In response to my review of his book on the life of Jim Angleton, Michael Holzman has written a thoughtful post on the particular challenges of writing histories of secret intelligence organizations:
Histories of the activities of secret intelligence organizations form a specialized branch of historical research, similar, in many ways, to military and political history, dissimilar in other ways. They are similar in that the object of study is almost always a governmental institution and like the Army, for example, a secret intelligence organization may produce its own public and private histories and cooperate or not cooperate with outside historians. They are dissimilar due to the unusual nature of secret intelligence organizations.
The diplomatic historian has at his or her disposal the vast, rich and often astonishingly frank archives of diplomacy, such as the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). Needless to say, there is no publication series entitled the Secret Foreign Operations of the United States (or any other country). What we have instead is something like an archeological site, a site not well-preserved or well-protected, littered with fake artifacts, much missing, much mixed together and all difficult to put in context.
The overwhelming majority of publications about secret intelligence are produced by secret intelligence services as part of their operations, whether purportedly written by “retired” members of those services, by those “close to” such services, by writers commissioned, directly or through third or fourth parties, by such services. There are very few independent researchers working in the field. The most distinguished practitioners, British academics, for example, have dual appointments—university chairs and status as “the historian” of secret intelligence agencies. There are, of course, muckrakers, some of whom have achieved high status among the cognoscenti, but they are muckrakers nonetheless and as such exhibit the professional deformations of their trade, chiefly, a certain obscurity of sourcing and lack of balance in judgment.
Thus, an academically trained researcher, taking an interest in this field, finds challenges unknown elsewhere. The archives are non-existent, “weeded,” or faked; the “literature” is tendentious to a degree not found otherwise outside of obscure religious sects; common knowledge, including fundamental matters of relative importance of persons and events, is at the very least unreliable, and research methods are themselves most peculiar. Concerning the latter, the privileged mode is the interview with secret intelligence officials, retired secret intelligence officials, spies and so forth. Authors and researchers will carefully enumerate how many interviews they held, sometimes for attribution, more often not, the latter instances apparently more valued than the former. This is an unusual practice, not that researchers do not routinely interview those thought to be knowledgeable about the subject at hand, but because these particular interviewees are known to be, by definition, unreliable witnesses. Many are themselves trained interrogators; most are accustomed to viewing their own speech as an instrument for specific operational purposes; nearly all have signed security pledges. The methodological difficulties confronting the researcher seem to allow only a single use for the products of these interviews: the statement that the interviewee on this occasion said this or that, quite without any meaningful application of the statements made.
An additional, unusual, barrier to research is the reaction of the ensemble of voices from the secret intelligence world to published research not emanating from that world or emanating from particular zones not favored by certain voices. Work that can be traced to other intelligence services is discredited for that reason; work from non-intelligence sources is discredited for that reason (“professor so-and-so is unknown to experienced intelligence professionals”); certain topics are off-limits and, curiously, certain topic are de rigeur (“The writer has not mentioned the notorious case y”). And, finally, there is the scattershot of minutiae always on hand for the purpose—dates (down to the day of the week), spelling (often transliterated by changing convention), names of secret intelligence agencies and their abbreviations (“Surely the writer realizes that before 19__ the agency in question was known as XXX”). All this intended to drown out dissident ideas or, more importantly, inconvenient facts, non-received opinions.
What is to be done? One suggestion would be that of scholarly modesty. The scholar would be well-advised to accept at the beginning that much will never be available. Consider the ULTRA secret—the fact that the British were able to read a variety of high-grade German ciphers during the Second World War. This was known, in one way or another, to hundreds, if not thousands, of people, and yet remained secret for most of a generation. Are we sure that there is no other matter, as significant, not only to the history of secret intelligence, but to general history, that is not yet known? Secondly, that which does become available must be treated with extraordinary caution in two ways: is it what it purports to be, and how does it fit into a more general context? To point at two highly controversial matters, there is VENONA, the decryptions and interpretations of certain Soviet diplomatic message traffic, and, on a different register, the matter of conspiracy theories. Just to approach the prickly pear of the latter, the term itself was invented by James Angleton, chief of the CIA counterintelligence staff, as a way for discouraging questions of the conclusions of the Warren Commission. It lives on, an undead barrier to the understanding of many incidents of the Cold War. The VENONA material is available only in a form edited and annotated by American secret intelligence. There are, for example, footnotes assigning certain cover names to certain well-known persons, but no reasons are given for these attributions. The original documents have not been made available to researchers, nor the stages of decryption and interpretation. And yet great castles of interpretation have been constructed on these foundations.
