The Cage

The Cage opens on a disappearance: a woman, later identified as Evelyn Greene, takes a telephone call at home and leaves without a word, to the bewilderment of her husband. At about the same time, three Russian defectors whom British intelligence has housed in apparent safe houses are found murdered by Soviet agents. Arthur Valentine, who runs the safe houses, is under pressure to explain the deaths and to find who is supplying the killers with addresses.

The case grows a second and a third body. A Russian man, Grigory Palenko, dies brutally, and Doctor Ian Ross, the physician who tried to save him, is murdered; Ross had been called out to an accident at Barton Hall the day before he died. Foyle, with Sam now his assistant, begins from a physical detail, an NKVD tattoo recorded on the dead Russian, and it takes him to the house. Barton Hall presents itself as a Y-station, a rural listening post that gathers and transcribes Soviet radio traffic. It is a cover. Beneath it the house runs a covert military interrogation programme in its basement cells, where suspected foreign agents are questioned by methods that are not always non-violent. The officer in command is Colonel Galt, who with one of his officers walks Foyle round the building and assures him there is no brutality, though one account records that Galt still has a prisoner taken out and subjected to a mock execution.

Foyle finds that the woman being held at Barton Hall is the innocent Evelyn Greene, whose only offence is to share a name with a vanished Foreign Office translator later found in the Soviet sector of Berlin, and he arranges for her release. The resolution exposes Major James McDonald, a man inside British intelligence, as a Russian sympathiser. McDonald is responsible both for the two Greene incidents and for the murders of Palenko and Ross; he has been working against his own service, and when challenged he tries to deflect Foyle with allegations about the running of the place. Foyle's case is that a British officer, not a Soviet agent, is the source of the deaths. The sources disagree on the rank and first name the character is heard to carry, so the form used here is the one the per-series record gives.

The strength is the interrogation house itself. Making the crime the work of a British officer in a British facility gives the episode a subject beyond espionage, and the obstruction Foyle meets comes from his own side as much as from the Soviets. Its weakness is that the mole hunt depends on a man the audience meets late, and the parallel election thread is only loosely bound to the case; reviewers split on it, one calling this by far the best episode of the three and ironically not written by Horowitz, another finding the Adam Wainwright strand the weakest part.

The Cage establishes the post-war intelligence order, with Sir Alec Meyerson arriving at the top of the episode as the new head of MI5 and Pierce and Valentine below him. Adam Wainwright fights and wins the West Peckham by-election for Labour, and the parliamentary career that runs through the rest of the programme begins here. The episode's argument is staged in a cellar rather than resolved: Foyle asks Meyerson whether it troubles him how the intelligence on his desk is obtained, and Meyerson answers that the Soviets use the same or worse methods.