I was rereading the first chapter of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (TSWCIFTC) yesterday in its 1964 French translation (by Marcel Duhamel and Henri Robillot) and one passage struck me.

In the original English text, there is this passage where Leamas questions Elvira about Karl Riemeck's location:

>Leamas walked over to the car, and said to the woman,
“Where is he?”
“They came for him and he ran. He took the bicycle. They can't have known about me.”
“Where did he go?”
“We had a room near Brandenburg, over a pub. He kept a few things there, money, papers. I think he'll have gone there. Then he'll come over.”

The sentence "We had a room near Brandenburg, over a pub" was translated into French as "Nous avions une chambre près de la porte Brandebourg, au-dessus d'un café" which would translate back into English as: "We had a room near the Brandenburg Gate, over a pub."

The novel takes place in 1962-63, in Berlin. And at that time, the Brandenburg Gate was located just a few meters behind the Berlin Wall, inside East Berlin. Because of its location right on the sector border, the Brandenburg Gate was trapped inside the restricted "death strip" (Sperrgebiet): to prevent East Germans from trying to flee to the West, East German authorities had cleared the historic square around the gate (Pariser Platz) and turned it into a heavily fortified exclusion zone. Since it was located in this no man's land, both East and West Berlin citizens were strictly forbidden from approaching the Brandenburg Gate, and it therefore seems very unlikely or even possible that there could be a café or a bar nearby where someone could rent a room above it... Plus, it would be a very poorly chosen spot for a safehouse, wouldn't it?

Furthermore, John le Carré would have written "the Brandenburg Gate" if he had meant the Brandenburg Gate, right?

I therefore conclude that there is a translation error in the French version of the novel (and it's not the only one!). Elvira is actually talking about a room located near the city of Brandenburg an der Havel, in the GDR west of Berlin, and not near the Brandenburg Gate. Do you confirm that this is indeed the case?

If that is the case, and if Elvira is telling the truth, Riemeck sets off by bicycle from Brandenburg an der Havel (or its surroundings) to go to Berlin and cross to the West. I looked on Google Maps and the closest checkpoint to Brandenburg an der Havel is the Glienicke Bridge (the famous Bridge of Spies, which crosses the Havel), connecting Potsdam to Berlin. It's a journey of about 45 km, or about 2 hours and 30 minutes by bike, which is entirely feasible... We don't know in the novel which checkpoint Riemeck is shot at, but I had always imagined it at a part of the Wall within Berlin itself (maybe because of the 1965 movie opening scene?), only to realize thanks to this translation error that Riemeck was actually shot at a checkpoint located west of West Berlin...

I always thought that one of the most deliciously subtle and clever part of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was the way le Carré shows Smiley, months after the events of Operation Testify, reconstructing Haydon's alibi for knowing about the shooting of Jim Prideaux in Czechoslovakia, and finding it to be full of holes. And yet, though, not to be enough to convict him.

The chapters in question are (mostly) 26, when Smiley interrogates Collins, and 38, when Haydon confesses to Smiley.

So I've summarized the key points of the alibi, and the way Smiley unravels it, in a way that I hope will be useful to other readers. It is a long post, but I'd be interested in reading your comments and feedback if you have any !! Thanks !

The context in a nutshell

The Circus (the British secret service) has been infiltrated by a Soviet mole: Bill Haydon, who works for Karla, Moscow's spymaster. Control, the head of the Circus, suspects the mole's existence and mounts Operation Testify: he secretly sends Jim Prideaux (workname "Ellis") to Czechoslovakia to meet a Czech general who is supposedly ready to reveal the traitor's identity. Except the whole thing is a trap set by Karla, with Haydon's own help: the real goal is to burn Jim, humiliate Control and bring him down.

A crucial detail for what follows: that night, Karla insisted that Haydon spend the night... in the bed of Ann, Smiley's wife. That is the "insurance" mentioned in chapter 38: Karla knows that Smiley is the only man strong enough to one day unmask the mole, and that his single weak point is Ann. If Haydon is known to be Ann's lover, Smiley will never be able to judge him coldly and if he ever accuses him, everyone (Smiley included) will be able to put it down to the jealousy of a cuckolded husband.

The plan as it was meant to unfold

On the night of Testify, everything is timed like a stage play:

1. The Czechs ambush Jim and capture him cleanly, without a shot fired.
2. 10:30 p.m.: Czech radio broadcasts the bulletin announcing the arrest of a British spy named "Ellis."
3. At the Circus, the duty officer (Sam Collins) panics and telephones all the top brass, so inevitably Smiley's house too, at Bywater Street, where Ann picks up... and where Bill is hidden in the bedroom. That call is Bill's signal: he knows the machine is in motion.
4. Bill gets up, stops by his club (the Savile), where a ticker-tape machine prints the agency dispatches. He "reads" the news (which has been public since 10:30pm) then turns up at the Circus, deeply shaken, with a perfectly innocent explanation of how he knows.
5. The icing on the cake: it is the mole himself who takes charge of the crisis response.

