{"id":3626,"date":"2026-09-11T03:27:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T03:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/?post_type=book&#038;p=3626"},"modified":"2026-10-10T16:43:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T16:43:29","slug":"tinker-tailor-soldier-spy","status":"publish","type":"book","link":"https:\/\/spyscribe.com\/isdb\/book\/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":3688,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_isdb_genre":0,"wds_primary_isdb_theme":0,"wds_primary_isdb_tradecraft":0,"wds_primary_isdb_agency":0,"wds_primary_isdb_country":0,"wds_primary_isdb_era":0,"wds_primary_isdb_technology":0},"isdb_genre":[16,18,17],"isdb_theme":[30,31,43],"isdb_tradecraft":[52,49],"isdb_agency":[],"isdb_country":[77],"isdb_era":[106],"isdb_technology":[],"isdb_language":[122,123,124,125],"isdb_format":[],"class_list":["post-3626","book","type-book","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","isdb_genre-espionage","isdb_genre-political-thriller","isdb_genre-spy-thriller","isdb_theme-cold-war","isdb_theme-counterintelligence","isdb_theme-insider-threats","isdb_tradecraft-handling-agents","isdb_tradecraft-safe-houses","isdb_country-united-kingdom","isdb_era-late-cold-war","isdb_language-english","isdb_language-french","isdb_language-german","isdb_language-spanish"],"acf":{"isdb_record_id":"W0000010","isbn_13":"9780143120933","isbn_10":"","asin":"","book_subtitle":"","edition_statement":"","work_type":false,"book_format":"Paperback","language":"English","original_language":"","page_count":381,"running_time_minutes":"","featured_record":false,"primary_author":3085,"additional_authors":"","editors":"","translators":"","book_series":3083,"series_number":"1","series_display_text":"","publisher":"Hodder & Stoughton, London (first UK edition) Alfred A. Knopf, New York (first US edition)","imprint":"Penguin Books","publication_date":"18740701","original_publication_year":1974,"edition_publication_year":"","place_of_publication":"London","distributor":"","cover_image":3688,"sample_file":"","short_description":"","full_synopsis":"<strong>Premise<\/strong>\r\n\r\nLondon, 1973. George Smiley has been pushed out of the British Secret Intelligence Service after an operation in Czechoslovakia went wrong. Staff call the service the Circus, after its headquarters at Cambridge Circus. A senior civil servant brings Smiley back in secret and gives him one job: find the Soviet agent who has sat near the top of the Circus for years.\r\n\r\nSmiley has to work from outside the building. He relies on stolen files and a few people he trusts, because any of his former colleagues could be the traitor.\r\n\r\n<strong>Plot summary<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<em>This section gives away the identity of the mole and the ending.<\/em>\r\n\r\nThe trouble begins with Operation Testify. Control, the ageing head of the Circus, believes one of his five most senior officers works for Moscow. He sends Jim Prideaux to Czechoslovakia to meet a Czech officer who claims to know the name. Control gives each suspect a code name from a children's counting rhyme: Tinker for Percy Alleline, Tailor for Bill Haydon, Soldier for Roy Bland, Poorman for Toby Esterhase and Beggarman for Smiley. The meeting is an ambush. Prideaux is shot and captured. Control is forced out and dies soon after. Smiley is retired with him, and Alleline takes over as chief.\r\n\r\nSome time later a field agent named Ricki Tarr reappears in England after going missing in Hong Kong. He tells Oliver Lacon, the official who oversees the Circus, that a Russian woman called Irina told him about a mole code-named Gerald. Tarr reported it to London. Soon afterwards the Soviets took Irina back to Moscow by force, and the record of Tarr's report vanished from the Circus logs. Lacon asks Smiley to investigate without the Circus knowing. Smiley works with Peter Guillam, who is still inside the service and can remove files, and Mendel, a retired police inspector.\r\n\r\nSmiley reads the files and visits the people Alleline pushed out. Connie Sachs tells him she identified Polyakov, a Soviet embassy official in London, as an intelligence officer and was ordered to drop it. The files lead Smiley to Operation Witchcraft, Alleline's prized stream of Soviet intelligence from a source called Merlin. Alleline, Haydon, Bland and Esterhase run it from a secret London safe house where they meet Merlin's go-between. Smiley works out that the go-between is Polyakov and that the trade runs the wrong way. Moscow feeds the Circus low-grade material. The mole uses the same meetings to hand over real British secrets.\r\n\r\nBehind all of it Smiley sees Karla, the Moscow Centre spymaster he once tried to persuade to defect in a Delhi prison. Karla said nothing and walked away with Smiley's cigarette lighter, a gift from Ann. Smiley tracks down Prideaux at a boys' prep school and learns that Karla questioned him in person about how much Control knew. Testify was Karla's trap, built to destroy Control and protect the mole.\r\n\r\nSmiley pressures Esterhase into giving up the address of the safe house. He then has Tarr send a message from Paris that is certain to alarm the mole into an emergency meeting with Polyakov. Smiley and Guillam wait at the house. The man who arrives is Bill Haydon.\r\n\r\nUnder interrogation Haydon says Karla recruited him decades earlier. He gives politics and his disgust at Britain's decline as his reasons, with the Suez crisis as a turning point. His affair with Ann Smiley was Karla's idea, meant to cloud Smiley's judgment. London plans to trade Haydon to Moscow for captured agents. Before the exchange, someone breaks his neck. The novel never names the killer, but the evidence points to Prideaux. Smiley takes temporary charge of the Circus, where he remains at the start of The Honourable Schoolboy.\r\n\r\n<strong>Background<\/strong>\r\n\r\nLe Carr\u00e9 worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and early 1960s. Kim Philby's defection to the Soviet Union in 1963 exposed British agents and was a factor in the end of le Carr\u00e9's own intelligence career in 1964. Haydon is modelled on Philby. The title comes from the counting rhyme that supplies Control's code names.\r\n\r\nMuch of the book's spy jargon is le Carr\u00e9's invention, including lamplighters and scalphunters. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, intelligence services probably took the word mole, meaning a long-term penetration agent, from le Carr\u00e9 and not the other way round.","editorial_summary":"","spoiler_notes":"","content_notes":"","target_audience":"Adult","fiction_status":"Fiction","bisac_classification":["FIC006000 | FICTION \/ Thrillers \/ Espionage","FIC031060 | FICTION \/ Thrillers \/ Political"],"genre":"Thriller | 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