37 Facts About George Smiley

George Smiley OBE is a fictional character created by John le Carre.

George Smiley is a central character in the novels Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People and Karla's Choice, and a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies.

Short, overweight, balding, and bespectacled, George Smiley is polite and self-effacing and frequently allows others to mistreat him, including his serially unfaithful wife; these traits mask his inner cunning, excellent memory, mastery of tradecraft, and occasional ruthlessness.

George Smiley's genius, coupled with other characters' willingness to underestimate him, allows Smiley to achieve his goals and ultimately become one of the most powerful spies in Britain.

In contrast to other fictional spies of the era, George Smiley is described as being short, overweight, balding, and middle aged, and he is frequently compared to either a toad or a mole.

George Smiley wears thick, round glasses and tends to clean the lenses on the 'fat' end of his tie while contemplating something of great significance; the gesture is ubiquitous enough that other characters consider it to be something of a trademark.

George Smiley knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the woods.

George Smiley could collect their gestures, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger.

The world of espionage presented by le Carre in his novels was a world where lies, betrayal, intrigue and paranoia were the norm for both sides, and much of the appeal of George Smiley was that of a moral man trying his best to stay decent in a profoundly amoral world.

George Smiley was born to middle-class parents in the South of England in the early part of the 20th century, and spent at least part of his childhood in Germany near the Black Forest.

George Smiley attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction, studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature.

George Smiley underwent training and probation in Central Europe and South America, and spent the period from 1935 until approximately 1938 in Germany recruiting networks under cover as a lecturer.

However, in 1947, with the onset of the Cold War, George Smiley was asked to return to the Service, and in early 1951 moved into counter-intelligence work, where he would remain for the next decade.

George Smiley first appears in Call for the Dead, le Carre's debut novel.

George Smiley's investigation uncovers that the "suicide" was in fact a murder perpetrated by an East German spy ring operating in the UK and being operated by one of his own former agents, whom he accidentally kills in a physical altercation.

George Smiley spends much of the story bemoaning the loss of the talented agents who were his mentors prior to the war, and their replacement by such talentless bureaucrats as the current head of service, Maston, who is widely, if secretly, mocked.

George Smiley next reappears as a minor but pivotal character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third novel.

George Smiley is revealed to have come back into the service of the Circus as the top aide to Control, Maston's mysterious successor as the Circus' chief.

Along the way, George Smiley learns that Leamas blew his own cover to his girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old communist sympathiser named Liz Gold, and arranges to incorporate her into the plot.

George Smiley plays a small but pivotal role in The Looking Glass War, le Carre's fourth novel, occupying the "North European desk" at the Circus.

George Smiley appears sporadically throughout the book as a liaison to The Department, a military intelligence agency, which attempts to surreptitiously conduct a dangerous and unnecessary operation without the Circus' knowledge.

When Control is eased out of the Circus in late 1972 after the capture of agent Jim Prideaux in Czechoslovakia, George Smiley too is forced out.

In September or October 1973, the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy take place, with George Smiley successfully managing to expose Haydon as the long-term Soviet agent, or "mole", codenamed "Gerald" and reporting directly to George Smiley's nemesis, Karla, head of Moscow Centre.

George Smiley is installed by Whitehall as the new head of the Circus and tasked with both tying up loose ends left by Haydon's treachery and launching a successful espionage mission to prove the organisation's viability.

The Honourable Schoolboy, set in 1974, finds George Smiley having assembled a new team, made up of former colleague Connie Sachs; Doc di Salis, a Jesuit priest who is an expert on communist China; Guillam; and a rehabilitated Esterhase.

George Smiley's People, set in late 1977, finds a retired George Smiley launching an investigation into the death of an elderly Estonian general, nationalist activist, and former Circus agent.

George Smiley uses his knowledge of Karla's daughter to blackmail him into defecting, and in December 1977 George Smiley greets Karla at the Berlin Wall as part of a contingent of Circus agents including Guillam and Esterhase.

George Smiley was absent in the three le Carre novels of the 1980s.

George Smiley re-surfaced for a penultimate time in 1990 when he appeared in The Secret Pilgrim, enjoying a happy retirement and in better spirits than his protege, the novel's narrator Ned, has ever seen him.

The end of the book finds George Smiley politely requesting that he never be brought out of retirement again, and departing for a vacation in Oceania.

George Smiley appears in le Carre's 2017 novel A Legacy of Spies, set after 2010.

The nonagenarian George Smiley is a resident of Freiburg, Germany, where he lives in a small apartment and conducts research at a library.

However, other than the thick glasses, loud clothes, and Green's habit of disappearing into a crowd, there were too many dissimilarities between the loquacious Green and the reticent George Smiley to make this a clear match, and so other sources for George Smiley continued to be named.

In 1986, le Carre denied that Oldfield was the inspiration for Smiley, saying: "I never heard of Sir Maurice either by name or in any other way until long after the name and character of George Smiley were in print".

Oldfield himself believed that, although Green probably inspired le Carre, the character of George Smiley was primarily based on John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, who had been le Carre's boss when he originally joined MI5 prior to his career in MI6.

Barker's George Smiley provides the brains to the brawn of Corbett's Doyle and actually comes out the better.

George Smiley is shown as something of an obsessive tea drinker.