The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Leamas and Kiever go to the airport, with Kiever acting rudely to staff so that they will be remembered. They fly to The Hague in the Netherlands, and arrive at a seaside hotel named Le Mirage. There they meet Peters, who seems to be Russian. Kiever leaves, and Leamas demands full payment for his information, after which he will go into hiding. Peters has Leamas tell the entire story of his intelligence career, beginning with his time in WWII. Leamas ran agents in Nazi-occupied Holland because he had the language skills and had lived there for part of his childhood. It was a difficult place to run an underground network, but he survived. After an unsuccessful transition to civilian life, Leamas received an offer to rejoin the Circus. Leamas started out as an intelligence analyst, but soon moved to operations in Berlin. He scored two major sources in East Germany, the second of which was Riemeck, whom Leamas saw die at the Berlin Wall. After Riemeck’s death, Leamas claimed that the last phase of his Circus career involved no contact with or specific knowledge of remaining agents. As Leamas is talking, Peters thinks about the difficulty of betraying the cause to which one has devoted their life, and worries that Leamas’s professionalism and residual pride will cause him to withhold the most vital information.