Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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0:00:04.3 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:06.9 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:08.6 Landry Ayres: Ripped from the headlines, John le Carré’s Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy is a tightly woven plot of the intrigue, espionage and entrapment. But George Smiley, one of the Circus’s top intelligence officials is on the case of this noted mess, pulling the threads and following them all the way to the top. Here to break down the legacy of one of the UK’s most enduring characters are Cato Institute Senior Fellow Patt Eddington.

0:00:36.2 Patrick Eddington: Greetings.

0:00:37.3 Landry Ayres: As well as Mike German, fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security program, and author of Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy. Welcome to the show, Mike.

0:00:50.4 Mike German: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

0:00:52.8 Aaron Powell: So George Smiley and the stories that he appears in don’t look an awful lot like James Bond or other espionage stories many of us have seen. So I thought maybe we’d start off with, how realistic is this? How much does this portray the way that intelligence and counter intelligence actually functions in practice?

0:01:17.8 Patrick Eddington: I would say that on balance, because le Carré himself, and that’s his pen name, for those who may be wondering, he was himself an officer in British MI6, their external intelligence service, if you will. So from the standpoint of human intelligence and playing offense and defense, I think you’d be hard pressed to find somebody better qualified in that respect, and in terms of a lot of the basic trade craft things, you know, the smuggling documents out, I had some experience doing that when I was doing my whistleblowing thing, all that kind of stuff, the clandestine meeting type stuff, all of those kinds of things. That’s I think at this point fairly common knowledge from a tradecraft standpoint, was not so much back in 1973 when this book was written, but I think pretty much is today.

0:02:17.1 Mike German: And I would agree with that. I think that people have the idea, of course perpetuated by the James Bond idea, that spying and undercover work is this very glamorous type of activity, but in fact, in order to be good at that, you have to be able to blend in and not appear threatening to anyone. And I found doing undercover criminal work that the more violent the group was, the more non-​threatening you had to be because, of course, you don’t wanna provoke somebody’s interest in proving they’re tougher than you, [chuckle] ’cause that’s uncomfortable [chuckle] As an undercover agent, you have enough problems to deal with trying to keep everything together and gather the evidence you want, you don’t need to be drawing unwarranted attention.

0:03:10.6 Landry Ayres: I’m curious, specifically, I was thinking about the 1979 BBC mini series, which is what I watched to prepare for this episode, even though there’s the wonderful Gary Oldman film and a lot of other adaptations, there’s a really great BBC radio play version that I also recommend, that I listened to several years ago, but specifically, the BBC mini series, a big theme that they hit upon is the idea of service and the sort of motivations of these characters and who they are intending to serve, whether it’s the mole that we find out at the end and sort of his line that I think he says is, “I still believe the secret services are the only true expressions of a nation’s character.” And this is interesting because specifically, le Carré in 2010 was doing an interview where he was sort of criticising the invasion of Iraq and things like that, and he likens the intelligence officers that he worked with, that he sort of amalgamated and based George Smiley off of almost like good journalists, he says. It’s about speaking truth to power, and this sort of very clear-​headed, unbiased service to the nation. Is that the kind of attitude that is still being cultivated in today’s intelligence or is there like we sort of see in a lot of different administrative positions the sort of politicisation of that? And is there any sort of bleed through of that into those sectors?

0:04:52.0 Patrick Eddington: So I would have to say that certainly in the CIA context, but also kind of the broader US intelligence community context, then I’ll talk about the British side of this in a second, that I think that idea of objectivity has always been a little bit of a myth, not entirely, but a little bit of a myth. And you go back to guys like Sherman Kent way back in the day, immediately post-​World War II and early Cold War, there was an effort to try to cultivate that kind of an ethic, much more so in what we call the Director of Intelligence at the CIA, this is literally like the Think Tank component of the CIA. When you’re talking about actual Director of Operation’s officers, here now I’m talking about the actual human spies or the people that basically try to run agent networks, if you will, overseas, when you teach people how to lie and how lying is so central to the success of the job, I think it’s naive to believe that they’re just gonna be able to flip that off like a light switch when it comes to how they deal with people in their own country, in our case, people in Congress and so on and so forth.