Intelligence materials can be used, indeed, if available, must be used, if we are to understand certain historical situations: the coup d’etats in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, for example. The FRUS itself incorporates secret intelligence materials in its account of the Guatemala matter. But such materials can only be illustrative; the case itself must be made from open sources. There are exceptions: Nazi-era German intelligence records were captured and are now available nearly in their entirety; occasional congressional investigations have obtained substantial amounts of the files of American secret intelligence agencies; other materials become misplaced into the public realm. But this is a diminuendo of research excellence. The historian concerned with secret intelligence matters must face the unpleasant reality that little can be known about such matters and, from the point of view of the reader, the more certainty with which interpretations are asserted, the more likely it is that such interpretations are yet another secret intelligence operation.
— Michael Holzman
Author Archive for peter
Page 69 of 85
Kim Dae-Jung RIP
The death has just occurred of Kim Dae-Jung (1924-2009), brave Korean dissident and opposition leader, who later became President. The Guardian’s obituary is here. He survived imprisonment, a death sentence, a kidnap and beatings by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, speaking out bravely and persistently against the ruthless Park and Chun dictatorships to become the Republic of Korea’s first non-Conservative President. However, the military-jaebol complex which has run the country since WW II proved too strong for him, and he was not able to enact the reforms he desired. His strong desire for peace and possibly unification of the two Korean states may also have led him to a certain naivety in dealings with the criminal gang who enslave the North.
The Guardian has a photo gallery of the life of Kim Dae-jung here.
With the Brotherhood against Germaine
Although born a Melbournite and raised a Catholic, Germaine Greer, while she was a post-graduate student at Sydney University, was a late child of one of Australia’s Bohemian moments, The Push. How odd, then, that she should take against that earlier group of Bohemian artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In her Guardian column, Germaine Greer first criticizes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) for not being original as artists, since their style resembles that of the slightly earlier German Nazarenes. I question the fairness of such a criticism for art made in the days before public art collections, colour photography, satellite TV, and international blockbuster exhibitions. But at least from this we know that she values originality in art over other criteria, and thus reveals herself captive to that insidious idea which has held most of our cultural critics hostage these last two centuries: that only those with something new to express should be permitted to make art. Nice to see you using your own critical faculties there, Dr Greer, and not just swimming with the art-critical tide.
She goes on to say:
It will be obvious to many that, while France was experiencing the dazzle of the impressionists, Britons were happy to applaud and reward the false sentiment, fancy dress and finicking pseudo-realism of a dreary horde of pre-Raphaelites.
The PRB led its followers into a welter of truly bad art: stultified, inauthentic, meretricious and vulgar. Where the Nazarenes went for luminosity, simplicity and piety, the PRB wallowed in elaboration, erotic suggestion and overheated colour. If they hadn’t had sex with their models, they wanted you to think they had. They realised pretty early on that nudes are not erotic; their languorous models drooped, swooned, gasped and died in ever more elaborate, flowing gowns shot through with new synthetic colours: arsenic greens, cobalt blues, alizarin crimsons.”
We learn that she does not like their art. But the justification of her taste leaves a lot to be desired. The art of the PRB is both “dreary” and uses “overheated colours”. How exciting to find an English text by a writer as good as this where precisely one, but only one, of two adjectives is used with the opposite of its usual meaning. But which one? Clearly, her writing is testing our wits here – challenging us to find a version of reality which enables both these conflicting descriptions to be simultaneously true of the same art.
The percipient Dr Greer clearly doesn’t like bright colours, although (as one might expect from someone with a PhD in EngLit) she enjoys finding the precise words to denote them: “arsenic greens, cobalt blues, alizarin crimsons”. Nicely put, and not merely the three primary colours, either. But one does not need the advice of a professional art critic to decide whether one likes certain colours or not. Any child can do that. And nothing provided by the indefatigable Dr Greer justifies – or could ever justify – her individual, peculiar preference here, because colour preference is entirely a matter of personal taste (itself perhaps partly of biology, for the colour blind), and not of art theory or art criticism or even of art newspaper mongering. I find the PRB’s colours and colour combinations riveting, electric and enchanting.
