–Adapted from a Center For Fiction conversation between Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich, November 9, 2023

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published in September 1963 in London under the name of a little-known writer, John le Carré, and several months later the novel came to America.  This month marks the 60th anniversary of the release of this gritty masterpiece that profoundly influenced the genre of spy fiction.  

Spy became an international best seller and it was the first book to remain on the New York Times best seller list for more than a year.  When the book was reviewed in the New York Times, le Carré was described as a pseudonym for a British civil servant employed in one of the Whitehall ministries.  The author’s real name remained unknown to the public until the book’s worldwide success piqued the interest of the BBC, which investigated, and found the author was David Cornwell.

The Times review prophetically said of the book: “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold should establish le Carré firmly beside Ambler and Greene in the small rank of writers who can create a novel of significance, while losing none of the excitement of the tale of sheer adventure.”

Six decades on, the novel has only grown in significance and stature, and the same is true of le Carré who died in 2020 at the age of 89.  Graham Greene, who received an advance reader copy, and didn’t know le Carré, called it the best spy novel he’d ever read.  Many years later, Philip Roth called another le Carré novel, The Perfect Spy, “the best English novel since the war.” Ian McEwan, known to have prickly views of other writers, called him the most important writer in English during the second half of the 20th Century.

Spy Fiction in the 1950s

Spy fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s was dominated by Ian Fleming’s fabulist and often misogynistic novels.  Len Deighton’s well-regarded first novel, The Ipcress File, which came out in 1962, had wit and sophistication that made it a best-seller.  It was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold that tilted the genre into a moodier, more realistic direction that struck a chord with a reading public weighed down by the grim reality of the Cold War.  The book’s stature was amplified by Martin Ritt’s award-winning 1965 film adaptation with Richard Burton. Ritt’s choice to make the film in black-and-white made it seem realistic and believable. 

The book’s decidedly pessimistic tone seemed drawn from world crises that filled daily newspapers and cast a pall over life in the early 1960s. Construction of the Berlin Wall began in 1961, dividing the city between East and West; the Cuban missile crisis brought the threat of nuclear war into people’s living rooms; and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated two months before the book’s American release.  Spy contained a rich vein of bleakness that for many readers was a mirror image of the Cold War itself.

The book told that story of divided post-war Berlin through the eyes of a disillusioned British agent, Alec Leamas, who was recruited for one last mission before retirement.  He had seen his network of East German assets rolled up and liquidated.  He was asked to “stay out in the cold a little longer.”  This line, suggested by le Carre’s editor for the title of the novel, was both easy to remember and perfectly captured the book’s sensibility.    

Leamas was an anti-James Bond figure: the opposite of a suave, debonair member of His Majesty’s Secret Service who drank martinis and had his choice of attractive women.  Leamas kept to himself.  He was short with iron-gray hair and stubby hands.  He wore suits made of artificial fibers, suede shoes with rubber soles, and American-style shirts with button-down collars.  He looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who was not quite a gentleman.

Spy was not a romantic story, but there was a bit of romanticism in the new class of spy that it depicted: the talented, diligent agent who defeated his enemies with cunning, guile, and wit and not with brute force.  Leamas didn’t wield a gun, or parachute from an airplane.  He was the world-weary loner who suffered the difficult choices forced on him by morally ambiguous work.

Spy was a refreshing departure from the light-hearted entertainments that preceded it.  Le Carré’s novel opens with a tense, border-crossing scene at Checkpoint Charlie, and the perilous reality of covert operations is on display, but the novel transcended the conventional espionage thriller.  It portrayed Western espionage methods as morally inconsistent with Western democracy and values and it depicted spies as lonely figures haunted by personal sacrifices.

The Mole Introduced

Spy influenced a generation of spy writers, both with its somber realism and with its innovative plot.  Le Carré introduced the fictional mole – a deep penetration agent inside the Communist opposition who had been turned and worked for London.  The term itself – mole – wasn’t used in the novel. Le Carré first introduced the apt metaphor in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in 1974, ten years later.

The mole in Spy is Hans-Dieter Mundt, Deputy Director Operations, Abteilung, a part of East Germany’s spy service.  The novel’s plot revolves around sending the protagonist, Alec Leamas, to East Germany as a faux defector to discredit the East German Fiedler, who suspects Mundt is a traitor.  

At the time le Carré wrote the book, he was a junior MI6 officer stationed in Bonn.  He had an insider’s view of tradecraft, which gave the novel a feeling of authenticity, and he was familiar with how badly British intelligence had been compromised in the 1940s and 1950s by Soviet double agents like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess.  It was in early 1963 that Philby finally defected to Moscow from Beirut.

Le Carré more fully developed the figure of the mole in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which his traitor, Bill Hayden, is clearly modeled on Philby.  But his first use of the mole figure is in Spy.  His deep penetration agent reflected the deceptive games played by East and West, and the image of an agent alone in a hostile world with no one he could trust, seemed true, almost personal.

Le Carré said in an interview in 1974, “The story of spy is really a story of loneliness.”  In a sense, the novel has as much kinship with Camus’s The Stranger as it does with Ian Fleming’s novels.  Spy presented a callous world where being idealistic was often a fatal choice and heartless men manipulated means to achieve an end.

The fictional mole had not appeared previously in the popular spy novels of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler, John Buchanan, Somerset Maugham, and Len Deighton, although Deighton made good use of a mole in Berlin Game, which appeared twenty years later. 

Today, the mole has become to the spy novel what the corpse is to the murder mystery.  A search for the mole drives the plot of many spy novels.  Moles, and former moles, appear in the fiction of contemporary spy novelists Joe Kanon, David Quammen, Alma Katsu, Charles Cumming, Tom Bradby, and others.  Two of my novels use the device. 

The deep penetration agent – a mole – provided le Carré a means to explore an enduring theme that appears in all his books: betrayal.  Spy, like his later novels, explores the habits and manners of a particular class of Englishmen who lie to their families, suborn friends, and undertake extra-judicial actions in the name of national security.  He wrote about men – and they were almost all men – who worked as spies, but his novels are really about deceptions in human relationships.  

Life Imitates Art

Spy profoundly influenced the espionage genre, but it also influenced the real world of spying.  Bits of jargon that le Carré invented moved into the general parlance and were adopted by the intelligence community.  Mole, honey-trap, baby sitter, and scalp hunter were words he coined to describe activity in his world of spies, and they have, to varying degrees, become part of the language of clandestine operations.  But no word has been adopted as broadly as ‘mole.’

Le Carré said that the origins of his use of the word ‘mole’ was a mystery to him.  He had a memory that it was in KGB jargon when he was briefly an intelligence officer in West Germany, but the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, who investigated, couldn’t find a trace of it.  He received a letter from a reader once referring to page 240 of Francis Bacon’s Historie of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh published in 1641, which refers to a “Mole” organizing conspiracies against the King.  Le Carré had never read Francis Bacon on moles and he didn’t object with OED editors who credited him with having invented the term to describe a long-term penetration agent.

The fictional mole that le Carré introduced in Spy reflected the world of espionage that he knew.  Its legacy is that it shifted the genre to greater realism and set in motion a new plot device, later giving it a name.

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Paul Vidich’s new spy novel, Beirut Station, is now available from Pegasus Books. He is the author of five previous novels: The Matchmaker, The Mercenary, An Honorable Man, The Good Assassin and The Coldest Warrior. He is indebted to Joseph Kanon for his insights into le Carré and Jeremy Dunn, whose familiarity with the spy genre was helpful to this essay.