Queen, King, Ace, Spy (Roman)

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Dame, König, As, Spion (English original title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1974. The fifth novel with the secret agent George Smiley marks the beginning of the so-called Karla trilogy ( The Quest for Karla ) about Smiley's Soviet adversary Karla, which was continued with Eine Art Held ( The Honorable Schoolboy , 1977) and Agent on his own behalf ( Smiley's People , 1979).

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The Circus , the London headquarters of the British secret service , is in a state of upheaval. Intelligence chief Control was ousted a few months before his death, his confidante George Smiley was forced to resign, as was his loyal companion Connie Sachs. Power in the circus has usurped a clique of four: Percy Alleline, who has become Control's successor, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase. They owe their political backing to Operation Witchcraft , a network of Soviet double agents under the code name "Merlin", who supply MI6 with secret information from the Soviet Union through unknown channels . The high quality of the material finally allows the British secret service, which had recently been hit by failures, to exchange information intensively with their American colleagues, who are generally referred to as “cousins”.

The unauthorized Operation Testify served as a welcome occasion for Control's disempowerment . Control suspected that a mole in the service of the Soviet Union had crept into the inner circle of the circus. He set his sights on five candidates, each of whom he assigned a cover name: Alleline (" As "), Haydon (" King "), Smiley (" Lady "), Bland (" Bube ") and Esterhase (" Zehner ") . In order to seek contact with the Czech General Stevcek, who supposedly wanted to expose the mole "Gerald", he sent Jim Prideaux, the then chief of foreign agents ("scalp hunters"), to Brno . But the meeting turned out to be the case, Prideaux was shot, brought by the Soviet secret into his power and only against its own agents exchanged , as all known British agent rings were busted him. Prideaux, who is still suffering from the long-term effects of his gunshot wound, now lives incognito and without contact with the circus as a substitute teacher in a boarding school in Devon .

Months later, the suspicion that the circus was infiltrated by a mole received new food when foreign agent Ricki Tarr reported irregularities in his mission in Hong Kong . There he met the Russian spy Irina and, after a love affair, was able to persuade him to go over to the British and divulge her explosive knowledge about a British mole. But the Circus, informed by Tarr, held up the agents in Hong Kong with inexplicable passivity. Finally, the Soviet secret service got ahead of the British, kidnapped the defector and flew her to the Soviet Union, where she has been missing since then. The ministerial official Oliver Lacon instructs Smiley, recently abandoned by his unfaithful wife Ann, to investigate the proceedings. He receives support from Inspector Mendel and Peter Guillam, his only remaining confidante in the circus.

Smiley discovers that files about the "Irina" incident have been suppressed and that Bill Haydon was informed in advance of Operation Testify . Haydon spent the evening in question with Smiley's wife before he took over the handling of the failed mission in the circus. The contact person for Operation Witchcraft turns out to be an alleged cultural attaché of the Soviet embassy named Polyakov, who is actually behind Colonel Viktorov, an agent of the Soviet chief of intelligence, Karla. Smiley personally tried to poach Karla many years ago and revealed to him his sore point while trying to establish interpersonal contact: his unhappy marriage to Ann. From Esterhase, the weakest link in the leading quartet of the circus, Smiley is able to squeeze the place of the conspiratorial meetings with Polyakov, where he lies in wait with Mendel and Guillam, while Tarr, who is in hiding, makes contact with the circus from Paris.

As expected, the fear of exposure by Tarr leads to a lightning bolt meeting with Polyakov and the mole, who turns out to be Bill Haydon and is arrested. In the subsequent interrogation with Smiley, Haydon confesses that he had been sabotaging all operations of the British secret service on behalf of Karla for years. The aim of Operation Witchcraft was to gain access to the American intelligence service, for which tagged information from the Soviet Union was exchanged. It was Karla who had put Haydon on Ann to tarnish Smiley's ability to judge his rival. Haydon's motives remain in the dark, but Smiley sees a lot of complacency behind the demeanor of the once esteemed colleague. The imprisoned Haydon waits calmly for an exchange with Moscow until one night Prideaux visits him to break the neck of his longtime friend and lover, whose betrayal he has long suspected. After the Soviet Union was officially held responsible for the murder of Haydon, Prideaux returned to boarding school, where he found fulfillment in his new job as a teacher.

title

The original title Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy refers to a well-known English counting rhyme

Tinker, Tailor,
Soldier, Sailor,
Rich Man, Poor Man,
Beggar Man, Thief.

Control assigns the code names "Tinker" (Percy Alleline), "Tailor" (Bill Haydon), "Soldier" (Roy Bland), "Poorman" (Toby Esterhase) and "Beggarman" (George Smiley) according to this rhyme Designation of the latter as a humble, unassuming "beggar" controls irony and compassion for his Adlatus Smiley. In the German translation, the camouflage names were replaced by playing cards.

Film adaptations

Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman, the two smiley actors Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman, the two smiley actors
Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman , the two smiley actors

The novel was filmed twice. In 1979 the BBC produced a seven-part television series directed by John Irvin . Alec Guinness took on the role of George Smiley . Also starring were Michael Jayston , Ian Richardson , Ian Bannen and Alexander Knox to see. In 2011 a remake by Tomas Alfredson was released . Colin Firth , Tom Hardy , Mark Strong , Benedict Cumberbatch and John Hurt played alongside Gary Oldman as George Smiley .

expenditure

  • John le Carré: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1974.
  • John le Carré: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . Random House, New York 1974, ISBN 0-394-49219-6 .
  • John le Carré: Queen, King, Ace, Spy . Translated from the English by Rolf and Hedda Soellner. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-455-00819-4 .

literature

  • David Monaghan: Smiley's Circus. The secret world of John le Carré . Heyne, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05629-9 , pp. 24-29, 45-50, and under the respective key words.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see Tinker, Tailor in the English Wikipedia .
  2. ↑ Peter Elfed Lewis: John le Carré . Ungar, New York 1985, ISBN 0-8044-2243-5 , p. 131.
  3. ↑ Dame, König, As, Spion (1979) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  4. ↑ Dame, König, As, Spion (2011) in the Internet Movie Database (English)