Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV miniseries)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 1979 sevenpart drama spy miniseries made by BBC TV. John Irvin directed and Jonathan Powell produced this adaptation of John le Carrs novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 1974. The miniseries, which stars Alec Guinness, Ian Richardson, Michael Jayston, Anthony Bate, Ian Bannen, George Sewell, and Michael Aldridge, was shown in the United Kingdom fromSeptember toOctober 1979 and in the United States beginning onSeptember 1980.

George Smiley Guinness, deputy head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, is forced into retirement in the wake of Operation Testify, a failed spy mission to Czechoslovakia. Veteran British agent Jim Prideaux Bannen had been sent to meet with a Czech general hes been told has information identifying a deepcover Soviet spy planted in the highest echelons of British Secret Intelligence Service, known as the Circus because of its headquarters at Cambridge Circus in London.The mission proves to be a trap, and Prideaux is captured and brutally tortured by the Soviets. Britains chief spymaster, known only as Control, is disgraced and soon replaced for his role in Testify by Percy Alleline Aldridge. Controls obsession with the Soviet mole was not shared by others in the Circus. On the contrary, it is the British who believe they have a mole working for them in Moscow Centre, passing them highly classified information codenamed Operation Witchcraft. ........

Source: Wikipedia