“It is the oldest question of all, George,” a colleague says to English spymaster George Smiley in John le Carre’s brilliant novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” “Who can spy on the spies?”
But I have a different question: Why is no one apprehended on charges of espionage ever a spy?
I mean, I know why. It wouldn’t do to just say, “Ya got me, Russkie! Toss me in the gulag and kiss my frosty heinie goodbye!”
Whenever I hear of an American journalist or businessman nabbed in Moscow on clearly spurious charges, and their employers and friends scream bloody murder about it, of course I believe, because I want to believe, in their innocence.
I’m just saying: But someone’s a spy. Plenty of them, if you read spy novels.
The old Mad magazine comic strip I grew up reading was “Spy vs. Spy,” not “Non-Spy vs. Non-Spy.”
Over the years, I’ve met a couple of people now retired from a career in the CIA. But of course, according to them, they were just paper-pushers, analysts. “Strictly state-side, don’t you know. No, none of the cloak-and-dagger stuff I’m afraid. Rather boring, in fact.”
Maybe. Again, that’s because no one, apparently, is a spy. And yet there are spies.
And, as a recent article in the Harvard Crimson noted, there are accepted international rules and even laws on practically everything, including war, but few regulating espionage during times of peace.
Spying is the world’s “second oldest profession,” said Asaf Lubin, but it is often overlooked at international law schools. Lubin is a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, where he co-teaches a seminar on intelligence and international law. “Every other area of state practice, from the law of the seas to the law of outer space to human rights law to the laws of war, gets a session devoted to it,” he said. “Yet no one talks about intelligence despite its enormous influence.”
And in 2016, a CNN story said that in the United States alone, “one expert estimates that there are about 100,000 foreign agents working for at least 60 to 80 nations — all spying on America.”
Not only are there spies — the country is just lousy with them!
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And, as is embarrassingly revealed every few years when a cable is leaked, it’s not just Russia and China, say, that we spy on. We spy on our allies as well. Everyone acts as if it’s a major faux pas, though they presumably do it, too. Just over a decade ago, when National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked a trove of documents showing that we were watching pretty much everyone, pretty much all the time, The New York Times reported: “In Berlin, thousands of people protested in the streets, the C.I.A. station chief was expelled, and the German chancellor told the American president that ‘spying on friends is not acceptable.’ In Paris, the American ambassador was summoned for a dressing-down. Brazil’s president angrily canceled a state visit to Washington.”
Then, last year, a new leak showed how we were surveilling the capitals of Egypt, South Korea, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates — all allies.
We might berate Beijing for its in retrospect rather incredibly clumsy spy balloon that floated over much of the U.S. last year before being shot down in a kind of opera-bouffe operation. But it’s all Spy vs. Spy, all the time, it would seem.
Le Carre was of course a spy before he wrote spy novels. The perfect spy, perhaps, to steal from one of his titles. And the reason he was perfect is that he was the son of a famous con man. He grew up with deceit as a model. And he got out before he got caught, and had to deny being a spy.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com