0:06:10.0 Patrick Eddington: So I think there’s always been… There’s always been a tension there and always, in my judgement at least, a fundamental ethical dilemma. It’s one thing to basically take imagery intelligence, signals intelligence and whatever human intelligence you can gather and sit down and analyse that the same way that our scholars at Cato analyse what’s available publicly, right? That’s one thing. It’s another thing entirely to try to essentially penetrate somebody else’s networks physically, right? And recruit people and run them on the basis, essentially, of both self-​deception and the deception of the hostile actors that you’re working against. So there’s always, in my judgment at least, there’s always been a tension there.

0:07:00.2 Mike German: And especially, doing criminal work as an investigator for the FBI, you plan motive because it’s an essential element of most crimes. And particularly, working undercover trying to figure out how to get close to people, and I think it’s a mistake to assume that human beings operate with just one motive. And certainly, that concept of service and the idea of patriotism, I’m sure most people who go into government work of any kind have that motive as part of their interest in pursuing that line of work. But I also was very much an adrenaline junkie and went to the FBI because I couldn’t see sitting behind a desk and doing lawyer work as something that would interest me.

0:07:49.7 Mike German: So I think there are a multiplicity of motives at any one time, and I think part of the problem that we see… And I think part of why le Carré, I think, is appreciated in the intelligence and law enforcement community is because it does show that ambiguity. And these are very much mono-​cultures to a large degree, and they have this very rigorous application and security screening process that keeps them as mono-​cultures. And because they have a peek behind the curtain and they can see secrets that the rest of the public doesn’t have access to, it’s very easy to start believing that you know better. That you know better than the democratic public about what is right and what is wrong and what is necessary and what should be done for the good of all, and that is often the path that leads to really dangerous and reckless and unhelpful types of activities.

0:08:53.9 Patrick Eddington: And in the movie, the 2011 movie, with Gary Oldman, you have that sequence that really kind of underscores what Mike just talked about, where you have Percy Alleline who’s now, essentially, maneuvered himself into being the new control. And that bureaucratic gamesmanship, that’s spot on. That’s totally spot… That’s one of the most authentic things about the entire book, just period. But you have Alleline, and then I think it was Roy Bland who was sitting there talking to le Carré of the treasury about this extremely expensive safe house they were using for this witchcraft project, and so on and so forth. And as le Carré basically tries to question the expense, Bland just blows up about, essentially, “We’re all that’s standing between you and World War III.” and so on and so forth, right? So that very self-​righteous attitude of, “We know best.” that Mike just talked about, that’s very much spot on and it’s well conveyed, well conveyed especially in the movie.

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0:09:57.2 Aaron Powell: I wanted to pick up on something Mike said about… You mentioned ambiguity, and… So Dr. No, the first James Bond film, came out a couple of years before le Carré’s first major novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, hit. And the difference between those two portrayals of espionage is rather stark. And one of the interesting things about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which is an absolutely phenomenal novel, is the ambiguity of it, is that this is… It’s kind of tired men playing a game that seems almost without purpose, and I wonder about that. And also in light of Tinker Taylor, how much… In le Carré’s fiction, it feels like these are characters who are… They’re engaged in intelligence gamesmanship against each other, but the actual intelligence itself, “We’ve got information about troop movements or about plans.” seems periphery to the game at best. This is just about one-​upping each other. And so I wondered how much of that is true of what it’s like inside of intelligence gathering, whether that’s in the criminal arena or in the more espionage arena, where it’s about the people engaged in it are about the game itself versus the actual value of what it is that they’re pursuing?

0:11:32.7 Mike German: Again, I think that’s… And I know that, at least at one point, le Carré said that his writing about George Smiley was an antidote to the James Bond version of what the spycraft is. And I think you’re right. I think that they say that when Truman first wanted to have a post-​war intelligence agency, really what he wanted was a global news clipping service. That he wanted that information and kind of what le Carré said about being just sort of a high-​powered, effective journalist providing information, where very quickly after the CIA was created, it took on this covert action role that is somewhat conflicting with the intelligence-​gathering mission. And I do think that there is a lot of spy versus spy gamesmanship going on that really has nothing to do with whether we’re getting the accurate information. And in fact, the intelligence community becomes a warning system rather than providing information that policymakers can make better decisions, and it’s just constantly warning, warning, warning, warning, warning, and policymakers can’t really do anything with that, right?

