no concrete biography beyond that offered briefly at the beginning of Call for the Dead, le Carré does leave clues in his novels. Smiley was born to middle-class parents in the South of England in the early part of the 20th century (his birth date is retconned from 1906 to 1915 in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and spent at least part of his childhood in Germany near the Black Forest. He attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction (in the 1982 BBC television adaptation of Smiley's People, he refers to himself as a fellow of Lincoln College, le Carré's alma mater in real life), studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature. One July, while considering post-graduate study in that field, he was recruited into the Circus by his tutor, Jebedee. Smiley underwent training and probation in Central Europe and South America, and spent the period from 1935 until approximately 1938 in Germany recruiting networks under cover as a lecturer. In 1939, with the commencement of World War II, he saw active service not only in Germany, but also in Switzerland and Sweden. Smiley's wartime superiors described him as having "the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin". During this time, he met and recruited Dieter Frey, who would go on to become an East German intelligence operative running the intelligence circle that was the main plot point of Le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead. In 1943, he was recalled to England to work at Circus headquarters, and in 1945 successfully proposed marriage to Lady Ann Sercomb, a beautiful, aristocratic, and libidinous young lady working as a secretary there. Ann would soon prove herself chronically unfaithful, engaging in numerous affairs and occasionally leaving Smiley entirely, though she always returned to him after the initial excitement of the separation ended. In the same year, Smiley left the Service and returned to Oxford. However, in 1947, with the onset of the Cold War, Smiley was asked to return to the Service, and in early 1951 moved into counter-intelligence work, where he would remain for the next decade. It is reported with a reference to the real life Gouzenko affair that "the revelations of a young cipher clerk in Ottawa had created a new demand for men of Smiley's experience". In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk at