Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by John le Carré

  The story was grotesque enough for Control to play it up: “Percy and I are blood brothers, I hear. We romped together in punts, imagine!” He never said whether it was true.

  To half-legend of that sort, Smiley could add a few hard facts from his knowledge of the two men’s early lives. While Control was no man’s child, Percy Alleline was a lowland Scot and a son of the Manse; his father was a Presbyterian hammer, and if Percy did not have his faith, he had surely inherited the faculty of bullish persuasion. He missed the war by a year or two and joined the Circus from a City company. At Cambridge he had been a bit of a politician (somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan, said Haydon who was himself, Lord knows, no milk-and-water liberal) and a bit of an athlete. He was recruited by a figure of no account called Maston, who for a short time contrived to build himself a corner in counter-intelligence. Maston saw a great future in Alleline and, having peddled his name furiously, fell from grace. Finding Alleline an embarrassment, Circus personnel packed him off to South America, where he did two full tours under consular cover without returning to England.

  Even Control later admitted that Percy did extremely well there, Smiley recalled. The Argentinians, liking his tennis and the way he rode, took him for a gentleman—Control speaking—and assumed he was stupid, which Percy never quite was. By the time he handed over to his successor, he had put together a string of agents along both seaboards and was spreading his wings northward as well. After home leave and a couple of weeks’ briefing, he was moved to India, where his agents seemed to regard him as the reincarnation of the British Raj. He preached loyalty to them, paid them next to nothing, and—when it suited him—sold them down the river. From India he went to Cairo. That posting should have been difficult for Alleline, if not impossible, for the Middle East till then had been Haydon’s favourite stamping-ground. The Cairo networks looked on Bill quite literally in the terms which Martindale had used of him that fateful night in his anonymous dining-club: as a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia. They were all set to make life hell for his successor. Yet somehow Percy bulldozed his way through and, if he had only steered clear of the Americans, might have gone down in memory as a better man than Haydon. Instead there was a scandal and an open row between Percy and Control.

  The circumstances were still obscure: the incident occurred long before Smiley’s elevation as Control’s high chamberlain. With no authority from London, it appeared, Alleline had involved himself in a silly American plot to replace a local potentate with one of their own. Alleline had always had a fatal reverence for the Americans. From Argentina he had observed with admiration their rout of left-wing politicians around the hemisphere; in India he had delighted in their skill at dividing the forces of centralisation. Whereas Control, like most of the Circus, despised them and all their works, which he frequently sought to undermine.

  The plot aborted, the British oil companies were furious, and Alleline, as the jargon happily puts it, had to leave in his socks. Later, Alleline claimed that Control had urged him on, then pulled the rug out from under; even that he had deliberately blown the plot to Moscow. However it was, Alleline reached London to find a posting order directing him to the Nursery, where he was to take over the training of greenhorn probationers. It was a slot normally reserved for rundown contract men with a couple of years to go before their pension. There were just so few jobs left in London those days for a man of Percy’s seniority and talents, explained Bill Haydon, then head of personnel.

  “Then you’ll damn well have to invent me one,” said Percy. He was right. As Bill frankly confessed to Smiley some while later, he had reckoned without the power of the Alleline lobby.

  “But who are these people?” Smiley used to ask. “How can they force a man on you when you don’t want him?”

  “Golfers,” Control snapped. Golfers and conservatives, for Alleline in those days was flirting with the opposition and was received with open arms, not least by Miles Sercombe, Ann’s lamentably unremoved cousin and now Lacon’s Minister. Yet Control had little power to resist. The Circus was in the doldrums and there was loose talk of scrapping the existing outfit entirely and starting elsewhere with a new one. Failures in that world occur traditionally in series, but this had been an exceptionally long run. Product had slumped; more and more of it had turned out to be suspect. In the places where it mattered, Control’s hand was none too strong.

  This temporary incapacity did not mar Control’s joy in the drafting of Percy Alleline’s personal charter as Operational Director. He called it Percy’s Fool’s Cap.

