The C.I.A. Goes Gentle Into the Spooky New Night
By FRANCIS X. CLINES - NYT Op-Ed
When the end came, eight former czars of central intelligence gathered in the Langley, Va., headquarters for an eerie moment of nostalgia - and devotees of the fact and fiction of the Central Intelligence Agency were already walking back the cat (spy talk for retrospectively figuring out how a careful scheme turned disastrous). Porter Goss, the former spy and congressman who was awarded the intelligence directorship last year, generously summoned his predecessors and two of their widows on Tuesday to a cafeteria celebration to bid adieu to the agency's tattered primacy. The agency director, once the morning briefer of presidents, is now a secondary player under the umbrella of the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte. In the wake of 9/11, the agency that once swaggered romantically as "the Company" has been subsumed like the loser in a corporate takeover.
So far, no moles have leaked the party's repartee. ("Remember the exploding Cuban cigar?" "Another martini, please - shaken not stirred.") No problem: Robert Littell, a master at studying the C.I.A. and producing spy thrillers, will likely tap into the clubby moment for some future chapter rich with ranking fogies' ruminations on how the spook's life changed wretchedly in the decade between the collapse of the cold war and the rise of the stealthy masters of terrorism.
Actually, the novelist already has done some of that, in his latest work, "Legends," which skewers the C.I.A. as an ossified global delinquent, a fumbling "risk-averse high-tech social club" whose chief spy manipulator is forced to lament: "There are people at Langley who do nothing but stare at satellite downloads from morning to night, as if a photograph could tell you what an adversary intends to do."
In precisely the way fiction can portend fact, the party at Langley was under way even as another actual spymaster, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the new director of the National Security Agency (an ultrasecretive strut in the Negroponte umbrella) unconsciously echoed Mr. Littell in ruing how "incredibly difficult" his job of eavesdropping and code-breaking had become. "It's no longer looking for a Soviet division; the threat is now about a person," the director told The Times's Scott Shane. "How do you find one person, among 20-some million in Iraq?"
The answer to those odds, if there is one, will likely never be known since the agency's record of work, like the C.I.A.'s, is officially sealed tight as the secret pantheon of honored spies memorialized in anonymity.
All the more tantalizing, then, to discover that the keynote speaker at the private gathering in Langley was identified as "the C.I.A.'s chief historian." Who knew the agency would dare to have such a job? How does he or she perform it? Is the historian free to walk back the cat on the agency's failure to foretell Soviet communism's fall? Or on muffing the gathering threat from Osama bin Laden four years ago? These are questions whose precise answers are usually attempted, or not, in the privacy of closed panels of Congressional overseers. The rest of us had best consult the work of fiction makers like Mr. Littell, who earlier did produce an encyclopedic historical novel titled "The Company." It is filled with as many tales of intramural treacheries as global, further teasing readers who yearn for the truth of spying.
"All is not what it seems," is the well-taken warning at one of the newer attractions in Washington, the International Spy Museum. The for-profit venture is crammed with actual spy gadgets, including the Nazis' Enigma code machine and a K.G.B. agent's lipstick-tube gun. Visitors can delve into spies' "legends" - the careful cover identities concocted for a life of lies. The museum's exhibitions include the aptly titled "Secret History of History" that fascinates up to a point. It is good to dabble in the history of the infamous Feliks Dzerzhinsky, father of the K.G.B. But what about our own old spymasters who rallied the other day at Langley? There are secret histories of history waiting to be told, manifold cats to be walked back. |
