The Karla Trilogy I: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. At the start of the book we're introduced to Jim Prideaux, who is teaching at Thursgood's School in the West Country. Impressed partly by his size and physique, what nickname do the boys eventually give him?

Answer: Rhino

The boys try various nicknames - Trooper, Pirate, Goulash - before settling upon Rhino, partly because of his size and strength, partly because he appears to live off the land and partly because of his appetite for physical exercise, despite still suffering from some obvious back problem. Bill Haydon says of Prideaux "he's about eight foot tall and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge". Jumbo is Jim's nickname for the helpful schoolboy Bill Roach, while a teacher at my old school of similar build and dimensions to Jim Prideaux was called Yeti.

As for Spy - well, we'll wait and see...

2. The next main character to appear in the book is George Smiley, who was a senior manager in the Circus, the British Secret Service. He has been sacked because of his connections to the failure of an operation in Czechoslovakia in which a British agent was shot and captured. What was the codename of this operation?

Answer: Operation Testify

Operation Testify was devised by Control. It was an attempt to secure the defection of a Czech artillery general, with Jim Prideaux being the field agent. However the operation went badly wrong, and Prideaux was shot in the back and captured. This debacle led to Control leaving the Circus, a number of senior personnel being sacked - Smiley among them - and Percy Alleline taking command.

3. Peter Guillam, a mid-ranking agent with the Circus, facilitates a meeting for Smiley with renegade agent Rikki Tarr. Tarr tells Smiley of his affair with a Russian woman while on a mission to Asia. In which city did this take place?

Answer: Hong Kong

Tarr meets Irina in Hong Kong after a close encounter with her husband, "a Moscow Centre-trained hood". She falls in love with Tarr and tells him of a threat to the London Circus from within, from a mole code-named Gerald who is run by a Russian agent in the Soviet Embassy named Polyakov. Tarr contacts the Circus saying that he has information of a threat and that he wants to facilitate Irina's defection, but almost immediately she is taken back to the Soviet Union under arrest and shot. Tarr flees and is listed as a defector, but he seeks out Guillam to arrange a meeting with Smiley and Lacon (a top-ranking Civil Servant from the Cabinet Office, with responsibility for the Circus) so that he can tell them what he's found out.

After this meeting Lacon asks Smiley to find Gerald.

4. Guillam has a bodyguard or "babysitter", whom he tasks with looking after Tarr. He's described as "small, dark and attentive" and "a steady, soft-spoken boy with a great will to please", but he has a propensity for sudden violence. What's his rather deceptive name?

Answer: Fawn

Fawn seems pleasant but we learn little about him from the book, except he behaves violently towards Tarr and also towards Polyakov at the book's denouement. He plays a much more significant role in the next book in the trilogy, "The Honourable Schoolboy".

5. Smiley too has a legman-cum-babysitter who watches his back and runs various errands for him. What's his name?

Answer: Mendel

Inspector Mendel is formerly of Special Branch and lives in Mitcham, Surrey. He's worked for both Smiley and Guillam in the past, and is described as a "quirkish, loping tracker of a man, sharp-faced and sharp-eyed". It was he who found out the name of the school where Prideaux teaches. Extra points if you realised that all the answer options are names of famous geneticists!

6. Smiley asks Guillam to go into the Circus to examine the Duty Officer's ledgers for the night of 11/12 April, when the exchange of messages between Tarr and the Circus took place. What did Guillam find out about these documents?

Answer: They have all been removed

Guillam finds that not only have all the relevant documents been removed but that this action took place very recently, on the day that Tarr arrived back in London. A note on the next page reads "All enquiries to Head of London Station" in Toby Esterhase's handwriting.

7. Smiley goes to Oxford to visit the former Head of Research at the Circus, who was forcibly retired along with him. Who is this person?

Answer: Connie Sachs

Sachs tells Smiley about her surveillance of Polyakov, who is nominally a Cultural Attache in the Soviet Embassy in London and was not seen as a threat. Close observation, however, revealed that Polyakov is a lot more powerful and important in the Embassy than originally thought. However when Sachs requested additional resources to investigate this further she was ordered to stop this.

8. Meanwhile the Circus is prospering. Alleline has found a new source of high-quality and important information from the Soviet Union that's codenamed Source Merlin. What is the codename for Source Merlin's product?

