Smiley Tracks the Mole

Smiley is back at work. He has rejoined the game, and now he has to assemble, quietly and without asking permission, the files his investigation needs. That means reopening old wounds inside the Circus and following suspicions the people upstairs would rather leave alone. The mole is still in place, still reading everything, and there is no time to waste on the wrong question. Most of the building would prefer to bury the whole business; Smiley cannot.

The episode runs two threads in parallel. Peter Guillam breaks into the Circus's own archives, a burglary committed at his place of work, and comes out with files that change the picture of the mole. The risk falls to Guillam, the one man Smiley trusts to take it for him. Smiley, meanwhile, goes to see an old comrade whose memory might settle the matter. One thread digs through dusty paper; the other through a memory that refuses to let go. The two searches are the same search, really: for the moment the story stops adding up.

John le Carré and Arthur Hopcraft wrote it, John Irvin directed it, and it aired on 24 September 1979. Alec Guinness is Smiley, with Michael Jayston's Guillam doing the breaking and entering. Anthony Bate's Sir Oliver Lacon hovers at the edges. Ian Richardson is Bill Haydon, Terence Rigby is Roy Bland, Bernard Hepton is Toby Esterhase. Beryl Reid is Connie Sachs, Alexander Knox is Control, Michael Aldridge is Percy Alleline and Frank Compton is Bryant. The chess pieces are all on the board now.

What sticks is how unglamorous it all is. It is espionage as office work, and all the more convincing for it. The deepest secrets sit in dusty files nobody has bothered to read, and in the memory of an old comrade who has kept too much. A cipher can be broken. Persuading a memory to give up its secrets is slower work. And the episode leaves you with the sense that the worst is still to come.