Hey, read the first post today first. Then this.

Secrets to Spies.

As I said in an earlier post, lately I have been working on a review of Body of Secrets for the Austin Chronicle. Now, my usual way of reviewing a book like this is to spend a lot of time researching matters extraneous to it � looking for an angle. I spend a lot of time in the library. In the real world, meanwhile, the Hanssen case has been in the news, a little memento mori from the Cold War era, for which our president is so nostalgic that he has decided to give us the 1980s redivivus if he can.

Although I am fascinated with spying, I�m not unduly impressed by it. Intelligence had a tremendous impact on the behavior of the Allies in World War II � to name just two instances, the Sorge ring in Tokyo was crucial to the timing of Stalin�s resistance to Hitler in 1942, and the by now well known story of the breaking of the Enigma code obviously gave the Britain and the US a tremendous advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic � for the fictional record of which, I recommend Cryptonomicon. But it isn�t clear that a fighting war with the peculiar attributes inherent in the German political structure is a very good guide to the cold war fought between the US and Russia. Two great features of the intelligence war in our time seem plain: one, American intelligence, both human and sigint, have been repeatedly and massively penetrated and exposed. Not only by the line going back from Hanssen to Philby, but by such disasters as the abandonment of tremendous caches of military and cryptological information by the NSA, at the end of the Vietnam war.

And the second fact is � it hasn�t mattered.

When the damage caused by such as Hanssen is assessed in the press, we are almost always told about agents betrayed, or codes handed over. In other words, the Intelligence community bears the brunt of losses caused by betrayals in their midst. But there is a closed circle here � because if the intelligence agency exists primarily to protect American interests, in practice they seem merely to protect their own interest. Their interest is disguised as merely analysis � it is something the CIA and the NSA like to say a lot, that they merely analyze. But of course that isn�t true � it is in the nature of intelligence organizations to distort the nature of the enemy by concentrating on the enemy�s intelligence. It is a subfight, in other words, within a larger fight; and that larger struggle soon starts to reflect the smaller one in the minds of intelligence officers. This famously happened with James Jesus Angleton, the mad head of CI in the fifties and sixties . His mind wholly ossified around his own perception of a worldwide communist conspiracy, to the extent that he thought that the Sino-Russian spit was faked. In other words, he thought the Russians were staging history to fool the CIA � or, finally, to fool one alcoholic bureaucrat, J.J. Angleton. Intelligence solipsism can�t go any further. .

While the CIA was fighting their battle as if it was the war, the real grassroots war was fought and finished. One day, the spies looked up and lo! The West, the good old Free Peoples of the West, to use the boilerplate of Cold War presidents, won! It came as a shocking surprise.

In the end, it didn�t matter that Aldrich sold the KGB the names of CIA sources in the Kremlin. It didn�t even matter that the Russians could read our encryption. The keepers of the secrets were keeping secrets, in the end, not from the enemy, but from the people they are supposed to be responsible to, however dimly the line of responsibility is traced. They were keeping secret what they had done in Chile, Argentina, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, and a host of other countries where they have been in cahoots with killers, thieves, rapists, and other forms of freedom fighter.

Over the last fifty years, however, the importance of the intelligence community in our history really doesn�t have to do with the Russians � it has to do with the ideological function of these organizations. If you read a bunch of spy books, you�ll soon become familiar with what that ideology is about � loyalty. That loyalty is identified with a certain brand of anti-communism that gradually became less ecumenical about accepting, say, anti-communist leftists. It gradually settled into the recognizable mold of American conservativism. Why does that ideology have a right wing taint? Probably there are a number of sociological reasons � the same reasons that would enable you to predict a leftish tilt in academia. Insular groups maintain themselves by filtering non-conformists out � they develop rituals for doing that, and sometimes the filtering process becomes the very center of the group, the thing it is about. The cosa nostra � the our thing. It is a contingent fact why, exactly, the filtering process is attached to a particular ideology � an accident depending not on the structure of the institution, but on the history of the personnel within it. Although these places always have that same stale reek, you know?

Tomorrow I�m going to switch to mirrors and spies, an Italian story.