Spying on Sparrows et al.

THE SUPER SPIES by Andrew Tully. 256 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Everybody loves a spy--unless, of course, he happens to be real. Then nobody likes him or his dirty work, and fewer still want to tell about it. Partly as a result, James Bond is a household word while practically nobody knows the names and numbers of the actual players in the cold underworld of international espionage. A journalist-author named Andrew Tully airs this situation in a provocative and detailed new book that claims to reveal a dark cloakful of hitherto secret tales of derring-do.

Tully's most startling assertion is that months in advance of the event a Polish traitor handed a U.S. Defense Department agent detailed plans of last year's Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Intelligence strategists, Tully asserts, then imaginatively suggested making the plans public in an effort to force a Russian change of heart. As Tully tells it, Washington overruled the idea on grounds that the U.S. could not afford such dangerous brinkmanship during the Viet Nam war.*

Button Microphone. Tully, a Washington columnist, has specialized in books that "reveal the truth" about Government agencies. His purpose this time is to demonstrate the pervasive and gigantic nature of the U.S. espionage establishment. Tully credits U.S. espionage experts with remarkable success. To hear him tell it, hardly a sparrow falls to earth in the world without a U.S. spy taking note. The book is filled with what might be called incidental intelligence. In Jordan, a U.S. agent was told a week in advance of the date of the planned 1967 Israeli offensive. (The U.S. believed the information, but Nasser, who heard it independently, still had most of his planes on the ground on the fateful morning.) In Viet Nam, when an ARVN officer was suspected of duplicity, special buttons were secretly sewn onto his uniform: the top one contained a microphone, the second a transmitter, the third a battery; when his guilt was confirmed by the hidden equipment, he was perfunctorily executed (with no Green Beret-style aftermath).

Finding out so much in so many places costs $4 billion a year, Tully estimates, and involves 60,000 people. The CIA is not even the largest (or most expensive) spy shop, according to Tully. That honor falls to the National Security Agency, which takes care of both making and breaking cryptology codes on a budget twice that of the CIA's. Why is so much effort necessary? Tully is not sure that it is. Even if it is accepted that the U.S. should secret-police the world, there is obviously much wasteful duplication among the agencies. Tully's popularly aimed book is hardly conclusive. The author raises questions far better than he explores them. Congress itself has shirked the job of keeping any real tabs on the intelligence funds it votes. It is possible that the only complete accounting of the elaborate U.S. espionage establishment lies in some busy and bulging file in Moscow.

* Both the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency refuse to comment officially. Unofficially, they say that they had considerable advance knowledge about the degree of preparedness of Red Army units --and how the attack would be made if it came--but no advance warning about whether or not the Kremlin would actually authorize an attack.

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