The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 novel by John le Carré, the pen name of the English author David Cornwell (1931-2020). Le Carré worked for British Intelligence, including a brief period as a secret agent in Germany. He also began writing novels during this time, and chose a pseudonym to preserve his cover. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third novel, achieved widespread popularity, allowing Le Carré to leave British Intelligence just as it was reeling from the revelation that one of its top agents, “Kim” Philby, had been a Soviet double agent. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold thus launched Le Carré’s career as a full-time author with a particular interest in the moral complexities of spycraft and its consequences for both the agents and the nations they purportedly serve. It is widely considered among the best and most influential spy novels ever written. The novel was the first to win both the prestigious Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It also won the Dagger of Daggers award in 2005 as the best Golden Dagger winner of the previous half century. The novel was made into a film starring Richard Burton in 1965, and a miniseries starring Aidan Gillen premiered in September 2023.

This guide uses the 1964 Coward-McCann hardcover edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Content Warning: This guide contains references to antisemitism and addiction, which appear in the novel.

Plot Summary

The novel begins with British agent Alec Leamas at the Berlin Wall, awaiting the crossing of his most prized agent, Karl Riemeck. The agent is killed in his attempt to get through the checkpoint, which marks the end of Leamas’s network that he had been running in Germany. Leamas returns to London expecting to be fired or demoted, and instead receives an offer from his boss, “Control,” to undertake one last job and bring down Hans-Dieter Mundt, the man responsible for killing his agents. Leamas can only cross over to East Germany in the pose of a defector, and so begins a public descent into alcoholism and squalor that results in his leaving the “Circus” (the name for the headquarters of British Intelligence) and then going to prison for striking a grocer. Yet before prison, he begins a relationship with Liz Gold, a librarian and member of the British Communist Party.

After being released from prison, Leamas meets with low-level Communist agents in Britain, who ferry him to the Netherlands to meet with Peters, an officer of the Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB). There, Leamas entices his interrogator with stories of an operation called Rolling Stone, which Peters suspects is the clue to finding another British double agent. Peters, convinced of Leamas’s integrity, sends him to East Germany, where Leamas meets Fiedler, Mundt’s deputy but also his greatest enemy, as the Jewish Fiedler has suffered humiliations at the hands of the antisemitic Mundt. Leamas spends several days with Fiedler, with Leamas’s cynicism clashing against Fiedler’s sincere commitment to communist ideology. Mundt has them arrested, but not before Fiedler reveals the evidence that Mundt himself was the double agent receiving the payments for Rolling Stone. Meanwhile, Liz has been invited by the East German Communist Party to participate in an exchange program, and while she is surprised, given her modest record as a Party member, she accepts the chance to travel and see the Communist world.

After their arrest, Fiedler and Leamas are summoned to a hearing for the inner Praesidium of the Party, where Fiedler has an opportunity to present his evidence against Mundt, with Leamas as his witness. After concluding that Mundt is a traitor deserving death, Mundt’s counsel brings in Liz herself, who had been picked up in Leipzig during her exchange program and driven to Berlin. There Liz admits under questioning that Leamas said she would be looked after financially, despite his claim to have no money during his tailspin, and that British Intelligence likely paid off her lease. This money is used as proof that the whole case against Mundt was British fabrication and that Fielder is simply trying to displace his superior for reasons of jealousy. When the trial is over, Leamas realizes that Mundt really is a British agent, and that Leamas was sent to East Germany with false evidence of a true proposition in order to discredit Fiedler publicly and therefore ensure Mundt’s safety within the East German Security Services. Fiedler, as well as Leamas and Liz, were sacrificial lambs to the greater good of a British spy serving as the head of East German counterintelligence. Mundt springs Leamas and Liz from prison and gives them a car to leave East Germany, but as soon as they reach the wall, the spotlights come on and they are both shot and killed.