Archive for the ‘Intelligence and Espionage’ Category

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Friday Poem: Song

Published by peter on 2008-10-24 in Intelligence and Espionage and Poetry. 0 Comments

A long-standing tradition here which we are starting today is a Friday poem.   Mention earlier this week of the movie The Good Shepherd reminds me of the scene in which the Jim Angleton character (played by Matt Damon) discovers that his Yale Literature Professor Dr Fredericks (played by Michael Gambon) has plagiarized a poem.

The poem in question, Song, is by a real poet, Joseph Trumbull Stickney, and is about a cuckoo; this is very appropriate for a movie about spies and spying, since many species of cuckoo are brood parasites, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds.   Gambon’s character was at that point in the film pretending to be someone other than he really was. Angleton had studied poetry at Yale and co-founded a poetry magazine, Furioso, while a student.

Joe Stickney (1874-1904) was a student of George Santayana at Harvard and later friends with him and with Henry Adams in Paris, where Stickney received the first doctorate of letters from the Sorbonne given to an American.  Adams wrote of him: “[in Paris one could] totter about with Joe Stickney, talking Greek philosophy or recent poetry” (The Education, p. 1088) and, “Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the Gotterdammerung.” (The Education, p. 1090).

Stickney traveled in Europe and then taught Greek at Harvard, before dying suddenly of a brain tumour.  Stickney’s poetry has an elegaic, autumnal feel about it, a sense of loss; it is writing from the end of an era, rather than from the start of one, as is Pounds’ or Eliot’s.    Here is “Song“, written in 1902, and very appropriate for the season we in the northern hemisphere are now in:

A bud has burst on the upper bough
(The linnet sang in my heart today);
I know where the pale green grasses show
By a tiny runnel, off the way,
And the earth is wet.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Not yet.”)

I nabbed the fly in a briar rose
(The linnet to-day in my heart did sing);
Last night, my head tucked under my wing,
I dreamed of a green moon-moth that glows
Thro’ ferns of June.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “So soon?”)

Good-bye, for the pretty leaves are down
(The linnet sang in my heart today);
The last gold bit of upland’s mown,
And most of summer has blown away
Thro’ the garden gate.
(A cuckoo said in my brain: “Too late.”)

POSTSCRIPT (added 2008-10-25): Since posting this, I have learnt about a recent setting to music of another elegaic Stickney poem, Mnemosyne, by the Russian-American violist Lev Zhurbin.  The song is performed here by Zhurbin’s eclectic gypsy-influenced group, Ljova and the Kontraband, and the poem itself is here.   The poem is about the decay of memories over time, and what I found most appealing about the setting is the final repetition of the central refrain, It’s autumn in the country I remember, a refrain which Stickney varies slightly each time it appears. (Thanks, JS).

POSTSCRIPT (added 2009-09-28): I wonder if Angleton met with Santayana in Rome when Angleton was engaged in espionage after WW II, using illegal bribery and much else besides to ensure (inter alia) that the Communist Party of Italy did not win the post-war elections.  They would probably have agreed on politics.  And, of course, Angleton, like Santayana, was a child of two cultures, American and Hispanic, since Angleton’s mother was Mexican.

POSTSCRIPT (added 2010-11-03):  I encounter something which suggests it would be more surprising for Angleton NOT to have met Santayana in Rome than otherwise.    From M. M. Kirkwood’s account of Santayana’s life and works [1961]:

So Santayana’s sympathy and gay human spirit remained unchanged.  He was responsive and generous always.  Not only [page-break] close friends like Daniel Cory, and distinguished creatures like the Marchesa Iris Origo, were warmly received in Santayana’s room with the Blue Sisters [in Rome].  Tom, Dick, and Harry were also welcomed, for of the numbers of American soldiers who were calling on him in 1945 he wrote in happy vein: “As to society, I have never received so many visits as the American soldiers in Rome have made me.  It has been very pleasant to see so many young faces and to autograph so many books, which is what they usually ask me to do.” [pp. 172-173] 

References:

Henry Adams [1907/1983]:  The Education of Henry Adams.  New York, NY, USA:  The Library of America.