Consider some of those other adjectives the irrepressible Dr Greer applies: “false sentiment”, “inauthentic, meretricious”. How, precisely, does one determine that a work of visual art is inauthentic or meretricious? Oh, I am sure one can do this with literature: a writer’s choice of words may reveal his or her true thoughts even when the surface description is pointing elsewhere. The novel, The Godfather, by Mario Puzo, for example, seems to show a writer reveling in the violence which his own text ostensibly deplores. But those arts which do not use language – visual art, music, dance, etc – have a murkier connection to the world they inhabit, and they do not have this capacity for self-reference and hence self-revelation. So how can the good Doctor actually determine the authenticity or otherwise of a painting? Perhaps by comparing its subject with its treatment, for example if a serious scene were painted in a slapdash manner, or the reverse. But against such an argument, one could just as easily argue that the means do not necessarily vitiate the ends, but instead may empower or ennoble them: ie, a careful, finicky, technically-adept painting of an apparently flippant subject could actually enhance the subject and bring it to our attention, as in Mozart’s operas with their silly plots or those Haydn symphonies containing musical jokes or even Duchamp’s Fountain. Or indeed, with the PRB’s careful, elaborated, and finely-accurate paintings of imagined scenes from myth and history. No, arguing the inauthenticy of visual art would only ever be persuasive if done painting-by-painting, and even then would need greater intellectual subtlety, depth and heft than the inestimable Dr Greer has chosen to provide here.
Pre-Raphaelite art, for reasons unclear to me, has almost always been unpopular with art critics. Depending on which historical era you select, art critics of the time have tended to believe that all art should celebrate us, or uplift us, or provoke us to thought, or confront us, or even attack us. Almost never have art critics wanted art merely to entertain us, to give pleasure to us, to be enjoyed by us. One has to ask what is wrong with a profession so opposed to simple beauty and pleasure. And what does our Germaine think? Well, she describes the PRB’s art as “vulgar”. Now this is a very interesting adjective, and in this word I believe we have found the deep ground of her dislike. This word is usually used to refer to objects and activities which are popular, which ordinary people do or which they enjoy, but of which the person deploying the word disapproves. That one word “vulgar” gives her game away. It is a word heard often by anyone having an Australian Convent education. And it is certainly indicative of the irony-rich subtlety of Greeresque thought that this word should be deployed by someone who has appeared on reality TV.
By an accident of historical timing, one of the great world collections of Pre-Raphaelite art is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney. I have no way of knowing if that collection and her time in Sydney and in The Push are connected to her present dislike of this great, technically-sophisticated, life-affirming, ennobling, and pleasing art. By the very same accident of timing (local people made good, collecting the latest in British art when the PRB were active), the other great world collections of Pre-Raphaelite are in the northwest of England, particularly the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, the Lady Lever Gallery in Birkenhead, and Manchester City Art Gallery.
Oz-NZ Cabinet Meeting
The Australian and New Zealand Governments are to hold their first-ever joint Cabinet meeting, in Sydney on this Friday 24 August. The political parties in charge of the two countries are currently of opposite hue: Labor in Australia, and National in NZ.
In some respects, the only surprise here is why this took so long. For a period before it was self-governing, New Zealand was a dependency of the British colony of New South Wales, and indeed NZ achieved self-government four years before NSW did (1852 vs. 1856). The preamble to Australia’s Federal constitution mentions NZ as one of the founding states, which would still provide NZ fast-track entry to the Federation should it ever wish. Immediately following Federation in 1901, both countries had cabinet ministers born in the other country, and New Zealand cabinet ministers (along with those from Papua New Guinea and from Norfolk Island) are now regular participants in the various Ministerial Council meetings of COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, the Australian Federal-State body tasked with co-ordinating policy. (As a consequence, COAG meetings, which rotate locations, sometimes take place in NZ or PNG.) The two countries have agreed freedom of trade in almost all products and services and freedom of movement (at least for each others’ citizens), and have even talked about a common currency. They have shared defence activities since at least the joint ANZAC force landed at Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915.