0:13:00.8 Mike German: If I have 10 warnings of possible harm to come, how do I know what needs immediate attention, and I think that’s what the statement that George Bush made after he was given the Al-​Qaeda briefing before 911 where his response reportedly was, “Okay, now you’ve covered your ass.” [chuckle] That this becomes just, “Well, we wanna be able to go back and say, we’ve warned about every possible thing so that we can say we did our job”, and it’s no longer about actually providing an accurate picture for policy makers to make wise decisions, rather it’s put in a way that empowers the agencies. That, that becomes the primary mission. Empower and protect the agency from any criticism.

0:13:52.6 Landry Ayres: So one of my favourite phrases is the bureaucratic self-​looking ice cream cone, right. So this is… And to kinda get directly at what you were asking about previously, Aaron, this idea of competition among these three letter agencies in the United States, and I’m sure it was the same way to some degree between MI-5 and MI-6, is a very real thing. And what’s really kind of been fascinating to me in the course of doing all of this research for this book that I’ve been working on, is looking at how much effort Army Intelligence and Navy Intelligence and the FBI expended, trying to prevent the CIA from being created in the first place. [chuckle] They really spent a lot of time trying to talk Truman out of that, and they failed in the end. And the thing about the agency of course, is that its origins under Wild Bill Donovan was absolutely as a covert action organisation. That’s what the Office of Strategic Services was all about. Yes, they were supposed to be collecting intel, but their big thing and the thing they preferred to do and the thing that Donovan preferred to do was to operate behind the enemy lines, whether it was the German lines or Japanese lines or whatever, and blow stuff up.

0:15:06.8 Landry Ayres: I mean, it’s just really that simple going after things of that nature. And if you collected intel at one point, that’s great, but it was that action-​oriented part of it that really animated Donovan and it was that aspect of it, the agency’s ability to engage in those kinds of covert actions that became, I would essentially say an addictive policy drug for successive presidents. It was definitely the case under Eisenhower, John Kennedy wound up with a real pile of stuff as a result of what Eisenhower handed him with these bigger pigs plans that they went ahead with anyway, when it was clear that was gonna be a disaster on through, let’s say, things like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and so on and so forth. So it’s inevitably been the covert action arm of the CIA that has gotten the agency into trouble over and over and over again, and that’s what Truman was lamenting towards the end of his life, especially.

0:16:12.2 Landry Ayres: That’s just not what I had in mind, essentially is what he was telling people, and that continues to be a problem that we have today. You’ve got the agency out there, along with the military, but the agency, very heavily operating a drone program, a lethal drone program. And to quote former CIA Director and former NSA Director, Michael Hayden, “We kill people using metadata.” Well, you wind up killing an awful lot of innocent people when you do that, and it just kind of underscores, I think the mindset that we’ve been talking about that they get to play God and they get an awful lot of money to do it. And the result, as we have seen, especially in the so called War on Terror era has been just a disaster for the United States, reputationally especially.

0:17:00.7 Aaron Powell: So you mentioned the covert operations, and so le Carré has another novel, on the George Smiley Series: The Looking Glass War, which is basically about people who have no idea what they’re doing in covert operations, trying to pull one off and it ends poorly. It’s another terrific… I keep saying terrific novels, I think le Carré might be my favourite author, so I’ll just state right now. All of his novels are terrific, but it makes me wonder, so we… Espionage fiction and fiction about undercover and intelligence gathering is very popular because it feels like very cool. It’s exciting and like that playing it out is cool, and I wonder, how much does that sense of, “This stuff is just cool”, factor into the way that the people who are actually doing it approach it? ‘Cause I’m thinking of… You mentioned all of the undercover or the operational stuff, but like Allen Dulles constantly as director of CIA was just like, “Well, what we should do is we should drop ex-​patriots in behind enemy lines in order to disrupt things”, and almost without fail, they would get dropped in, parachuted in and then they would just disappear.