M. M. Kirkwood [1961]: Santayana:  Saint of the Imagination.  Toronto, Canada:  University of Toronto Press.

Perceptions and counter-perceptions

Published by peter on 2008-10-22 in Decision theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Prophecy. 0 Comments

The recent death of Yuri Nosenko allows me to continue an intelligence arc in these posts.  What is the connection to marketing, I hear you cry!  Well, marketing is about the organized creation and management of perceptions, which could also be a definition of secret intelligence activities.  In any case, the two disciplines have many overlaps, including some coincident goals and some similar methods, which I intend to explore on this blog.

First, let us focus on Nosenko.   He presented himself in Geneva in 1961 to CIA as an agent of KGB willing to spy for the Americans, and then defected to the USA in 1964.  Among other information, he came bearing a firm denial that the USSR had had anything to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963.   JFK’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was, after all, one of the very few (perhaps under 1000) people who had defected from the USA to the USSR between 1945 and 1963, and one of the even fewer (perhaps under 50) people who had defected back again.  Nosenko claimed to have read Oswald’s KGB file.
From the start, lots of doubts arose regarding Nosenko’s testimony.   He did not seem to know his way around KGB headquarters, his testimony contradicted other information which CIA knew, there were  internal inconsistencies in his story, and he cast serious aspersions on an earlier defector from KGB to CIA, claiming him to be a KGB plant.   Was Nosenko, then, a KGB plant or was he the genuine defector?   Within CIA the battle waged throughout the 1960s, with first the sceptics of Nosenko and then subsequently the believers in his bona fides holding sway.  Chief among the sceptics was James J. Angleton, who came to see conspiracies everywhere, and who was eventually fired from CIA for his paranoia.   (Robert De Niro’s film “The Good Shepherd”  is based on the life of Angleton, with Matt Damon taking this part, and features a character based on Nosenko.)  Finally, CIA decided officially to believe Nosenko, and he was placed in a protection programme.  He was even asked to give lectures to new CIA recruits on the practices of KGB, such was his apparent acceptance by the organization.
This final position so angered one of the protagonists, Tennent Bagley, that, 40 years later, he has written a book arguing the case for Nosenko being a KGB plant who duped CIA.   The book is very compelling, and I find myself very much inclined to the sceptic case.   However, one last mirror is missing from Bagley’s hall.   What if the top-most levels of CIA really did doubt that Nosenko was genuine?    Would it not be better for CIA to not let KGB know this?  In other words, if your enemy tries to dupe you, and you realise that this is what they are trying to do, is it not generally better to let them think they have succeeded, if you can?    Certainly, more information (about their methods and plans, about their agents, about their knowledge) may potentially be gained from them if you manage to convince them that they have indeed duped you.  All you lose is – perhaps – some pride.  Pretending to be duped by Soviet intelligence is perhaps what Britain’s MI6 did regarding Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess:  it is possible that MI6 knew many years before their defections that these men were working for the Soviets, and used them in that period as conduits for messages to Moscow.
In the case of Nosenko the dupe arrived bearing a message about the JFK assassination.   For many and various reasons (not all of them necessarily conspiratorial), CIA may have been keen to accept the proposition that KGB were not involved in JFK’s assassination.   How do you convince KGB that you believe this particular message if you don’t believe the messenger is genuine?   So, also for pragmatic reasons, the top levels of CIA may have decided to act in a way which would lead (they hoped) to KGB thinking that the KGB’s ruse had worked.
How then to convince KGB that their plant, Nosenko, was believed by CIA to be for real?  Simply accepting him as such would be too obvious – even KGB would know that his story had holes and would not believe that a quick acceptance by CIA was genuine.   Better, rather, for CIA to argue internally, at length and in detail, back-and-forth-and-forth-and-back, about the question, and then, finally, in great pain and after much disruption, decide to believe in the defector.   Bagley either does not understand this last mirror (something I sincerely doubt, since his book evidences a fine mind and very keen understanding of perception management), or else perhaps his book is itself part of a plan to convince KGB that Nosenko was fully believed by CIA.
 
