The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Liz Gold begins as Leamas’s romantic interest. She provides a human connection that has been sorely lacking in his life. At the same time, she respects his aversion to intimacy, and puts up with his frequently rude treatment of her. She is described as physically awkward, and “her face, like her body, had large components which seemed to hesitate between plainness and beauty” (37). Her personality similarly hesitates between shyness and warmth. She is the one who invites Leamas to dine with her, she is adept at dealing with Miss Crail’s moods, and she is quick to detect and evade men with ulterior motives. At the same time, her relationship with Leamas is unequal from the start, with her knowing that he will soon leave and promising, “You must go when you want. I’ll never follow you, Alec” (41), even before their connection becomes romantic. She endures his poor treatment of her without complaint, and after his shocking arrest, trusts his plan rather than seek out answers.

Liz’s membership in the British Communist Party speaks to another kind of ambivalence within her character. Leamas treats the revelation as a joke, and later tells her that it’s merely a hobby for her: “Some people keep canaries, some people join the Party” (165). It soon becomes clear, however, that Liz is no mere hobbyist, as she possesses a deeply humanistic vision of peace and progress, which likely stems at least in part from her father’s death in the Holocaust. She claims to believe in “history,” but as Leamas will later point out to her, she recoils at the prospect of people suffering even though Communists have never “preached the sanctity of human life” (245).

Liz is acted upon more than she acts. She is the passive beneficiary of a mysterious entity that pays off her lease, and receives an invitation to East Germany that blatantly mischaracterizes her work and reputation. On the witness stand, she is described as a “blind child,” and she breaks down in tears under the withering questioning of Karden. She is an innocent person who suffers greatly, and through this experience she emerges as the moral center of the novel who exposes the insufficiency of Leamas’s cynicism. Her appeals to justice may not accomplish much, but she plainly points out what Leamas cannot admit, that Fiedler’s fate is unjust. By the end, she has moved from love interest to a figure whose tragedy is even more profound than that of the protagonist. Her fundamental honesty and willingness to see good in people makes her the perfect tool for the security services on either side of the Iron Curtain.

The antagonist of the novel, Hans-Dieter Mundt is a fearsome spymaster. He was a Nazi as a young man before rising through the ranks of the Stasi, one of the most feared intelligence agencies of the Cold War. For most of the book, the mere mention of Mundt’s name is enough to provoke fear and dread in the other characters. It’s said that his own agents “dread him” as much as the British do. His rapid ascent through the ranks suggests extraordinary abilities, and he has turned the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of Berlin into a mob war. For a readership that has learned to associate Germany with evil, Mundt is a Teutonic supervillain, but he is also the white whale to Leamas’s Captain Ahab, the prize that must be taken to justify a lifetime of hardships and sacrifice. Like Moby Dick, he disappears from the novel for long stretches, and when he does appear, his mere presence is enough to drive the action, without his having to do or say very much.

When Leamas finally meets him, he finds something almost admirable in the man’s “extraordinary self-confidence,” which spares him from needing to build psychological rapport with his interrogation subjects. Leamas sees him as “a man of fact and action” (176), which Leamas welcomes after having dealt with Fiedler’s extensive philosophical inquiries. Yet it soon becomes evident that Mundt is villainous not because he represents a totalitarian agency or even because he is responsible for many deaths, but because he is a petty, cruel man driven by antisemitism. It also becomes clear that he is an ideological mercenary, working for the capitalists to spare himself the consequences of his own reckless actions. His mighty reputation in East Germany is thanks to his secret work for the British: Only the Circus could provide him with the intelligence to represent himself as an all-knowing and all-seeing mastermind. Mundt is entirely the creature of his handlers; he rose through the ranks through false allegations and seedy cover-ups. His cruelty often seems purposeless, as when he releases Liz and Leamas from prison, only to have them gunned down at the Berlin Wall. As a man without loyalty or scruples, he has made himself indispensable to both sides of the Cold War, which explains in no small part why he is the only major character to survive.