BBC Radio.

A veteran spy wants to "come in from the cold" to retirement. He undertakes one last assignment in which he pretends defection and provides the enemy with sufficient evidence to label their leader a double agent.

Ned considered delivering his own speech to the new "Joes" at Saratt, but in the end, he called on George Smiley, the legendary officer who had retired to Cornwall. Smiley's "fireside chat" gives the dangerous edge back to Ned's memory, transporting him to his own beginnings as an agent in the 60s when the Red Peril was everywhere.

George Smiley's first outing as a detective investigating a mysterious suicide of a high-ranking official at the Foreign Office begins when he receives a vicious blow to his head in a dark alley.

Magnus Pym, Britain's premier spy, has vanished--sending intelligence communities on a frenzied international manhunt. As the search plays out, so does a chain of clandestine operations surfacing in Washington, Vienna, Prague, London, and Berlin. But the most powerful drama of all comes from exploring Pym's background--his education as a spy, and the spectacular motives and mentors who transformed him into a master of guile and deception.