58 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
intelligence program against each other,
which ended with the Times having all
the details about each cubicle at the
Post—who occupied it, what that per-
son did, what she had for lunch, and the
phone number of each editor’s secre-
tary. But knowing exactly what the other
paper is doing is not at all the same
thing as actually beating the other paper
to the news. The two agencies were so
busy spying on each other, it almost
seems, that they forgot to spy on each
other’s government. Knowing what the
K.G.B. was doing wasn’t the same thing
as knowing where the Soviet state was
heading, and the rise of Mikhail Gor-
bachev and the fall of the Soviet Union
came as a complete surprise to the C.I.A.
You could have arrived at better judg-
ment about what was going on in Rus-
sia by reading the newspapers, it seems,
than by working for the C.I.A. The
conclusions that the intelligence ser-
vices reached in the crucial period of
the late eighties tended to be wildly
wrong—as with the widely shared be-
lief that Gorbachev was part of a ploy
to put America off its guard—or bi-
zarrely skewed by politics. (Ronald Rea-
gan was outraged by a supposed Rus-
sian plot to plant mini bombs in West
Germany, and his C.I.A. director, Wil-
liam Casey, was so enmeshed in the
Cold War mythos that he told agents,
who had a brief meeting scheduled in
a Moscow alley with a K.G.B. contact,
to ask about the fate of Raoul Wallen-
berg, four decades earlier.)
And then there’s the mordant fact
that the moment when the worst pos-
sible penetration had taken place—with
a mole in charge of our entire Soviet op-
eration, neatly seconded by an F.B.I.
mole of equal duplicity—was the mo-
ment when the larger tide of battle had
turned into a rout, to our advantage.
America’s worst Cold War fear came to
pass ... exactly as the Cold War ended
with an American victory. The K.G.B.
was so busy winning that it only be-
latedly realized that its own house had
burned down. Angleton, had he lived to
see it, might at least have been impressed
to learn that the text of the Cold War,
although not as ambiguous as he had
supposed, truly was—another favorite
term of his beloved Empson—ironic.
A subtler moral enigma is felt on the
pages of “Circle of Treason.” Ames’s
moral affront, the mole hunters say, is
that he betrayed his colleagues and his
country. It’s certainly true that, as the
result of his actions, a number of C.I.A.
sources in Russia went to terrible deaths.
In court, Ames countered that his fel-
low American spies spent their days ca-
joling, or blackmailing, Russians into
selling out their colleagues. (Ames never
changed his ideology; he merely added
another checking account.) His real sin,
from this perspective, was not betray-
ing his colleagues but betraying the Rus-
sians whom his colleagues had per-
suaded to betray their colleagues. It’s a
complicated business.W
hich leads us to the final para-
dox of paranoia. Espionage and
intelligence are so conducive to mis-
trust that the people who make the best
use of them tend to be the most equa-
ble and disinclined to suspicion. Chris-
topher Andrew has praise for the way
George Washington would shrewdly,
serenely evaluate multiple intelligence
sources, rather than relying upon a sin-
gle spectacular one. Even the famous
Ultra case, in the Second World War,
turns out to be a far messier story than
the simple heroic one of Alan Turing
“breaking the code” of the Nazi Enigma
machines. There were many code break-
ers, much had been done already by the
Poles, and multiple sources were always
in use by the Brits in any case. And,
when decrypts were available, the ju-
dicious use or non-use of the informa-
tion involved agonizingly difficult de-
liberation. Antony Beevor’s recent
account of the invasion of Crete ex-
plores the unsettled question of whether
the commander of the British garrison
on the Greek island knew that the Ger-
mans were coming in force by air and
couldn’t say so for fear of giving away
Ultra secrets, as his defenders insist, or
whether he was, in the British way, sim-
ply too hidebound to recognize the pos-
sibility of anything other than a naval
invasion. Whom to tell when was just
as important as what was known and
how. Even the significance of the un-
questioned coups can be exaggerated:
the Allied victory on D Day ultimately
rested on numbers and equipment,
while atomic espionage only margin-
ally accelerated a Russian bomb that
was bound to be developed anyway.The C.I.A. seems to have flourished
best in the hands of procedure-minded
functionaries, the kind who try to fire
the rule-breaking heroes of spy mov-
ies. Scientists and literary critics and
chess masters, intent on spotting hid-
den patterns, may benefit from being
mildly paranoid. It helps to be mildly
paranoid to “read” a poem as fully as
Empson could, just as Isaac Newton’s
more galloping paranoia surely helped
him to imagine the invisible, occult
force of gravity, reaching out through
nature and governing all. But spy agen-
cies benefit from having sincere opti-
mists in charge, since the paranoia will
always supply itself. Scientists should
see hidden patterns; spies shouldn’t.
Andrew makes this point in reference
to the Soviet penetration of F.D.R.’s
Administration, which was, he shows,
quite real. (History is what happens,
not what we want to have happen, and
the State Department did have a lot of
Russian spies in it.) The right argu-
ment against McCarthyism, as Andrew
says, was not that there were no Soviet
spies but that paranoia about Soviet
spies did far more damage to the coun-
try than the spies could do.
Back in 1975, in the pages of The
New York Review of Books, at the height
of the congressional hearings into C.I.A.
abuses, including MK-ULTRA, the
journalist I. F. Stone proposed the ab-
olition of the C.I.A., on grounds not
unlike these. It was a question not just
of abuses to be curbed but of pointless
redundancies to be avoided (every mil-
itary group had its own intelligence di-
vision already). But few took Stone’s
proposal seriously, in part because we
understand that what intelligence ser-
vices do is mostly not a matter of feed-
ing acid to sex workers or even crack-
ing codes in black chambers but of
preparing, from sources as often open
as clandestine, reasonable summaries
of the state of play in other govern-
ments for the use of elected officials
who can’t know as much as they need
to. What most spies really do is not un-
like the “fundamental analysis” that in-
vestors attempt. Efficient market the-
ory tells us that scrutinizing the strategy
and the balance sheet of a firm won’t
give you a financial edge, but if nobody
were doing fundamental analysis the
market wouldn’t be efficient. Were ev-