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.
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.’
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.
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.
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’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.
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.’
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.
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/
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.
Am I about to read Le Carre? Thanks to you it seems so.
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.