So if Control suspected the key players to be possible traitors (the photos he showed Prideaux) and one pictured there IS the traitor, surely Control would have made sure none of these five men who were under suspicion would know about Prideaux's mission to get their name from the asset Prideaux was going to meet?
Yet, the mission was still blown.
Memory not being what it was, how was Prideaux's mission compromised?
Doesn't it have to do with 'the asset'--Strelnikov (sp)? Remember that Haydon, after his capture, tells Smiley that Strelnikov was real, but never made any offers of information to anyone. So apparently he was planted by Karla with a story of wanting to deal information to British Intelligence and naturally Haydon would certainly know about the setup. So all that has to be done is to surround and capture Prideaux when he arrives at Strelnikov's residence.
What I've wondered is, who does the gloved hand belong to, that lifts the blind slightly to look out at Prideax in his car, as he waits in the queue to have his papers checked?
Yes, the mission was blown before it started. In Haydon's words, "it was a setup from start to finish." Once they captured Prideaux, all they had to do was torture him long and hard enough to get the details of the story.
Karla got the suspect's codenames from Prideaux, Haydon from Karla, and Esterhase from Haydon (though he didn't know what it meant).
I first thought the gloved hand was Karla's, but then I thought, why would he bother to come all the way to watch his operation? It's more probable that the gloved hand is shown just for dramatic purposes, to give the viewers a hint that Prideaux was being followed.
I think a similar hand was shown in the movie version, and I do remember it as Karla's hand, though.
Never be complete.
I first thought the gloved hand was Karla's, but then I thought, why would he bother to come all the way to watch his operation? It's more probable that the gloved hand is shown just for dramatic purposes, to give the viewers a hint that Prideaux was being followed.
I agree, the mission was blown from the start. Prideaux is watched and followed from the moment he enters Czechoslovakia. The man watching him through the blinds (who might even be Karla), the matronly middle-aged woman watching him in the department store when he collects the gun, the driver who takes him to the meet.
share
Memory not being what it was, how was Prideaux's mission compromised?
There's a great irony in the whole General Stevcek deal. Control doesn't believe in the authenticity of the Witchcraft material, because it's very timely, very proper, and very on-topic : In other words, too good to be true. Yet other names in The Circus, who should be having the same doubts about it as Control, choose to believe in it. Perhaps simply because (for lack of a better expression) they want to believe in it, or because they've been hoping to see something like that for such a long time that they don't want to doubt it when they indeed come across it.
Yet Control does the same mistake, falls into the same trap himself: Just as he's looking for the name of the mole in the Circus, and desparately running out of time, some general makes him an offer to give him the name that he's been looking for. He should have stepped away from this offer for the very same reasons he wanted to step away from Merlin and Witchcraft, but he takes the bait.
In the first minutes of the first episode, when Control is briefing Prideaux about his mission and Stevcek, Prideaux asks him "How sure are you?" and Control averts his eyes. You can sense that he has doubts, after all.
Never be complete.
Yet Control does the same mistake, falls into the same trap himself: Just as he's looking for the name of the mole in the Circus, and desperately running out of time, some general makes him an offer to give him the name that he's been looking for. He should have stepped away from this offer for the very same reasons he wanted to step away from Merlin and Witchcraft, but he takes the bait.
Ageing Control's health was failing him as well as possibly his mental faculties. Issuing Jim with his mission clearly exhausts Control and his reactions to news of its apparent failure is far below the standard required of a competent leader. A further irony, Karla/Haydon's objectives aside, is that having Control replaced would not be such a bad thing.
shareEven Smiley begins to wonder (in the novel) if Control's mind is failing, but of course, as events play out, Smiley realizes that Control certainly had all his mental faculties intact in suspecting the mole--in fact, Smiley comes to realize that Control was, indeed, very close to even knowing Gerald's real identity.
shareEventually Control would have had to be replaced, but he was correct in suspecting the existence of a mole. Ensuring that he was replaced by someone dumber would certainly fit Karla's agenda, though a dupe rather than the actual mole is Control's replacement.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."
Haydon was probably as intelligent as Control, but Karla had his own reasons for not wanting him in the top spot (Haydon names a couple of fairly self-serving ones to Smiley; it's easy to guess that Karla may have had other reasons besides those); Alleline is a useful idiot who's already gathered his own coterie around him in the Circus, so it was quite easy to slip him into place following Control's death.
shareHaydon probably was indeed as intelligent as Control, and I think that was a factor in Karla wanting to keep him from the top spot - it is unlikely that Karla fully trusted Haydon and may have feared that an all-powerful Haydon would slip out of his control somehow. Keeping him in an influential but subordinate position to Alleline, a comparative imbecile, was likely preferable from Karla's point of view.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."
Haydon in the top position would have constituted too great of a risk due in large measure to his own personality, and Karla would have recognized that. Karla also knew that Haydon's ego had to be stroked quite a lot, and so gave him as the reasons he was excluded from the very top job the same reasons that Haydon retails to Smiley later--and that Haydon himself, in his own self-infatuation, probably really believes.
I can't help but think that if Haydon had indeed made it back to Moscow Centre, life wouldn't have been pretty for him. He'd probably have been feted with a hero's welcome at first, and then kept under constant surveillance, mothballed away in a sinecure, and likely eventually had up on trumpery charges and summarily executed. He would simply have posed too much of a risk factor on too many levels to be safely handled in any other fashion by his owners.
I doubt that he would have been executed but he might have been kept under constant surveillance, not fully trusted and required to stay in some provincial city.
Burgess, a real-life defector, was at first sent to Kuibyshev (Samara), which he compared to Glasgow in the 19th century, definitely not a compliment from Burgess.
In the book, Haydon mentions to Smiley before his expected handing over to Moscow that he needs to have a suit made or an existing one supplied to him, because first appearances matter. Smiley reflects that this is the first time Haydon worried about appearances and this may point to him not being sure of the reception he will get in the USSR.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."
The mission was blown three times:
First Jim tells Haydon that he is on his way to a mission that only can be described as a very complicated way to commit suicide.
Second, to be sure, you can bet that Haydon sends a message to Karla. Jim would also have told Smiley, if this only had been in London. But Control had sent him to Big B - to prevent just that.
Then, of course, Stevcek had blown the whole game.
The gloved hand:
'Course it is Karla. Knowledge trumps reports and guesswork. So he has flown to the Czeko-German border to overview the operation (Just at he does in the 2011 movie version! - only in Hungary. And I understand why: the coffee was a thousand times better in Hungary than in Czeko.....😀)