You can see the elegance of it: Bill has to know what is going on (Moscow briefed him), but he needs a public, verifiable source to account for that knowledge. The club's ticker tape is his alibi.

The hitch

On the ground, things go wrong: Jim is late at his rendezvous with Stevcek, and he resists and tries to run, and the Czechs shoot him. That was not part of the plan. On the Czech side, it turns into a scramble (the "fumble"): the promised bulletin gets pushed back again and again, and finally goes out only at 12:30 a.m. that is, after Bill's club has closed.

Bill's alibi has just collapsed, but he doesn't know it yet. He arrives at the Circus at 1:15 a.m. reciting the prepared script: "I picked the story up on the club ticker-tape."

The three inconsistencies this creates

This is where the chapter 26 passage becomes delicious, because Smiley, months later, interviewing Sam, gently pulls on each thread:

1. The timing doesn't add up. Bill arrives at 1:15 claiming to have read the news at his club. But the news only broke at 12:30... when the club was already closed. And in any case, who hangs around his club's ticker-tape at that hour? Hence Smiley's deceptively absent-minded questions: "At what time was that, exactly?", "Isn't that late for reading club ticker-tapes?", "Bill's the Savile, isn't he?" (Smiley knows the Savile's opening hours.)

2. Bill knows too much. He arrives already knowing there has been a shooting in Czechoslovakia. Yet Sam said nothing to Ann on the phone : he only asked where George and Bill were. So if Bill could not have read the dispatches... where does that information come from? The answer he can never admit: from Moscow. He knew about the trap in advance.

3. And at the same time, Bill doesn't know enough. When Sam tells him it was Jim who was hit, Bill turns white, almost mad: shot? Shot how? Shot dead? His shock is genuine (Jim is his oldest friend, a person he really loves and Moscow hadn't told him, since it wasn't in the plan). But here is the problem: the bulletin's main point, its headline, was precisely that the spy "Ellis" had been shot. Anyone who had actually read the ticker-tape would have known that before anything else.

To sum it up the way Smiley does: Bill knows the secret half of the story (an operation has gone wrong in Czecho, something only the conspirators knew) but is ignorant of the public half (Jim shot : the bulletin's headline). That is exactly the reverse of someone who learned the news from the press. His knowledge has the shape of a Moscow briefing, not of an agency dispatch.

Why nobody noticed at the time

Because it was total chaos: the military were yelling about Czech tank movements, the Foreign Office was in a panic, Lacon and the Minister were pounding at the doors. And above all because Bill was Bill : brilliant, admired, beyond suspicion, magnificent in a crisis (Sam describes him as a treat to watch that night). Nobody took the time to cross-check the timings. Hence Haydon's chilling little remark in chapter 38, once he has been unmasked: lucky no one followed it up.

Except that someone did, eventually: Smiley. Months later, replaying Sam's account minute by minute, he spots the crack. And in the same moment he understands the other thing, the cruellest one for him: if Bill was able to walk into the Circus an hour after Sam's call to Ann, knowing things Ann could not have told him... then he was there in Smiley's own house (in Smiley's own bed!) when the telephone rang. Ann's curt "no" to the question "do you happen to know where Bill Haydon is?" suddenly makes complete sense.

The "small hitch" is this two-hour delay in the radio bulletin. And that tiny grain of sand in a perfect piece of clockwork ends up bringing the mole down.

What Smiley knows when he arrives at Collins's

At this stage of his investigation, Smiley has three things:

1. First, the frame: Control, before his fall, suspected the existence of a mole within the Circus. Smiley knows this. Note though that when Smiley arrives at Collins's he does not know yet about the Tinker, Tailor, etc. codenames (he learns about those in chapter 31, when interrogating Jim).
2. Next, confirmation that a mole exists: Ricki Tarr's story and Irina's diary speak of an agent called "Gerald," run personally by Karla, placed at the very top of the Circus.
3. Finally, a mechanism: by combing through the files and listening to Connie Sachs, Smiley has understood that the "Witchcraft" operation (the miraculous fake source Merlin, fed through the Russian Polyakov) is the channel through which the mole works. But here is the problem: Witchcraft incriminates the group : Alleline, Haydon, Bland and Esterhase are all four up to their necks in it. Nothing, at that point, singles out an individual.