0:18:12.9 Aaron Powell: Because they either ran off with the money or they got captured and killed or whatever, but it felt like kind of reading that history of the CIA, especially in the ’50s and ’60s, feels like a bunch of boys who have a bunch of fun stuff to do and are trying to do fun stuff. And then on the FBI side, like Hoover had a slightly different approach, but a lot of it ends up feeling like just kind of, “We’ve got cool tools to use and we’re making it up as we go along.”

0:18:43.0 Patrick Eddington: I think in the beginning at CIA, that emphasis on covert action, certainly in the ’50s and ’60s, it overshadowed almost anything analytical. Not entirely, but almost so. And it became a real problem. I can only speak for myself in terms of how I felt when I got the job in 1988, which was literally at the tail end of the Cold War. But the idea for me, to be able to sit there as a 25-​year-​old and control a multi-​100 million dollar satellite and point it at places on the earth, outside of the United States, in order to take lots of pictures and then sit down and figure out what was going on, yeah, that was pretty… That was just pretty damn cool. There’s no question about it. It was a tremendous amount of fun. My first three years there were just amazing. They were just life-​changing in that respect. But once you’re inside an organisation long enough and you begin to understand the culture, the monoculture that Mike so eloquently spoke of, that’s when you begin to see the works, that’s when you begin to really kind of understand what the priorities are and what they should be and are not.

0:19:58.5 Patrick Eddington: And I think… When we had a single monolithic or relatively monolithic target like the Soviet Union, it did, in some ways, make things easier. It made it easier to focus. I always knew essentially what I was supposed to be doing. I had a whole series of Soviet installations and military units that I was responsible for monitoring. And we had a very, very detailed system of collection for doing that kind of thing. And that’s the world of technical intelligence, though. And I think that’s… I’m reluctant to use the word, it’s a cleaner form of intelligence gathering, but I think in many respects it is. That’s not to say that it isn’t subject to potential deception and denial-​type operations. It’s harder to do that with imagery than it is with signals intelligence, but it can be done. Whereas I’ve always felt in the human intelligence world, you are dealing with a hall of mirrors.

0:20:57.0 Patrick Eddington: And that’s why… [chuckle] It’s why I admire that Mike spent so much time in the trenches trying to do this in the criminal world, in an undercover kinda capacity, because you’re doing nothing but dealing with different individuals with different motives, different agendas, maybe some of ‘em overlap, but trying to figure out, essentially, who’s lying to you. To the extent to which they’re lying to you, all the rest of that, that’s, in my judgement, an infinitely harder business to be in than to sit around and look at satellite imagery or even drone footage or anything like that.

0:21:36.0 Patrick Eddington: So it’s… If you’re in technical intelligence, I always think people feel like that was really cool, and it was. But it’s the human… The human side of it, I think, is just so much harder to work. And I think le Carré does a great job of bringing that out, this whole issue of Ricki Tarr, is this guy, has he been turned, all this stuff. Hall of mirrors is, I think, the best way for me to kinda describe how I feel about it.

0:22:02.8 Mike German: And I think that’s true. And I should say that I have a tremendous respect for people who do undercover work in the espionage field, or going into foreign countries, because while certainly the risks were as high or perhaps even higher when you’re dealing with a criminal organisation that would immediately take some violent action against you if they found out who you were, where perhaps a foreign nation might just embarrass your nation and send you home, never to return. But, obviously, there is risk there, and the tools that the state has are so much stronger than what the criminals have, as far as trying to use their police powers to uncover the identity, and also the length of time. For most of my undercover cases, if I spent two hours with the criminal element, that was preceded by two hours of preparation with the case agent and the other agents working on the task force and the surveillance team, and then two hours of de-​briefing afterwards. So it wasn’t that constant pressure of maintaining cover.

