Did Leamas's professional pride put his ostensible mission in jeopardy?

Leamas, of course, believes that he has been sent on a mission to discredit the counter-espionage chief Mundt by providing tantalizing evidence to Fiedler that Mundt has been accepting payment from British intelligence. In his own mind he knows and believes that Mundt is not a British spy, but at the same time he realizes that he must present a credible case to Fiedler implicating Mundt. In doing so, however, he cannot be too obvious in his attempt to implicate Mundt lest Fielder suspect Leamas of simply being an agent provocateur with potentially manufactured evidence. Hence in a way it adds to Leamas’s credibility with Fielder that he “insists” that the British could not possibly run spies in Berlin without his (Leamus’s) knowledge as station chief. But . . . I somehow got the impression that Leamas protested this point too much. Leamas seemed to take genuine umbrage at the prospect of a spy he wasn’t running himself, as if it were a challenge to his authority. Yet in his own mind he knows (falsely, of course) there wasn’t any such agent, as he truly believes Mundt is a dedicated East German who certainly has never been turned by the British. So why such genuine umbrage? He went way beyond what was necessary to convince Fielder he wasn’t engaged in any subterfuge, enough beyond to the point where Fiedler could reasonably have second thoughts about Mundt’s guilt. It appeared to me that to assuage his own ego, Leamas might have put his ostensible mission in jeopardy. Did anyone else see it this way?

Geoman660066