What the interview with Sam changes

This is where chapter 26 pivots. Look at the way Smiley questions him: he is not asking open questions, he is checking something. "At what time exactly?", "Isn't that late for a club ticker-tape?", "Bill's the Savile, isn't he?" : deceptively vague questions, surgically precise. It is clear that he arrives with the Haydon hypothesis already in mind, and is testing its strength against Sam's testimony. Le Carré also shows him under controlled tension: Smiley pulling at his lip, speaking "in a small voice," staring into the middle distance. And Sam himself notices : this is the chapter in which le Carré places Ann's metaphor comparing George to a swift, the bird that lowers its body temperature so as not to waste energy. In other words: impassivity on the surface, a storm underneath.

Then, on the doorstep, Smiley does something remarkable: he dares to voice the hypothesis out loud. Bill in Ann's bed, Sam's phone call serving as the signal, Bill turning up an hour later knowing what he should not know. And Sam answers with a single word ("Broadly") before closing up again, half angry, half out of his depth, and withdrawing into his croupier's twilight. So by the end of the chapter, Smiley holds the first piece of evidence pointing at Bill individually, plus a coherent reconstruction. It is a near-conviction. But it is not proof.

Why Smiley cannot conclude

Why Smiley cannot conclude (and the novel would end there) is for three reasons, stacked on top of one another :

Logically, the ticker-tape inconsistency is suggestive, not conclusive. Bill could have had another source, another club, a stroke of luck. A good counsel would take it apart in five minutes. And the Witchcraft machinery leaves the other three perfectly possible.

Politically, Smiley needs something rock-solid. Accuse Bill Haydon --- the hero of the service, and one of the most admired men in the Circus --- on the strength of a two-hour discrepancy in a radio bulletin from months back? Unthinkable without flagrant proof. Lacon and the Minister will demand the irrefutable.

Psychologically (and this is the most beautiful part I think) Smiley cannot trust his own suspicion. He knows Bill has been Ann's lover. He therefore knows that his jealousy could manufacture guilt where there is none. Karla has literally poisoned the well: as Haydon will explain to him in chapter 38, Karla had calculated that if Bill were known to be Ann's lover, Smiley would never again see him "straight." Ann, the last illusion of the illusionless man. The cruelty of the situation is that Smiley suffers this effect before learning that it was deliberate : he will only discover at the very end that it was a manoeuvre. In the meantime he does the only thing possible: he imposes extra rigour on himself, building the case against Bill while distrusting himself at every step.

How certainty arrives, afterwards

It is built in three stages after Collins.

First, Jim Prideaux's account: his Czech and Russian interrogators knew Control's rotten-apple theory and Karla in person attended the sessions. Karla learnt about the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, etc. codenames, and then back in England, Prideaux is told to forget about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, etc. Who else but the mole could have got that information?

Then Toby Esterhase's confession, which lays out the whole Polyakov machinery and gives up the address of the Lock Gardens safe house... while Toby himself does not know who the mole is (the compartmentalisation is perfect). The machinery alone does not yield the name.

Hence the final stage: the trap. Smiley has Tarr send, from Paris, a telegram announcing vital information about a Soviet penetration, enough to force the panicked mole to call an emergency meeting with Polyakov at the safe house. Smiley and Guillam wait in the dark. The door opens. It is Bill. There, and only there, does suspicion become fact, with recorded proof on the tapes.

The coda, in hindsight

What makes chapter 26 so delicious on rereading is I think that we watch Smiley accomplish exactly what Karla had bet was impossible: running the investigation against Bill despite Ann : not by ignoring his wound, but by treating it as a bias to be neutralised. And le Carré adds one final melancholy touch: once Haydon is unmasked, everyone, Smiley included, has the troubling feeling of having "known all along." The truth had been visible from the start. It was simply unbearable. Karla's insurance worked to perfection : it turned the one correct intuition into the very one that nobody, starting with Smiley himself, dared to claim as his own.

I am currently re-reading several translations of TSWCIFTC, and I have noticed a few differences in the various translations, and actually in the different English editions as well!

In chapter 7 ("Kiever"), Leamas, Ashe, and Kiever are together for the first time, and they are dining together at a Chinese restaurant. Kiever relaxes a bit after 2 bottles of wine, and he talks about the situation in France and Germany. Here is the excerpt from the 50th-anniversary edition of TSWCIFTC by Penguin Books in 2013:

>Dinner was very good and they drank both bottles of wine. Kiever opened up a little on the second: he'd just come back from a tour of West Germany and France. France was in a hell of a mess, de Gaulle was on the way out and God alone knew what would happen then. With a hundred thousand demoralised colons returning from Algeria he reckoned Fascism was on the cards.

>“What about Germany?” asked Alec, prompting him.

