what no professional lever could give him: the private crime for which Karla's own service would destroy him. He sends word to Moscow through the channel Karla built, offering him the choice between exposure and coming across. Karla comes. On a bridge in Berlin, watched by Smiley, Toby and the reception party, he crosses into the West, a small man carrying almost nothing, and as he passes he drops the cigarette lighter Smiley once gave him. Smiley has beaten him by using the one human attachment Karla had, exactly as Karla would have done, and the victory gives him nothing. He turns away, and when Toby tells him he has won he can barely agree.