{"id":864,"date":"2009-08-11T11:02:54","date_gmt":"2009-08-11T11:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=864"},"modified":"2009-08-11T11:02:54","modified_gmt":"2009-08-11T11:02:54","slug":"recent-reading-2-spooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/recent-reading-2-spooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent reading 2:  Spooks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the record, herewith brief reports of recent reading of books on espionage:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Michael Holzman [2008]:\u00a0 <em>James Jesus Angleton<\/em><em>:\u00a0 The CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence<\/em>. (Amherst, MA, USA:\u00a0 University of Massachusetts Press).<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 A fascinating topic, not given justice in this poorly-written account.\u00a0 Sentence without verbs.\u00a0 Not fond of. I.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0This means it has no new insights.\u00a0 On some issues, the book is not up to date &#8211; eg, on the Nosenko affair, the author seems not to have seen Bagley&#8217;s book (see below), published a year before.\u00a0 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 <em>en passant<\/em>;\u00a0\u00a0 for example, we only learn about Angleton&#8217;s first child well after its birth.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps that is an editor&#8217;s failing, as much as an author&#8217;s.\u00a0\u00a0There are worse problems:\u00a0 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2008\/11\/presidential-planning\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">rightly belongs in the White House, including with JFK himself<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Relying on secondary sources and without new insights, Holzman could have shown us how Angleton&#8217;s literary training helped him in the world of intelligence.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 To show us this, Holzman would have needed to provide a detailed presentation of at least one <em>theory <\/em>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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tennent H. Bagley [2007]:\u00a0 <em>Spy Wars:\u00a0 Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games.<\/em> (New Haven, CT, USA:\u00a0 Yale University Press).\u00a0<\/strong> An insider&#8217;s account of the Nosenko affair, which I have blogged about <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2009\/07\/epistemic-modal-logic-at-the-cia\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2008\/10\/perceptions-and-counter-perceptions\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.\u00a0 Bagley argues compellingly that Yuri Nosenko\u00a0was a KGB plant, not a genuine defector.\u00a0\u00a0 From this he concludes that CIA should not have accepted him as a genuine defector.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>S. J. Hamrick [2004]:\u00a0 <em>Deceiving the Deceivers:\u00a0 Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess<\/em>. (New Haven, CT, USA:\u00a0 Yale University Press).<\/strong> 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 \u2014 both information and disinformation \u2014 to the Soviet leadership, knowing it would more likely be believed if it came from the Soviets&#8217; own agents.\u00a0 If Holzman&#8217;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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The (alleged) facts of Hamrick&#8217;s book are fascinating, but the book itself is poorly-written, repetitious, acronym-rich and comes with added right-wing tirades.\u00a0 There are even anti-Catholic tirades against the novelist Graham Greene and \u2014for goodness sake! \u2014 the poet-priest <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?s=southwell\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Robert Southwell SJ<\/a>\u00a0(p. 32), who was executed in 1595. \u00a0These tirades are not only out-of-place here, but replete with errors.\u00a0\u00a0 One has to wonder at the immense power of a Catholic\u00a0missionary that he can still provoke such an irrational rant four centuries after his murder by Elizabeth&#8217;s police-state. I am certainly one of Southwell\u2019s admirers (see, for example,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2011\/07\/east-of-my-days-circle\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>), but there cannot be more than a score or two of people alive who even know of him.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Valerie Plame Wilson [2008]: <em>Fair Game:\u00a0 How a top CIA Agent was betrayed by her own Government<\/em>. (New York, USA:\u00a0 Simon and Schuster).<\/strong>\u00a0 Published with CIA redactions shown.\u00a0\u00a0 Very well-written and her life story is fascinating.\u00a0 Shame about her Government.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tim Weiner [2007]:\u00a0 <em>Legacy of Ashes:\u00a0\u00a0The History of the CIA<\/em>.\u00a0 (London, UK:\u00a0 Allen Lane).<\/strong>\u00a0 The best single-volume history of CIA, at least as far as an outsider can judge.\u00a0\u00a0Well-written and thorough, although I would have liked more on Africa.\u00a0 On page 80,\u00a0Weiner 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&#8217;s book below), and Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973 (and perhaps Malcom Fraser in Australia in 1975)?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Larry Devlin [2007]:\u00a0 <em>Chief of Station, Congo:\u00a0 A Memoir of 1960-67<\/em>.\u00a0 (New York, USA:\u00a0 Public Affairs)<\/strong>.\u00a0 An insider&#8217;s account of the role of CIA in putting Mobutu into power in Zaire.\u00a0\u00a0 Having <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2009\/10\/public-lectures\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">once met Mobutu<\/a>, I found this account fascinating, although, of course, I have no idea how honest or comprehensive it is.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Markus Wolf\u00a0 and Anne McElvoy [1997]:\u00a0 <em>Man Without a Face:\u00a0 The Autobiography of Communism&#8217;s Greatest Spymaster<\/em>. (New York, USA:\u00a0 Public Affairs).<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 A riveting read, which I read in a single day. \u00a0Markus Wolf presents himself, I am not sure how\u00a0sincerely,\u00a0as a reform Communist, an admirer of Andropov and Gorbarchev.<\/li>\n<li><strong>David C. Martin [1980]:\u00a0 <em>Wilderness of Mirrors<\/em>. (Guildford, CT, USA:\u00a0 The Lyons Press)<\/strong>.\u00a0 A detailed account of the relationship between Jim Angleton and Bill Harvey.\u00a0 Well-written and an easy read.\u00a0 However, the chronology of the events in the George Blake affair (pp. 100-102) is inconsistent.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Milt Beardon and James Risen [2003]:\u00a0 <em>The Main Enemy:\u00a0 The Inside Story of the CIA&#8217;s Final Showdown with the KGB<\/em>. (New York, USA:\u00a0 Ballantine Books).\u00a0<\/strong> Although mostly riveting, I skipped over the history of 1980s Afghanistan.\u00a0\u00a0 Reading of KGB watching CNN during the attempted coup of August 1991 to learn what has happening was very amusing.\u00a0\u00a0 The book would have been better if more had been included on the post-1990 period:\u00a0 just when events get interesting, the book ends.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the record, herewith brief reports of recent reading of books on espionage: Michael Holzman [2008]:\u00a0 James Jesus Angleton:\u00a0 The CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence. (Amherst, MA, USA:\u00a0 University of Massachusetts Press).\u00a0\u00a0 A fascinating topic, not given justice in this poorly-written account.\u00a0 Sentence without verbs.\u00a0 Not fond of. I.\u00a0\u00a0 The author claims to have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,35,38,70,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-intelligence-and-espionage","category-recent-reading","category-religion","p1","y2009","m08","d11","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}