Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy recap

George Smiley, forced into retirement when the Circus's old chief fell, is brought back secretly by the Cabinet Office after the field man Ricki Tarr reports what a Soviet defector told him: Moscow Centre has run a mole at the top of the British service for years. Control had suspected the same and had given his five candidates codenames from a nursery rhyme before sending Jim Prideaux into Czechoslovakia to identify the traitor. Prideaux was shot and captured, Control was destroyed, and Percy Alleline took over with a spectacular Soviet source, Merlin, whose Witchcraft material has made the Circus's reputation. Working outside the service with Guillam, Mendel and the retired researcher Connie Sachs, Smiley reconstructs the whole history and concludes that Witchcraft is Moscow's own creation: a channel to feed London selected material while the mole hands Karla everything the Circus has. Smiley uses Tarr to force the mole to break cover, and takes him at the safe house where he meets his Soviet controller. The traitor is Bill Haydon, the service's most admired officer and Ann's lover. Haydon is arrested and killed at Sarratt by Prideaux, and Smiley is left to rebuild the Circus.

Jim Prideaux arrives in mid-term at Thursgood's, a small preparatory school in the west of England, to teach French. He lives in a caravan at the edge of the field, is visibly damaged in the back and shoulder, and watches the road. A lonely new boy, Bill Roach, adopts him and observes him closely. In London, George Smiley is living in enforced retirement in Chelsea, put out of the Circus along with the old chief, Control, after a catastrophe that ended both their careers. His wife Ann has left him again. Gossip at a club dinner unsettles him, and then Peter Guillam, a former protege now sidelined to a basement section, arrives to drive him to Oliver Lacon, the civil servant who oversees the service for the Cabinet Office. Lacon has received an allegation he cannot handle through official channels and cannot ignore, and he wants Smiley, the one senior man wholly outside the present Circus, to look into it privately.

The allegation comes from Ricki Tarr, a scalphunter who vanished on a job in Hong Kong. Sent to look over a Soviet trade delegation official, Tarr instead got to know the man's wife, Irina, who was doing serious intelligence work under her husband's cover. Irina wanted to defect and offered, as her price, the fact that Moscow Centre has run a mole inside the Circus's own leadership for years, an agent handled personally by a senior Centre officer known as Karla. Before London would act she was seized and taken back to Moscow, and Tarr went to ground, certain that his own service had betrayed her. Smiley learns that Control had reached the same conclusion before his fall. Suspecting one of five men at the top of the service, Control had given each a codename from a nursery rhyme: Tinker for Percy Alleline, Tailor for Bill Haydon, Soldier for Roy Bland, Poorman for Toby Esterhase, and Beggarman for Smiley himself.

Smiley begins reconstructing the recent history of the Circus from memory, borrowed files and the people it discarded. Control's last year was one of secrecy and decline while Alleline rose, backed by Haydon, Bland and Esterhase, on the strength of a Soviet source codenamed Merlin whose product, distributed as Witchcraft, was so good that it restored the Circus's standing in Whitehall and bought valuable intelligence in exchange from the Americans. The material is handled outside the ordinary machinery, in a special safe house, with distribution restricted to the inner group. Control's response was an operation of his own into Czechoslovakia, run behind his own service's back. Smiley visits Connie Sachs, the great Soviet researcher whom the new regime pensioned off, and hears what she had found and been forbidden to pursue: that Aleksey Polyakov, a long-serving Soviet cultural attache in London, had a background wholly inconsistent with the job he appeared to be doing.

To get the documents Smiley needs, Guillam steals a file out of the Circus registry under the noses of his colleagues, at considerable risk to himself. Smiley then reopens the disaster that destroyed Control. The operation, Testify, sent Jim Prideaux secretly into Czechoslovakia to meet a Czech general who claimed he could name the traitor. Prideaux was walking into an ambush: he was shot, taken and interrogated at length, and eventually traded back to Britain, broken and pensioned off. The scandal finished Control, discredited Smiley and cleared the way for Alleline. Sam Collins, the duty officer that night and now the manager of a gambling club, gives Smiley the sequence of signals and the identities of the men who were in the building, showing how the news was handled and by whom while Control was still nominally in charge.