0:23:18.5 Mike German: But I think part of what makes it interesting is that you are dealing with this mix of motives where, say, we would have a big meeting going on where I’m gonna be engaged in some kind of criminal activity in a dangerous contact, so we have surveillance up, and we’re watching this person that I’m meeting with all day long, and we can see him go to Home Depot and go and have lunch with a friend and do a couple of other things before our meeting, and I get there and say, “Hey, what have you been up to today?” “Haven’t left the house.” Which I know is a lie, but now I have to figure out, Okay, why is he lying? Did he pick up surveillance, and he’s testing me? What is going on? So you… Even in that much smaller context, you do have that hall of mirrors that what is it that I’m dealing with here, and how do I make sense of the fragmentary pieces of knowledge that I have when I have to recognise that my bias is that he’s doing something dangerous to me, because if I don’t keep that bias, my guard will go down, and that’s not good. So you’re not paranoid if somebody really is out to get you. [chuckle]

0:24:44.3 Patrick Eddington: The one nit that I have with the book and with the movie, the 2011 movie, and this is like… You have to be an intelligence guy to kind of appreciate this, to a certain degree, I think. But do you remember the scene when they’re… When Witchcraft is essentially revealed in terms of that naval exercise document that they got, and they were basically… Smiley was like, could be gold dust, but… And so on and so forth. And of course, the mole himself, Haydon is in the room when all this is going on. And all I could think was, “Well, what did GCHQ have to say about the exercise? What did the signals intelligence guys have to say about what happened during that exercise? What kind of radar emissions were picked up? And what was the comms traffic like, and all the rest of that?” And for me, that was like… That was the missing piece in terms of confirming or denying, really, whether or not there was any kinda value there.

0:25:41.6 Patrick Eddington: So that’s a genuine professional nit that I have with how that… With how the book unfolded. That just kinda gets to the total focus, essentially, on the human aspect of this, and the human intelligence aspect of it. But you have lots of ways that you can uncover human spies. And the most famous case that we know of that’s public, of course, is the Rosenbergs. And that was, of course, accomplished after the fact through the decryption of the Soviet… A partial decryption of the Soviet VENONA code.

0:26:13.0 Aaron Powell: This leads into something that I found curious in… So I… As I was researching for this episode, I came across the CIA has an in-​house journal called Studies In Intelligence. And I think it was in 2018, they published a review of the Gary Oldman film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is very interesting, and we’ll put a note to it… A link to it in the show notes. It’s worth reading. But they point out one of the changes that that movie makes to the original material, which is there’s a scene in the Gary Oldman one where Smiley tells Peter Guillam, who’s his right hand man, his Watson that they might… It’s possible that what they’re doing is gonna be found out ’cause they’re investigating this mole on the down-​low and to clear up any loose ends that might be out there and in a change from the novel, so in the novel, Peter Guillam is straight and in later novels has a family, has a wife and kids. But in this movie, he is in a homosexual relationship, and so there’s a scene where he goes and basically kicks out his boyfriend, because if this is exposed, it’s a hook.

0:27:29.8 Aaron Powell: And I wondered about that in light of what you guys were talking about about focusing in on minorities and whatnot, like how that… So I should note that the CIA journal takes offence at this change and they say, “There’s no context, no follow-​up and no apparent significance to this revelation. It’s difficult not to interpret this change as gestures to political correctness,” which to me seemed to entirely miss the point of this scene. But the way that minorities get treated within intelligence and law enforcement communities because I know like the FBI for a long time, if you were found out to be gay you were fired. In the CIA it was a similar thing because it was seen as something where that could be leverage used against you to flip you, to turn you, to get information out of you, blackmail you, and so on. How does that sort of stuff play out in these kinds of scenarios, both in terms of from the counter intelligence, but also in terms of getting people to turn on their employers to become double agents because you have this leverage over them?

0:28:43.2 Patrick Eddington: That entire issue of homosexuality being something that would get you kicked off the federal payroll is directly tied to Executive Order 10450, which was Eisenhower’s update to Truman’s infamous government employee loyalty program executive order. And the formal adding essentially of that language about sexual activity and so on and so forth, that became essentially an excuse to go through and conduct anti-​gay witch hunts throughout the entire Federal government, and that’s something that continued literally for decades. And because it was viewed as disqualifying from an employment standpoint, it then of course becomes a place whereby you have a vulnerability, a counter intelligence vulnerability. And in the case of Britain, homosexuality was actually illegal, it was actually literally against the law for a good period of time. And that’s… And I understood that instantly when I saw that scene, that Smiley was trying to make sure that Guillam did not literally go to jail, not simply for going into MI5 to try to… Or MI6 to try to liberate information to expose the mole, but because if his sexual orientation was discovered, he would definitely go to jail.

