I’ve always wondered at government horse-trading spies. Some event happens and suddenly twelve guys are kicked out of the country for being spies like it was discovered that afternoon. If everyone knew they were spies already what was the point? And then what is the value of kicking spies out if you know they’re spies and they don’t know you know. What better situation? And yet these fast exchanges of pawns happen a lot. Maybe it supports your thesis somehow.
I didn't think about that Adam, but that's probably right. There's an understanding that everybody spies on everybody else, and everybody seems to be ok with that. I suspect what that means is that it's a lot easier all around to condone the "spies" and to just pass information back and forth. You don't have to throw people in prison for espionage and you can make use of in-place networks. I'm fairly certain that that happens often. The question is how widespread it is and whether intelligence agencies through that mechanism are able to set their policies distinct from central governments.
The intelligence sharing theory is fascinating. The people who have a finger in every pie in any organization seem to see themselves as a higher ring above all rings and all sides.
But of course, if we begin to see that nothing is as it seems to be, ‘that way madness lies.’
There are hints of this in Tinker, Tailor with the idea that Esterhazy is pretending to be giving away ‘chicken feed.’
Thanks Francesca! You've inspired me to change my photos for the piece to reflect that. By the way, there's a whole exegesis for me with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trying to figure out if Le Carre knew about this system (or was just close enough to the center to hypothesize about it) and that maintained a degree of "plausible deniability" towards his own work. The real point of Tinker Tailor, in a way, is that George doesn't actually exist; that the intelligence-sharing apparatus is the "circus within the circus" that generates all the actual intelligence and drives the Circus' operations. The dialogue between Elliott and Le Carre in 1986 is beyond fascinating. Elliott claims that he had no idea at all of what Philby was up to. And then, in his notes on the meeting, Le Carre writes the following: "I don't believe I ever seriously doubted that what I was hearing from Elliott was the cover story - the self-justification - of an old and outraged spy." A moment later, Le Carre seems to back away from that, but it can feel as if everybody knows how the intelligence-sharing system worked and can hint towards it very obliquely but without ever saying so in plain words.
I find your theory about mutuality and exchange very plausible, and where Occam's Razor would seem to point in the Philby case at least. It's not uncommon for governing elites to relate more to their foreign counterparts than to the constituencies they ostensibly represent. Part of the context of McCarthyist hysteria, and how a sweaty drunk bully was able to amass so much influence, was earnest concern across much of the country that the eastern establishment was overly blase about, and sometimes even outright sympathetic, to communism.
Thanks! Occam's razor is a good way to put it. (Although that doesn't mean it's necessarily right!) What's very interesting about McCarthy - this is my understanding - is that he was basically telling the truth. The State Department in particular was full of people who had left-wing backgrounds if not direct ties to the USSR. I've gone partially down another rabitthole that connects to the Elizabeth Bentley/Jakob Golos ring. It turns out that there were, like, an unbelievable number of Soviet spies in the US in the 1940s - so many that it stretches credulity that they weren't part of this orchestrated intelligence-sharing system. Elements of the US system in World War II - probably FDR himself but also the OSS - would have felt that the United States had to be vigorously sharing information with the USSR to keep the Soviets in the war but that it was better to do so surreptitiously (with a "spy ring" as the cover story). Duncan Lee, the assistant to Donovan during the war and later exposed as a Soviet spy, may well have been a point person for this exchange. And I suspect that information for the atomic bomb may have been handed off on this basis. At some point this whole system would have been an open secret in the halls of power, enough so that when McCarthy, as a rogue senator, went public with an aspect of it, it was deeply destructive and the establishment had no really effective line of defense. It's all really complicated stuff and I'm far from having a handle on it. But would like to post about it at some point.
All the time i was reading this essay, I was thinking of C.S. Lewis's short lecture, The Inner Ring. It corresponds to the view you laid out about the higher loyalty at the top echelons of spies to their profession. Being at the top of the professional pyramid being more important to certain personality types than patriotism. Thanks Sam for another thought provoking essay.
