The Family Trade

The novel unfolds with all the conventions one would expect of classic le Carré: with the painstaking set up of the backdrop and set pieces, followed by an unanticipated unraveling, culminating in a dramatic international car chase. Harkaway has an ear for rough and tumble action worthy of any James Bond novel — less in keeping with Smiley’s more restrained and cerebral disposition.

Notably, Harkaway offers a more rounded and realistic depiction of the novel’s female characters than his father often did. Whereas Charlie (The Little Drummer Girl) and Annabel (A Most Wanted Man) were mostly passive victims of the secret world, Susanna asserts her own agency, meeting the deceit around her with some deceit of her own. Although the novel leaves open the question of whether this agency was anticipated by Smiley from the beginning. We also gain new insight into Smiley’s wife, Ann, whose long-running infidelity takes on new shading when we learn she, too, is enduring an unfaithful spouse: Smiley himself, whose true and lasting commitment has always been to the Service.

Harkaway has a knack for the rhythm of his father’s dialogue, and at times it’s easy to hear le Carré’s voice shining through. Here’s Smiley, in a conversation with a counterpart in the other secret service,

“I’m afraid I don’t know all of it myself, Don. I’ve retired — you may have heard. Control has me dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s, and this is one of my chores, but it seems there’s a dead arms dealer in the Bahnhofstrasse using a doctored Russian-made passport. Head of Station there thinks the work was done here, but no one we know is owning up. I wondered if you knew someone we wouldn’t think of.”

“I’m sure we do” Evans snapped, “but there’s a sort of perception over here, George, that you aren’t always forthcoming with security. You play fast and loose, and we only get to hear about it later.”

Eventually, all this fast and loose maneuvering catches up with Smiley, who becomes a victim of an act of deception himself. It is this deception that leaves him pondering the point of the entire affair; he longs, “above all,” to “show that the brutal passages of his life were an aberration and not his underlying truth.”

This brutality — and the long-running game of cat and mouse with the elusive and titular Karla — leaves Smiley pondering the nature of his secret world. Karla, a Soviet spymaster and Smiley’s opposite number, is a near-mythic figure in le Carré’s Cold War Smiley novels: brilliant, ruthless, rarely seen but always present. Their rivalry spans decades and defines much of Smiley’s career. In this novel, as in the ones before, the shadow of Karla looms large, and the moral ambiguity of their struggle drives the essential question of the book:

Would the Cold War with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and shape ordinary lives come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell? [. . .] Or was all this to and fro between them just a way to stay busy while God disposed? There had to be something more, something better, or what was the point?

How We Learned to Love Tradecraft

“The secret world,” wrote the military historian John Keegan, has “always occupied a halfway house between fact and fiction.” Few genres are so entangled with real institutions and popular imagination. Both Ian Fleming and le Carré inhabited that ambiguity: each worked in intelligence before writing the stories that came to define it.

One of the most influential real-world figures in shaping this popular understanding is Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5. As early as the 1990s, Rimington understood the importance of public relations in the world of espionage. She helped reposition British intelligence in the cultural landscape — not only by promoting intelligence as a viable career option but also through her influence on how spies were depicted. She’s widely credited as having been a key influence in the choice of Judi Dench as M in the Bond movies. Since her retirement, she has become a best-selling spy novelist and in doing so paved the way for other intelligence chiefs, on both sides of the Atlantic, to feel comfortable with frequent appearances as podcast guests, media commentators, and regulars on the literary conference circuit.

Espionage is often jokingly referred to as the world’s “second-oldest profession” — and stories about it have been with us almost as long. One of the earliest known spy stories appears in the Torah: after Moses’ death, Joshua sends two spies into Jericho, the world’s oldest walled city, to prepare for invasion. There, a Canaanite innkeeper named Rahab — interpreted by some as a prostitute — hides the spies from the king’s guards, lowers them from her window on a rope, and extracts a promise of protection for her family. The tale includes all the familiar elements of modern spy fiction: power, sex, tradecraft, midnight escapes, and a deal struck in the shadows. Espionage begins not simply as subterfuge, but as strategy.

In contemporary form, the spy novel rose in popularity in the nineteenth century, with early works like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands (1903). John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), introduced the now-familiar man-on-the-run formula, and was read widely in the trenches during World War I, was among the first to cross into mass cinema. It became a cinematic template, adapted most famously by Alfred Hitchcock, whose influence shaped the suspense-thriller for decades. That blueprint would carry forward into the morally murkier worlds of writers like le Carré, whose novels reimagined espionage as psychological terrain as much as political.

