Octopus the Second Oldest Profession

By R.Z. Sheppard

Journalist Phillip Knightley prefers his legends lightly tarnished. An earlier book, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker, removed the romantic luster from combat journalism. The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century is a pickling look at the romantic past and bureaucratic present of the flourishing espionage business.

Understandably rough figures are offered in evidence. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. each spend more than $7.5 billion on intelligence services. The British tally is given at $900 million. The number of people directly or marginally employed in spooking is even more difficult to estimate, although Knightley confidently puts the minimum at 1.25 million.

The pre-World War I founders of today's major spy networks did not think that big. Forerunners of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and MI5 were tight little units of upper-class amateurs. Ex-Operative David Cornwell, better known as Novelist John le Carre, offers a few bitter words on the subject: "The Empire may be crumbling; but within our secret elite, the clean-limbed tradition of English power would survive. We believe in nothing but ourselves."

The gentleman spy was also native to the U.S. Founded in 1917, a clique known as the Room used the cover of international travel and scientific expeditions to gather information that it passed on to Washington and London. The Room's membership list read like the Social Register: Vincent Astor, Kermit Roosevelt, David Bruce (Andrew Mellon's son-in-law), Nelson Doubleday and a gilt edging of Wall Streeters and lawyers.

The Central Intelligence Agency, offspring of World War II's Office of Strategic Services, has its own clubby traditions. Knightley quotes Allen Dulles, who testified on agency staffing before a congressional committee in 1947. "I should think," said the future CIA director, "that a couple of dozen people throughout the United States could do it, two in New York, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco." Dulles felt that "scores rather than hundreds" could handle U.S. intelligence requirements abroad, and, he added, "If this thing gets to be a great big octopus, it should not function well."

Knightley estimates that the CIA now employs about 16,000 people. Add to that the million or more who are directly engaged in deception and analysis throughout the world, and the potential for chaos is enormous. As the author's survey of modern snooping illustrates with unrestrained relish, free- lancers, self-serving desk jockeys, double and triple agents turn espionage into what James J. Angleton, former chief of the CIA's counterintelligence division, called a "wilderness of mirrors."

And who is the fairest of them all? Knightley's candidate is Kim Philby, the KGB's mole in British intelligence who set up the SIS's anti-Soviet division, coordinated activities with the CIA and so could convey details of the West's counterspy activity to the Kremlin. Philby, exposed by a KGB blunder, was able to escape to Moscow but not before he came within a hair of becoming "C," the chief of the SIS and, according to Knightley, "the most accomplished spy ever."

In general, however, the author holds the effectiveness of espionage to be overrated. Perhaps, but Knightley cannot prove this with lively anecdotes bounced from a wilderness of mirrors. He is more convincing when demonstrating that the gathering of secrets, and the spreading of lies, is one of the world's biggest growth industries.