Smiley sets out his own history with Karla: how, years earlier in an Indian jail, he tried to persuade a Soviet officer awaiting recall to Moscow and probable execution to change sides, talked to him for a whole night, gave him a cigarette lighter that had been a present from Ann, and got nothing at all in return. Karla went home, survived, and rose to run Moscow Centre's most sensitive agents in the West. Smiley now understands that Karla knew everything about him, including his marriage. Meanwhile the shape of Witchcraft becomes clearer: the material passes through a house in Lock Gardens where the Circus believes it is running Polyakov as Merlin's London contact, an arrangement operated by Esterhase's lamplighters and known to only a few men, with the meetings and their contents recorded by nobody outside the inner group.

Jerry Westerby, an occasional Circus hand, supplies the last piece of the night of Testify, and other discarded people fill in the rest. Smiley concludes that Witchcraft has always run in both directions: Moscow supplies genuine but controlled material to make its own man indispensable, and receives in exchange, through the Lock Gardens meetings, everything the Circus knows, including the American product bought with Merlin's own intelligence. Polyakov is not the Circus's agent but the mole's controller, and the safe house was built to give the two men a legitimate reason to meet. Control's suspicions are vindicated, Testify was betrayed from inside before Prideaux crossed the border, and the traitor is one of the four men Control named. Smiley prepares a trap: Ricki Tarr is sent to Paris to signal that he has crucial information to deliver in London, which will force the mole to run to Moscow for instructions.

Smiley goes down to the school and hears Jim Prideaux's account of Testify in full: the recruitment pitch from a Czech intermediary, the certainty that the operation was known to the other side before he arrived, the ambush, and the interrogation in which his questioners already knew the Circus's structure, its networks and Control's suspicions, and pressed him for the codenames from the rhyme. Prideaux was traded home and told to forget it, and the service asked him nothing. He also describes what he did on his return before disappearing into schoolmastering. With the reconstruction complete, Tarr's signal is sent from Paris. Esterhase is confronted and turned, the Lock Gardens house is prepared, and Smiley, Guillam and Mendel wait for the mole to come to his controller.

The mole comes to Lock Gardens and is taken: Bill Haydon, the Circus's most admired officer, recruited by Karla decades earlier and run by him ever since. He had betrayed the networks, engineered Control's fall, given away Prideaux and Testify, and used Witchcraft to keep himself indispensable while handing Moscow everything London and Washington held. Under interrogation at Sarratt he explains himself as a matter of politics and taste, contemptuous of a Britain living as an American dependency, and confirms that his affair with Ann was set up on Karla's instructions to make Smiley doubt his own judgement about him. Arrangements are made to exchange him for prisoners in the East, but before that can happen he is found dead at Sarratt with his neck broken, killed at night by Jim Prideaux, who then returns to the school and to the boy who watches for him. The Circus is left wrecked and penetrated at every level, and Smiley is asked to take it over and rebuild it. Ann comes back to him, and neither the marriage nor the service is repaired.

The trap works. Tarr's signal from Paris forces the mole to warn Moscow, and Smiley, Guillam and Mendel are waiting at the Lock Gardens house when he comes to meet Polyakov. The mole is Bill Haydon. Recruited by Karla before the war and run by him ever since, Haydon fed the Circus's secrets to Moscow for decades while Witchcraft fed back the chickenfeed and half-truths that made him indispensable. He betrayed Prideaux and Operation Testify, destroyed Control, and had blown every network the Circus ran. Interrogated at Sarratt, he explains himself in terms of aesthetic and political contempt for a Britain in American service, and admits that his affair with Ann was arranged by Karla to cloud Smiley's judgement. It is agreed that he will be exchanged for agents held in the East. Before the exchange can take place he is killed at Sarratt at night, his neck broken; Jim Prideaux, who had loved him and whom he had sold, disappears back to the school. The Circus is left ruined and must be rebuilt from nothing, and Smiley, the last man untouched by it, is asked to take charge. Ann returns to him, and he knows the marriage is no more repaired than the service is.