The arrest of Alec Leamas and Fiedler marks a decisive reversal in Operation Rolling Stone: the two men who have been using evidence to expose a suspected spy become prisoners within the political system they sought to influence. Their detention does not settle the dispute over Mundt. Instead, it gives the East German leadership time to examine Fiedler’s case while the evidence assembled by Leamas is reinterpreted as part of a larger deception.

Background: evidence and suspicion

Before the arrests, Fiedler had challenged Leamas over the value of the intelligence he had supplied. The material on the Berlin organization and its agents was accurate, Fiedler conceded, but it did not amount to the fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of intelligence that Leamas was supposed to have sold. Fiedler insisted that the operation was unfinished because Leamas had not explained what he knew about Rolling Stone. Leamas, in turn, described how an indication of a spy at some level could raise suspicion without identifying either the person or the country involved. The uncertainty was not a gap around the operation; it was part of its design, and it left Fiedler trying to infer an identity from incomplete signals.

The earlier discussion of Karl Riemeck supplied another reason to suspect that the available evidence was incomplete. Peters questioned whether Riemeck could have obtained all the intelligence attributed to him without assistance. Leamas later remembered that Control had also asked about Riemeck’s access. He considered whether an unnamed high-level collaborator might have worked with Riemeck, but did not know whether this possibility was true. The question helped establish the operation’s central problem: the same facts could support different accounts of who had access, who was being protected, and what the evidence was meant to prove.

A financial detail gave the suspicion a more specific shape. Fiedler told Leamas that a Copenhagen bank had confirmed the co-signatory withdrew the deposited money exactly one week after it was paid in. The withdrawal coincided with Mundt’s visit to Denmark under an alias to meet an American agent. At the Tribunal, Fiedler set out the account more fully: Leamas had deposited ten thousand dollars in Copenhagen on June 15, using the name Robert Lang, and the co-signatory withdrew the sum a week later. He also linked Leamas’s later visit to Helsinki, around September 24, with Mundt’s clandestine journey to Finland on October 3. These dates and movements formed a pattern Fiedler asked the Tribunal to assess, but the pattern did not by itself resolve the competing explanations.

The arrests

The arrest follows Fiedler and Leamas’s return to the lodge. They drive the remaining distance in silence, park in a shed beside the house, and walk together toward the entrance. A shout comes from the trees; three men are waiting nearby, and someone calls for Fiedler. The sudden arrival of the men interrupts the pair’s return and changes the immediate stakes from investigation to custody.

At the doorway, a young captain of the People’s Police stands with two men, one of them young and dressed in civilian clothes, holding a pistol. Leamas has just brought down a man who approached him, and the group’s attention is fixed on the figure on the ground. When Leamas turns, he is ordered to stand still. He is struck and loses consciousness. The scene makes clear that the arrest is not a voluntary appearance before an inquiry: armed officials take control, and Leamas is left unable to know at once what has happened to Fiedler or what charges will follow.

Leamas wakes in a cell, with his hands and feet restrained and his body in pain. He realizes that the restraints prevent him from straightening his legs, and that he has been beaten while unconscious. The confined room offers no furniture or ordinary means of orientation, only close whitewashed walls and a steel door. The arrest thus removes him from the open contest of evidence and places him in an environment where the authorities determine when he can speak, move, and learn what has become of the case.

Custody and the political case

When Leamas later asks where Fiedler is, Mundt replies that Fiedler is under arrest. He says the charge is conspiring to sabotage the security of the people. Leamas understands this as a reversal: Fiedler, who had been building a case against Mundt, is now the prisoner, and Mundt tells Leamas that the arrest occurred the previous night. The accusation changes the political frame of the inquiry, recasting the investigator’s effort as a threat to state security.

Fiedler explains that the struggle had already moved beyond the immediate questioning. On the day he and Leamas were arrested, he had applied to the Praesidium for a civil warrant to arrest Mundt as an enemy of the people. Fiedler says he had been collecting other evidence against Mundt for three years, piece by piece, and that Leamas’s information supplied proof needed for his report. He sent the report to every member of the Praesidium except Mundt on the same day that he applied for the warrant.

Fiedler had anticipated that Mundt would resist and that members of the Praesidium might warn him. He believed the report would nevertheless give the leadership grounds to act: while Fiedler and Leamas were being questioned, the members read and reread it until they knew it was true and knew that the others knew it as well. Fiedler describes their eventual decision as a collective response shaped by shared fear and knowledge. They ordered a secret Tribunal, which was due to meet the following day, and Mundt was under arrest. The sequence shows that Fiedler’s detention did not mean his accusation had simply disappeared; the political process continued, but behind closed doors and under the same security pressures that had produced the arrests.

The evidence at the Tribunal

At the Tribunal, Fiedler returns to the detailed procedures surrounding Rolling Stone. He takes Leamas through the rules governing circulation of the file, the letters to the Copenhagen and Helsinki banks, and the one reply received. Helsinki sent no reply. The Copenhagen letter, addressed to Robert Lang, documented the withdrawal of the ten-thousand-dollar deposit by the co-signatory. Fiedler then juxtaposed the bank record with Mundt’s recorded travels, presenting timing and identity as linked clues rather than isolated facts.

The method depends on inference. Fiedler cannot treat every indication of a spy as proof on its own; he arranges dates, deposits, aliases, and journeys into a pattern that might identify the person behind Rolling Stone. Earlier, he had pressed Leamas to explain what he himself would conclude if presented with the same story. At the Tribunal, the documents give that question institutional force: the assembled officials must decide not only whether individual details are accurate, but how far those details support Fiedler’s accusation. The evidence is therefore both informational and political, capable of being read as grounds for action or as a case against the people who assembled it.

Reversal and significance

The immediate result of the arrests is a double displacement. Leamas and Fiedler lose their freedom, while Mundt becomes the focus of a secret proceeding supported by Fiedler’s report and the financial evidence. Yet the apparent progress of the case does not give Leamas certainty about what his own role has accomplished. During the Tribunal, he insists that the Circus could not have sent Mundt against the East German authorities without his knowledge, arguing that such an operation would have been administratively impossible. Fiedler answers that Leamas himself has provided the missing answer. The clash exposes how their different accounts of institutional knowledge have shaped the case.

When the Tribunal makes clear that it has no executive powers and that the people’s prosecutor, together with Mundt, will consider what action to take against Leamas, Leamas suddenly understands the larger deception. That recognition changes the meaning of the arrests and of the evidence that preceded them: what had seemed to be a contest in which Fiedler could use Leamas’s information against Mundt has also served a purpose Leamas did not understand. The event ends not with a secure verdict, but with the discovery that apparent evidence, procedural hearings, and even the arrest of the accused can be elements in a concealed operation. It makes the gap between what the protagonists know and what their institutions are doing the decisive pressure of the scene.