First interesting thing (though it is not my main question), in the 1964 French translation by Marcel Duhamel & Henri Robillot, the passage concerning De Gaulle is purely and simply deleted! This is not surprising : we are in 1964, and De Gaulle is in power, and while officially it is not forbidden to criticize the president, French publishers are very cautious about this subject. The 1964 French translation is therefore as follows (and it is still the one you can find on shelves today!):

>La cuisine était très bonne et ils vidèrent deux bouteilles. À la deuxième, Kiever se livra un peu et raconta qu'il rentrait juste d'un voyage en France et en Allemagne de l'Ouest. La France se trouvait dans une telle pagaille et Dieu seul pouvait dire ce qui en résulterait ! Avec une bonne centaine de milliers de colons démoralisés rentrant d'Algérie, il s'attendait à une remontée très nette du fascisme.

>— Et l'Allemagne ? demanda Ashe pour le pousser à parler.

Another small but significant difference that is in the 1964 French translation: It is Ashe who asks Kiever the question about Germany, whereas in the original version, it is Alec. It is a detail, but I find that it changes the scene's dynamic a bit, and it makes the character of Ashe a little more present and active in the conversation. So, who addresses Kiever regarding Germany: Ashe or Alec? We can understand that a typo is easy to make: both names start with A, and they both have four letters. From a story perspective, both are possible: Ashe is, in a way, Kiever's accomplice, and can therefore prompt his colleague to steer him toward the right conversation to have with Leamas. And we know that Ashe is not very subtle, a bit abrupt in his approach to Leamas. But it could also be Alec who asks the question: he needs to get "hired" by Kiever, and it is in his interest to show him that he is ready to switch sides, starting by bringing up the current situation in Germany.

Since I also own the 2013 German translation by Sabine Roth (Ullstein editions), which was also released for the 50th anniversary of TSWCIFTC, I decided to check this passage in that translation:

>»Und in Deutschland?«, gab ihm Ashe sein Stichwort.

In the 2013 German translation, it is also Ashe who asks Kiever the question about Germany. So, in both translations for the 50th anniversary of TSWCIFTC, it is Ashe who asks Kiever the question about Germany, whereas in the original version, it is Alec. But the 1964 French translation (the one and only currently in French) necessarily relied on the 1963 Victor Gollancz Limited hardback edition, so I decided to check this passage in that original 1963 edition:

>“What about Germany?” asked Ashe, prompting him.

Interesting. In the original 1963 text, it is indeed Ashe who asks Kiever the question about Germany! So? Is it an error by Penguin Books? Or was it a correction made with the author's approval between 1963 and 2013? Actually, I'm inclined to lean toward the second hypothesis: an error must have slipped in during the typesetting of the original 1963 edition. Back then, manuscripts were typed on typewriters, and it wasn't uncommon for typos to slip into the text. And this error would have been corrected later, with the author's approval, for subsequent editions.

After the original red hardcover edition of TSWCIFTC from Gollancz, a paperback edition was released as early as 1964 by Pan Books Limited (the rights remaining with Gollancz at that time). I was able to get my hands on the 13th reprint from 1976 by Pan Books, and in this reprint, it is Alec who addresses Kiever. So, was the Ashe->Alec correction already in the 1964 Pan Books paperback edition? Are reprints meant to change the text or not ? I don't know. I could not get my eyes on the original Pan Book 1964 paperback edition :(

So I don't know where & when the Ashe->Alec correction was made... Prior to the Penguin editions for sure. But was it already in the 1964 Pan Books paperback edition? Not sure about that, and I doubt this was the case... Or was it made in a (Sceptre?) edition by Hodder & Stoughton : Michael Benskin from University of Oslo wrote in this 2023 article "Times Out of Joint: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (available for free here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370669802_Times_Out_of_Joint_The_Spy_Who_Came_in_from_the_Cold) that John le Carré "in his introduction to the Sceptre edition of 2009 records that various “minor errors” have been corrected, but they remain unspecified". I couldn't find such a quote in the foreword to the 2009 Sceptre edition, but maybe this is another 2009 sceptre edition that I don't have access to? If you have any information about this, please share it with me :)

It's interesting to note that both the 1964 French translation and the 2013 (!) German translation wrongly have Ashe asking Kiever about Germany. This means that the 2013 German translation was based on the somehow outdated original 1963 Victor Gollancz Limited hardback edition, which contained the Ashe->Alec typo, rather than on a later edition that had already corrected this error !

Your thoughts? Do you know when these minor corrections were made? Do you know the other corrections ? Thanks !

PS: The plot of TSWCIFTC suffers from numerous inconsistencies, but when John le Carré was proposed late 1998 / early 1999 to fix them in an upcoming edition by Hodder & Stoughton, he (rightfully imho) refused to do so, explaining in a foreword to the Sceptre edition of 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton (isbn13 9780141194523) :

>My diligent publisher kindly suggested that, for this new edition of the novel, I might grab the opportunity to correct some of the more blatant inconsistencies and - dare I say it? - infelicities that occur in the original text. I declined. To me, they are honourable scars, part of who I was and wasn’t, still at the threshold of my writing life, thirty-five years ago. JOHN LE CARRE, October 1998