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SPEAKING
FREELY
I spy with my little eye
...
By Richard Thieme
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
 James Jesus Angleton
embodied the inevitable trajectory of a person committed
to counterintelligence. Maybe he got a little crazy at
the end, but that might explain why we are all getting a
little crazy too.
Angleton was director of
counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) from 1954 until 1974. Fans of spy fiction might
think of him as John Le Carre's George Smiley, but that
portrait puts a benign and smiling face on the grimace
that counterintelligence practitioners can't completely
hide.
For 20 years, Angleton's job was to doubt
everything. This enigmatic figure presented puzzles for
people to solve in every conversation, stitched designer
lies into every narrative, trusted no one.
The
task of counterintelligence is to figure out what the
other side is doing, how they are deceiving us, what
double agents they have planted in our midst.
Counterintelligence is predicated on double deceiving
and triple deceiving the other side into believing
fictions nested within fictions, always leavened with
some facts, just enough to seem real.
Counterintelligence is a dangerous game. You
have to be willing to sacrifice pawns to save queens.
Those pawns may be loyal agents, but nothing you have
told them, no promises or pledges, can stand in the way
of letting them go when you have to, letting them be
tortured or killed or imprisoned for life to protect a
plan of action.
Angleton came to suspect
everyone. Whenever a mole was uncovered in the ranks, he
believed that he had been allowed to discover that mole
to protect a bigger one, higher up.
You see how
the moebius strip twists back onto itself. Every
successful operation is suspect. If you discover double
agents in your own ranks, it is because the other side
wanted you to find them. The more important the agent
you uncover, that is how much more important must be the
one you have not yet found.
For example. The
Americans built a tunnel under the Berlin wall so they
could tap Soviet military traffic. In fact, a mole
working for the Soviets told them about the taps. But he
told the KGB, not the military, whose traffic was
tapped. The KGB did not tell the military because then
they might alter the traffic, which would signal that
the Soviets knew about the taps. That in turn would mean
there was a mole. So to protect the mole, the traffic
was allowed to continue unimpeded.
The
Americans, once they knew about the mole, concluded that
the intercepted traffic had been bogus because the
operation had been compromised from the beginning when
in fact the Soviets had let the Americans tap the
traffic, saving their mole for future operations.
You get the idea. It's not that we know that they
know that we know but whether or not they know that we
know that they know that we know.
It takes a
particular kind of person to do this sort of work. Not
everyone is cut out for distrusting everybody and
everything, for thinking that whatever they accomplish,
they were allowed to do it to protect something more
important. Daily life for most people means accepting
the facts of life at face value and trusting the
transactions in which we are engaged, trusting the
meaning of words, trusting that there is firm ground
under our feet.
Otherwise we inevitably tend
where Angleton tended. Every defector considered a
plant, every double agent considered a triple agent,
everyone in the American network considered compromised.
Angleton tore the agency apart, looking for the mole he
was sure that the moles he found were protecting.
I am struck lately by how many plain people,
mainstream folks uninvolved in intelligence work,
volunteer that they distrust every word uttered by the
government or the media. How many treat all the news as
leaks or designer lies that must be deconstructed to
find a motive, plan or hidden agenda. Daily life has
become an exercise in counterintelligence just to figure
out what's going on.
It's not a question of
party politics. This is deeper than that. It's about
trying to find our balance as we teeter precariously on
the moebius strip of cover and deception that cloaks our
public life, that governs the selling of the latest war,
that called the air in New York clean instead of lethal,
that has darkened the life of a formerly free people who
enjoyed constitutional rights as if there's a midday
eclipse. We see our own civil affairs through a glass,
darkly, and nobody really knows what's what.
As
the envelope of secrecy within which our government
works has become less and less transparent, the
projection of wild scenarios onto that blank space where
the truth was once written has become more evident. But
that only makes sense. The inability to know what is
true unless you are a specialist in investigative work
makes our feelings of dissonance, our craziness
understandable.
We are all getting a little
crazy about now. We are becoming the confused and
confusing person of James Jesus Angleton in a vast
undifferentiated mass, a citizenry treated as if we are
the enemy of our own government. We spend too much time
trying to find that coherent story that makes sense of
the contradictory narratives fed to us day and night by
an immense iron-dark machine riding loud in our lives.
It got to be too much, and at last they let
Angleton go into that good night in which he had long
lived where nothing was what it seemed and everyone was
suspect. So he retired and went fishing. But where can
we go? On what serene lake should we go fish, listening
to the cry of the loons, trailing our hands in the cold
water because cold is at least a fact we can feel, one
of the few in a world gone dark and very liquid?
Richard Thieme
rthieme@thiemeworks.com speaks, writes and consults
on the human dimensions of life and work, the impact of
technology, and "life on the edge". He is a contributing
editor for Information Security Magazine. His articles
have appeared in Wired, Salon, Information Security,
CISO, Forbes, Secure Business Quarterly, Village Voice,
Asia Times Online, Counter Punch, and others. He has
taught in universities around the world.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
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