Smiley uses his knowledge of Karla's daughter to blackmail him into defecting, and in December 1977 Smiley greets Karla at the Berlin Wall as part of a contingent of Circus agents including Guillam and Esterhase. Karla is taken into British custody, with Esterhase congratulating Smiley on the accomplishment of a lifetime, though Smiley appears to reproach himself for the methods he used to achieve it. Smiley in retirement Smiley was absent in the three le Carré novels of the 1980s. He re-surfaced for a penultimate time in 1990 when he appeared in The Secret Pilgrim, enjoying a happy retirement and in better spirits than his protege, the novel's narrator Ned, has ever seen him. Ned reveals that, shortly before the events of the book, he temporarily returned to the Circus to chair the "Fishing Rights Committee", a body set up to explore possible areas of co-operation between British and Russian intelligence services. The end of the book finds Smiley politely requesting that he never be brought out of retirement again, and departing for a vacation in Oceania. Smiley appears in le Carré's 2017 novel A Legacy of Spies, set after 2010. At the end of the novel, which explores fallout from the events depicted in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Smiley meets with the novel's central character, Peter Guillam. The nonagenarian Smiley is now a resident of Freiburg, Germany, where he lives in a small apartment and conducts research at a library. The novel portrays him as still visited occasionally by his wife, Ann, and in touch with his old associate Jim Prideaux. Speaking with Guillam, he contends that his work had ultimately been for the benefit of Europe. Models In 1995, le Carré said that the character of George Smiley was inspired by his one-time Lincoln College, Oxford tutor, the former Rev. Vivian Green—a renowned historian and author with an encyclopaedic knowledge. However, other than the thick glasses, loud clothes, and Green's habit of disappearing into a crowd, there were too many dissimilarities between the loquacious Green and the reticent Smiley to make this a clear match, and so other sources for Smiley continued to be named. It has been suggested that le Carré subconsciously took the name of his hero from special forces and intelligence officer Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley. More commonly, it was rumoured that Smiley was modelled on Sir Maurice Oldfield, a