The Spy Who Came in from the Cold recap

Alec Leamas, the British service's Berlin station head, loses the last agent of his network at a checkpoint and is called home. Control offers him a final operation against Hans-Dieter Mundt, the East German operations chief who destroyed his network. Leamas plays out a public decline into drink, debt, petty employment at a library and prison, along the way falling in with Liz Gold, a young communist librarian. On release he is recruited by East German talent-spotters, debriefed in Holland and taken East, where Jens Fiedler, the service's counter-intelligence chief, uses his information to accuse Mundt of being a British agent. Mundt arrests them both, but Fiedler forces the case to a secret tribunal. There Mundt's advocate produces Liz, brought over on a party exchange, whose truthful answers about a stranger paying her rent expose Leamas's whole story as a British construction. Fiedler is destroyed and Mundt is cleared. Mundt then frees Leamas and Liz, and Leamas realises he was never meant to bring Mundt down: Mundt is London's agent, and the operation existed to protect him. At the Wall, Liz is shot, and Leamas climbs back down to die with her.

Alec Leamas, head of the British service's Berlin station, waits at a checkpoint for Karl Riemeck, the last surviving agent of a network that the East German service has dismantled over the past year. Riemeck is shot dead in the open ground before he can cross. Leamas returns to London expecting to be retired, and blames Hans-Dieter Mundt, the operational chief of the East German Abteilung, a man who once worked in London and killed his way out of it. Control, the head of the service, instead offers him one more job: to stay out in the cold a little longer and go after Mundt. The method is to make Leamas himself look available. He is moved to a dead-end desk, drinks openly, quarrels with colleagues, is eased out of the service without a pension, and sinks into shabby lodgings and debt. Taking a job at a small psychical research library, he meets Liz Gold, a young librarian and member of the local Communist Party branch, and they become lovers. She knows nothing of his past and does not ask.

Leamas's decline is played out in public. His debts mount, his temper is uncontrolled, and he assaults a grocer who refuses him credit, for which he is sent to prison for several months. He tells Liz nothing except that she must not look for him afterwards. In prison his story hardens into a matter of record: a bitter, discarded intelligence officer with no money, no friends and a grievance. On his release he is met almost at once by Ashe, an ingratiating Englishman claiming a chance acquaintance, who feeds him, lends him money and hands him on to a harder man named Kiever. The approach is exactly what the operation was designed to attract, and Leamas lets himself be drawn while appearing to resist. Kiever moves him quickly out of England to a comfortable house in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands Leamas is debriefed over several days by Peters, a patient professional who takes him through his career in detail and pays for it. Leamas gives away real tradecraft and, buried in it, the material Control planted: evidence of large sums paid out of London to a source in the East, of accounts and travel that only a very senior man could have used, and of an operation whose files were closed to him. He offers no conclusion and pretends not to see one. In London, Liz is left behind and is visited by a mild, plump stranger who takes an interest in her and pays her outstanding rent. Leamas's story is checked and found good, and the arrangement changes: rather than being resettled, he is flown out of Holland and taken East, where Peters hands him over and disappears from the case.

In East Germany Leamas is housed in the country and questioned by Jens Fiedler, the Abteilung's counter-intelligence chief, a sharp, argumentative communist who wants to know not only what Leamas did but what it meant. Fiedler reaches the conclusion the material was designed to produce: that the payments and the protected operation point to Mundt, his own chief, as a British agent, and that Leamas is too incurious to have understood what he was carrying. Fiedler puts his accusation to the Praesidium. Mundt strikes first, arresting both of them. Leamas is beaten and interrogated, and Fiedler is held as a conspirator. But Fiedler has support at the top of the party, and the matter cannot simply be buried: he is released and a secret tribunal is convened to decide the charge against Mundt, with Leamas as the principal evidence.

Meanwhile Liz Gold's party branch selects her for a goodwill exchange visit to East Germany, an unlooked-for honour that takes her to a small town and then, without explanation, into custody. At the tribunal Fiedler lays out the case against Mundt, and it holds: the payments, the closed operation and Leamas's account fit together. Then Mundt's advocate, Karden, calls Liz Gold as a witness. Truthfully and without understanding what she is doing, she describes the man who came to see her after Leamas disappeared, the rent that was paid for her and the trip arranged for her. Her evidence proves that Leamas was still in touch with his service throughout the period of his supposed disgrace, and that his defection was an operation. Everything Fiedler built collapses into a British plot to frame Mundt, with Fiedler as its instrument, and Leamas, seeing Liz in the room, understands that his own side put her there.

The tribunal clears Mundt and condemns Fiedler as his accuser, and Leamas and Liz are held to be killed. Mundt then comes for them himself, releases them and gives them a car and instructions for crossing the Wall at a prepared point. In the car Leamas tells Liz what he has finally worked out: Mundt is a British agent, recruited after his London operation went wrong, and the whole enterprise, including Leamas's ruin and every lie he told, existed to destroy Fiedler, who had come too close to the truth. Liz was selected and used precisely because her honesty could not be shaken. Liz is appalled and refuses to accept it; Leamas can only answer with the reality of the trade. At the Wall he climbs first and is called over by the men waiting on the Western side, but Liz is shot from the watchtowers as she follows. Leamas climbs back down into the searchlights to be with her and is shot dead beside her. Fiedler is finished, Mundt is safe in his post, and the operation has done exactly what it was built to do.

The tribunal ends with Fiedler discredited and arrested and Mundt cleared, and Leamas and Liz are held to be executed. Mundt himself takes them out of the prison and puts them in a car with instructions for crossing the Wall. In the car Leamas tells Liz the truth: Mundt has been a British agent for years, and every stage of the operation, including Leamas's disgrace, his recruitment and his lies, was designed to make the East Germans destroy Fiedler, the one man closing in on him. Liz herself was chosen and used because her honest evidence would be believed. Liz refuses to accept a survival bought this way, and Leamas has no defence to offer beyond the trade he has spent his life in. At the Wall, with the escape arranged from the Western side, Liz climbs the ladder and is shot by the guards while Leamas is already at the top and being called across by his own people. He goes back down to her, and is shot dead beside her body. Fiedler is destroyed, Mundt survives in place with the service's protection, and the operation succeeds exactly as it was designed to.