The Spy Who Came in from the Cold characters

Appears from the start

A British intelligence officer in his early fifties, head of the Berlin station, running agents into East Germany. Hard, blunt and unsentimental, with a drinker's habits and no talent for office life, he has spent his career in the field and has watched his network in the East destroyed one man at a time. He despises cant about the work and expects nothing from it beyond survival and the occasional professional satisfaction. The book opens with him waiting at a Berlin checkpoint for the last of his agents to cross.

Appears from the start

Leamas's best East German agent, a man he recruited and ran for years and regards as a friend as much as a source. He has been getting material out of East Berlin at increasing risk, and the operation to bring him across the checkpoint has become urgent.

First appears in chapter 2

The head of the British service, known only by his title, an ageing man of donnish manners who keeps his office overheated and speaks in evasions and euphemisms. He never states a purpose directly, and the officers who work for him are told only as much of an operation as their part requires. He proposes to Leamas one last piece of work before retirement.

First appears in chapter 2

A short, plump, bespectacled officer of the service, mild in manner, badly dressed and easy to underestimate. He appears at the edges of the operation without any stated role in it, and takes a quiet, apparently personal interest in the people it touches.

First appears in chapter 2

The operational head of the East German intelligence service, the Abteilung, and the man responsible for the destruction of Leamas's network. Cold, physically formidable and entirely without scruple, he served in London under commercial cover, where he killed to protect himself and escaped before he could be taken. His record includes an anti-Semitism his colleagues note and a war-time past he does not discuss. For Leamas he is both a professional adversary and a personal one.

First appears in chapter 4

A young librarian in Bayswater, idealistic, lonely and a member of the local Communist Party branch, which she joined out of a straightforward wish for a fairer world rather than any interest in the politics of espionage. She meets Leamas when he takes a job at the library, is drawn to him without understanding anything about him, and asks almost nothing about his past. Her honesty and her literal-mindedness are absolute.

First appears in chapter 7

An ingratiating, well-dressed Englishman who attaches himself to Leamas after his release from prison, claiming an old acquaintance and offering hospitality, money and sympathy. He is a talent-spotter, working for people he does not name.

First appears in chapter 7

A smoother and harder operator to whom Ashe passes Leamas: a recruiter who deals in the practical arrangements of defection and does not pretend to be doing anything else. He handles Leamas's departure from England.

First appears in chapter 8

A patient, professional interrogator, Russian by manner and training, who debriefs Leamas over several days in a house in the Netherlands. He is methodical, unhurried and interested in exactly the details a good intelligence officer would want, and he pays properly for what he is told.

First appears in chapter 12

The deputy head of the East German service and its head of counter-intelligence, a small, dark, quick-minded Jew whose family suffered under the Nazis and who is a committed communist for reasons he can argue at length. He takes over Leamas's debriefing in East Germany and is a far more dangerous questioner than Peters: sceptical, imaginative and willing to follow an idea wherever it leads. He detests his own service's operational chief and is looking for the evidence to destroy him.

First appears in chapter 20

The woman who presides over the secret tribunal convened by the Praesidium, formal and exact in her conduct of the proceedings, concerned that the forms of the hearing be observed whatever its outcome.

First appears in chapter 20

An advocate who appears for the defence at the tribunal: mild, courteous and apparently harmless, a lawyer rather than an intelligence officer. He questions gently and appears to concede much, and has prepared his case with a thoroughness nobody in the room has anticipated.