Apart from actual political unions, such as the USA and the EU, I wonder what other two political entities have this degree of co-ordination. Even the British-Irish Council of the Isles, which links the various national assemblies of Eire, Great Britain, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Northen Ireland, Scotland and Wales, does not involve much substantive collaboration. No doubt different languages make joint cabinet meetings difficult across many borders: The only example I can recall in recent years were the joint Franco-German cabinet meetings held under Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl.
Poem: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Today the poem is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens, first published in 1917. I don’t know if Stevens had in mind the popular meaning of depression, aka the black bird – as, for example, in the 1926 song Bye, Bye Blackbird (music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by Mort Dixon). Viewing the meaning that way changes the poem from simple descriptions of nature to something more moving.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Recent listening 1: DVA / Fonok
I’ve been listening lately to an album Fonok by a Czech duo, DVA, comprising husband and wife: Jan Kratochvil and Barbora Kratochvilova. They describe their music as the folklore of non-existent nations, and it is a wonderful combination of electronics, acoustic instruments, nitrous-oxide-inflected voices, Slavic language chants (I think the language is Czech, but I am not certain), ostinato rhythms, and jazz sensibilities. The sax licks could be by James Chance, and the overall sound places this folklore firmly in that no wave, nao wave, post-punk nation of 1980s downtown Sao Paulo.
DVA [2008]: Fonok. Indies Scope.
DVA website is here and myspace page here.
Australian political debate: the teenage years
Australia’s Federal Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, is never a man one could describe as “no drama”. Apparently his histrionic side began very early, as this letter in today’s Sydney Morning Herald recounts. The letter-writer is Alison Lockwood of Katoomba.
“Can you do anything with this completely true reminiscence?” she writes. “In 1969 my family arrived in Sydney and I was enrolled at SCEGGS Darlinghurst in year 9 (age 13). As I was ‘academic’ I was required to be part of the debating team with our ‘brother’ school, Sydney Grammar. The topics for debate were contemporary and highly debatable subjects such as ‘Should women receive equal pay for equal work?’ and ‘Is ”no blame divorce” a good thing?’ It was, nevertheless, slightly risque for the times to propose the topic ‘Should the age of discretion (i.e. consent) be lowered?’ ”As designated first speaker I spent days preparing my arguments carefully, and my well-ordered palm cards referred to meticulously researched areas such as ‘Marriage in Hindu cultures’, ‘Underage marriage in Appalachian societies’ and ‘The menarche 1860 to 1960’. My English teacher, the enthusiastic Mrs Black, helped me refine the most pertinent points.
”I felt well prepared and as excited as any 13-year-old engaging in an activity at night time and in a boy’s school. The debate was held at Sydney Grammar and my opposite first speaker was a podgy school boy called Malcolm Turnbull. Unfortunately, there were two factors in this debate that the worthy Mrs Black had neglected to tell me were relevant.
”1. This was a mock debate; 2. I was prepubescent.
”When all the mostly male student and teacher body were assembled, and before I had any chance to speak, Malcolm Turnbull rose from his pew and announced, ‘As my opposite first speaker has obviously not reached the age of discretion I move that she be removed from this debate.’
”After which a pimply boy hooked an umbrella around my neck and dragged me into an adjoining room, to the accompaniment of loud guffaws from the audience.
”Mrs Black fussed around me uselessly, and I myself hadn’t much idea quite what had happened. I was vaguely aware I had been humiliated and that the debate was now continuing without me because …?
”As you can imagine, Ms Crabb, this was a seminal (excuse the double entendre) experience. Months later, I both reached the ‘age of discretion’ and read The Female Eunuch. I figured it out.
”Malcolm, I’m afraid, remains an opportunistic bully.
”Kind Regards, Alison Lockwood.
Obama Felix
I have never thought much of historian Niall Ferguson’s ideas. For years he has been arguing that America and the West suffer from too little religion, while simultaneously arguing that the Islamic world suffers from too much. One is tempted to ask for this spiritual Laffer Curve to be quantified and differentiated, so that we can determine the optimum level of religion for our society once and for all. At least we could then stop having to accuse him of inconsistency, which surely must wrankle him.
But, despite the shere impossibility of the task, he has managed to plumb even shallower waters. Barack Obama is like Felix the Cat in that firstly . . . ahem, how do I put this without upsetting those of you who’ve been asleep at the back of the class these last few months? . . . apparently, they are both black. Are such superficialities bordering on racism the content of lectures these days at Harvard Business School? Shame that some adult at the FT did not object before publication.
