The double-naught spy, in the popular imagination…
There’s a little confusion over terms going on in the news the last day or so.
First, Edward Snowden says he wasn’t some “low-level analyst,” but a sure-enough, double-naught spy.
Susan Rice denies it, saying he was no such thing.
Not that she’s necessarily a reliable witness on such things, but she must be in the right of it.
That’s because, even if Snowden actually was, as he claims, an American sent abroad under a cover to collect intelligence, he wasn’t a spy, and certainly not an agent.
“Spies” and “agents” are the people recruited by CIA intelligence officers to collect intelligence, usually regarding their own country. A spy, generally speaking, isn’t someone like James Bond or George Smiley. A spy tends to be someone who is working for someone other than who he claims to be working for.
Kim Philby was a spy — not because he worked for Britain’s MI6, but because while pretending to work for MI6, he was actually working for the Soviets. Burgess and McLean, Jonathan Pollard, Aldrich Ames and Whittaker Chambers were spies.
Yes, it’s a malleable term. When Snowden says, “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word,” I think what he means is “in the popular sense of the word,” as opposed to the technical one.
Of course, my impression of what the word means is based mostly on spy fiction, so I could be wrong, too. (And occasionally, even in le Carre, the word is used loosely to mean “someone engaged in the intelligence world”). But I don’t think I am.
I’m also a bit puzzled that he believes being a field officer is automatically higher-ranking than an analyst. True, there’s more cachet to being a field man than a desk man; it’s way cooler. (As Jethro Bodine knows, or thinks he knows, they get to do all that “fightin’ and lovin’.”) And Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson held desk men in contempt. And sure, there are certainly analysts who are lower in the organization than senior field people, particularly when they are contractors rather than career officers. But who is higher-ranking, Jim Prideaux, a.k.a. Jim Ellis, out in the cold in Czechoslovakia or George Smiley back at the office in London? Obviously, Smiley. (Not that George didn’t still have some great tradecraft if forced into the field himself, as in Smiley’s People.) It’s sort of like with newspapers. Reporters may have the fun, but editors decide what goes into the paper. Field officers may be posted to romantic, exotic places, but the analysts more directly affect the policies that result from intel-gathering.
Anyway, if Snowden had ambitions of being a spy, he should rejoice, because that’s what he is now. He took American secrets with which he was entrusted and revealed them to the nation’s enemies. Of course, he revealed them to everybody else as well, which kind of blows the whole secrecy thing that we associate with spies. But he should comfort himself that he’s now as close to being a spy as he’ll ever be.
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People who work to gather intelligence from foreign governments refer to themselves as “Intelligence Officers”. The word “spy” has a negative connotation to it.
But I might have read that in a Tom Clancy novel.
And as I confess above, I’m getting my terminology from novels as well.
That’s because there’s a lot more fictional material available describing the details and nuances of the secret world than fact. Given that this stuff is kept secret.
So while I can name a few real-life spies, I know more about the personalities, job descriptions and tradecraft of the fictional characters.
One of the troubles with le Carre — and also one of the things that makes his stuff fun to read — is that he makes up some of this stuff. The Circus. Lamplighters. Scalphunters.
I think, although I’m not sure, that he also made up some terms that have since entered the real world. “Mole,” for instance. Although maybe that existed before he made it a universal term for an agent who burrows deep into a society years before he starts actively spying on it. And “honey trap.” I thought that was pure le Carre for using an attractive woman to trap and blackmail a potential agent. And then, I heard it used in the film “Munich,” which was supposedly a true story. (IMDB, though, says that was an error in the script.)
I have read SOME nonfiction on the subject.
Years ago, I read an autobiography of a CIA officer who had served in some of the more interesting fronts of the Cold War. One of the boring truths I learned from that was that most of the best humint doesn’t come from active recruitment by CIA officers, but just walks in off the street. That’s why it’s important to have people in our embassies and consulates who everybody KNOWS is CIA, so they can be approached.
I can’t remember the title of that book. But I remember that it dealt in part with his time in Indonesia in the early 60s. And what he described was pretty consistent with the way it was described in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” which is one of my favorite movies.
OK, here’s a fun anecdote arising from my having read that book and seen the movie multiple times.
Back in the late 80s or early 90s, I was dealing for some reason with a reporter with States News Service in Washington. It was either during that period between Lee Bandy and Brigid Schulte when we didn’t have anybody up there, or maybe she was just staffing a story that our person couldn’t get to. (States News Service is, or was, a service that existed to serve newspapers across the country that didn’t have people in Washington. For a fee, they’d cover your congressional delegation for you, etc.)
Anyway, as tended to be the case with reporters with that service, this writer was less interested in her day job than she was in a book or freelance assignment she was working on. She was writing about Indonesia in the early 60s, for whatever reason.
So she was rattling on enthusiastically about this topic to me over the phone, and I was going “Uh-huh,” and “yeah,” listening politely. And at one point she mentioned the Indonesian Communist Party. And I just added, “Yeah, the PKI…”
Wow, was SHE impressed. She had probably never met anyone, outside this project, who knew what the Indonesian Community Party was called in the early 60s. Her voice was filled with awe as she asked, “How in the world…”
But I’m like, “Yeah, the PKI… what? Of course I’ve heard of them…” I can’t remember whether I eventually admitted that I’d learned it from Mel Gibson…
Googling “spy” does not give me the Warthen definition. If Snowden is telling the truth, IF, then he meets the Webster definition.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spy
I’m using the sense of the word that I THINK is actually used in the intelligence-gathering world — the world that Snowden claims to have been a dashing part of.
I don’t really have much to go on beyond the way the word is used in novels, and occasionally in nonfiction.
I’m using “spy” here as a synonym for “agent.” And I AM able to find references that explain “agent” the way I just explained “spy.” (If I’m wrong, the error would be in equating “spy” with “agent.”)
But since the word is used — according to my definition — incorrectly about 99.9 percent of the time (just as “agent” is), I would not expect dictionaries or Google searches to back me up…
Somewhere out there, within reach of this blog, is someone who KNOWS I’m right and could back me up convincingly. But then he’d have to kill us all…
But yeah, you should read all of this while being aware that I could be wrong. I don’t THINK I am, but there’s that possibility…
What is probably worth remembering, in the U.S., at least, is that traitors (including spies) are charged with a non-capital felony EXCEPT in times of a war actually declared by congress. Remember Ethel and Julius Rosenberg?
They were executed Friday, June 19, 1953. As a young lad in grammar school I was tasked with buying french bread and the Saturday paper for my parents before breakfast.
Saturday’s headline was unforgetttable for a second grader.
So little is expected from citizens these days.
I love the picture of Jethro. If I remember correctly from reruns in my childhood, his hat is made of iron a la Goldfinger. He kept banging it and hurting himself. The “idiot sitcoms” of the sixties were great. Good memories.
I had two reactions to the NBC interview with Snowden:
1 — he’s not an idiot.
2 — he thinks everybody else is an idiot.