Bill Haydon

John le Carré (David Cornwell)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is his one major appearance. He is discussed retrospectively, after his death in that novel, in the later Karla Trilogy volumes, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.

A senior officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service, running the London Station and serving as deputy to Chief Percy Alleline. He is unmasked by George Smiley as “Gerald,” a Soviet mole who has fed British secrets to Moscow Centre for years. The character is partly modeled on the real-life double agent Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five.

British Secret Intelligence Service (the Circus), while secretly working as a penetration agent for Soviet intelligence under the spymaster Karla

Cold War. Haydon was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1930s and is exposed as the mole in the early 1970s, so his career spans roughly four decades.

United Kingdom, with earlier postings in the Middle East, notably Egypt

British (English)

Male

Born around 1917, making him roughly in his mid-fifties at the time of his exposure

English. His Circus career included postings abroad, but le Carré does not itemize a specific list of foreign languages for him.

Le Carré presents Haydon as a charming, artistic figure, a talented amateur painter with an easy, aristocratic charisma. Commentators have noted that le Carré’s own description of Kim Philby’s “boyish, flirtatious charm” reads as an apt description of Haydon as well, given the character’s basis in Philby.