Answer: Witchcraft

Source Merlin's Witchcraft product seems immensely valuable, accurate and wide-ranging, covering all aspects of government and the armed forces. If it's genuine then the Circus becomes very powerful - but if it's chickenfeed then the Circus will founder. Alleline profits immensely from this, being promoted to head the Circus after Control's departure and demise.

9. In a core section of the book, Smiley actually meets Karla. In which hot and sweaty Asian capital city does this meeting take place?

Answer: Delhi

In the mid-50s Karla is travelling from the US after a failed Soviet operation, but he is arrested in Dehli at the request of the Circus. Smiley meets with him on a couple of occasions while he's in detention, in an attempt to get him to defect. However at no time during the course of these meetings does Karla utter a single word.

This unnerves Smiley to such an extent that he begins telling Karla about his private life and his relationship with his wife, Ann. He feels defeated by Karla's strength and dedication to his cause. Eventually Karla returns to Moscow, where he is promoted to a high level in Moscow Centre.

10. During his meeting with Karla, Smiley provides him with a quantity of his favourite cigarettes. What brand does Karla smoke?

Answer: Camels

Karla chain-smoked Camel cigarettes. During the meetings with Smiley Karla took Smiley's cigarette lighter, which was a present from his wife Ann.

11. As well as his chain-smoking, Karla has another distinguishing feature that identifies him: he is totally averse to the use of one particular form of message transfer. What technique does he never use?

Answer: Radio messaging

There were a number of occasions during Karla's career when a reliance on clandestine radio messaging led to problems. In 1941 Karla was running a group of Russian resistance fighters behind German lines when his radio operator was turned and transmitted messages to the Germans, and in the US a network he was running was rolled up after a mistake by another radio operator.

After this Karla totally dropped radio messaging (except from Embassy locations) from his repertoire. At one time the Circus, thinking that they were servicing Source Merlin, offered him a dedicated long-arm radio service from Finland, but he refused this.

12. Smiley goes to meet Sam Collins, who was Duty Officer at the Circus on the night of Operation Testify. He too has left the Circus, but what is his job when Smiley goes to see him?

Answer: Manager of a casino

Collins is the manager of a very high-class casino in London. He tells Smiley about the events of the night and how Control reacted to the shooting of Prideaux. Later in the discussion he mentions something which Smiley identifies as an inconsistency in one person's account of what happened that night.

13. Smiley meets with Prideaux to discuss Operation Testify. Prideaux tells him that Control hoped to obtain the name of the mole from the Czech general, and devised a code by which Prideaux could report back. In this sytem, what was the codename for Haydon?

Answer: Tailor

Alleline was Tinker, Haydon was Tailor, Bland was Soldier, Esterhase was Poorman and Smiley was Beggarman. However when Prodeaux arrived in Czechslovakia it was clear that the Czech security services already knew of the operation and were lying in wait for him.

After his capture he was interrogated by Karla and Polyakov, and it was clear they were familiar with the most intimate details of the Circus.

14. Smiley comes to understand the system enabling Gerald's treachery, which demands a Circus legman to shuttle back and forth between Polyakov and the Circus carrying secret material. Who is this legman?

Answer: Toby Esterhase

Using the secret house, Polyakov delivers Witchcraft product from Source Merlin (ie Karla) to a Circus legman - normally Esterhase. All of this material is chickenfeed or fake. At the same time, Esterhase - pretending to be Polyakov's agent in the Circus - provides product to Moscow Centre.

The latter product is comprised not only of chickenfeed from the Circus but also of genuine information from Gerald. Smiley is now in a position to trap Gerald using the secret house which he does by asking Tarr to message the Circus again to see who is disturbed.

15. So - who is "Gerald"?

Answer: Bill Haydon

Yes, the mole is Bill Haydon. After being captured he is held in captivity at Sarratt to be interrogated while awaiting repatriation to the Soviet Union. He spends some days explaining the motivations for his treachery to Smiley. One evening he goes out to sit in the garden but a little later a guard finds him dead with his neck broken.

The broken neck brings to mind the earlier incident at Thursgood's School when Prideaux killed an injured owl in the same way.

Source: Author Southendboy

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor looney_tunes before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

John Le Carre wrote three books featuring secret agent George Smiley's pursuit of the Soviet agent Karla. This Quiz concerns the first of these books, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". NB: the questions refer to the book, not the film.

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