Spy v. spy: where fact and fiction seldom meet

Press, 10 September 1984, Page 30

Spy v. spy: where fact and fiction seldom meet

By

LESLIE GELB

of the “New York Times"

Washington Spies generally do not like spy movies. They say it is not because of gadget envy or envy of James Bond’s females, and I believe them. It is, well, because they do not like being thought of or portrayed as “spies” — those skulking or bionic creatures engaged in feats of superhuman hunches or violent acrobatics that you tend to see on film.

They see themselves as intelligence agents, with the accent on intelligence. Their idea of fun is watching grass grow into an odd insight or, better still, a trend. If any fictional spy is heroic to them, it is George Smiley of John le Carre fame, portrayed by Alec Guinness in the 8.8.C.’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” Even that television portrayal was a bit racy by their standards. “The book was much better,” said Ray Cline, a former head of covert operations in the Central Intelligence Agency, because it was even more leisurely and complex. After talking with a dozen or so former and present American spies about spy movies, I get the feeling that even the name of the organisation, C.1.A., is not good enough. They seem to prefer the name used for the organisation in World War H, the Office of Strategic Services, or better yet, Mensa.

To them, spying is a cerebral exercise, and they see themselves as scholarinvestigative reporters piecing together bits of puzzles. George Smiley’s unfaithful wife understands this all too well when she says to him at the end of the last episode: “Poor George, life’s such a puzzle to you, isn’t it?”

To hear them tell about their tradecraft, there is precious little adventure, no naked lady spies of American vintage, although the Russians are said not to share our puritanism, no karate lessons for those being sent into the field, hardly any killing or gore, and few gadgets for escape because they are too expensive. In other words, no fun

for the moviegoer. To William Colby, former director of Central Intelligence, or America’s top spy, a real spy has to be “a grey man who has a hard time catching the eye of a waiter in a restaurant” As a result, “I still have a hard time catching a waiter’s eye in a restaurant.”

Better yet, he has to blend into whatever background he lives in and role he plays. To the real spies, the only one who did this successfully was Richard Burton in the film based on le Carre’s “Spy Who Came In From the Cold.”

The spies consider the recent crop of spy movies in particular to be terrible. That includes James Bond in “Never Say Never Again” and in “Octopussy”; the Russian detective who gets involved in spying in “Gorky Park”; the female Sam Spade in “Trenchcoat”; “The Osterman Week-end” that is so bad it defies description; and the spy spoof by the title of “Top Secret” At least “Top Secret” had one good line, delivered by an East German who says that he had an uncle born in the United States “but he escaped during the Carter Administration - in a balloon.”

It is not that the real spies object to spy movies as entertainment, it is just that they are not entertained. To Walter Pforzheimer, 42 years in the intelligence business and one of the men who helped bring about passage of the 1947 act that established the C.1.A., their careers are “too serious” for the screen or even most books. There is about them a quality of apartness which is both inherent in their business and which they cultivate, something that cannot be readily dramatised let alone Hollywoodised. Their secrets make them feel different. They can talk only about what they are doing to each other, and even then, on a special need-to-know basis. “You cannot come home from work and tell your neighbours or your wife, ‘I met the nicest spy you ever saw at the office today*,” explained Pforzheimer. Only a few movies, like “The Human Factor” based on the Graham Greene novel,

convey this isolation. To Mr X, a former agent-in-the-field and top manager of covert operations, it is more than that

“There is a different kind of camaraderie from other trades, the fact that you are dealing with people on a one-to-one basis, particularly in espionage and coun-ter-espionage. It is the case officer and his agent. You are not reporting to a multitude. It is only a handful of people who know who your agent is. It was an exclusive basis. You feel more exclusive.” The exclusivity of most spy movies derives from sexual and physical prowess — not the feeling of specialness that comes from secret knowledge. Theirs is a life that is hard to share. The spies I talked to had some of that feeling from Thames Television’s most recent spy venture, “Reilly: Ace of Spies,” based on a real person. Reilly, born Sigmund Rosenblum, a spy for Britain and whoever paid him, does have more than his share of close calls and women. But of greatest importance to the real spies is that no one really knows him. They like that.

