Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
by Calder Walton.
Simon and Schuster, 672 pp., $34.99
Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence
by Cécile Fabre.
Oxford University Press, 251 pp., $41.99; $25.00 (paper; to be published in March)
On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.
Burns didn’t board his flight from D.C. that day. The mood in the carpeted ballroom was somber. Aside from the shock and horror everyone felt at the attacks and the terrible anticipation of what would befall Gaza in response, there were dumbfounded silences as people asked one another versions of the same question. Israel’s legendary security services, Mossad and Shin Bet, were reputed to be the best of the best, the “gold standard,” as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden put it. Why hadn’t they known?
These are the moments, in the astonished silence after catastrophes, when most people suddenly become hyperaware of intelligence agencies in their all-too-human reality. For the most part we seem not to like to think about them much unless it’s through the grit-gray, jump-cut, shaky-cam world of spy movies and television. In America in particular, the attitude toward them has always been uncomfortable.
The intelligence services of the US and Britain were profoundly shaped by the chilling view of humanity that emerged during World War II. The bombed-out cities, the millions of deaths, and the horrors of the extermination camps resulted in a visceral sense of mankind’s potential for limitless brutality. And after the war, Stalin—armed with nuclear weapons, in increasing conflict with his former Western allies—seemed to present a new and even more terrifying threat.
In 1954 President Eisenhower commissioned a report on the need for covert operations in a world facing the prospect of nuclear war. Its author, Lieutenant General James Doolittle, wrote of the Soviet menace:
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.
These words have resonated
