My Book Report
A novel you may have missed that seems horribly relevant today
Mastering the Art of Intelligence
By Deidre Depke
It is frightening to contemplate the damage that could be done by the incompetents tapped by Donald Trump to conduct America’s intelligence operations. John Ratcliffe has been confirmed by the Senate as CIA director. An apologist for Russia who put in 10 months as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2020, Ratcliffe’s main qualification is his loyalty to Trump
Tulsi Gabbard is the nominee for DNI, the official who oversees the nation’s 18 spy agencies. She is a pal of deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and another fan of Russia. Oh, and she has no meaningful intelligence experience whatsoever.
If only David Cornwell, the English author who wrote as John le Carré, were available to serve. As any reader of the modern spy novel knows, the former British intelligence agent, who died in 2020, was the undisputed master of the genre.
Many of le Carré’s books are classics. There’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, about the hunt for a Soviet double agent at the top of the British secret service. Set in the 1970s, the book is also a devastating critique of the English upper classes. In The Little Drummer Girl, le Carré created a surprisingly nuanced female character, Chalie, an actor who collaborates with the Mossad to infiltrate a Palestinian network.
But it’s the elegant, evocative The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published in 1963, that’s widely considered his masterpiece. The story centers on Alec Leamas, a British agent working deep undercover in East Berlin to sow disinformation. Graham Greene called it “The best spy story I have ever read.”
Spy spent 34 weeks atop The New York Times’ bestseller list. In it, le Carré masterfully conveyed the themes that would remain constant throughout his work: that intelligence is a melancholy, lonely business where antagonists on all sides engage in amoral methods in the name of national security. Says the story’s British intelligence chief: “I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition, simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” Leamas is more direct: “Spies, whether allies or adversaries, [are] just a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too.”
Playing a supporting role in Spy is le Carré’s most important character, George Smiley, the British secret agent who appeared in nine of his novels. Smiley is no Bond: He’s a bookish, morally conflicted character capable of great bravery under fire despite ambivalence about the value of his work.
Le Carré’s final novel, the very good Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021. Its story is about a young bookseller who becomes enmeshed in an intelligence struggle featuring a Polish immigrant and a British agent hunting down a leak. George Smiley, alas, makes no appearance, and a reader would be forgiven for assuming the curtain had fallen on le Carré’s classic character.
Except…. Late last year, Viking published Karla’s Choice, subhead: a John le Carré novel. Karla was written by Nick Harkaway, the pen name of le Carré’s third son. The story is set in 1963 and takes up where Spy left off: Haunted by the death of Alec Leamas (sorry, spoiler), Smiley comes out of retirement to help hunt down a Russian agent working in London.
Harkaway makes a valiant effort to create a book equal to the work of his father. Like le Carré’s novels, Harkaway’s plot is complex — if convoluted. And Smiley is written well, demonstrating his usual intelligent valor and moral reluctance.
But Harkaway’s writing is knotty: “Recently there’d been a move among the young inquisitors to a modern perception which emphasised the psychological.” And the story doesn’t really get going until the last third of the novel’s 300 page. That’s when Smiley turns up in East Berlin to manage a daring intelligence operation — complete with car chases and a dramatic escape back to the West.
What Harkaway has mastered, extremely well, in fact, is the moral ambivalence that was a trademark of his father. Consider this rather long excerpt about the possibility of the Soviets besting Smiley: “Then what? Would Moscow abruptly suffer a shortage of brutal and brutalized men, thinking to make good whatever sinkholes were in them by destroying the West? By finally achieving Peter the Great’s ambitions and standing Russia at the pinnacle of the world? Would the Cold War, with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and unshape ordinary lives, come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell and the fear of a Russian land invasion sweeping everything before it, not stopping until it reached Normandy and Lagos and Palermo, fade into history?...Or was all this to and fro just a way to stay busy while God disposed? There had to be something more, something better, or what was the point?”