This is more than remaining anonymous. That, too, is very important to them and something moviemakers are not terribly interested in conveying. Almost all the movie spies are instantly recognised as soon as they arrive on the scene. Sean Connery’s James Bond in “Never Say Never Again” is even attacked while on a rest cure at a spa. Even Michael Caine in his deft portrayals of a British spy in “The Ipcress File” and “Funeral in Berlin” is too well known to his adversaries.

Not that the spying business does not have occasional moments of drama. Colby, for example, led a team of commandos in World War II to blow up the Nazi heavy water plant in Norway, thus slowing Hitler’s drive to develop his atomic bomb. He remembers other forays, such as blowing up bridges “to show it could be done,” not because the effects were lasting: “They’d repair it quickly.” But these adventures

were the exception, not the rule, of espionage to Colby and the others. They were of a time long past, not the modern intelligence but “the old spy business,” as Colby calls it, “when you could steal a secret, give it to the King so that he could win the big battle.” Spy movies have not caught up to the fact that modern intelligence has little to do with people, the lifeblood of drama, and much more with technology. Human intelligence-gather-ing has been largely replaced by machines and people who know how to run the machines and by organisations and people who know how to run them. The modern spy hardly ever sidles up to a door to overhear a conversation. Conversations are snapped out of the air by special long-range listening devices. No one is needed to doh a disguise and slip into the Russian countryside to see how the crops are doing. The cornfields are photographed with great precision by reconnaissance satellites in orbit thousands of kilometres above Earth.

This is power undreamed of by spies of yesterday in search of a scrap of information. It is a waterfall of facts. It can only be digested by the computer and its programmer and analysts. Not that the real spies would not grab up a real insider who could see what the spy satellites could not and hear conversations beyond the range of the microphones. Cline and Mr X anti the others were always looking for such a man, and sometimes found him. But unlike movie portrayals, the best of these spies were not those who did it for money (such as the famous Cicero, a valet played by James mason in the movie “Five Fingers,” who spied for the Germans on the British Ambassador in Turkey), or someone who was turned on by the Declaration of Independence. “Most of the best agents,” said Mr X, “came to us because they want to hurt somebody who hurt them.”

Many of the real spies, it should also be said, are not very happy with the political views of the one man

who wrote of their: lives most accurately, John le Carre. “His attitude is a plague on both your houses, that the United States is as bad as the Soviet Union,” said Mr Y. “Le Carre really attacks intelligence as intelligence, that it is all a dirty business — and we do not think we are as bad as the Russians.”

But as things are, the real spies are not the arbiters of entertainment, and as Cline says, he is not against fantasies “as long as I do not have to watch them.” But others want to watch. Even the Russians have recently discovered the public’s fascination with spying. Just ending to record television audiences in the Soviet Union is a prime time James Bond-type thriller called “Tass Is Authorised to State.” In it, K.G.B. or Soviet State Security men battle and outwit American spies around the world and especially in Moscow, where of course the Soviet citizen ought to be very much on the alert.

Whether the real spies like it or not, I would like to see a movie about my favourite spy. His name was Isaac Trebitsch Lincoln. He was born in Hungary in 1879 to parents who wanted him to be a rabbi and died in Shanghai under the name Abbot Chao Kung in 1943. Trebitsch became Lincoln in 1909, having converted from Judaism to Lutheranism to Anglicanism, in order to run for Parliament. He won.

Alas, he made some bad investments, turned to freelance journalism, and became a double agent for Turkey and Bulgaria which were fighting each other in 1912. The Bulgarians jailed him, but the Germans got him out, meaning he was probably working for them as well. Adventure followed adventure in the United States and then Weimar Germany, until he found his way to China. There, he hitched up with Morris “Two Gun” Cohen, another Eastern European emigre, who was running the intelligence apparatus for Nationalist China.

So, who needs puzzles?