But the espionage fiction genre is still defined by one man, Bond. All other cultural productions bow to his stature: James Bond remains the world’s most iconic spy. Bond’s nine-lives ability to survive the most horrific torture, escape the most extreme capture scenarios, and enjoy superhuman sexual attractiveness combine to make him a British Golem — an indestructible projection of power when Britian itself was in decline.

In the novels we hear little about that decline. Written from the early 1950s to the mid-’60s, Fleming’s series coincides exactly with the collapse of British power, exemplified by the disastrous Suez Crisis. Paul Gilroy has described Britain’s failure to reckon with its own loss of stature as a form of “post-colonial melancholia.” Bond, then, is a superhero not of his zeitgeist but against it — an imperial fantasy invented in the face of imperial retreat.

Where espionage fiction goes from the original Bond moment is harder to pin down. A vast cultural industry promoting spy-related stories and cultural paraphernalia is alive and well. The Bond series, recently critiqued for being in a crisis after the departure of Daniel Craig, has had a successful reboot in Kim Sherwood’s novels set in the “Double O” universe. On the literary left, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, a novel of infiltration in the environmental movement, was well received. And in the vast ecosystem of spy-related podcasts, the standout is unquestionably the “Rest is Classified” from the ever-prolific Goalhanger crew.

The Spy Who Came Into the Cubicle

Reflecting the deeper cynicism of the contemporary moment, the espionage genre has broadened — making room not only for the superhuman but also for the inept, the pedestrian, and the bureaucratically marooned.

Mick Herron’s Slough House series, written during an era when intelligence work had a tarnished reputation, takes aim at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bond. His antihero, Jackson Lamb — flatulent, bigoted, and sharply funny — is a once-formidable spy who now presides over a band of seemingly failed operatives. He reactivates his skills only when one of his own is under threat, and even then, with great disdain for all involved.

In many ways, Herron’s Lamb descends from Smiley, not in method or temperament but in his awareness that the real enemy may lie within. Smiley, especially as depicted by Harkaway, embodies a quieter kind of endurance: flawed, principled, and painfully aware of the price exacted for loyalty in a faithless world.

Unlike most spy fiction, politics is ever-present in Slough House. But there is rarely a sense that the intelligence services are helping to advance a higher cause or contributing to the safety of the British state. In one of the series’ more pointed entries, 2018’s London Rules, the threat emerges not from foreign agents but from internal rot — a perverse “imperial-folly-strikes-back” twist. Herron casts a withering eye on Britain’s political class, especially the Tories, whose austerity politics and flag-waving form the background noise of the novels.

Bond and Lamb are manifestly different creatures — one athletic and glamorous, the other revolting and relentlessly crass. Yet both are survivors. What truly distinguishes Lamb, and his contemporary counterparts, from Bond is the ordinariness of their world: stained shirts, unchanged underwear, and empty takeout containers.

This blend of the mundane and the high stakes is echoed elsewhere. In the recent TV remake of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, Lashana Lynch plays Bianca Pullman, a replacement for the original Inspector Claude Lebel. Pullman juggles everyday domestic pressures while hunting Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal, a villain with superhuman abilities. Similarly, the French series The Bureau, set in a drab industrial estate, portrays the friction between the dull surfaces of office life and the perilous operations that unfold beneath.

By grounding espionage in the domestic and the procedural, writers are able to depict the spy as a flawed, human figure — and to reintroduce the political context so often absent in the Bond era. In this sense, they follow in the footsteps of Eric Ambler, regarded by some as the true originator of the modern spy novel. The exploration of the political context in which spies operate is critical both in fiction and in nonfiction. And there is a surprising alignment between the cynical realism of today’s literary spies and the hard-nosed world of writers with a security background.

Our Man With Bad Information

Le Carré was highly critical of the secret world and recognized its profound limitations. His attitude to politics and politicians became increasingly despairing over the course of his life. One of his final acts was to claim his Irish citizenship — both as an affirmation of his new homeland’s pro-European outlook and as a rebuke to Britain’s growing Euroskepticism, aligning him, perhaps ironically, with the same London circles his novels frequently skewered.

Intelligence is both a peacetime and wartime endeavor. For Keegan, espionage is a “weak form of attack” — one that still requires the use of traditional methods of force to achieve victory. The Macedonians, he argues, “beat the Persians at Gaugamela not because they took the enemy by surprise but because of the ferocity of their attack.”

