The Spy Who Came in From The Cold

“I think,” he said, “we will now take your Berlin service in some detail. That would be from May 1951 to March 1961. Have another drink.”

Leamas watched him take a cigarette from the box on the table and light it. He noticed two things: that Peters was left-handed, and that once again he had put the cigarette in his mouth with the maker’s name away from him, so that it burned first. It was a gesture Leamas liked: it indicated that Peters, like himself, had been on the run.

Peters had an odd face, expressionless and gray. The color must have left it long ago–perhaps in some prison in the early days of the Revolution–and now his features were formed and Peters would look like that till he died. Only the stiff gray hair might turn to white, but his face would not change. Leamas wondered vaguely what Peters’ real name was, whether he was married. There was something very orthodox about him which Leamas liked. It was the orthodoxy of strength, of confidence. If Peters lied there would be a reason. The lie would be a calculated, necessary lie, far removed from the fumbling dishonesty of Ashe.

Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic. of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical.

Leamas began to talk about Berlin. Peters seldom interrupted, seldom asked a question or made a comment, but when he did, he displayed a technical curiosity and _expertise_ which entirely accorded with Leamas’ own temperament. Leamas even seemed to respond to the dispassionate professionalism of his interrogator–it was something they had in common.

It had taken a long time to build a decent East Zone network from Berlin, Leamas explained. In the earlier days the city had been thronging with second-rate agents: intelligence was discredited and so much a part of the daily life of Berlin that you could recruit a man at a cocktail party, brief him over dinner and he would be blown by breakfast. For a professional it was a nightmare: dozens of agencies, half of them penetrated by the opposition, thousands of loose ends; too many leads, too few sources, too little space to operate. They had their break with Feger in 1954, true enough. But by ’56 when every Service department was screaming for high-grade intelligence, they were becalmed. Feger had spoiled them for second-rate stuff that was only one jump ahead of the news. They needed the real thing–and they had to wait another three years before they got it.

Then one day de long went for a picnic in the woods on the edge of East Berlin. He had a British military number plate on his car, which he parked, locked, on a gravel road beside the canal. After the picnic his children ran on ahead, carrying the basket. When they reached the car they stopped, hesitated, dropped the basket and ran back. Somebody had forced the car door–the handle was broken and the door was slightly open. De long swore, remembering that he had left his camera in the glove compartment. He went and examined the car. The handle had been forced; de Jong reckoned it had been done with a piece of steel tubing, the kind of thing you can carry in your sleeve. But the camera was still there, so was his coat, so were some parcels belonging to his wife. On the dnving seat was a tobacco tin, and in the tin was a small nickel cartridge. De Jong knew exactly what it contained: it was the film cartridge of a subminiature camera, probably a Minox.

De Jong drove home and developed the film. It contained the minutes of the last meeting of the Praesidium of the East German Communist Party, the S.E.D. By an odd coincidence there was collateral from another source; the photographs were genuine.

Leamas took the case over then. He was badly in need of a success. He’d produced virtually nothing since arriving in Berlin, and he was getting past the usual age limit for full-time operational work. Exactly a week later he took de Jong’s car to the same place and went for a walk.

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