0:30:19.8 Patrick Eddington: So this is something that was absolutely a thing, at least up through the Clinton Administration, until you began to see a change and of course, on the national security side, kind of the DOD side, this is when we begin to see this, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” “bastardisation policy” is how I like to call it rather than just confronting it directly. But this is when things begin to change. Now, I don’t know whether or not this is necessarily still something of overall counter-​intelligence concern at CIA, I tend to doubt it’s not as much of one as it once was, I can’t speak to the bureau, Mike would be better positioned to say that. But if somebody… I could see… I could see if somebody was in a closet, a gay relationship, but actually had a heterosexual family, that would create a blackmail situation, it could be a counter-​intelligence issue. But I think an openly gay relationship now, I would tend to doubt that that would be as big a deal from a counter-​intelligence standpoint. I think they’re much more concerned, always gonna be much more concerned about any kind of close and continuing contact with foreign nationals.

0:31:41.2 Mike German: And I found the CIA criticism kind of laughable, on the one hand, that’s absolutely correct. This was an err towards political correctness in that it was political… Politically accurately, right, [chuckle] that it was in a very… You’re a film maker, you’re trying to turn this wonderful book that has all these twists and turns into an hour and a half. How do you convey something that the audience will immediately understand what you’re getting at and show that bias within the intelligence community? And I agree completely with Pat that by the late ’90s, that had pretty much gone, but there was a period where as Pat used that term, the self-​licking ice cream cone, where what the security establishment would say is, “Well, we don’t care if you’re in a homosexual relationship, we’re just afraid that it might be used against you, so that’s why it becomes an issue for us.”

0:32:50.3 Mike German: Because where it’s like, okay, you just… If you made it that it didn’t matter, then it couldn’t be used against them [chuckle] It’s like you have to decide one or the other, either it’s an issue from a counter intelligence perspective or it’s not. But you can’t sort of exonerate yourself by saying, “Well, the bad guys might target you because of this, so we have to treat you like a pariah.” No. That’s not really what’s happening here. And to the extent, any illicit relationship, heterosexual or homosexual could be fodder for somebody to blackmail you, that certainly the sex of a person shouldn’t matter, and I don’t think does anymore, I think people are albeit past that in… At the FBI.

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0:33:49.5 Landry Ayres: I’m curious because this is coming up between what Pat was talking about and some things that you were mentioning, Mike, specifically talking about the experience of being undercover but also being behind enemy lines. And we’ve talked a lot about what the intelligence officers, the people who are “on our side” are doing day-​to-​day and what their experience is like and their motivations. But it’s really curious because this story specifically was influenced not just on le Carre’s experience in doing that, but also it was born specifically out of the incident with Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, something that really happened where Kim Philby, a double agent for the Soviet Union, who had been acting as an intelligence offer for the UK, flipped and obviously blew a bunch of people’s cover including John le Carre who at the time had to leave his position.

0:34:57.2 Aaron Powell: That’s the silver lining is if Kim Philby hadn’t done what he did, we wouldn’t have all these novels.

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0:35:06.2 Landry Ayres: Yeah, he really did us a favour there. But Bill Haydon, for instance, he was undercover for decades, for a long period of time. I obviously, I don’t know how much of that he was getting breaks and having two hours to meet with somebody else and two hours… Two hours on, two hours off. Does he get a 15-​minute smoke break? I don’t know. But what is that experience like? What is it like to be the one lying for that extended period of time, and who is the kind of person that becomes specifically a double agent? That takes, I think, an extra level of ability to regulate and manage the persona that you are trying to present to someone. Because not only, specifically in intelligence, you’re trying to be the person on the inside for one, but you’re managing secrets for both sides. What is that like?

