The Spy Who Came in From The Cold - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

At its publication during the Cold War (1945–91), the psychological realism of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) rendered it a revolutionary espionage novel by showing that the intelligence services of both the Eastern and Western nations practiced the same expedient amorality in the name of national security. Until then, the Western public imagined their secret services as promoters of democracy and democratic values; a view principally espoused in the popular James Bond thriller novels — romantic high adventures about what a Secret Service should be. John le Carré, on the other hand, shocked readers with chilling realism and detail, portraying the spy as a morally burnt-out case.

The espionage world of Alec Leamas is exactly the opposite of the James Bond world; Bond’s brightly romanticized world features sexual adventure and heroic danger, all in a day’s work for 007 whereas Leamas's world features love as a three-dimensional, problematic, true emotion that can have disastrous consequences to those involved. Moreover, good does not always vanquish evil in Leamas's world – an existential fact problematic to some conservative critics. In the 1960s, some reviewers criticized Alec Leamas’s resultant defeatism; The Times said, “the hero must triumph over his enemies, as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story.” This observation, however, is from the Cold War perspective, wherein the West are the "good" and the East is "evil", implying that the story's ending with the British Secret Service agent killed by East German border guards is a victory for Evil.

Yet hints in the story — Leamas's personal qualms about his role in the plot, and the qualms of Smiley and Fiedler about their roles — indicate a different perspective. Leamas' description of spies and the intelligence world to Liz, during their drive to the Berlin Wall, is of a world very different from the simple romanticism of the Bond novels — one of utter disregard for human lives:

"There's only one law in this game," Leamas retorted. "Mundt is their man; he gives them what they need. That's easy enough to understand, isn't it? Leninism — the expediency of temporary alliances. What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play Cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London, balancing the rights and wrongs? I'd have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens that they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me."

Leamas further notes that despite the moral indefensibility of the operation against Fiedler, it had to be effected; despite his revulsion, Leamas watched:

People who play this game take risks. Fiedler lost and Mundt won. London won — that's the point. It was a foul, foul operation. But it's paid off, and that’s the only rule.

Hans-Dieter Mundt is a true villain: a cruel man, a mercenary who enjoyed killing and who so hated Jews, he might have ignored his British controllers and ordered Liz Gold killed before her return to the West. Nevertheless, whilst driving to the Berlin Wall, Alec cynically tells Liz that Mundt's survival was more important to British Intelligence than either his own, Fiedler's or that of anyone else. That Mundt arranged the killing of Liz Gold (viz. the detailed instructions to Leamas about climbing over the Wall) is clear, but why he ordered the border guards to kill her is unclear. Perhaps as a British double-agent, his continued anonymity required her death, lest she tell her fellow British Communists back home and blow his cover.

George Smiley's last question to Leamas (about Liz's whereabouts) perhaps indicates that Mundt acted without Smiley's knowledge, but that does not absolve the British of responsibility. It would be in the ruthless and secretive character of Control to decide Liz Gold's death without implicating the British, and to conceal his hand from the scrupulous Smiley. By contrast, Leamas's death is unplanned, and was required only because he climbed back down to the East German side of the Berlin Wall. Any other border guard action would have cast suspicion upon Mundt.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold misleads the reader, by changing a key plot element of its predecessor, Call for the Dead, wherein Hans-Dieter Mundt escaped capture by Smiley and Guillam and returned to East Germany. Control reinforces that version in his opening talk with Leamas, and Leamas then tells others that story of how Mundt escaped, consistent with the version related in Call for the Dead. Like Leamas, the reader suspects neither Mundt's capture during the events of Call for the Dead, nor that he now is a British double agent, until the concluding plot twist at the trial. The change aligns the reader's empathy with Alec Leamas, including his shock at the falsity of Control's official version of the events of the Call for the Dead.

In her essay Is Common Human Decency a Scarce Commodity in Popular Literature?, Margaret Compton contrasts the ending of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with the ending of Call for the Dead: "Le Carré's début book ends with Smiley feeling deeply guilty about having killed Dieter Frey, the idealistic East German spy who had been Smiley's agent and friend (and, in effect, his adopted son) during the Second World War. Smiley bitterly reflects that Dieter had remembered their friendship, and kept faithful to it — while he, Smiley, forgot it and gave precedence to his ruthless Cold War loyalty. Leamas, in the end of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold makes the diametrically opposite moral choice, renouncing his loyalty to Britain and to the Circus, and keeping faith with Liz to the bitter end, even to letting himself be killed at her side — after she had earlier kept faith with him in the courtroom, and let herself be disgraced as a Communist, by openly proclaiming her love for him. A dispassionate and careful reader of Le Carré's oeuvre can have little doubt that — though the writer clearly liked Smiley, and brought him back, again and again, until the very end of the Cold War — for the creator of both of them, Leamas's conduct stands on a higher moral level”.

Time magazine, while including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in its top 100 novels list, stated the novel was "a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he's forgotten how to tell the truth."

In the season 4 finale episode of the AMC television series, Mad Men, "Tomorrowland," Donald Draper (Jon Hamm) is reading a paperback copy of the novel. In this episode, Draper chooses to be with the woman who will accept his false identity rather than the woman who wants him to tell the truth about his past.