The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
“Who’s Mr. Ironside?” Leamas asked. “I don’t think he exists,” she replied. “He’s her big gun when she’s stuck for an answer. I asked her once who he was. She went all shifty and mysterious, and said ‘Never mind.’ I don’t think he exists.” “I’m not sure Miss Crail does,” said Leamas and Liz Gold smiled.
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
network; she was used for courier jobs. They shot her dead in the street as she left a West Berlin cinema. The police never found the murderer and Leamas was at first inclined to write the incident off as unconnected with her work.
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
“The word is going around that you’re wanted for an offence under the Official Secrets Act. Your photograph’s in all the London evening papers. The captions are very vague.” Leamas was standing very still.
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
“We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really, I mean . . . one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold . . . d’you see what I mean?”
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
He seemed pleased to despise them all, and they hated him because, like the world outside, he did not need them. After about ten days they had had enough.
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
And to my awe, add over time a kind of impotent anger. Anger, because from the day my novel was published, I realized that now and forever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world and written about it.
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Just a few years ago, in circumstances of extraordinary courtesy, one of the Bundesnachrichtendienst’s latter-day luminaries gave me a personal tour. I recommend the 1930s furniture in the conference room and the Jugendstil statues in the gardens at the back. But the main attraction must surely be the great dark staircase winding into the cellars a
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The Services may choose to leak a name when it pleases them. They may showcase an intelligence baron or two to give us a glimpse of their omniscience and—wait for it—openness. But woe betide a leaky former member.
John le Carré • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
And now they had Karl, and Leamas was leaving Berlin as he had come—without a single agent worth a farthing. Mundt had won.