The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage (Hardcover)

~ Frederick P. Hitz (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
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From The Washington Post

The author of this sure-footed little book tells us that he originally intended "to produce yet another 'What's wrong with American intelligence tome' " but was persuaded by his literary agent to do something less boring and more constructive. The result is a lucid overview of 20th-century espionage that says more about the great game as it was played by Americans and their allies and adversaries than just about anything else ever published by someone who knew what he was talking about.

Frederick P. Hitz is a former inspector general of the CIA who now teaches at Princeton. His book grew out of a freshman seminar in which works of spy fiction were compared to actual intelligence operations, but don't be alarmed. It reads less like Espionage 101 than dinner-party talk -- Kipling for starters, le Carré for the leftover indigestible roast beef of Old England, Maugham for the trifle, Conrad for the port. Not surprisingly, Hitz and his students "have concluded that . . . real espionage cases are more bizarre . . . than the fictional accounts."

I wonder how many fans of the genre will believe that. The late Richard Condon, whose entirely implausible, irresistibly believable 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate is not mentioned by Hitz (though -- disclaimer -- one of mine is), advised thriller writers to eschew research and simply make it up. His point was that most readers just aren't gullible enough to swallow the truth.

Now comes Hitz to tell us that a former CIA director, Robert M. Gates, and a legendary American case officer, Dwight "Dewey" Clarridge, "both acknowledged that they knew of no significant recruitments of Soviet spies during their long careers. The spies were all walk-ins, or volunteers." Volunteering to work for the Americans was no easy matter. Owing to a respect for the Soviet security services that amounted to paranoia, the CIA routinely assumed that every would-be agent might be a provocateur. Oleg Penkovsky and Pyotr Popov, who between them practically emptied Soviet safes of top-secret files, recklessly threw themselves at American and British recruiters for months, if not years, before being allowed by the West to commit treason.

Conversely, the even more destructive American turncoats, Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Hanssen, were welcomed with open arms on first approach to hungry Russian intelligence officers. Interestingly, all four moles seem to have had similar motivations: narcissism, disgust with the system, bitterness that lesser men were promoted while they were ignored -- and, with the exception of Popov, a pure hater, money.

As Orwell assured us, the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know. How much more credible than reality is the set-up, seduction and coercion of the Serbian dupe in Eric Ambler's classic A Coffin for Dimitrios. However, as Hitz explains, the real-life problem of weaving a web of blackmail and fear around an agent is that it almost never works. It's easier (and safer) to make it possible for a person to do what he wants to do than to force him to act against his will, in fear and trembling of both sides.

James Bond notwithstanding, Hitz suggests that the West was finicky about employing sex as a recruitment tool. "By contrast, the Soviet [bloc] used women operatives to entrap Western[ers]," he reports. In fact, it wasn't all girls, girls, girls. Both sides used Lotharios, with marked success, to bed and then handle vulnerable females in sensitive posts. The crackerjack East German spymaster Markus Wolf raised this technique to an art form. Less cynical methods often worked better: Clarridge bound a Polish official to him by providing him with an abortion pill for his pregnant wife. Had her condition been discovered, the couple would have been shipped back to Poland. Instead, the husband became a productive agent.

Some of the most informative passages in The Great Game deal with the problems the United States faced ("confronted" might be too strong a word) in the form of unfriendly members of friendly intelligence services. As a case in point, Hitz offers Anthony Blunt, the "fourth man," along with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in the ring of class renegades who famously penetrated British intelligence on behalf of the USSR. Hitz cites The Untouchable, a novel by John Banville, to suggest that their prime motive was not high-minded love of mankind and its tender friend, the "socialist" motherland, but hatred of America. "To many of us the American occupation of Europe was not much less of a calamity than a German victory would have been," says the untouchable himself, who is closely based on Blunt.

Plus ça change. . . . Or as Kipling put it in Kim, "When everyone is dead, the Great Game is over. Not before."

