The Secret Pilgrim is a 1990 episodic novel by British writer John le Carré, set within the frame narrative of an informal dinner talk given at the spy-training school in Sarratt by George Smiley.

[1] Smiley reflects on the end of the Cold War, and makes a rueful joke that, in one way, the world has changed, but in another, it has always been the same and the secret services are gradually waking up from their own deluded perceptions of it, and themselves.

After a couple of years of training at the Sarratt Nursery, in the glens of Argyll and battle camps of Wiltshire, Ned is looking forward to his first overseas posting and is disappointed to be kept in London, as part of a team of watchers keeping an eye on a Middle Eastern royal family.

Ned learns that the wife is a compulsive shoplifter and the man is not a fanatic assassin, but instead assigned by the prince to pay compensation and hush money to the stores she steals from.

Smiley informs him that Ned's best friend from Sarratt, Benjamin Arno Cavendish, disappeared just after starting his assignment in Berlin, and the East German network he was supposed to be running has collapsed.

Ben confesses that, beneath his confident, derring-do exterior, he is always terrified of failure, especially when he feels he has to live up to the example of his father, who had an illustrious career during the Second World War as a mathematician, devising the Double-Cross System.

After his unwitting exposure of his friend Benjamin Cavendish, Ned is posted to Hamburg in Western Germany to run a network of Baltic sailors, led by a passionate Latvian smuggler named Brandt.

Though surprisingly efficient, Ned is wary of his position due to his predecessor's hushed up departure after embezzling massive amounts of Circus funds and settling to Southern Spain with his boyfriend.

Though Ned answers reasonably, Haydon counters him with a photograph, depicting Bella as a language student in a Moscow Centre linguistics school that trains prospective undercover agents.

Ned himself was in Rome, in the middle of a celebratory dinner after installing a wiretap against a Roman Catholic cardinal suspected of involvement with arms dealers, when he received the telex from London with the shocking news.

Ned's first post-Haydon posting is to Munich, as the Circus's liaison with various Eastern Bloc exile communities, quietly discouraging their crackpot schemes to foment anarchy in the Soviet Union, or encouraging whatever legitimate intelligence sources they have in their home countries.

At first, Ned is dazzled by Teodor's passionate lectures on the evils wreaked on Hungary by the Allied Powers after World War I, but finds his opinions shallow when the Professor is quizzed on more current events.

Before long, Esterhase and the American CIA are lauding the two Hungarians for their courage and arranging for Teodor's honourable retirement from intelligence work, including issuing passports.

After delighting Ned's students with a lighthearted story about how the Circus recruited a South American diplomat with a secret passion for British model trains, Smiley sobers and reflects that intelligence officers usually remain aloof from the harsher realities of their work, but sometimes they are forced to confront it, and become a little more humble about the risks they ask their agents to take.

Once he arrives, he finds that the whole thing is a trap; the agent is long dead, and Ned is arrested and brutally tortured by the Poles' ruthless counterintelligence chief, Colonel Jerzy.

Years later, several weeks before the graduation dinner, Ned sees Jerzy on the television while watching the evening news about a Polish cardinal blessing his flock.

Smiley warns Ned's students that spies can encounter a mid-life crisis the same as any others do, and sometimes the effects are more severe, given the nature of their work and their inclination to keep their true feelings concealed from everyone, including themselves.

Ned remembers his own middle-age crisis, in which his marriage had grown stale and he began to feel that he had reached his forties without any clear idea of what he had accomplished in his career.

After gaining a reasonable amount of seniority and prestige, thanks to the kudos accruing from his productive running of Colonel Jerzy, Ned is appointed as a sort of roving troubleshooter, hopping around the globe to investigate random leads or smother minor crises.

Despite his good nature and popularity, it is revealed that Giles had suffered a nervous breakdown and hid dozens of confidential files out of shame and guilt he felt towards a young girl he had fallen in love with.

Along with his many accomplishments in the fields of archaeology, linguistics and various branches of humanities, Hansen also harboured an open secret about his sexuality, bedding young girls and boys alike.

Having been recalled to Rome for indoctrination and subsequently sent back to a harsh master of his Order, Hansen later went berserk on his colleagues due to his confinement and disappeared in Southern Asia.

Due to the unconventional and unmotorised guerrilla tactics of locals, Hansen's services were invaluable to the British, who had no material presence in the region, and sold his intelligence to the Americans who were knee-deep in conflict against the Viet Cong.

A few years later (during the events of The Russia House), when "Barley" Blair betrays the Circus to save a Russian woman he has fallen in love with, Ned is unable to muster the same outrage as his superiors.

In addition to supplying interrogators to debrief defectors or captured enemy agents, the Pool acts as a clearing-house for suspicious members of the public who believe they have relevant information for the government.

While browsing through the Pool's old files, Ned is excited to find an old record from Smiley's tenure there (after being relieved of his position as Chief at the end of The Honourable Schoolboy).

Smiley interviewed a retired British Army sergeant who wanted to know if it was true that his recently deceased son was actually a top-class undercover agent in Russia?

But Ned's private theory is that Smiley, who was ambivalent at the best of times about the usefulness of the Circus's work, wanted to carry out an "intelligence operation" that clearly succeeded in achieving something good.

Frewin reveals to Ned all his equipment provided by Moscow Centre, including a custom-made pair of opera binoculars that doubled as a covert camera.

The final chapter is unconnected with Smiley; Ned recollects Leonard Burr, who appears in the novel The Night Manager, foreshadowing, in retrospect, the development of that story.