{"id":5904,"date":"2026-09-22T12:15:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T12:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/?post_type=_characters&#038;p=5904"},"modified":"2026-10-16T18:57:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T18:57:47","slug":"bill-haydon","status":"publish","type":"_characters","link":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/_characters\/bill-haydon\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Haydon"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":true,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5904","_characters","type-_characters","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":{"isdb_character_id":"C0000011","character_display_name":"Bill Haydon","character_last_name":"","character_gender":false,"character_aliases":"","character_role":"","character_portrait":"","character_short_profile":"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","character_full_profile":"<table width=\"623\">\r\n<tbody>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">John le Carr\u00e9 (David Cornwell)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">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.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">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.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">British Secret Intelligence Service (the Circus), while secretly working as a penetration agent for Soviet intelligence under the spymaster Karla<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">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.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">United Kingdom, with earlier postings in the Middle East, notably Egypt<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">British (English)<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">Male<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">Born around 1917, making him roughly in his mid-fifties at the time of his exposure<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">English. His Circus career included postings abroad, but le Carr\u00e9 does not itemize a specific list of foreign languages for him.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<tr>\r\n<td width=\"449\">Le Carr\u00e9 presents Haydon as a charming, artistic figure, a talented amateur painter with an easy, aristocratic charisma. Commentators have noted that le Carr\u00e9'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.<\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>","character_type":"Antagonist","character_status":"Unknown","character_books":[3626,3620,3622],"character_series":[3083],"character_creators":[3085],"character_agencies":[3140],"character_organizations":"","character_record_status":"Published","character_verification_status":"Verified","character_editorial_notes":"","character_sources":null,"character_relationships":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_characters\/5904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_characters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/_characters"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_characters\/5904\/revisions"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_agencies\/3140"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_author\/3085"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_series\/3083"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book\/3622"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book\/3620"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book\/3626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}