The Looking Glass War characters

Appears from the start

A courier for the Department, an ageing man doing a simple job badly paid: flying to a northern airfield under a false name to collect a film from an airline pilot. Out of his depth in cold weather and worse tradecraft, he drinks to steady himself and talks more than he should. His run opens the book.

Appears from the start

A Scandinavian civil airline pilot who has been persuaded, for money and for the excitement of it, to divert his scheduled route over a restricted area of East Germany and photograph what is on the ground. He is nervous about the risk to his licence and wants the arrangement ended.

First appears in chapter 2

The Director of the Department, a small, neat, self-contained man who has spent twenty years presiding over the decline of a military intelligence organisation that mattered during the war and has mattered less every year since. He lives on the memory of its wartime operations, speaks of them constantly, and manages his Minister and his rivals with a mixture of optimism and evasion. A chance to run a real operation again is, to him, the recovery of everything the Department has lost.

First appears in chapter 2

The Director's young assistant, in his early thirties, intelligent and unformed, who drifted into the Department without ever choosing it and has no clear idea what he is for. Married to Sarah, with a small son and an unhappy home, he is susceptible to the glamour of the wartime stories his colleagues tell and eager to be trusted with something real.

First appears in chapter 3

Avery's wife, isolated in a marriage to a man who cannot explain what he does, tired of the secrecy and increasingly unconvinced that the work is worth what it is costing them. She presses Avery to leave the Department.

First appears in chapter 3

The Department's head of research, a dry, fastidious, chronically ill man with a cough and a taste for watercolours and precise detail. He is the most intelligent person in the building and the least deceived about it, contemptuous of Leclerc's illusions, and yet the operational professional the Department must turn to. He accepts the work with the manner of a man returning to a bad habit.

First appears in chapter 3

A senior member of the Department's staff who was there in the war and never left it: hearty, loud in the club, dismissive of the rival service, and fond of describing operations he had a small part in twenty years ago. He pushes hard for action.

First appears in chapter 6

The head of the rival civilian intelligence service, the Circus, which is better funded, better staffed and openly sceptical of the Department. He is courteous to Leclerc in a manner that concedes nothing and agrees to lend support with an ease that ought to be a warning.

First appears in chapter 9

A plump, quiet, apologetic officer of the Circus, sent to handle liaison and to provide the practical assistance the Department cannot supply for itself. He is polite, unassuming and almost invisible in a room, and he says very little about what his own service thinks of the enterprise.

First appears in chapter 11

A Pole in his forties who worked for the Department as an agent during the war, now naturalised British and running a garage in the south of England. Vain about his clothes and his success with women, proud of his war record and privately conscious of never having been quite accepted in the country he adopted, he is flattered to be sought out again after twenty years and wants very much to be told that he is one of them.

First appears in chapter 13

The Department's wireless instructor, an old hand who trained agents during the war and has been brought back to teach the same procedures on the same kind of set. Kindly, patient and entirely uncritical of the methods he is teaching, he becomes fond of the man he is training.