Hunt, ever a true believer -- in himself

OF all the heresies that have plagued the great monotheistic religions, none has been more pernicious -- or as seductive -- as Gnosticism. The notion that there is a secret knowledge, a special wisdom accessible only to a purified elite seems to exert an irresistible pull on a certain kind of mind.

In our own time, a secular variation of this old fallacy has arisen to justify the role of the intelligence agencies in the creation of what we now can recognize as the national security state. John le Carre captured the essence of this tendency in his great novel of the Cold War, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” when he has double agent Bill Haydon proclaim that “the secret services” are the essential expression of a nation’s character.

You won’t find that level of artful introspection in “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond,” a bitter and self-pitying memoir by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, who died recently in Florida at the age of 88. Instead, Hunt -- who wrote dozens of violently xenophobic spy and detective novels, as well as a World War II-vintage bestseller -- offers a rather standard account of how men of his generation became involved in intelligence work. In his case, that involved distinguished service in the OSS under the justly revered William Donovan and, then, Hunt’s recruitment into the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. Hunt served mainly in Latin America -- Mexico, Guatemala (where he participated in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz), Uruguay and Cuba. Hunt was one of the prime movers in the Bay of Pigs debacle and blames what he sees as John F. Kennedy’s cowardice and irresolution for the operation’s failure.

With his career on the rocks and his personal finances ruined by familial tragedy, Hunt went briefly into public relations before being recruited into the Nixon White House by Charles Colson. There, the former CIA agent engineered the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office and, later, the failed burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. Ultimately he did 33 months in federal prison for that caper, after which he retired to life as a writer. “American Spy” is an unsurprising summing up of a life in which Hunt failed to do any wrong, always knew best and was betrayed by every colleague and president from Truman to Nixon.

What’s to be made of this sort of thinking: “The difference between the abuse of power and the use of power continues to dance around the fine line of semantics and chance. If our Watergate team had found that the Democrats were indeed being financed by Communist enemies, then our criminal actions might have been judged heroic.”

Similarly, he writes, the only problem with George W. Bush’s domestic spying operations is that the “president just went too far too fast. Maybe society hasn’t caught up yet.”

But there’s still hope: “The CIA needs to clandestinely produce television programs, movies and electronic games that make people want to grow up to serve their country and enter the intelligence community. Television shows like Fox’s ‘24’ are doing a bang-up job

One of the things that never seemed to trouble the intelligence cult’s true believers, like Hunt -- whose anti-communism was of the vulgar and paranoid sort -- was the fact that even the operations they judged successful seldom produced a desirable result. That was particularly true of the CIA’s major exercises in regime change. The overthrow of Iran’s nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and re-imposition of the venal and ineffectual Pahlavi dynasty simply paved the way for the dangerous Shia theocracy that followed the shah’s fall. We’re still paying the price for that bit of Langley derring-do. The coup that toppled the democratically elected Arbenz in Guatemala set in motion a wave of blood-letting that took hundreds of thousands of lives and left a residue of distrust that bedevils American policy in Central America to this day. The agency’s involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile had a similarly catastrophic human and political impact.

In fact, most of the CIA’s short-term successes came at the expense of democratic governments whose economic policies the United States found distasteful. What the agency never succeeded in doing was remove a single ruling communist party from power in any place that mattered -- and, yet, the need to defend U.S. interests against an aggressive Soviet communism with a genuine flair for conspiracy was the agency’s ostensible reason to exist.

A failure to foresee

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the shrewdest minds ever to consider the realities of the United States’ intelligence operations, used to point out not only the spies’ waste of trillions of dollars during the decades-long Cold War, but also the plain truth that the spooks’ failures were greatest where the danger was highest -- the Soviet Union.

Not long after hearing Moynihan make that point in person, I happened to lunch with the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, William H. Webster. The collapse of the Soviet regime was then in progress and I asked whether he had seen any report by any agency analysts that forecast anything like those events.

He smiled wanly, shook his head and said, no. Nobody got it right? I asked. Well, there was one person, Webster said. Could we speak to him, I wondered? No, the director laughed. (Shortly afterward, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney would complain that Webster’s briefings on the ongoing Soviet disintegration were making it hard to win congressional support for the administration’s defense budget. It’s somehow comforting to know that some things -- and some people -- never change.)

At the end of the day, the real lesson in all this recent history is that there is no special “gnosis,” no secret knowledge, no higher truth that only an elite can comprehend. If memoirs like Hunt’s “American Spy” have any value, it is as a cautionary rather than prescriptive tale.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com