Lewis would have been very familiar with inner rings and how they work socially having been born and raised in Belfast. A bastion of British unionism and their archaic colonial endogamous worldview.
Thanks David! Yes, Macintyre in his book makes The Inner Ring kind of the clinching argument for his case:
"In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.”
Btw really enjoyed your essay on seeing your brother in the courtroom. Very moving.
The most interesting person in the whole Cold War spy setup was clearly Markus Wolf.
Wolf was German Jew, born the same year as Henry Kissinger. I really do think that Wolf and Kissinger lead parallel lives, that Wolf was a version of Kissinger who's family fled east instead of west. They each used intelligence and iron determination, but also a certain mystique attached to their status as Jewish refugees from Nazism, to wield massive and amoral power on behalf of the two blocs that destroyed Nazism. This was very unusual in both cases but particularly Wolf's. There weren't a lot of Jews in the upper reaches of the East Bloc but he pulled it off with aplomb. (This doesn't have to do directly with him being a Jewish intellectual but just look at pictures of Communist higher-ups in his memoir from the everywhere except Cuba: 29 of them look like a boiled potato in huge glasses and an ill-fitting suit, the 30th is Markus Wolf, who looked like a movie star till he turned sixty.)
He's the son of a good-but-not-great Communist intellectual and writer; grows up in Moscow with every reason to support a communist Germany; basically founds East German foreign intelligence and runs it for the duration of the DDR state; his brother Konrad is the leading art film director in East Germany (in part thanks to the artistic freedom that comes from having a brother like Markus); he is by far the most effective East Bloc spy chief and places agents everywhere including most famously Willy Brandt's chief of staff Günter Guillaume (Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor when the secret was revealed); he's known for decades as "the man without a face" because western intelligence can't get a photo of him; he strongly supports Gorbachev as against the old DDR Stalinists to the point of resigning his office in the 80s; he actually addresses the half million-strong pro-democracy rally at the Alexanderplatz in the name of reformed communism (the video of the crowd realizing who Wolf is and starting to boo him is one of the most electric moments on Youtube; Bärbel Bohley says that when she saw Wolf's hands shake while he was giving his speech she knew the regime was doomed); he avoids jail and becomes a weird media celebrity, publishing a (genuinely good!) literary memoir of his Weimar Berlin to Moscow childhood, a sort of potboiler spy memoir co-written with an Economist correspondent to pay the bills and... a Russian cookbook.
John le Carré claims that Karla (and Fiedler from the Spy Who Came in From the Cold) aren't based on Wolf but that's obvious bullshit. We know from manuscripts that Fiedler, the sympathetic intellectual Jewish East German spy, was originally named Wolf. If le Carré happened by chance to name his fictional East German Jewish spy-intellectual after the only real East German Jewish spy-intellectual, that would be an amazing coincidence.
As for Karla: le Carré disliked Wolf the post-Cold War media figure and called him morally equivalent to Albert Speer. This may be true! But Le Carré's fiction is full of Russian and German apparatchiks who are supposed to be as morally ambiguous as his literary English spies. If there was anybody like that, it was Markus Wolf. Karla is based less directly on Wolf than Fiedler because Karla is Russian and non-Jewish, but Karla still has many of Wolf's personal and professional characteristics.
I actually have trouble reading Le Carre. I don’t know why. He’s a perfectly fine writer but somehow I don’t really get into it. On the other hand, the Alec Guinness series of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People may be the absolute best thing ever made.
Yeah me neither lol! I just can’t get enough of it for some reason. But I do think it’s more than human interest - it actually is a glimpse of the shape of power.
I’ve always wondered at government horse-trading spies. Some event happens and suddenly twelve guys are kicked out of the country for being spies like it was discovered that afternoon. If everyone knew they were spies already what was the point? And then what is the value of kicking spies out if you know they’re spies and they don’t know you know. What better situation? And yet these fast exchanges of pawns happen a lot. Maybe it supports your thesis somehow.