0:36:15.0 Patrick Eddington: Well, I think that one of the things that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy does is really kind of convey that tension essentially, and the level of skill. And the thing is Colin Firth plays the character that we’re talking about here, Bill Haydon the double agent who I think, in many respects, really was kind of based on Kim Philby. Philby went to work for the NKVD, the Soviet Intelligence Service back then, I think at least as early as 1940. So he was basically on their payroll for almost a quarter of a century. And he was suspected on the basis of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two other members of the so-​called Cambridge Five, defecting in 1951, if I remember correctly.

0:37:09.0 Patrick Eddington: And Philby was subjected to this examination even separated from the service, but he was cleared in 1955. And then he goes back to work undercover for MI6 basically posing as a journalist. So I think someone who is successful in beating the system, if you will, and being a mole, A, being a really good actor undoubtedly helps. The ability to kind of have two personalities really helps. But the other thing that plays into this, and I’m thinking specifically here about the Aldrich Ames episode at the CIA, is just the lousy counter-​intelligence trade craft, the sloppy-​ness of it, the failure to kinda look at it, and I would also say in Ames case, the insane reliance on the polygraph. We know on the basis of science now, actually it is 20 years ago, that the National Academies actually looked at this entire question and it’s like an electronic ouija board. A good polygrapher can get you to confess to things that you never did. But that’s much more of a human element. I mean, sure, the technology is kinda hovering there in the background the whole time, but a cop that’s really good at interrogation can get people to confess. They can break them down and they can do it in various ways. A lot of times you see this good cop, bad cop, kind of thing.

0:38:46.7 Patrick Eddington: My favourite cop show of the 1990s hands down was NYPD Blue. And of course, Andy Sipowicz is my favorite character. And I’m ashamed to say that I cheered every time he beat the crap out of a suspect, ’cause I most times they really did seem to deserve it. But that isn’t how good interrogation takes place, as Mike knows far better than I do. But it’s that ability to, number one, live kind of a double life. But I think you also, at some level, have to count on the system to miss stuff and when you understand the counter-​intelligence procedures, policies, practices of the organisation that you’re in, obviously, it gives you an enormous advantage in terms of being able to beat the system. But in the case of the Cambridge Five, when we talk about motivations, I think they were like a lot of people back in the day where there was this insane romanticism about the Soviet Union, about the Soviet model and all the rest of that. And this idea that somehow the West was decadent fall and all the rest of that. And it’s not as if plenty of stories about Soviet Gulags were not coming out in this period of time. So to me, it’s impossible that Philby and the rest of those guys were not aware of those things, right? So I think it’s also the ability to kind of deceive yourself about what it is you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

0:40:17.5 Mike German: From my experience, I think part of what happens in the intelligence community is, there’s a tendency to paint everything black or white. These are either good guys or bad guys. [chuckle] And not recognise that there’s good and bad in every system and in every culture, and that the people who are expressing some animosity towards the West are not necessarily wrong in that criticism or somehow criminally dangerous because they have these ideas, and particularly, I was sent on my first undercover assignment into a violent neo-​Nazi group. [chuckle] And when you’re painting the black and white, they definitely fall on the bad guy side of things. But experiencing that where these were people who had very deeply held beliefs and were trying to change society in a way that fit along with their beliefs and the vast majority of them didn’t engage in criminal activity and encouraged me to avoid the people I was hanging out with because they did. So I think gaining that perspective is really important, but it’s easy to ignore when… Part of… Kind of human element of it was as one of the instructors who in my career, I spent a lot of time doing training for other agents, the way he would explain undercover work to new trainees, is he would say, “Look, your job is to befriend people.”

