FREEwilliamsburg: The Great Game

THE GREAT GAME
The Myth and Reality of Espionage
Frederick P. Hitz
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole

In, The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage; Knopf, 2004, which compares the literature of spies with the real thing, Frederick P. Hitz writes, "In the world of espionage, as elsewhere, absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely." Daniel Patrick Moynihan might concur. In his 1998 book, Secrecy: an American Experience, he says secrecy is not only inefficient, it is bad for democracy. An example, the Venona Project broke the Soviet signal code toward the end of World War II, revealing the names of American agents at work for Uncle Joe; Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs among them. Both Hitz and Moynihan suggest the McCarthy witch hunt wouldn't have occurred had the secrets of the Venona code been revealed and debated. The military decided Venona was so sensitive even President Truman was kept in dark about the code with the result that Truman correctly doubted a huge internal Red threat, while J. Edgar Hoover and the McCarthy conservatives were convinced a Commie lay hidden beneath every D.C. bush.

Much has changed since the Cold War and the fiction it spawned. There was a bit of premature mission-accomplished zeal when the Soviet Union fell, leaving America the sole superpower. The Soviets were out, but the mind set did not readily shift from a Cold War attitude as stateless rogues with fundamentalist grudges against the infidel were gearing up. Just when it began to look as if the spies could come in from the cold, the game went low-tech with too few agents on the ground speaking Farsi, Urdu and Arabic. What happened to the INTELL that might have prevented 9.11? Was it there, but kept too secret to do any good? Where are the George Smiley and Alec Leamas fictional spy types, writer John le Carré's dogged, single-minded operatives when you need them?

If former CIA head, George Tenet really did give the go-ahead to preemptively invade Iraq, at least so far as a rational-the missing WMD's-we have a problem. Tenet's name is glaringly absent from Hitz's book, and the omission is probably CIA censorship. Agents can't seek employment utilizing their talents for three years after their careers end, nor can they write a book without prior approval of the Agency. While reading, I began to get why Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants a clandestine takeover of HUMINT gathering for the Pentagon, his own special forces snooping without so much as a whisper of Congressional oversight. You didn't know? Mr. Rumsfeld is right at home with superpower, and allergic, apparently, to trivialities like accountability. But no matter who runs the game, spying is a shady business and reliability of information hard to verify. That is part of Moynihan's point; a culture of secrecy can easily lead to critical policy mistakes. Hitz would site the failed Bay of Pigs adventure under President Kennedy as an example. Moynihan suggested, even more radically, the Cold War might have been avoided altogether if another bit of post World War INTELL had been made public: that Stalin's Russia was doomed to fail, which it did under the weight of its own collapsed economy. Vladamir Putin, himself a hard-nosed KGB man, has said the Cold War was a huge waste of money.

Espionage novelists haven't had to bother with cumbersome chores like Congressional oversight and the weight of history. Congress got involved with oversight after the 1976 Church hearings when the CIA was found out to be abetting, if not committing, assassinations, among other unsavory activities, like spying on us. It all came out in a New York Times article written by Seymour Hersh in 1974, exposing abuses; Hitz: "The guardians of U.S. liberty against the stealthy and all-out assault mounted on them by Stalin and the monolithic Communism were shown to be law-breakers themselves. The consensus which had existed from the earliest days of the Cold War to fight the spread of godless Communism had been shattered by the petering out of the direct Soviet threat, the tragedy of the Vietnam War, and the criminal behavior of an American president in the Watergate break-in. Now Hersh and the Times had revealed that Americans were being victimized by the forces they had unleashed to counter the Communist threat." CIA has had a black mark ever since. There was a recent piece in the Times about a criminal investigation (now dropped) against anti-drug CIA agents in Peru who were partly responsible for friendly fire shooting down a plane full of American missionaries mistaken for drug runners. The "tradecraft" in this case had grown sloppy; an eyeball check was required to confirm before shooting a plane out of the sky, that step, apparently, was skipped. One may not care for missionaries, but what are the "good guys" up to? What exactly is the role of the CIA in prisoner interrogations? Abu Graib comes to mind, and what of the reported extrajudicial policy of rendition, whereby the CIA turns suspects over for questioning to countries with no scruples against torture. This is not fiction.

The problem with Congressional oversight, of course, is how many people can keep a top secret? On the other hand, what's to keep a spy, or a defense secretary, honest? Secrecy breeds secrecy. Where was the internal oversight to interdict a traitor like Aldrich Ames, or Anthony Blunt, and most recently, Richard P. Hanssen, who sold FBI secrets to the Russians? What prevents a rogue agent? The answer is, not much. Periodic lie detector tests and lifestyle checks are supposed to keep agents clean. The literature is filled with counterintelligence genius, George Smiley again in le Carré's, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, worming out a British SIS mole. In the real world it took nine years catch Aldrich Ames, with much damage done in between as he got rich selling out fellow spies, who were usually executed. Hanssen, Hitz reports, asked the FBI agents who finally nabbed him, "What took you so long?"

What happens to retired spies who know too much? It seems a thankless job, spying; shadowy, double and triple lives, often a bottle of scotch for a best friend. If an agent dies in the field it's all hush hush. Eventually the name will be carved into the tribute wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, but there won't be a nice obit about dying for one's country, not if friends and even your wife and kids think you were something else, a diplomat or a foreign vacuum cleaner salesman, say. Case in point, not a mention in the book of outed spy Valerie Plame. CIA censorship again? While I'm guessing, I think at least part of the reason Hitz quotes so extensively from the spy literature is because real spies can't kiss and tell. The best retired spy, Hitz suggests, is one who sails out to sea, to an out of sight afterlife. Maybe there really is an island somewhere for retired spooks, like Patrick McGoohan's No.6, "The Prisoner" in the Cold War TV series that upset the whole spy-as-hero genre.

The Great Game (Hitz calls it the second oldest profession) left me with the feeling that stuff was being withheld. Hitz is now a teacher at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, but for twenty years was in government service, most of that in the CIA where for eight years he was inspector general. Is he trying to wink as he tells? As for the much quoted literature, Graham Greene looks more at human nature in books like, The Quiet American, and, The Human Factor, than truth in spying. Le Carré asks, in, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, what happens when the good guys employ the same dark methods as the enemy? Le Carré's attempt at an answer is that the West is not the aggressor, is benevolent even if it regretfully fights fire with fire. Is that still true? The real value of Hitz's book, beyond a voyeuristic look at spies, may lie in the brief chapter on espionage and terrorism which suggests improvements in our approach: "Many thoughtful observers believe it is high time now for the U.S. and its principal allies to take the religious terrorist threat for what it is: a wide ranging assault on the cultural and economic assumptions of the West and the globalization that is its manifestation." If the writer means what I think he means, we have an even bigger problem; the current White House, with its extreme secrecy and "us or them" stance, is not about to take a look at any of its own assumptions. We are probably due for a spate of new spy novels; maybe one of them will shed some light on the festering dangers of secrecy.

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