And, as further evidence of his tin-ear for conversation in the public square, his defence is a doubling-down.
Recent reading 3: Santayana
I’ve just read the memoirs of philosopher George Santayana, as mentioned in this earlier post. They were published in three volumes, being written during and just after WW II.
The personal aspects of these memoirs are fascinating, and very enjoyable. Santayana seems to have known everybody, or if not, he was related to them. He had two families – one via his mother and father, Spanish colons in the Philippines, and one via his mother’s first husband and their children, American from Boston, not quite Brahmins but society people. The two families, at least from this account, were Faulkneresque in their eccentricities, entanglements and bedevilments. Santayana’s writing is as smooth as a gimlet and the reader is carried along as if reading a Doris Lessing novel. No wonder the one novel he wrote – about his family and friends (The Last Puritan) – was such a financial success.
At least the first volume of his memoirs was smuggled out of Italy (where Santayana was living), allegedly with assistance from the Vatican’s international network, and published during the war. It is therefore not surprising that it makes no mention, even allusively, to current political events. Ditto the second volume. I was surprised that even the third volume makes no real mention of the war, although it does contain a section near the end which seems to present Santayana’s political positions, although in an indirect and abstract way. I wonder if the reticence was due to the extremity of his political beliefs. Having been able to retire anywhere, he chose Rome and stayed there through the Mussolini years. He also barely mentions the Spanish civil war in his memoirs, but perhaps this was still too close, with the possibility of his family being affected by his writing. From the few comments he makes on matters political it is apparent he was a conservative, although he gives no good reasons for this. (Nor could he.)
I can make no sense of Santayana’s writing in philosophy. His writing typically consists of a sequence of abstract assertions and generalizations, none of which is supported by evidence or even argument. Against each one I cavil and wish to argue the case, or at least to have the pleasure of being the recipient of a case in support; since he provides no justification for these assertions, argument-against them is difficult, and there are so many, it is tiring. Perhaps this style was typical of the philosophy of his day. I find that every academic discipline takes some significant statements or assumptions for granted, and that people in the discipline expend most their intellectual heft arguing over the trivial remainder. People outside the discipline wonder how anyone could argue about the trivialities while ignoring the big issues assumed or implied at the start.
For the record, I’ll include here some quotations which struck me:
With parents evidently Catalans of the Catalonians how did my mother come to be born in Glasgow, and how did she ever meet a Bostonian named Sturgis? These facts, taken separately, were accidents of travel, or rather of exile and of Colonial life; but accidents are accidents only to ignorance; in reality all physical events flow out of one another by a continuous intertwined derivation;” (page 8, Santayana 1944)
Catholicism is the most human of religions, if taken humanly: it is paganism spiritually transformed and made metaphysical. It corresponds most adequately to the various exigencies of moral life, with just the needed dose of wisdom, sublimity, and illusion.” (1944, p. 98)
Even what we still think we remember may almost become the act of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to the interests of the present. This, when it is not intentional or dishonest, involves no deception. Things truly wear those aspects to one another. A point of view and a special lighting are not distortions. They are conditions of vision, and spirit can see nothing not focused in some living eye.” (1944, p. 155)
It is or it was usual, especially in America, to regard the polity of which you happen to approve as sure to be presently established everywhere and to prevail for ever after.” (1947, p. 138)
Unattached academic obscurity is rather a blessed condition, when it doesn’t breed pedantry, envy or ill-nature.” (1953, p. 103)
References:
George Santayana [1935]: The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel. (London, UK: Constable.)
George Santayana [1944]: Persons and Places. (London, UK: Constable.)
George Santayana [1947]: The Middle Span. (London, UK: Constable.)
George Santayana [1953]: My Host the World. (London, UK: The Cresset Press.)
