The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Alec Leamas, a burnt-out British agent whose network in East Germany has been destroyed, agrees to one final operation involving a staged defection. What he is not told is where he sits in the design. Le Carre wrote it in 1963 while still with the Foreign Office, and it arrived as a rebuke to the glamour of Bond: the intelligence services here are bureaucracies that spend people, and the ending refuses any consolation.