Part 5

The fifth part turns an enquiry into an operation. Armed with the tapes, Smiley calls a crash meeting with Saul Enderby, now head of the Circus, and plays them. Kirov's recorded confession is the core of the hour: Karla had instructed Kirov to build a legend, a false identity complete with a false mother in the West, for a young woman, and had authorised the transfer of ten thousand Swiss francs a month to the account of a Mr Glazer in Thun. The whole mechanism of the case is in that recording, and it is played to a room rather than shown in flashback, which keeps the discovery in the present.

The scene is a group of spies sitting and smoking and talking for something close to a quarter of an hour, and it is both the part's method and its cost. Enderby authorises Smiley to mount an operation to get the evidence out of Grigoriev, and the sanction is a totally deniable blessing. His warning is the terms on which the job is being run: if the plan aborts and there is a scandal, he will say the whole catastrophe was a ludicrous piece of private enterprise by a senile spy who has lost his marbles. Smiley's own line, the serial's most quoted sentence, is that if a rogue elephant charges out of the thickets of his past and gives him a second shot, he intends to shoot it dead, but with the minimum of force.

Before he goes, he visits his wife Ann at the coast, on a Cornish clifftop, and the marriage ends there. It is the last thing that happens to him as a private person before the operation begins. Then he and Esterhase and a small team of operatives from his own Circus days close the London safe house and set up in Switzerland, where the team works out that Glazer is a Soviet diplomat named Grigoriev: a man who has lately moved out of the diplomatic ghetto, acquired a Mercedes, withdraws money from the bank every month and visits a private medical clinic every week. The clinic is where the young woman is held under a false name, in the care of Mother Felicity and the religious house that keeps her.

The strength is the tape. Kirov's confession has to carry almost the whole of the plot, and it does, as an audio recording played to a room full of people, which keeps the solving of the case in the room rather than in a reconstruction. It is the only part of the serial in which the mystery is solved on screen by a document rather than by a person: the tapes identify the target completely before anybody travels to Berne.

The weakness is the meeting's length. One critic treats the quarter-hour talk scene as a virtue, an example of a drama that refuses to hurry; a viewer coming to the serial cold will find the first act the least eventful stretch of the six. The hour has other business that does not need defending. It is the part in which Smiley gets authority, of a kind the institution will disown the moment it becomes inconvenient, and the part that makes the case a discovery that Karla has been spending his service's money on something of his own. It sits in the run as the plot part: the evidence, the authorisation and the move to Berne.