54 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
and contradictory that one finishes this
history wondering if having a success-
ful spy service really is a good way to
have a successful nation. (That early spy
mission, in which most of the Israelites
came back to say that the promised land
was too well guarded to keep its prom-
ise, went badly enough, God knew.)
There seems to be a paranoid paradox
of espionage: the better your intelligence,
the dumber your conduct; the more you
know, the less you anticipate. Again and
again, a reader of Andrew’s history finds
that the countries with the keenest spies,
the most thorough decryptions of enemy
code, and the best flow of intelligence
about their opponents have the most
confounding fates. Hard-won informa-
tion is ignored or wildly misinterpreted.
It’s remarkably hard to find cases where
a single stolen piece of information
changed the course of a key battle.
During the First World War, the Brit-
ish decrypting center known as Room 40
had useful information about the move-
ment of German ships during the Bat-
tle of Jutland, off the coast of Denmark,
but the officers of the British fleet, dis-
liking the cut of the analyst’s intellec-
tual jib, contemptuously ignored what
they were told, and managed only to
draw a battle they could have won. Rich-
ard Sorge, a Russian spy in Germany’s
Embassy in Japan, gained detailed knowl-
edge about the approaching German in-
vasion of Russia in 1941, and passed it
on. Stalin not only ignored information
about the coming invasion but threat-
ened anyone who took it seriously, since
he knew that his ally Hitler wouldn’t be-
tray him. The delayed reaction cost hun-
dreds of thousands of lives, perhaps mil-
lions, and very nearly handed Hitler
victory. The invasion was launched, and
Stalin soon retreated to his dacha in
shock. When a delegation of apparat-
chiks came to see him, he took it for
granted that they were coming to de-
pose him, since that’s what he would
have done in their place, and was star-
tled when they begged him to step for-
ward and lead, being themselves depen-
dent on the cult of the great leader.
More frequently, one comes upon ab-
surd stories like the following. In 1914,
on the brink of war, French officials
became so consumed with an earlier
episode in which their cabinet noir had
decrypted certain German messages—
with politicians trying to wield the de-
crypts to embarrass one another or pro-
tect themselves from embarrassment—
that they helped keep the intelligence
professionals from going on with their
actual work of anticipating a German
attack. As Andrew explains, the climax
of the affair occurred when Gaston
Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, ac-
cused the former Prime Minister Joseph
Caillaux of having worked in the Ger-
man interest. Caillaux had reason to think
that Calmette had obtained decrypted
cables from another journalist, who was
given them by a former foreign minis-
ter, and, in January, he warned the Pres-
ident, Raymond Poincaré, that Le Figaro
was planning to publish the decrypts.
But Caillaux, as Andrew explains,had already taken devious precautions of his
own in case the decrypts were published. During
a week as caretaker Interior Minister in De-
cember 1913 he had raided the Sûreté archives
(a raid condemned by its director, Pujalet, as a
“burglary”) and removed copies of the Italian
intercepts which had embarrassed Poincaré the
previous spring—no doubt as a potential means
of putting pressure on the President.. .. The
whole extraordinary affair took a new and even
more sensational turn on the afternoon of 16
March 1914, when Madame Henriette Caillaux
walked into the office of Gaston Calmette, drew
a revolver from her muff and shot him dead.
Her immediate motive for murder was to pre-
vent Le Figaro publishing love letters between
herself and Caillaux, written while he was still
married to his first wife. It was quickly ru-
moured, however, that Madame Caillaux’s main
motive had been to prevent publication not of
the love letters but of the German telegrams
intercepted during the Agadir crisis.This series of events turns out to be only
a particularly rococo Parisian instanceof what happens again and again in this
history: a seeming national advance in
intelligence is squandered through cross-
bred confusion, political rivalry, mutual
bureaucratic suspicions, intergovern-
mental competition, and fear of the press
(as well as leaks to the press), all sea-
soned with dashes of sexual jealousy and
adulterous intrigue. “Because of this po-litical mishandling,” as Andrew puts it
dryly, the decrypts “did as much to con-
fuse as to inform French policymakers.”
Not for the first or the last time, the
point of spying—to know what the other
side is likely to do—had been swal-
lowed up by the activity of spying, a
frantic roundelay in which each actor
is trying to score obscure points against
his internal enemies, with a certainty
(often misplaced) that someone else is
playing him in another complicated
roundelay. Meanwhile, Andrew notes,
“the great power with the best foreign
intelligence during the few years be-
fore the First World War continued to
be Tsarist Russia.” And we know how
that worked out.
A few famous modern espionage
coups do still register as coups. The Al-
lied creation of George S. Patton’s “phan-
tom army”—a ploy to make the Ger-
mans think that the D Day offensive
in Normandy was only a feint, with the
real invasion planned for the Pas de
Calais—really did work. And the par-
allel Soviet penetration of the Manhat-
tan Project’s atomic secrets was even
more impressive than is generally un-
derstood: the famous perpetrators, like
Klaus Fuchs or the Rosenbergs, turn
out to have been relatively small fry
compared with Theodore Hall, a Har-
vard physicist who delivered the real
goods to the Russians and went on to
have a long, productive career in Chi-
cago and then in Cambridge. (He seems
to have escaped prosecution for a rea-
son typical in the history of these things:
had the government used as evidence
its top-secret “Venona intercepts,” which
might have identified Hall, the project
would have been exposed.)
And many fabled espionage gam-
bits seem to have been double-sided.
The Cambridge Spies—the much stud-
ied and dramatized cell that formed in
the thirties and included Kim Philby
and Anthony Blunt—were utterly sin-
cere about the Communist cause they
had pledged their lives to, but all were
assumed by their Soviet handlers to
have been turned, and made double
agents. Despite the spies’ strenuous
efforts to provide Stalin with British
secrets, the Soviets regarded them as
so untrustworthy that they sent a team
of additional spies to England in order
to monitor them. Only after they had