The Secret Pilgrim characters

Appears from the start

The narrator: a career Circus officer near the end of his service, now in charge of Sarratt, the training establishment where new entrants are taught the trade. Conventional, decent and self-questioning, he has spent thirty years running agents in Germany, the Middle East and the Far East and administering others who did, and he has never entirely resolved what the work made of him. He invites George Smiley to address a passing-out class, and the evening sets him remembering his own career.

Appears from the start

The service's legendary retired chief, brought back for an evening to speak to a class of trainees. Old, mild and unhurried, he talks to them about tradecraft, about the agents he ran and about what an intelligence service is for, with a candour that unsettles his hosts as much as it fascinates the students.

First appears in chapter 3

Ned's closest friend from their training course: handsome, gifted, well connected and expected to go further than any of them. Posted to Berlin with a network of his own, he vanishes along with the details of his agents, and the service has to decide whether it is looking at a breakdown or a betrayal.

First appears in chapter 3

A woman living in an isolated house whom Ben knew before his posting, and the only person he might have gone to. She is protective of him and reluctant to explain either his presence or her own history.

First appears in chapter 5

A Baltic seaman and adventurer run by the Circus out of Hamburg, taking small boats across to the eastern shore to land and recover agents. Physically imposing, courageous and sentimental, he is one of the last of the old wartime breed and is devoted to the young woman who lives with him.

First appears in chapter 5

A young woman of Baltic origin living with Brandt in Hamburg, beautiful, watchful and impossible to place. When his crossings begin to go wrong, suspicion settles on her, and Ned has to decide what her answers are worth.

First appears in chapter 7

A woman with whom Ned has an affair during a posting, outside the marriage he does not leave. She belongs to the part of his life that the service's habits of concealment made possible and then made impossible.

First appears in chapter 9

Ned's wife: patient, shrewd, a formidable golfer, and long accustomed to a husband who cannot tell her where he has been. She endures his absences and his silences, and is still there at the end of them.

First appears in chapter 10

A Dutchman, once a Jesuit and a scholar of the region's languages and religion, who worked for the Circus in South East Asia and disappeared into the war there. Captured and brutally treated, he came out of it with his faith and his allegiances rearranged, and he no longer regards himself as answerable to London.

First appears in chapter 12

A senior cipher clerk of impeccable record and total solitude: unmarried, fastidious, without friends or interests beyond his work and his music, and trusted with the most sensitive traffic in Whitehall. He has one friendship, formed years earlier with a foreign acquaintance, which he has never declared.

First appears in chapter 13

An English businessman of great wealth and no scruple, dealing in arms and in the services that go with them, protected by his usefulness and openly contemptuous of the officials sent to lean on him. He regards the intelligence service as an instrument of people like himself.