The Secret Pilgrim

With his time in British intelligence drawing to a close, veteran spy "Ned" asks his colleague George Smiley to address his graduating class of trainee spies in Sarratt. Smiley's remarks on espionage in the wake of the Cold War serve as trigger and backdrop for a series of recollections and memories of Ned's many decades as a British spy.
Both a reminiscence of times past and a meditation on the future, “The Secret Pilgrim,” published more than ten years after “Smiley's People” and little more than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a mosaic that masterfully captures the complex and contradictory moral landscapes of Cold War intelligence.