The Spy Who Came In From The Cold - Home

FILM DESCRIPTION
Alec Leamas, a former SOE operative during World War II who fought in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and Norway [3], is recalled from his posting as Station Head of Berlin Station, West Berlin's operational branch of the Circus, and returns to London in despair after watching the death of his final undercover operative, Karl Riemeck, a member of the praesidium in East Germany's Socialist Unity Party, at the hands of Hans-Dieter Mundt. Mundt, formerly a lower level intelligence operative who is known to the Circus for his involvement in the murder of Foreign Office official Samuel Fennan a few years earlier, has risen to become the head of the East German Abteilung on account of his brilliant counter-intelligence aptitude, a skill demonstrated with his liquidation of Leamas' entire network. Finding himself with no operatives left, Leamas visits Circus chief Control and expresses a desire to get out of the intelligence community and "come in from the cold". Control asks him to instead stay "in the cold" for one last mission: defect to East Germany and frame Mundt as a double agent for SIS. Mundt's deputy, Josef Fiedler, Control explains, is beginning to believe that Mundt may be a turncoat, and could be a useful target for Leamas in this endeavour. In exchange for this, Leamas will keep anything he makes on the mission, in addition to a pension pot, and will be granted leave to retire from the service.

In order to convince the East Germans' of Leamas' potential defection, the Circus demotes Leamas to the finance department, where he starts to exhibit signs of alcoholism. He eventually is sacked abruptly on rumours he was stealing money from the Circus' accounts to support the small pension he was granted by his superiors, and is forced to go on the dole. Eventually he takes a job in a small run-down library, whilst living in a low quality flat. Whilst there, he meets Liz Gold, the secretary of her local Communist Party of Great Britain organisation, and the two gradually strike up a friendship, and eventually become lovers. After a period of illness reveals the extent of Liz's feelings for him, Leamas confides in her that a day is coming where he will say goodbye and she must not look for him. A few days later, he says goodbye, and takes the "final plunge" into Control's plan, getting arrested for assault and sentenced to three months in prison. Before fully involving himself in the scheme, he makes Control promise to leave Liz alone and out of the remit of the Circus.

Upon his release, Leamas is approached by an East German recruiter who claims to know him from his time in Berlin. He lets him stay at his home, and introduces him to a contact who takes him across to the Netherlands on a faked passport. Whilst there, an intelligence agent from the East interviews him heavily on his past in the Circus at a safe house in the Netherlands, before then taking him across into East Germany and gradually meeting more senior officials of the Abteilung, all the while dropping occasional hints about payments to a potential double agent. Whilst this occurs, Liz is suddenly visited by the retired Circus agent George Smiley, who tells her to come to him should she need anything, enquires about her relationship with Leamas, and pays off the outstanding rent on Leamas' flat.

Now in East Germany, Leamas is finally introduced to Fiedler, where he is held under guard in a sparsely decorated home in the middle of nowhere. His days consist largely of extended discussion about his past Circus work, combined with walking in the local countryside and hills with Fiedler or a guard. The two men often end up in philosophical debate, particularly on the topic of Leamas' more pragmatic view of life in comparison to Fiedler's idealist ideological views about life in East Germany. These conversations reveal what Leamas observes as a fear about both the righteousness of Fiedler's motivations, as well as the morality of what he does for his country. In contrast, Mundt, is a brutal opportunist, also mercenary-like in manner, who left the Nazis after the war out of convenience and joined the Communists. Fiedler also notes his suspicions about Mundt as the men get closer, and Fiedler conveys his fears about Mundt's anti-semitism affecting him, a Jewish man.

© Paramount Pictures 1965