0:42:10.9 Mike German: “Do what’s necessary to gain their trust and then betray them.” [chuckle] “Don’t paint any lovely pictures about what you’re doing because it’ll just confuse things. That’s your job.” And when you can paint everybody as black or white, it’s much easier to do that kind of betrayal. And when that flips to the other side and say, somebody coming up in the system, and I’ve got a Penguin paperback that was published, that had a forward, written by le Carré that was really interesting because he talks about the Cambridge Five and sort of how he viewed it. And basically… And talks about the way Philby was close to James Angleton at the CIA who, once he realised he had been duped by Philby, went on a mission to find the moles within the CIA, and in many ways, crippled the CIA for a number of years because of those internal investigations where again, it’s looking for somebody who…

0:43:21.1 Mike German: You have in your mind this picture of this very bad guy and not recognising that that’s not really the way it is, and it makes me think of a scandal within the FBI where the Chinese espionage unit found out that there was a leak of FBI information that was going to Chinese Intelligence and did one of those insider threat and focused on a Chinese-​American agent and ruined her career again, based on a polygraph, which even as criminal investigators, we know that it’s not admissible because it’s not accurate. [chuckle] It doesn’t really have enough accuracy for us to say that this really works. When it turned out, it was a very prominent supervisor in the program who was considered the best.

0:44:20.3 Mike German: It would have been like this Haydon character that had an illicit relationship with one of his sources where the leak was apparently coming from, and it turned out that the number two person in that National Chinese espionage program was also having an illicit relationship with the same informant. So that kind of… How do you even get your head around, number one, what their motives were, and was this just sex and didn’t involve any kind of intentional espionage moving the information and the alleged that she would simply go for his briefcase when he was napping after their interlude? Who knows? And how do you peel it back? Now, this person has been the number one person on Chinese espionage at the FBI for a decade or more. How do you then assess what’s real and what isn’t real? And this asset, maybe it was considered a prized asset, but now do we have to wonder whether any of that was true? And how do we unwind all of this? It’s unfortunately real life, and le Carré does a really good job of expressing it in an artistic form. But what is that once you practice to deceive, it’s just inherent in a system that is by all measures anti-​democratic. Just the very notion of the secrecy that this type of intelligence gathering demands is poisonous to a democratic society. We can only exist if there’s public knowledge, we can only make decisions as a group, and particularly when they feel the…

0:46:31.0 Mike German: They have the authority to as one FBI training slide said, bend or suspend the law in pursuit of their mission. You end up in a lot of problems, and I think that’s certainly the response to 9/11 and a great expansion of this secret part of our government and the impunity in which they act, to where there wasn’t any hesitation to having these very prominent heads of our intelligence agencies tell absolute falsehoods in public about the activities that they were engaged in, whether it was the war on this wiretapping program, or the torture program. To where how can the public express their will and how they want the government run, when there’s so much information being spread by the intelligence agencies that we’re depending on to give us that true and verifiable information that we can make good policy choices from.

0:47:36.4 Patrick Eddington: And what Mike has just described with respect to what happened, that was the Los Angeles Field Office, right, Mike? Is it… Yeah. That episode with Chinese intelligence, the American trader was a White guy, right? And what did the bureau do? They focused on the Chinese agent, and so we see this today, and this is something that Mike and I have spent a huge amount of time working on, is this whole China initiative that the FBI has had in a way since 2018, and so the presumption is ultimately, if you have a relationship with China, and especially if you are of Chinese heritage, we better take extra look at you and maybe a lot more than an extra look for you, and it’s of course turned into a giant racial profiling disaster.

0:48:21.0 Patrick Eddington: A number of court cases now that they’ve either outright lost or had to drop because of the bogus nature of it, but that’s not a new phenomenon. This racial and ethic aspect of it, obviously was huge and continues, frankly, in the post-​911 era targeting either the Muslim-​Americans, again, just on that basis, thinking that anybody is going to be an Al-​Qaeda supporter if they come from that community, which of course is insane. Completely nuts. But that’s been a hallmark of American intelligence for the last 100 years, quite frankly. When you look at how they handled German-​Americans and especially Japanese-​Americans during World War II. So that’s an aspect of the business that’s missing essentially from le Carrè’s novels, at least the one that we’re talking about, because these were all pretty much Caucasian folks, it’s a very ideologically-​based frame, essentially le Carrè is using, and of course, that’s directly connected to the time.

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0:49:31.8 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And please rate and review us if you like the show. We look forward to Unraveling your favorite show or movie, next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. It is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by myself and our director and editor, Aaron Ross Powell. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.