Keegan goes on to outline the rare but critical moments when intelligence has met its ideal form was reached — decisively shaping the course of military operations:

[w]hen one side was privileged to know the other’s intentions, capabilities, and plan of action in place and time . . . while its opponent neither knew as much in return or that his own plans were uncovered [as in the British and US codebreaking efforts in WWII]. Ultra — and Magic — occasionally met the ideal standard.

This standard, however, seems consistently more honored in the breach than the observance. Public disillusionment with intelligence reached new heights in the early part of the twenty-first century. First came the US failure to foresee the attacks of 9/11. Then came a cascade of intelligence failures in the run-up to the second war in Iraq — both were fueled by intelligence ineptitude and strategic complacency about the costs of morally dubious interventions.

The British government’s Chilcott Inquiry — whose executive summary alone runs to 150 pages — was one of four official investigations that examined British intelligence failures in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Chilcott provided a very poor grade for the conduct of the secret services, who provided “flawed information” while their political masters manipulated that misinformation to beat the heady drums of war.

After Iraq — with its hundreds of thousands dead — intelligence to many seemed to have passed its zenith, useful only as a supplier of dramatic stories on screen or in novels. Yet, outside of the world of cultural production, intelligence has been undergoing a renaissance of its own.

A turning point came in February 2022, when the United States publicly announced an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Though the announcement did not prevent the Russian invasion, and thus failed in its immediate goal, it marked a new phase in intelligence’s public role. For many, it signaled that intelligence was “back” — not just as a hidden tool of war but as a driver of visible political strategy, one that might even aim toward peace and deterrence.

Donald Trump’s on-and-off threats to halt US intelligence cooperation with Ukraine underscores the ongoing importance of espionage and surveillance in modern warfare. Ironically, some recent Ukrainian attacks inside Russia were reportedly carried out without advance notice to Washington — partly due to fears that leaks could emerge from within the Trump administration itself.

Signals and Silence

In the Middle East, Israel’s famed spy agencies failed to anticipate the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. The roots of that failure run deep.

In 2004, Israel adopted a new strategy toward Gaza known as hitnatkut (disengagement), shifting from a “boots on the ground” occupation to a system of control based on technological supremacy. After successive military victories, Israeli defense planners came to rely heavily on remote surveillance systems and early-warning technologies like the Iron Dome.

Hamas adapted by going entirely off-grid. With Israeli soldiers no longer exercising direct control inside Gaza, Israel’s ability to collect human intelligence was sharply reduced. One key cause was the dramatic reduction in Palestinian workers entering Israel for work — previously, a major source of on-the-ground information. (In contrast, Israel’s tight control over Palestinian movement in the West Bank ensures no such dearth of information.) This intelligence gap was compounded by a political and strategic pivot: attention shifted toward the West Bank, Iran, and settling the lingering scores with Hezbollah after the bruising war of 2006.

The aftermath of October 7 created an opportunity for political, military, and intelligence recalibration — one that led to a series of lethal Israeli operations and the reassertion of military supremacy. Consequential among these was the extrajudicial execution of Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader (previously indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court), while he was in Tehran for the inauguration of the Iran’s new president. Reports suggest that Israel either penetrated deep into Iranian territory and/or received help from high-level insiders within Iran’s own military establishment.

In early 2024, Israeli intelligence struck again through attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership, infiltrating the organization’s communications network. A coordinated attack on Hezbollah’s supply chains led to the destruction of pagers held by operatives across Lebanon — crippling the organization’s military capacity. This operation, with its surgical precision, seemed to belong more to the realm of fiction than reality. Yet it led directly to the killing of Hezbollah’s top leadership and was a key domino in the fall of the Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

The combined effects of these operations have created a new strategic dynamic in the region. The situation remains fluid. It is far too early to predict the long-term consequences. The path from flawed intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was not linear but it was cumulative — an arc of compounded failure. In contrast, the implications of Israel’s renewed intelligence and military dominance have yet to firmly emerge. Those supporting the Israeli attack on Iran have been quick to deny the historical parallels with the war on Iraq. But history offers precedent: such operations are best understood not in isolation but in light of the broader political goals they serve.