References:
Tennent H. Bagley [2007]: Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Robert De Niro, Director [2006]:  The Good Shepherd. Universal Pictures.
Tim Weiner [ 2007]:  Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.  Doubleday.

A salute to Dick Bissell

Published by peter on 2008-10-20 in Design, Heroes, Intelligence and Espionage, Joint-Action Society, Planning and Project Management. 0 Comments

For those who know his name, Richard Bissell (1910-1994) probably has a mostly negative reputation, as the chief planner of the failed attempted invasion of Cuba at the “Bay of Pigs” in April 1961.  Put aside the fact that last-minute changes to the invasion plans (including a change of location) were forced on Bissell and CIA by the Kennedy Administration; after all, as Bissell himself argued in his memoirs, he and CIA could have and should have done more to resist these changes.  (There is another post to be written on the lessons of this episode for the making of complex decisions, a topic on which surprisingly little seems to have been published.)  Bissell ended his career as VP for Marketing and Economic Planning at United Aircraft Corporation, a post he held for a decade, although he found it unfulfilling after the excitement of his Government service.

Earlier in his career, Bissell was several times an administrative and organizational hero, a man who got things done.  During World War II, Bissell, working for the US Government’s Shipping Adjustment Board, established a comprehensive card index of every ship in the US merchant marine to the point where he could predict, within an error of 5 percent, which ships would be at which ports unloading their cargoes when, and thus available for reloading.  He did this well before multi-agent systems or even Microsoft Excel. After WW II, he was the person who successfully implemented the Marshall Plan for the Economic Recovery of Europe.  And then, after joining CIA in 1954, he successfully created and led the project to design, build, equip and deploy a high-altitude spy-plane to observe America’s enemies, the U-2 spy plane.   Bissell also led the design, development and deployment of CIA’s Corona reconnaisance satellites, and appears to have played a key role in the development of America’s national space policy before that.
Whatever one thinks of the overall mission of CIA before 1989 (and I think there is a fairly compelling argument that CIA and KGB successfully and jointly kept the cold war from becoming a hot one), one can only but admire Bissell’s managerial competence, his ability to inspire others, his courage, and his verve.  Not only was the U-2 a completely new plane (designed and built by a team led by Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, using engines from Pratt & Whitney), flying at altitudes above any ever flown before, and using a new type of fuel (developed by Shell), but the plane also had to be equipped with sophisticated camera equipment, also newly invented and manufactured (by a team led by Edwin Land of Polaroid), producing developed film in industrial quantities.  All of these components, and the pilot, needed to operate under extreme conditions (eg, high-altitudes, long-duration flights, very sensitive flying parameters, vulnerability to enemy attack).  And the overall process, from weather prediction, through deployment of the plane and pilot to their launch site, all the way to the human analyses of the resulting acres of film, had to be designed, organized, integrated and managed.
All this was done in great secrecy and very rapidly, with multiple public-sector and private-sector stakeholders involved.   Bissell achieved all this while retaining the utmost loyalty and respect from those who worked for him and with him.  I can only respond with enormous admiration for the project management and expectations management abilities, and the political, negotiation, socialization, and consensus-forging skills, that Dick Bissell must have had.  Despite what many in academia believe, these abilities are rare and intellectually-demanding, and far too few people in any organization have them.
References:
Richard M. Bissell [1996]:  Reflections of a Cold Warrior:  From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. New Haven, CT, USA:  Yale University Press.
Norman Polnar [2001]:  Spyplane:  The U-2 History Declassified.  Osceola, WI, USA: MBI Publishing.
Evan Thomas [1995]:  The Very Best Men.  Four Who Dared:  The Early Years of the CIA.  New York City, NY, USA:  Touchstone.