I didn't think about that Adam, but that's probably right. There's an understanding that everybody spies on everybody else, and everybody seems to be ok with that. I suspect what that means is that it's a lot easier all around to condone the "spies" and to just pass information back and forth. You don't have to throw people in prison for espionage and you can make use of in-place networks. I'm fairly certain that that happens often. The question is how widespread it is and whether intelligence agencies through that mechanism are able to set their policies distinct from central governments.
The intelligence sharing theory is fascinating. The people who have a finger in every pie in any organization seem to see themselves as a higher ring above all rings and all sides.
But of course, if we begin to see that nothing is as it seems to be, ‘that way madness lies.’
There are hints of this in Tinker, Tailor with the idea that Esterhazy is pretending to be giving away ‘chicken feed.’
Thanks Francesca! You've inspired me to change my photos for the piece to reflect that. By the way, there's a whole exegesis for me with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trying to figure out if Le Carre knew about this system (or was just close enough to the center to hypothesize about it) and that maintained a degree of "plausible deniability" towards his own work. The real point of Tinker Tailor, in a way, is that George doesn't actually exist; that the intelligence-sharing apparatus is the "circus within the circus" that generates all the actual intelligence and drives the Circus' operations. The dialogue between Elliott and Le Carre in 1986 is beyond fascinating. Elliott claims that he had no idea at all of what Philby was up to. And then, in his notes on the meeting, Le Carre writes the following: "I don't believe I ever seriously doubted that what I was hearing from Elliott was the cover story - the self-justification - of an old and outraged spy." A moment later, Le Carre seems to back away from that, but it can feel as if everybody knows how the intelligence-sharing system worked and can hint towards it very obliquely but without ever saying so in plain words.
I find your theory about mutuality and exchange very plausible, and where Occam's Razor would seem to point in the Philby case at least. It's not uncommon for governing elites to relate more to their foreign counterparts than to the constituencies they ostensibly represent. Part of the context of McCarthyist hysteria, and how a sweaty drunk bully was able to amass so much influence, was earnest concern across much of the country that the eastern establishment was overly blase about, and sometimes even outright sympathetic, to communism.
Thanks! Occam's razor is a good way to put it. (Although that doesn't mean it's necessarily right!) What's very interesting about McCarthy - this is my understanding - is that he was basically telling the truth. The State Department in particular was full of people who had left-wing backgrounds if not direct ties to the USSR. I've gone partially down another rabitthole that connects to the Elizabeth Bentley/Jakob Golos ring. It turns out that there were, like, an unbelievable number of Soviet spies in the US in the 1940s - so many that it stretches credulity that they weren't part of this orchestrated intelligence-sharing system. Elements of the US system in World War II - probably FDR himself but also the OSS - would have felt that the United States had to be vigorously sharing information with the USSR to keep the Soviets in the war but that it was better to do so surreptitiously (with a "spy ring" as the cover story). Duncan Lee, the assistant to Donovan during the war and later exposed as a Soviet spy, may well have been a point person for this exchange. And I suspect that information for the atomic bomb may have been handed off on this basis. At some point this whole system would have been an open secret in the halls of power, enough so that when McCarthy, as a rogue senator, went public with an aspect of it, it was deeply destructive and the establishment had no really effective line of defense. It's all really complicated stuff and I'm far from having a handle on it. But would like to post about it at some point.
All the time i was reading this essay, I was thinking of C.S. Lewis's short lecture, The Inner Ring. It corresponds to the view you laid out about the higher loyalty at the top echelons of spies to their profession. Being at the top of the professional pyramid being more important to certain personality types than patriotism. Thanks Sam for another thought provoking essay.
https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
Lewis would have been very familiar with inner rings and how they work socially having been born and raised in Belfast. A bastion of British unionism and their archaic colonial endogamous worldview.
Thanks David! Yes, Macintyre in his book makes The Inner Ring kind of the clinching argument for his case:
"In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.”
Btw really enjoyed your essay on seeing your brother in the courtroom. Very moving.