Recent reading 2: Spooks
For the record, herewith brief reports of recent reading of books on espionage:
- Michael Holzman [2008]: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence. (Amherst, MA, USA: University of Massachusetts Press). A fascinating topic, not given justice in this poorly-written account. Sentence without verbs. Not fond of. I. The author claims to have undertaken interviews with key players (although I only noticed one reference to such an interview), but the book is almost entirely written from secondary sources. This means it has no new insights. On some issues, the book is not up to date – eg, on the Nosenko affair, the author seems not to have seen Bagley’s book (see below), published a year before. The writing is very vague about dates (a rather important failing for a writer of a history book), and lots of information is only provided en passant; for example, we only learn about Angleton’s first child well after its birth. Perhaps that is an editor’s failing, as much as an author’s. There are worse problems: the author appears to have a very unsophisticated understanding of marxism (p. 103), and his description of the Bay of Pigs invasion puts all the blame on Bissell and colleagues (p. 187), when some of it rightly belongs in the White House, including with JFK himself. Relying on secondary sources and without new insights, Holzman could have shown us how Angleton’s literary training helped him in the world of intelligence. Despite repeated claims that his literary education did help, we are not ever shown it doing so, nor given a detailed explanation of how it helped. To show us this, Holzman would have needed to provide a detailed presentation of at least one theory of intelligence and counter-intelligence; this is something that would have been very interesting and very useful in itself, yet is also lacking from the book.
- Tennent H. Bagley [2007]: Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press). An insider’s account of the Nosenko affair, which I have blogged about here and here. Bagley argues compellingly that Yuri Nosenko was a KGB plant, not a genuine defector. From this he concludes that CIA should not have accepted him as a genuine defector. As I argue, it is not certain that CIA did in fact accept him as such, despite what it looks like, and the benefits of accepting him (or appearing to accept him) may have outweighed the costs. An intelligence agency needs to think through the wider consequences of its beliefs and of what are believed by others to be its beliefs, in addition to considerations of simple truth and falsity.
- S. J. Hamrick [2004]: Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press). Hamrick argues that British intelligence knew that Philby, Burgess and Maclean were Soviet agents several years before their public exposures, and during this period used them to securely transmit messages — both information and disinformation — to the Soviet leadership, knowing it would more likely be believed if it came from the Soviets’ own agents. If Holzman’s book about Jim Angleton (above) had included some discussion of theories of intelligence and counter-intelligence, this is just the type of case that such a theory would seek to account for. The (alleged) facts of Hamrick’s book are fascinating, but the book itself is poorly-written, repetitious, acronym-rich and comes with added right-wing tirades. There are even anti-Catholic tirades against the novelist Graham Greene and —for goodness sake! — the poet-priest Robert Southwell SJ (p. 32), who was executed in 1595. These tirades are not only out-of-place here, but replete with errors. One has to wonder at the immense power of a Catholic missionary that he can still provoke such an irrational rant four centuries after his murder by Elizabeth’s police-state. I am certainly one of Southwell’s admirers (see, for example, here), but there cannot be more than a score or two of people alive who even know of him.
- Valerie Plame Wilson [2008]: Fair Game: How a top CIA Agent was betrayed by her own Government. (New York, USA: Simon and Schuster). Published with CIA redactions shown. Very well-written and her life story is fascinating. Shame about her Government.
- Tim Weiner [2007]: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. (London, UK: Allen Lane). The best single-volume history of CIA, at least as far as an outsider can judge. Well-written and thorough, although I would have liked more on Africa. On page 80, Weiner claims the only two successful CIA-sponsored coups were both executed under Eisenhower, but what of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire in 1965 (see Devlin’s book below), and Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973 (and perhaps Malcom Fraser in Australia in 1975)?
- Larry Devlin [2007]: Chief of Station, Congo: A Memoir of 1960-67. (New York, USA: Public Affairs). An insider’s account of the role of CIA in putting Mobutu into power in Zaire. Having once met Mobutu, I found this account fascinating, although, of course, I have no idea how honest or comprehensive it is.
- Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy [1997]: Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster. (New York, USA: Public Affairs). A riveting read, which I read in a single day. Markus Wolf presents himself, I am not sure how sincerely, as a reform Communist, an admirer of Andropov and Gorbarchev.
- David C. Martin [1980]: Wilderness of Mirrors. (Guildford, CT, USA: The Lyons Press). A detailed account of the relationship between Jim Angleton and Bill Harvey. Well-written and an easy read. However, the chronology of the events in the George Blake affair (pp. 100-102) is inconsistent.
- Milt Beardon and James Risen [2003]: The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB. (New York, USA: Ballantine Books). Although mostly riveting, I skipped over the history of 1980s Afghanistan. Reading of KGB watching CNN during the attempted coup of August 1991 to learn what has happening was very amusing. The book would have been better if more had been included on the post-1990 period: just when events get interesting, the book ends.