Army of the Shadows
Russell Warren Howe
Nov. 5, 1995
IN 1987, my old foreign editor at the London Sunday Times, Donald McCormick, published under the pseudonym Richard Deacon his Spyclopaedia, in which you could discover in brief mentions who was Greville Wynne or Izzy Beer or Vladimir Kuzichkin or what, in the jargon, was a raven or a swallow. He McCormick was the author of 13 other books on espionage, including the definitive biography of Sir Basil Zaharoff.
Jeffrey Richelson's A Century of Spies is the next step in turning file cards into a book, but it's more of a Reader's Digest-ish synopsis than the multi-volume treatment that must appear one day. It's a vast but tight panorama of "sigint" (signals intelligence) from pigeons and semaphore to three-dimensional satellite imagery, and of "humint" (human intelligence -- that is, actual spying) from the siege of Troy to Verdun to Tehran.
There are few revelations. An interesting one is that, of the MI-6 traitors, Philby, Burgess and Maclean, the latter was "clearly the most potentially valuable" because of his access to U.S. armed forces data and especially to the Atomic Energy Commission "without an escort, a privilege not extended to members of the cabinet or Congress or FBI director J. Edgar Hoover."
Richelson's evaluations are only so-so. Most scholars would now agree that Chamberlain and Daladier were prudent in playing for time with Hitler and that Capitol Hill was then the capital of appeasement. The overestimate of Germany's strength was, as Richelson says, a fault of intelligence -- although this is surely a question of degree: In 1940, Germany went through France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark and Norway as though these countries were a Cecil B. de Mille plywood set.
Intelligence shortcomings in not anticipating Pearl Harbor surely sprang mainly from American laziness about learning Japanese (or even easier tongues) and the bizarre failure to employ Japanese Americans in intelligence. A former director of central intelligence, Stansfield Turner, told me a decade ago how a similar failure to employ Arab Americans at Langley had led to excessive dependence on Israeli sources, including "disinfo" going all the way back to the Lavon Affair, and affected by the KGB penetration of the Mossad. (One senses that Richelson is more constrained than a European writer would be in treating such "sensitive" subjects, including CIA or CIA-assisted assassinations of public figures in Chile, Vietnam and the Congo -- now Zaire.)
There are synopses of some great spy-war anecdotes: * Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a much-decorated Red Army full colonel at 21, being denied the KGB Rezidentura (a job equivalent to station chief) in New Delhi at 26 because his father might have been a White Russian officer; Penkovsky turned his coat, was caught, and shot. * The United States and British intelligence role in overthrowing Mossadegh and restoring the Shah of Iran. * James Jesus Angleton, the director of the CIA's Special Investigation Group, being duped by Anatoly Golitsyn into rejecting all the valuable intelligence passed on by a more reliable turncoat, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko. (But the then-head of the KGB First Directorate's "S" division -- nondiplomatic spies -- Major-General Vadim Alexeivich Kirpichenko, told this reporter in Moscow in 1992 that Angleton was never "one of ours," just a useful idiot; and former DCI William Colby, who fired Angleton, is of the same opinion.) * The MI-6 rescue from Moscow of Oleg Gordievsky, and the rocambolesque Vitaly Yurchenko's comic-opera defection and "redefection." * The spy-in-the-sky revolution pioneered by Leslie Dirks and others -- although Richelson includes regrettably little about Soviet satellites.
BUT SUCH a compendious work should have put espionage into context. If the American establishment American media have tended to fuse the Fourth Estate with the First, a serious historian cannot be too neutral. Nationality is usually an accident of birth, but the law requires that one bear fealty to the card one draws from ones mother's womb. The spy for his own country is as deserving of respect as the diplomat or the foreign correspondent. Spying against one's country is white-collar crime, even if, like bad car design, it sometimes causes deaths: It is unconscionable to give spies longer sentences than hoodlums. One can distinguish between the "venals" like Ames and Pollard and the Walkers and the Russian "defectors" (whom a former director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, once described to me as "all scumbags") and idealists like Philby and the Rosenbergs, and between spies and idealistic press informants such as John Vanunu, the American who gave the Pentagon Papers to the Post and the Times.
As could be expected in such a short book (431 pages, plus notes and indices), Richelson makes some mistakes, which are perhaps attributable to dependence on single sources. Mata Hari, for instance, was never a German spy, as the official Geschicte des Weltkriegs und Nachkriegsspionage makes clear.
And there are plenty of "star" omissions: in World War I, Georges Ladoux, Antoine Goubet, Sir Basil Thomson. There is the Pueblo case, but nothing on the Liberty. There is nothing about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its worldwide features service and magazines, from Encounter on down, published by the CIA. One would have enjoyed a more detailed account than has yet appeared in the press of the literary prostitution of Sir Stephen Spender, Melvin Lasky, Brian Crozier, and others.
Russell Warren Howe's 17 books include "Mata Hari, The True Story" and "Sleeping With The FBI: The Saga of an American Counterspy Who Couldn't."
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