  There was nothing Smiley could do. Bill Haydon was in Washington by then, trying to renegotiate an intelligence treaty with what he called the Fascist puritans of the American agency. But Smiley had risen to the fifth floor, and one of his tasks was to keep petitioners off Control’s back. So it was to Smiley that Alleline came to ask “Why?” Would call on him in his office when Control was out, invite him to that dismal flat of his, having first sent his paramour to the cinema, and interrogate him in his plaintive brogue. “Why?” He even invested in a bottle of a malt whisky, which he forced on Smiley liberally while sticking to the cheaper brand himself.

  “What have I done to him, George, that’s so damn special? We’d a brush or two—what’s so unusual to that, if you’ll tell me? Why does he pick on me? All I want is a place at the top table. God knows my record entitles me to that!”

  By top table, he meant the fifth floor.

  The charter which Control had drafted for him, and which at a glance had a most impressive shape, gave Alleline the right to examine all operations before they were launched. The small print made this right conditional upon the consent of the operational sections, and Control made sure that this was not forthcoming. The charter invited him to “co-ordinate resources and break down regional jealousies,” a concept Alleline had since achieved with the establishment of London Station. But the resources sections, such as the lamplighters, the forgers, the listeners, and the wranglers, declined to open their books to him and he lacked the powers to force them. So Alleline starved; his trays were empty from lunchtime onwards.

  “I’m mediocre, is that it? We’ve all to be geniuses these days, prima donnas and no damn chorus; old men, at that.” For Alleline, though it was easily forgettable in him, was still a young man to be at the top table, with eight or ten years to brandish over Haydon and Smiley, and more over Control.

  Control was immovable: “Percy Alleline would sell his mother for a knighthood and this service for a seat in the House of Lords.” And later, as his hateful illness began creeping over him: “I refuse to bequeath my life’s work to a parade horse. I’m too vain to be flattered, too old to be ambitious, and I’m ugly as a crab. Percy’s quite the other way and there are enough witty men in Whitehall to prefer his sort to mine.”

  Which was how, indirectly, Control might be said to have brought Witchcraft upon his own head.

  “George, come in here,” Control snapped one day over the buzzer. “Brother Percy’s trying to twist my tail. Come in here or there’ll be bloodshed.”

  It was a time, Smiley remembered, when unsuccessful warriors were returning from foreign parts. Roy Bland had just flown in from Belgrade, where with Toby Esterhase’s help he had been trying to save the wreck of a dying network; Paul Skordeno, at that time head German, had just buried his best Soviet agent in East Berlin; and as to Bill, after another fruitless trip he was back in his pepper pot room fuming about Pentagon arrogance, Pentagon idiocy, Pentagon duplicity, and claiming that “the time had come to do a deal with the bloody Russians instead.”

  And in the Islay it was after midnight; a late guest was ringing the bell. Which will cost him ten bob to Norman, thought Smiley, for whom the revised British coinage was still something of a puzzle. With a sigh, he drew towards him the first of the Witchcraft files, and, having vouchsafed a gingerly lick to his right finger and thumb, set to work matching the official memory with his own.

  “We spoke,” wr
ote Alleline, only a couple of months after that interview, in a slightly hysterical personal letter addressed to Ann’s distinguished cousin the Minister and entered on Lacon’s file. “Witchcraft reports derive from a source of extreme sensitivity. To my mind, no existing method of Whitehall distribution meets the case. The dispatch-box system which we used for GADFLY fell down when keys were lost by Whitehall customers, or in one disgraceful case when an overworked Under-Secretary gave his key to his personal assistant. I have already spoken to Lilley, of naval intelligence, who is prepared to put at our disposal a special reading-room in the Admiralty main building where the material is made available to customers and watched over by a senior janitor of this service. The reading-room will be known, for cover purposes, as the conference room of the Adriatic Working Party, or the A.W.P. room for short. Customers with reading rights will not have passes, since these also are open to abuse. Instead they will identify themselves personally to my janitor”—Smiley noted the pronoun—“who will be equipped with an indoctrination list illustrated with customers’ photographs.”

  Lacon, not yet convinced, to the Treasury through his odious master, the Minister, on whose behalf his submissions were invariably made:Even allowing that this is necessary, the reading-room will have to be extensively rebuilt.

