Secret warriors

More than 100 years ago, Rudyard Kipling referred to espionage as “the Great Game” in his novel of the Raj, “Kim.” “We of the game are beyond protection,” he wrote. “If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book.” It was a time when the object of the game was Western control of much of the territory that is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and much of India. To a large degree, the game is still going on.

Today, the United States sends planeload after planeload of spies to Afghanistan and Iraq to maintain Western control -- temporarily, we are told. And when a CIA intelligence officer is killed in action, his or her name is indeed blotted from the record book and replaced with a simple star.

But a century after Kipling, what is missing from the game is the intellectual jousting, the romance and the unquestioning certainty of early espionage fiction. As double-digit daily death tolls in Iraq become more common, and as Afghanistan continues to slip back into anarchy, the Great Game has become the great question mark. Intelligence officers today are more likely to wear a flak jacket than an emblem-encrusted blue blazer, and to have meetings with potential sources in armored personnel carriers rather than at diplomatic cocktail parties. Gone also is the verbal foreplay, replaced by mispronounced words in Dari or Pashtun and the Arabic for “reward” and “capture.”

In “The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage,” former CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz compares the evolution in spy fiction with the evolution in spy reality. “If one leaves the more fantastic conceits of Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy aside,” he writes, “real espionage cases are often more bizarre, more deserving of a place in Ripley’s than the fictional accounts.”

Real espionage is far less human than accounts in most spy fiction. About 90% of U.S. intelligence is obtained not by human agents, for example, but by eavesdropping and imaging satellites. But few would prefer to read about the orbits of an Enhanced Crystal satellite over the exploits of John le Carre’s rumpled spy master George Smiley. That, however, may change as more of the public gravitates away from images of CIA agents in trench coats to those of mysterious eavesdroppers and code breakers of the National Security Agency. (The popularity of Dan Brown’s novel “Digital Fortress” and the Will Smith movie “Enemy of the State” suggest that this is happening.)

Most spy fiction includes the successful recruitment of foreign agents, but, in reality, the CIA has had little, if any, success recruiting spies. “Over time I came to believe that the Clandestine Services wasted a lot of emotional energy trying to recruit Soviets during the Cold War,” Hitz quotes former CIA senior official Dewey Clarridge as saying. “Historically, those who really wanted to cooperate with the United States have walked in of their own volition. I know of no significant Soviet recruitment that was spotted, developed, and recruited from scratch by a CIA case officer.”

Spy fiction and reality, however, have much in common when it comes to the convoluted personalities of those in the business. But even novelists, Hitz suggests, can’t capture the depths of deception of true spies.

“In my judgment,” he writes, “the human side of espionage is more peculiar than the fictional accounts portray it. It is not that the spy novelist cannot outdo the real thing in terms of raw creativity, it is that no writer is capable of imagining all the ways in which a human spy can scheme, rationalize, justify, and alter his behavior to perform his espionage mission.”

As example No. 1, Hitz cites former senior FBI counterintelligence official-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen, a person I knew well -- so I thought -- in Washington, D.C., during the 1990s. For nearly two decades, Hanssen sold prized U.S. secrets to the Russians while leading a private life that ranged from reportedly donating spy money to Mother Teresa to acting as a sugar daddy to a stripper and proselytizing for Catholicism.

“What all this adds up to for me,” Hitz writes, “is that espionage is a vastly more complicated enterprise for human beings than even the coldest, cleverest, most calculating traitor can imagine.... Thus, I feel confident in maintaining that few spy novelists can capture the full range of human emotions that the life of a spy entails. The snowflake has too many crystals.”

But for every rogue spy like Hanssen, there are hundreds of other dedicated American spies working undercover around the world (most assigned to embassies under light cover). Others, known as NOCs (for “non- official cover” and pronounced “knocks”), work in a variety of jobs in foreign countries and hide any relationship to the U.S. government. Their private lives, a mixture of mundane and deep deception, more closely resemble Smiley’s than Hanssen’s.

As spying moves from dead drops (such as hiding secret documents under a tree trunk or a bridge) to geostationary orbit, and from the Cold War to the war in Iraq, the one certain thing is that there will always be secrets and a need for someone to steal them. “[T]here will always be espionage and there will always be counter-espionage,” Somerset Maugham noted in 1927. “Though conditions may have altered, though difficulties may be greater, when war is raging, there will always be secrets which one side jealously guards and which the other will use every means to discover; there will always be men who from malice or for money will betray their kith and kin and there will always be men who from love of adventure or a sense of duty will risk a shameful death to secure information valuable to their country.”

*

From The Great Game

THE U.S. Congress had registered its objection to President Reagan’s covert action plan to oppose the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the early 1980s by first passing a law forbidding the provision of covert aid to the contra opposition “solely for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua.” Apart from the fact that Congress was legislating openly to restrict an action in which the United States was working hard to deny its participation, the first so-called Boland Amendment did not overly restrict CIA-sponsored covert activities, because it could be argued that the aid was intended primarily to prohibit transshipment of Communist arms through Nicaragua to Communist rebels in El Salvador. However, after the U.S. was shown to have placed firecracker mines at the entrance to Nicaraguan ports in the Caribbean in 1984 in violation of international law and allegedly without notifying its congressional overseers as required by law, the fat was in the fire.