Peace Deferred

If Israel has ever pursued a multitrack approach to diplomacy, peacebuilding, and statecraft, it bore some fruit from the early 1970s to the late ’90s. During that period, Israel participated in numerous international peace initiatives, with varying degrees of commitment and success. Alongside this diplomatic effort, however, the second track remained constant: the primacy of military and intelligence approaches.

As the Oslo Accords unraveled in the early years of the twenty-first century, Israel’s increasingly right-wing leadership turned to three strategic pillars. First, it sought to establish deep trading ties with global markets through a deregulated, neoliberal economy. Second, it relied on overwhelming military force to deter troublesome regional actors. And third, it used political, military, and intelligence means to contain and isolate its enemies — especially the Palestinians.

This third strategy was not new. In Rise and Kill First, a comprehensive history of Israel’s targeted assassination program, Ronen Bergman traces its roots from before the foundation of the state up to the present day. Bergman, who has a sympathetic ear for the perspective of Israeli securocrats, does not mince his words when drawing conclusions about the long-term, strategic, impact of the program:

the intelligence community’s very success fostered the illusion [. . .] that covert operations could be a strategic and not just a tactical tool — that they could be used in place of real diplomacy to end the geographic, ethnic, religious and national disputes in which Israel is mired [. . .] In many respects the story of Israel’s intelligence community [. . .] has been one of a long string of impressive tactical successes, but also disastrous strategic failures.

Whether tactically successful or not (many were not), Israel’s intelligence community is still constrained by the long-standing failure of its political class to establish a meaningful strategy for peace. This historic failure has compounded in the present.

The October 7 attacks represent the failure of Israel’s strategies of containment and deterrence. The containment of Hamas in Gaza was an illusion. In its aftermath, Israel — supported by the European Union and the United States — has shifted to a strategy of containment by elimination, using maximum ferocity to reestablish deterrence in ways that run counter to international humanitarian law. The implications are grave, most especially for Palestinian civilians. The final drawing of the line from bad intelligence to bad politics leads, inevitably, to tragedy.

The Thinking Spy’s Burden

Christopher Felix — the nom de plume of former CIA agent, diplomat, and sometime historian of the US labor movement, James McCargar — recounts his experiences in the secret war (inside Suzanna’s Hungary) in his “thinking man’s spy book,” A Short Course in the Secret War. The book is a review of the perils and methods of running covert operations behind enemy lines and concludes with a dramatic escape worthy of le Carré or his heirs.

Like much of the literature, fictional or otherwise, it avoids sustained reflection on the strategic political context. For spies, too much political introspection can be dangerous; as with Harkaway’s Smiley, it risks eroding their operational faith. But, toward the end of the book, Felix allows himself a moment of reflection on the relationship between strategic purpose and effectiveness in espionage: “The Soviets are laboring under a severe handicap in the secret war. It is simply that their basic policy objectives are false. No single set of ideas [. . .] doctrine or scale can uniformly animate all men everywhere. Man’s unity is in his diversity.”

Felix held Western liberal democracy in high regard. It is another day’s work to engage in a discussion on the merits and demerits of this worldview. But what remains critical is this: intelligence services are ultimately the servants of their political masters. In a world marked by the ubiquitous shortcomings of politics and politicians, our expectations of intelligence must necessarily be modest. One doesn’t need to look far for proof: Trump publicly contradicted his own intelligence agencies on the question of Iran’s nuclear capability. The episode underscores a recurring danger in modern warfare: that even credible intelligence is only as effective as the political leadership willing to believe — or exploit — it.

And yet in fiction we may find a kind of hope. By the end of Karla’s Choice, Smiley is left without answers to the questions of purpose and value that haunt him. He yearns for a resolution that does not come. But although Smiley feels adrift, the reader finds solace in knowing that Smiley exists. Smiley’s everyman dignity affirms that, even in a world permeated by betrayal and deceit, loyalty and integrity are possible.

In the book’s introduction, Harkaway cites Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the “short twentieth century,” adding the riposte that we are “still waiting for it to end.” This novel, set deep inside the Cold War, is not merely a period piece. By centering the story of a refugee in a world that dehumanizes refugees, it pushes against the cynicism of our times and quietly insists on a virtue deeper than strategy or doctrine.

In an essay marking the posthumous publication of le Carré’s final book, Silverview, Herron argued that le Carré’s work allowed us to see the light as well as the dark and that its lasting value lies in the recognition that “in dark times walls are built, but bridges are what matter.” With this latest addition to the Smiley canon, Harkaway has delivered precisely that.