  1. Will you authorise cost?

  2. If so, the cost should seem to be borne by the Admiralty. Department will covertly reimburse.

  3. There is also the question of extra janitors, a further expense . . .

  And there is the question of Alleline’s greater glory, Smiley commented as he slowly turned the pages. It shone already like a beacon everywhere: Percy is heading for the top table and Control might already be dead.

  From the stairwell came the sound of rather beautiful singing. A Welsh guest, very drunk, was wishing everyone good night.

  Witchcraft, Smiley recalled—his memory again, the files knew nothing so plainly human—Witchcraft was by no means Percy Alleline’s first attempt, in his new post, at launching his own operation; but since his charter bound him to obtain Control’s approval, its predecessors had been stillborn. For a while, for instance, he had concentrated on tunnelling. The Americans had built audio tunnels in Berlin and Belgrade; the French had managed something similar against the Americans. Very well, under Percy’s banner the Circus would get in on the market. Control looked on benignly, an inter-services committee was formed (known as the Alleline Committee), and a team of boffins from nuts and bolts made a survey of the foundations of the Soviet Embassy in Athens, where Alleline counted on the unstinted support of the latest military régime which, like its predecessors, he greatly admired. Then, very gently, Control knocked over Percy’s bricks and waited for him to come up with something new. Which, after several shots between, was exactly what Percy was doing that grey morning when Control peremptorily summoned Smiley to the feast.

  Control was sitting at his desk, Alleline was standing at the window; between them lay a plain folder, bright yellow and closed.

  “Sit over there and take a look at this nonsense.”

  Smiley sat in the easy chair and Alleline stayed at the window resting his big elbows on the sill, staring over the rooftops to Nelson’s Column and the spires of Whitehall beyond.

  Inside the folder was a photograph of what purported to be a high-level Soviet naval dispatch fifteen pages long.

  “Who made the translation?” Smiley asked, thinking that it looked good enough to be Roy Bland’s work.

  “God,” Control replied. “God made it, didn’t he, Percy? Don’t ask him anything, George, he won’t tell you.”

  It was Control’s time for looking exceptionally youthful. Smiley remembered how Control had lost weight, how his cheeks were pink, and how those who knew him little tended to congratulate him on his good appearance. Only Smiley, perhaps, ever noticed the tiny beads of sweat that in those days habitually followed his hairline.

  Precisely, the document was an appreciation, allegedly prepared for the Soviet High Command, of a recent Soviet naval exercise in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. In Lacon’s file it was entered simply as Report No. 1, under the title “Naval.” For months the Admiralty had been screaming at the Circus for anything relating to this exercise. It therefore had an impressive topicality, which at once, in Smiley’s eyes, made it suspect. It was detailed but it dealt with matters that Smiley did not understand even at a distance: shore-to-sea strike power, radio activation of enemy alert procedures, the higher mathematics of the balance of terror. If it was genuine it was gold-dust, but there was no earthly reason to suppose it was genuine. Every week the Circus processed dozens of unsolicited so-called Soviet documents. Most were straight pedlar material. A few were deliberate plants by allies with an axe to grind; a few more were Russian chicken-feed. Very rarely, one turned out to be sound, but usually after it had been rejected.

  “Whose initials are these?” Smiley asked, referring to some annotations pencilled in Russian in the margin. “Does anyone know?”

  Control tilted his head at Alleline. “Ask the authority. Don’t ask me.”

  “Zharov,” said Alleline. “Admiral, Black Sea Fleet.”

  “It’s not dated,” Smiley objected.

  “It’s a draft,” Alleline replied complacently, his brogue richer than usual. “Zharov signed it Thursday. The finished dispatch with those amendments went out on circulation Monday, dated accordingly.”

  Today was Tuesday.

  “Where does it come from?” Smiley asked, still lost.

  “Percy doesn’t feel able to tell,” said Control.

  “What do our own evaluators say?”

  “They’ve not seen it,” said Alleline, “and what’s more they’re not going to.”

