The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage

This compact study contrasts the fictional treatment of espionage with its real life machinations, and manages to be both informative and entertaining in spite of its modest size. The author, a former CIA officer now teaching at Johns Hopkins, focuses particularly on how living a double life affects the players' personalities. Each part of the actual spies' career--from recruitment (or recruiting others) to arrest or retirement--is studied in terms of how differing character traits often lead to different sets of decisions in the construction of a shadow self, and how spies re-train their physical and emotional instincts so that their new personalities feel natural. Such alterations are part and parcel of""tradecraft""; CIA traitor Aldrich Ames and the famous Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky may have been deadly, but they were sloppy in keeping their spy personae and actions consistent, while FBI mole Richard Hanssen was exquisitely careful except where one woman was concerned. (Yes, sex is a part of many espionage scenarios--though Hitz suggests that that these arrangements are more complex than any a novelist would dare create.) Hitz then goes on to analyze fictional spies, giving John Le Carre's creations high marks, as well as Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, based on the author's WWI experience with British intelligence. Hitz also has good things to say about Tom Clancy's characters, notably Marko Ramius of Red October. As for the future of spying, Hitz believes that satellite-based snooping will exist alongside""human intelligence,"" but that even the office technocrats behind the controls will have tics that affect their work--and the information they gather.