The question is one with resonance today. Unfortunately, there is virtually no chance that the spies at the top of America’s intelligence echelons will meet it with the clear-eyed skills of a George Smiley.
The Awful & The Odious
What a Bunch of ‘A-Words’
By Ciro Scotti
A young woman I know was once a child chorister at a famous cathedral in New York City. The choirmaster, also renowned, was a fidgety perfectionist with no patience for 10-year-olds.
One afternoon after choir practice, the youngster reported tearfully that Mr. Fidget “called us the A word — the long one.”
The long one is not a pretty word and with slight shame I must admit it emerges sotto voce from my mouth quite frequently, especially when driving and often with a “what an” in front of it. Last Monday, watching the installation of the King from Queens, the word was un-suppressible as the camera panned across the chorus of billionaires behind Trump, punctuated by a woman who apparently dressed so hastily that she forgot her shirt.
Unlike Putin’s gang of scary oligarchs, Trump’s cohort seems more like a bunch of olidorks. For a leader who likes his Cabinet members to look the part, maybe the Prez needs to find some insanely rich men as back-up singers who don’t scream: “Geeks!”
The week before, the A-Word also kept slipping out during the confirmation hearing of the natty and hair-gelled Pete Hegseth, usually when one of the fawning Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee tossed him a softball question. That included Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a 23-year military veteran and sexual assault survivor. Ernst earnestly pressed Hegseth on whether he would appoint an Pentagon official to focus directly on sexual assault in the services. But she failed to mention that Hegseth paid off a woman (to the tune of $50,000 it was later revealed by Senator Elizabeth Warren) who accused the then-Fox News host of sexually assaulting her after a boozy meeting of a Republican women’s group to whom he had given one of those fair-and-balanced speeches.
Unlike Ernst, whom the MAGAs worried might torpedo the nomination of Hegseth, Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was one of the Demorats who asked real questions. In particular, she didn’t shy away from grilling Hegseth about his maltreatment of women. In fact, the 77-year-old cancer survivor, as they say in the military, tore him a new one.
Not that it mattered. Hegseth, a former major in the Army National Guard, is now the Secretary of Defense, overseeing millions of fighting men and women and civilian employees. The political advocacy groups he ran and is said to have bollixed up — despite deep-pocket ties to the Koch brothers and Trump mega-donor Miriam Adelson — probably had dozens of employees at most. And during his tenure at Fox, he wasn’t running anything. That’s kind of like making an evening-shift middle manager at a low-volume Walmart the CEO of the whole shebang.
But Hegseth does look like a young warrior, and isn’t that what really matters?
To be sure, there are plenty of A-Words among the Democrats — Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, and Adam Schiff, to name a few — but MAGA-World seems to be chockablock with them.
There are the old-timers in Congress like Ted Cruz, Tim Cotton, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, and dozens of others.
Then there are the executive branch retreads and new arrivals, including some who have already been appointed to, or may wind up in, positions of power. Among them are the anti-immigrant boy wonder Stephen Miller (now White House Deputy Chief of Staff); Russell Vought, an author of Project 2025 nominated to head the Office of Management & Budget, where he previously served as Assistant Director; bullet-headed deportation czar Tom Homan, who was briefly the heartless acting director of ICE; his boss, Homeland Security Secretary-Lite Kristi Noem; the aforementioned Hegseth; Department of Government Efficiency chieftain and bogus top gamer Musk, who has already dispatched his DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswarmy (incorrect spelling intentional); Kashyap “Kash” Pramod Vinod Patel, the manically partisan hatchet man Trump wants to install as FBI Director; and on and on and on.
Forget executive experience, domestic or international policy cred, a track record on economics and trade, and military chops. Integrity, adherence to the rule of law, a love of liberty and democracy, and respect for the Constitution would be nice. But maybe the next time there is a Presidential election — whenever that may be — there should be a single requirement for candidates: You must prove to the American people that you’re not an A-Word and won’t surround yourself or align yourself with those that are.
True, more than 77 million voters chose Trump last November, but four years of all these A-Words could change a lot of minds.