“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011)

The work

The film was directed by Tomas Alfredson from a screenplay by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, based on John le Carré’s novel. George Smiley is played by Gary Oldman. The story is set at the height of the Cold War: a retired British intelligence officer is called back to find a Soviet spy at the top of the service.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesIn Polish cinemas the film was shown from 25 November 2011 under the title “Szpieg” (The Spy).⁴

An author from intelligence

John le Carré was the pen name of David Cornwell (1931–2020). The Bodleian Library, which holds his archive, writes that his espionage novels were inspired by his years working in both MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s.⁵

In the world of the novel the ‘Circus’ stands for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and ‘Control’ for its head, as the film and television scholar P. Kiszely points out.⁶

The real case

MI5 files released in 2025 confirm that Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross were recruited by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. In 1951 Burgess and Maclean disappeared, and in January 1963 in Beirut Philby, an SIS officer, made a partial confession (see the Cambridge Five).³

Fiction and its model

Thomas Coffey, reviewing in the CIA journal ‘Studies in Intelligence’ (2015), writes that two of Philby’s British intelligence colleagues based their fiction on him – Graham Greene in ‘The Human Factor’ – and that the same goes for le Carré’s classic about high-level betrayal at MI6.²

Kiszely, writing in the peer-reviewed ‘New Review of Film and Television Studies’ (2021) about the 1979 BBC serial of the same novel, calls the mole Bill Haydon a Philby-esque traitor, but warns that it would be a mistake to view him solely as an approximation of Philby.⁶

Smiley, Karla and Operation Testify are elements of the plot, not historical people and operations. The real Philby disappeared from Beirut after his partial confession in January 1963.^3,6,7