The legacy of the spies

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The Legacy of Spies (English original title: A Legacy of Spies ) is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 2017. He takes up the plot of his bestseller The Spy Who Came from the Cold from 1963 and reports it from a different perspective. He also refers to the events from Queen, King, Ace, and Spy . The main character is the now retired British secret agent Peter Guillam. His long-time supervisor George Smiley also makes an appearance. The German translation by Peter Torberg was published like the original 2017 edition.

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MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross in the London Borough of Lambeth

British secret agent Peter Guillam was retiring on a remote farm in Brittany when he received a letter from London ordering his appearance at the Secret Intelligence Service headquarters . This is no longer located at Cambridge Circus , which in Guillam's days led to the nickname “Circus”, but is now in a modern building on the Thames. Service Legal Counsel A. Butterfield, nicknamed "Bunny," and a historian by the name of Laura interview Guillam about past operations on which the Circus files have disappeared. The survey soon focuses on two surgeries from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Cold War , which Guillam does not like to think back to: “Mayflower” and “Windfall”.

"Mayflower" was the code name of the East German doctor Karl Riemeck, who offered himself to the British secret service as a spy out of resistance against the GDR. He also put in contact with “Tulip”, Doris Gamp, the wife of an employee in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and assistant to an executive at the Ministry of State Security , who was ill-treated by both men. Guillam was appointed as the contact person for "Tulip" and he made a cardinal mistake for secret agents by falling in love with his source. When “Tulip” threatened to be blown, the British exfiltrated her from the GDR, not least because she believed Guillam's assurances that her son Gustav, who had been left behind, would follow them. It came to a love night in Prague that was unforgettable for both sides . Doris was found hanged in a British secret service camp where the defector was extensively interrogated. Outwardly disguised as a suicide, her death was actually the deed of the East German spy Hans-Dieter Mundt.

Mundt was the focus of the subsequent “Windfall” operation. Supposedly turned around after his arrest, he subsequently worked as a double agent for the British, but without ever being able to provide them with any significant information. Nevertheless, Control, the head of the circus, started an operation to strengthen Mundt's position against his internal Stasi competitor Josef Fiedler. With the wrong order to kill Mundt, he sent the British agent Alec Leamas to the GDR in order to clear up doubts about Mundt's loyalty to the GDR through his exposure. Leamas was killed by border guards at the Berlin Wall together with his girlfriend Liz Gold . His death was a severe personal blow to Smiley and Guillam and led to a weakening of their Covert department in the British secret service compared to the rival Joint department of the men led by Bill Haydon, known as "Bills Boys". Haydon later turned out to be the mole who had carried the activities of the circus on to the Soviet Union over the years.

Well, long after Guillam and Smiley's retirement, it is the children of the dead, Christoph Leamas, Karen Gold and Gustav Quinz, who are suing British intelligence. He would only too gladly to pass the responsibility on to personal misconduct by Peter Guillam, who, as Romeo agent, instigated Doris Gamp to do things that she could not reconcile with her conscience, and who betrayed his friend Leamas and sent him to death in the GDR . It was only when Guillam took on his own lawyer named Tabitha that he could only defend himself by disclosing all the documents about the failed operations that had been stashed away on behalf of Smileys. He manages to find George Smiley, who now lives in Freiburg im Breisgau . This gives Guillam the approval for the documents. And he defends himself against Guillam's unspoken accusations by asserting that he did not commit any of his deeds in the name of world peace, capitalism or Christianity, not even for England, but always for Europe, for which he is a new age of reason hoped for. Long after these events, Guillam lived his peaceful life in Brittany again, even if he was still waiting for letters from England.

reception

The novel received the German Crime Prize 2018 in the International category . According to Thomas Wörtche , le Carré is still unbeatable “in the elegance of its dialogues, the artificial secret service jargon that opens up its own linguistic universe [...] and in the virtuosity with which every sentence is three and four times encoded.” The novel is much more than just nostalgia, but rather takes up a highly topical topic with the subject of “language as disinformation”; Peter Torberg's translation was brilliantly successful. In the annual ranking of the 2017 best crime list , he reached third place.

In times of Brexit , George Smiley's final commitment to Europe is also current : “If I have had a mission, then it was in Europe. If I was heartless, it was for Europe. If I had one goal, it was to lead Europe out of the dark into a new age of reason. ”According to Marcus Müntefering, someone like George Smiley is needed today, who has always tried to do the right thing and his own To preserve humanity, even if it always had to give way to a higher, abstract goal. Le Carré quoted May Sarton in this context : "There are times when you have to think like a hero if you want to behave like a decent person."

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 34th German Crime Prize 2018 at www.krimilexikon.de.
  2. ↑ Marcus Müntefering: "For God's sake, don't hold a referendum" . In: Der Spiegel from October 16, 2017.