The Looking Glass War

The Looking Glass War is a spy novel by the English writer John le Carre, published in 1965. He wrote it in response to the reception of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and it is a book about the unglamorous side of the work and about the danger of nostalgia.

The Department is a former military intelligence organisation that once flew reconnaissance missions in the war and now survives on the memory of them. Its staff have been reduced to a skeleton crew, and the more professional service they compete with has taken most of the ground.

The Department is funded by Whitehall but is losing its standing, and what it wants is a success to justify itself. When a defector describes a Soviet missile build-up in East Germany, it sets out to verify the story, and the operation is put together by people who are out of practice.

The novel follows the consequences of that decision, and the people who are sent across are not the ones who made it. Smiley appears in it, though the story belongs to the Department rather than to him.