In the early nineties, almost thirty years after this book was published, the author penned an introduction to a new edition. In it, he explains the role of this book as the follow up to Spy. Spy was "a fan letter" to the British security establishment and as a veteran of that Service, he knew it had over embellished the skills of both the British and the Germans. This book "would be a deliberate reversal, if not an actual parody, of The Spy". He totally succeeds.
Here, a security agency (never clearly identified, but certainly not the Circus) attempts to uncover information about Soviet missiles in the north of E. Germany. Their first agent is killed. Their second effort is absolutely, depressingly, appallingly third rate. Lacking funds, personnel, transport and the support of their unhappy wives, the men behind this operation scrounge up government backing and delude themselves into thinking they know what they are doing. They are so incompetent that they recruit a naturalized Pole who botched his only WWII mission as their agent. In borrowed training facilities, they prep him to go behind the Iron Curtain. He unnecessarily kills a border guard, asks inappropriate questions all over town and has the slowest imaginable 'hand' on the telegraph equipment he carries with him. Every one in E. Germany is looking for him within days of his infiltration. Smiley shows up and pulls his handlers from their hideout on the western side of the border and leaves the poor Pole to his own devices. LeCarre observed in the aforementioned introduction that the British public hated the book.
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