It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ by John le Carré
October 21, 1964
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
#1 on the New York Times Best Seller List (Fiction), February 23 – October 3, 1964, and October 11-24, 1964
The early-to-mid 1950s mark the height of anti-communist feeling in the West, bolstered by Cold War tensions, the conflict over Korea, and high-profile espionage trials such as the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. By the turn of the decade, however, these sentiments had begun to ebb. US Senator Joseph McCarthy, the figurehead of the “Red Scare,” had lost power, and the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities suffered a backlash and fell into decline. Free speech concerns took precedence over political hounding, while the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 seemed to eliminate the Soviets as an imminent threat. By 1964, the most popular novel of the year (#1 on the New York Times Best Seller List for 34 weeks) could take a decidedly ambivalent position on the West’s antagonism toward the Communist bloc.
David John Moore Cornwell had been working on and off in British intelligence since 1950, becoming an MI5 (British Security Service) officer in 1958 and transferring to MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS — the UK equivalent of the CIA) in 1960. Feeling burned out, Cornwell turned to a career as a novelist on the side, adopting the nom de plume “John le Carré” (French for “the square”). The massive success of his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, came at the right moment — his cover was leaked to the KGB by a double agent in 1964, ending his career in espionage but allowing him to become a full-time novelist.
The weariness and ambivalence that Cornwell/le Carré felt in his job expresses itself in the downbeat tone of his novels. Alec Leamas, the protagonist of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and George Smiley, le Carré’s signature character (who makes only a minor appearance in this novel), feel like the sort of men that a thirtyish Cornwell feared himself becoming if he stuck it out in the intelligence service. These aren’t suave, handsome, martini-swilling James Bond types, whose spying duties give them license to travel to exotic locales, engage in glamorous activities, and sleep with beautiful women. Instead, they’re middle-aged civil servants with troubled personal lives, constantly butting heads with the head of the SIS (known only as “Control”), compromising with the enemy, and spending long stretches of time doing nothing while awaiting the next move. The bureaucratic, somewhat shabby atmosphere of le Carré’s novels is not quite the mental image of nonstop action and sophisticated gadgetry that the word “spy” typically conjures up, but it’s almost certainly a more realistic one.
In fact, it’s Leamas’ shopworn state that sets the incidents of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in motion. Professionally, he seems primed for removal from service, his last connection in East Germany having been killed while trying to defect to the West. His personal life fares no better: Leamas is divorced and disconnected from his children, and has descended into alcoholism. Instead of releasing him from service, however, Control uses Leamas’ poor performance as a cover to push him deeper undercover — to keep him “out in the cold” a little longer.
The SIS goes through the motions of letting Leamas go, even setting him up with a new job at a small library (which he quickly loses). Leamas furthers his reputation as a fallen man by punching a grocer in order to be sent to prison. By magnifying his instability to the point where his colleagues view him as a fallen man – and his communist counterparts view him as a potential defector – he can divert attention from his mission of exposing a double agent in East Germany.
While this scheme seems ingenious, it also sets up how capably the SIS can deceive the employees it supposedly 
trusts — something that Leamas will come to understand the full horror of by the book’s end. Throughout the book, the tactics British intelligence engages in are just as dishonest and ruthless as that of the communists they’re fighting, giving a morally dubious cast to any so-called victories for democracy. So bleak is le Carré’s depiction of the West’s espionage style that one chapter late in the book, set in a communist prison and filled with uncharacteristically heavy-handed dialogue, seems inserted for the sole purpose of assuring the reader that the author doesn’t think any higher of the Reds.
Compared with many of le Carré’s later novels, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is surprisingly short and sketchy in its plot, lacking the layers and procedural detail of something like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). Nevertheless, it must have been an anomaly on its release: a spy novel cerebral yet thrilling, embraced both by genre fans and readers of fine literature, unafraid to challenge the moral superiority of supposedly democratic states. Its immense popular success also points to changes in political attitudes that would take shape in the West over the course of the 1960s, including a fading belief in the exceptional evils of communism, and a growing mistrust of the government to always tell the truth to its people and maintain the high ground over its enemies.
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