  Control said icily, “My brother in Christ, Lilley, of naval intelligence, has passed a preliminary opinion, however, has he not, Percy? Percy showed it to him last night—over a pink gin, was it, Percy, at the Travellers’?”

  “At the Admiralty.”

  “Brother Lilley, being a fellow Caledonian of Percy’s, is as a rule sparing in his praise. However, when he telephoned me half an hour ago he was positively fulsome. He even congratulated me. He regards the document as genuine and is seeking our permission—Percy’s, I suppose I should say—to apprise his fellow sea-lords of its conclusions.”

  “Quite impossible,” said Alleline. “It’s for his eyes only, at least for a couple more weeks.”

  “The stuff is so hot,” Control explained, “that it has to be cooled off before it can be distributed.”

  “But where does it come from?” Smiley insisted.

  “Oh, Percy’s dreamed up a cover name, don’t you worry. Never been slow on cover names, have we, Percy?”

  “But what’s the access? Who’s the case officer?”

  “You’ll enjoy this,” Control promised, aside. He was extraordinarily angry. In their long association Smiley could not remember him so angry. His slim, freckled hands were shaking and his normally lifeless eyes were sparkling with fury.

  “Source Merlin,” Alleline said, prefacing the announcement with a slight but very Scottish sucking of the teeth, “is a highly placed source with access to the most sensitive levels of Soviet policy-making.” And, as if he were royalty: “We have dubbed his product ‘Witchcraft.’ ”

  He had used the identical form of words, Smiley noticed, in a top-secret and personal letter to a fan at the Treasury, requesting for himself greater discretion in ad hoc payments to agents.

  “He’ll be saying he won him at the football pool next,” Control warned, who despite his second youth had an old man’s inaccuracy when it came to popular idiom. “Now get him to tell you why he won’t tell you.”

  Alleline was undeterred. He, too, was flushed, but with triumph, not disease. He filled his big chest for a long speech, which he delivered entirely to Smiley, tonelessly, rather as a Scottish police sergeant might give evidence before the courts.

  “The identity o
f Source Merlin is a secret which is not mine to divulge. He’s the fruit of a long cultivation by certain people in this service. People who are bound to me, as I am to them. People who are not at all entertained, either, by the failure rate around this place. There’s been too much blown. Too much lost, wasted, too many scandals. I’ve said so many times, but I might as well have spoken to the wind for all the damn care he paid me.”

  “He’s referring to me,” Control explained from the sidelines. “I am he in this speech—you follow, George?”

  “The ordinary principles of tradecraft and security have gone to the wall in this service. Need to know: where is it? Compartmentation at all levels: where is it, George? There’s too much regional backbiting, stimulated from the top.”

  “Another reference to myself,” Control put in.

  “Divide and rule, that’s the principle at work these days. Personalities who should be helping to fight Communism are all at one another’s throats. We’re losing our top partners.”

  “He means the Americans,” Control explained.

  “We’re losing our livelihood. Our self-respect. We’ve had enough.” He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. “We’ve had a bellyful, in fact.”

  “And like everyone who’s had enough,” said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, “he wants more.”

  Now for a while Lacon’s files, instead of Smiley’s memory, once more took up the story. It was typical of the atmosphere of those last months that, having been brought in on the affair at the beginning, Smiley should have received no subsequent word of how it had developed. Control detested failure as he detested illness, and his own failures most. He knew that to recognise failure was to live with it; that a service that did not struggle did not survive. He detested the silk-shirt agents, who hogged large chunks of the budget to the detriment of the bread-and-butter networks in which he put his faith. He loved success, but he detested miracles if they put the rest of his endeavour out of focus. He detested weakness as he detested sentiment and religion, and he detested Percy Alleline, who had a dash of most of them. His way of dealing with them was literally to close the door: to withdraw into the dingy solitude of his upper rooms, receive no visitors, and have all his phone calls fed to him by the mothers. The same quiet ladies fed him jasmine tea and the countless office files that he sent for and returned in heaps. Smiley would see them piled before the door as he went about his own business of trying to keep the rest of the Circus afloat. Many were old, from the days before Control led the pack. Some were personal, the biographies of past and present members of the service.