Series
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was followed by The Honourable Schoolboy in 1977 and Smiley's People in 1979. The three novels together make up the "Karla Trilogy", named after Smiley's long-time opponent Karla, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence. These were later published as an omnibus edition titled Smiley Versus Karla in 1982.These are the fifth, sixth, and seventh le Carré spy novels featuring George Smiley (The first four being: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and The Looking Glass War). Two of the characters, Peter Guillam and Inspector Mendel, first appeared in le Carré's first book, Call for the Dead (1961).
Plot
It is 1973, the height of the Cold War. George Smiley, former senior official of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (known as "the Circus" because its London office is at Cambridge Circus), has been living in unhappy retirement for a year after an operation in Czechoslovakia, codenamed Testify, ended in disaster with the capture and torture of agent Jim Prideaux. The failure resulted in the dismissals of Smiley and his superior, Control, the head of the Circus.Smiley is unexpectedly approached by Peter Guillam, his former protege at the Circus, and Under-Secretary Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service officer responsible for overseeing the Circus. At Lacon's home they meet with Ricki Tarr, a Circus agent who had been missing for months and had been declared persona non grata upon suspicion of having defected to Moscow. Tarr tells them of the existence of a Soviet mole at the highest level of the Circus. The mole is codenamed Gerald and is handled by Moscow Centre's agent, Polyakov, stationed at the Soviet embassy in London. Tarr tells them that when he obtained this information from a female Russian diplomat visiting Hong Kong and informed London, the woman was forcibly returned to Moscow. Tarr, realising someone in London had betrayed him, went on the run, eventually coming out to contact his former boss Guillam, the only person in the Circus he could trust.
Since Control died shortly after his forced retirement, Guillam and Smiley are the only former top operatives still alive who are above suspicion. The fact that they have been demoted and dismissed, respectively, as a result of Operation Testify is virtual proof that neither of them is a double agent.
Smiley accepts Lacon's request to begin his investigation in absolute secrecy. He soon focuses on the details of the Circus's best source of intelligence on the Soviet Union, codenamed Merlin. Merlin had been developed and vigorously sponsored, under an operation codenamed Witchcraft, by four ambitious senior Circus men, led by Percy Alleline. Alleline had subsequently been made the head of the Circus following Control's ousting after Testify. Smiley believes the mole Gerald must be one of these four: Alleline himself, Roy Bland, Toby Esterhase, or Bill Haydon. By examining classified documents surreptitiously provided by Lacon and Guillam, Smiley discovers that the operation has a secret London end: a safe house where Alleline and his inner circle personally collect information from a Merlin emissary posted in London under diplomatic cover. Eventually, Smiley realises that the emissary must be Polyakov himself, and that the actual flow of information goes the other way, with Gerald passing actual British secrets ("gold dust") while receiving fake and worthless Soviet material ("chicken feed").
Smiley suspects a link between Merlin and the botched Operation Testify. He tracks down Prideaux and other participants in the operation, whose details Control had hidden from him at the time. Control had independently concluded the existence of a mole and mounted Testify to learn his identity from an aspiring defector in Czech intelligence who claimed to be privy to the information. Polyakov and Karla, Moscow Centre's spymaster, were both present at Prideaux's interrogation which focused exclusively on the extent and status of Control's investigations. The Czech defector was a plant, contrived by Karla to engineer Control's supplantation through Testify's failure, and thus protect the mole.
Esterhase, upon arriving to a meeting called by Guillam under a false pretext, is quickly detained. Smiley states that he is aware that Esterhase has been posing as a Russian mole, with Polyakov as his handler, ostensibly in order to provide cover for Merlin's emissary Polyakov. Smiley compels Esterhase into revealing the location of the safe house, through making him realise that not only is there a real Soviet mole embedded in the SIS, but also that Polyakov has not been "turned" to work in British interest pretending to run the "mole" Esterhase, and in fact remains Karla's agent. Tarr is sent to Paris where he passes a coded message to Alleline about "information crucial to the well-being of the Service". This triggers an emergency meeting between Gerald and Polyakov at the safe house where Smiley and Guillam are lying in wait. Haydon is revealed to be the mole.
Haydon's interrogation reveals that he had been recruited several decades ago by Karla and became a full-fledged Soviet spy partly for political reasons, partly in frustration at Britain's rapidly declining influence on the world stage. He is expected to be exchanged with the Soviet Union for several of the agents he betrayed, but is killed shortly before he is due to leave England. Although the identity of his killer is not explicitly revealed, it is strongly implied to be Prideaux. Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus to deal with the fallout.
Title
Control, chief of the Circus, suspects one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus to be a long-standing Soviet mole and assigns code names with the intention that should his agent Jim Prideaux uncover information about the identity of the mole, Prideaux can relay it back to the Circus using a simple, easy-to-recall codename. The names are derived from the English children's rhyme "Tinker, Tailor":Tinker, tailor,
soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man,
beggarman, thief.
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