Oh, let’s just have fun this fine autumn Sunday and retreat from the sordid back alleys of espionage skullduggery. Each profession, even one that is considered to be the world’s second oldest, deserves a bit of frivolity from time to time. Thus today’s offerings are intended to divert your minds from the tedium of the endless political campaigns and other boredoms.
An absolutely delightful browse-read (meaning something you’d best address an hour or so at a time, rather than non-stop) is The Literary Spy: The Ultimate Source Book for Quotations on Espionage and Intelligence, compiled and annotated by Charles E. Lathrop (Yale University Press, $39.95,478 pages). Lathrop is a pseudonym for a man who served as a CIA analyst and spokesman and a speechwriter for the Director of Central Intelligence.
Naughty curiosity prompted me to go to the phones, and I established “Lathrop’s” identity on the third call. But rather than risk being Novaked, I’ll leave the fellow with the name of his own choosing.
What Mr. Lathrop has done is put together more than 3,000 quotations from sources ranging from the Bible to spy novels, the media and declassified government documents — a book that is at once a serious source text and plain old fun. Hear, for instance, the Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank railing about his attempts to cut the CIA’s budget, the exact amount of which is a secret. Sayeth Frank: “Your budget by now is about as big a secret as my sexuality.”
Understandably, intelligence is a calling that is long on hypocrisy. We have the Chinese leader Mao Zedong writing to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during negotiations on the opening of a U. S. Embassy in Communist China: “But let us not speak false words or engage in trickery. We don’t steal your documents. You can deliberately leave them somewhere and try us out. Nor do we engage in eavesdropping and begging. There is no use in those small tricks.” Mr. Kissinger presumably harumphed and kept the office safes locked.
Nor can Mr. Lathrop resist tossing in bits of insider gossip. He recites, with a straight face, an excerpt from an Air Force dissent to a CIA estimate on Soviet military strength circa 1948 that aptly illustrates the uncertainties and fuzzy language that often bedevil the profession: “The fluidity and momentum inherent in the immediate situation can render an abrupt change in the present balance readily possible.” And in a howler-packed section titled, “Nut Cases & Conspiracies,” he quotes from some of the… . ah, interesting? … letters CIA received over the years from citizens. Typical was “Mary,” who begged, “Please cease tricking me and poisoning my sacred body. Also, where’s all my children? & my CIA badge? [sic] I am demanding your agency’s abolishment.” In a footnote, Mr. Lathrop laconically commented, “Mary, you’re on to us.”
And permit the final word to come from former DCI Robert Gates: “It is not entirely true that when an intelligence officer ’smells the flowers’ he looks around for a coffin. But the nature of our business, in both operations and analysis, makes of us great skeptics and pessimists.”
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Alongside Mr. Lathrop’s work, find shelf space for avolume that must be a necessary source book for anyone who writes about intelligence: Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, (Random House, $29.95, 719 pages, illus.). Mr. Polmar and Mr. Allen are two of this town’s most competent military historians, and their book is a expanded paperback edition of an earlier version published almost a decade ago.
“Spy Book” contains about everything anyone would want to know about the subject. There aretightly crafted profiles of espionage personalities both prominent and obscure — the latter, for instance, including such long-forgotten figures as James D. Harper, an engineer who sold missile secrets to the Polish intelligence service for transmittal to the KGB, and who managed to skip the country without being jailed. There are also good and taut summary descriptions of the world’s major intelligence services and definitions of terms used by intel professionals.
The reissue gave the authors an opportunity to clean up a handful of glitches that marred their earlier work and irked the dickens out of many persons. Sadly, one prominent error remains. I refer to the authors’ citation of a Russian military historian’s claim that since he could not find the name Alger Hiss in KGB files, the diplomat never spied for the Russians. Whoops! Hiss in fact worked for another Soviet service, the GRU, or Red Army intelligence.
Apprised of his error, the Soviet quickly retracted his exoneration claim, and such was duly reported by The New York Times, whichhad published the first story. But the glitch remains intact in “Spy Book.” Heaven knows that any of us who write for a living make our share of errors, and I have put some whoppers into print over the years. But to see such an extraordinary error repeated rudely intrudes on what is otherwise a splendid book.
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Over the last several years, the International Spy Museum has become a major tourist attraction in Washington, with 3,000+plus visitors daily during the busy season. So how appropriate that the museum, in cooperation with National Geographic, has issued The Handbook of Practical Spying, by Jack Barth (Smithsonian, $14.95, 191 pages, illus.)Mr. Barth is a London-based writer whose book shows extensive research among folks knowledgeable about the tradecraft of espionage. It benefited greatly from the expert input of Peter Earnest, a retired CIA operations officer who is the museum’s executive director.
As Mr. Barth writes, in essence spying is a brain game. “The mind is the only weapon that a spy is guaranteed to discharge on a daily basis.” He covers how to recruit a source, witting or not, how to elicit desired information, how to do auto and foot surveillance, and detect being the subject of same. And he notes that many “espionage” skills can be used in every day life. For instance,a father can use a spy’s interrogation techniques to enlighten himself on a daughter’s new boy friend. And a discreet dash of cayenne pepper over food might point to whoever is pilfering from the office communal refrigerator.
Light-hearted, to be sure, but as said above, this is let’s-have-fun Sunday.
Joseph C. Goulden is doing a book on Cold War Intelligence His e-mail is JosephG894@aol.com.
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