The most interesting person in the whole Cold War spy setup was clearly Markus Wolf.
Wolf was German Jew, born the same year as Henry Kissinger. I really do think that Wolf and Kissinger lead parallel lives, that Wolf was a version of Kissinger who's family fled east instead of west. They each used intelligence and iron determination, but also a certain mystique attached to their status as Jewish refugees from Nazism, to wield massive and amoral power on behalf of the two blocs that destroyed Nazism. This was very unusual in both cases but particularly Wolf's. There weren't a lot of Jews in the upper reaches of the East Bloc but he pulled it off with aplomb. (This doesn't have to do directly with him being a Jewish intellectual but just look at pictures of Communist higher-ups in his memoir from the everywhere except Cuba: 29 of them look like a boiled potato in huge glasses and an ill-fitting suit, the 30th is Markus Wolf, who looked like a movie star till he turned sixty.)
He's the son of a good-but-not-great Communist intellectual and writer; grows up in Moscow with every reason to support a communist Germany; basically founds East German foreign intelligence and runs it for the duration of the DDR state; his brother Konrad is the leading art film director in East Germany (in part thanks to the artistic freedom that comes from having a brother like Markus); he is by far the most effective East Bloc spy chief and places agents everywhere including most famously Willy Brandt's chief of staff Günter Guillaume (Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor when the secret was revealed); he's known for decades as "the man without a face" because western intelligence can't get a photo of him; he strongly supports Gorbachev as against the old DDR Stalinists to the point of resigning his office in the 80s; he actually addresses the half million-strong pro-democracy rally at the Alexanderplatz in the name of reformed communism (the video of the crowd realizing who Wolf is and starting to boo him is one of the most electric moments on Youtube; Bärbel Bohley says that when she saw Wolf's hands shake while he was giving his speech she knew the regime was doomed); he avoids jail and becomes a weird media celebrity, publishing a (genuinely good!) literary memoir of his Weimar Berlin to Moscow childhood, a sort of potboiler spy memoir co-written with an Economist correspondent to pay the bills and... a Russian cookbook.
John le Carré claims that Karla (and Fiedler from the Spy Who Came in From the Cold) aren't based on Wolf but that's obvious bullshit. We know from manuscripts that Fiedler, the sympathetic intellectual Jewish East German spy, was originally named Wolf. If le Carré happened by chance to name his fictional East German Jewish spy-intellectual after the only real East German Jewish spy-intellectual, that would be an amazing coincidence.
As for Karla: le Carré disliked Wolf the post-Cold War media figure and called him morally equivalent to Albert Speer. This may be true! But Le Carré's fiction is full of Russian and German apparatchiks who are supposed to be as morally ambiguous as his literary English spies. If there was anybody like that, it was Markus Wolf. Karla is based less directly on Wolf than Fiedler because Karla is Russian and non-Jewish, but Karla still has many of Wolf's personal and professional characteristics.
For sure. I can't believe Le Carre denied that Karla was based on Wolf. You're right that that's obviously the case. But I don't know much about Wolf.
They say men are always thinking about the Roman Empire. Well, Markus Wolf is my Roman Empire.
Am I about to read Le Carre? Thanks to you it seems so.
I actually have trouble reading Le Carre. I don’t know why. He’s a perfectly fine writer but somehow I don’t really get into it. On the other hand, the Alec Guinness series of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People may be the absolute best thing ever made.
Ok I'll start their then. Is that your final proclamation?
Well, wait for a rainy day, pour yourself a sherry, and cancel your social life for a work or so. Enjoy! (It’s free on YouTube btw.)
Cuz he sort of starts in the middle. It’s not an easy read. Truthfully.
Well I can hardly wait to read this as I’m obsessed with the whole Cambridge 5 story. Not sure why I’m so obsessed.
Yeah me neither lol! I just can’t get enough of it for some reason. But I do think it’s more than human interest - it actually is a glimpse of the shape of power.
For me I think it’s like the idea of subterfuge.