Reviewed by Charles McCarry

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (April 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375412107
• ISBN-13: 978-0375412103
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #963,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Amusing, Inaccurate, Silly, Not Informative -- Doubtful That The Author Ever Met Or Recruited A Spy, September 17, 2008

By	David M. Dougherty (Arkansas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I bought this book hoping to read an intellectual treatise of the reality faced by spies and their handlers as contrasted to fictional representations in spy novels. In short I expected an expose` of what really goes on (which is pretty mundane) as compared to riveting and thrilling adventures. What I read was a silly half-baked comparison of fictional spy characters from Ashenden to The Hunt For Red Oktober" (not really spies) to ten well-known and exposed spies, five Brits, two Soviets and two Americans (Ames and Hanssen.) There was little to learn, and what there was was well-hidden.

The author brings interesting bureaucratic credentials to the table having served in the CIA, Departments of State, Defense, and Energy, and finally as inspector general of the CIA. However, although his first position was as an "operations officer" (note the does not use the term "case officer"), he may have spent his entire 18 years at Langley, and all those after his first stint in positions requiring a lawyer. In short, his bio indicates he was the ultimate Washington bureaucrat rather than an intelligence operative. Nonetheless, one would think at least he would know something about spies from osmosis, but this book failed to display any insider knowledge, or indeed, anything that could not be gleaned from reading the fictional works referenced and widely published books by others on the real spies he used for comparisons. The best that can be said for this standard product of an Ivy League school (Princeton) and Harvard Law School is that he can write fairly well, although repetitiously.

Hitz points out that the CIA failed to penetrate the Soviet Union, was unable to ferret out Soviet agents in the CIA itself, and has become increasingly inept, bureaucratic and bureaupathic (my word.) Two statements were telling. One, that Americans were "too nice" to be successful in an inherently dirty game, and two, that meaningful contact between American case officers in diplomatic cover and Soviet targets was non-existent so that recruitment of Soviet agents was precluded. Unfortunately, Hitz fails to point out the obvious. The solution to the first problem is to stop recruiting socially acceptable personnel from Ivy League schools who cannot function outside diplomatic cocktail parties, and the second is solved by moving case officers to non-official cover where life becomes personally dangerous and have them recruit indigenous spotters and assessors. Oh wow, that means the Agency has to hire non-elite personnel who will be willing to take risks.

Hitz never discusses what makes up a good spy (access and motivation) or an effective case officer (in his term "spy-runner.") Frankly I prefer the MI term "agent handler", but spy-runner will do. Allow me to make up for what Hitz omitted. The first requirement for an agent handler is fluency in the host language. Requirements two through nine are fluency in the host language. Tenth is the willingness to take risks to accomplish the mission, eleventh is an understanding of people, and twelfth is political adeptness in handling the home office.

There are many errors in this book such as his statement that the Venona Project was not publicized during the forties and fifties due to the "sensitivity" of the project. This is a red herring since the project had already been betrayed to the Soviet Union by a Soviet Agent William Weisband in 1946 (or 1948). If there was any sensitivity it was that the American people were not ready to hear that several hundred Soviet agents were active in the Federal Government, most notably the State Department. McCarthy was actually almost spot on, leading some analysts to surmise that McCarthy had been tipped off to Venona by someone on the project. Hitz mentions the Soviet spies confirmed through Venona such as the Rosenbergs, Hiss, Currie and White, but fails to mention those spies who were not brought to trial like Ted Hall. This and other errors makes it seem like Hitz possesses little knowledge beyond what has already been published and widely accepted.

In addition, given that the CIA has become increasingly bureaucratic and incompetent, one wonders what part the author played in inhibiting or enhancing this trend as the CIA's inspector general for eight years. If this misbegotten book is any indication, Hitz does not figure prominently among the good guys.

In short, this book is amusing, but has little otherwise to offer. It will only appeal to literary types who have no personal experience in intelligence activities and can readily confuse reality with fiction. It does not present the reality of life in positive intelligence gathering that one might have expected -- rather Hitz confuses some arcane reality in his own mind with myths contained in spy books.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spy Fact, Spy Fiction, May 25, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you are a fan of spy films and fiction, you will appreciate the countless times double agents are integral to their plots, and how often the Americans, say, would dangle rewards to recruit Soviet spies to come over to the other side. It worked in fiction; it never worked, not once, in any significant way, in actual spying. Frederick P. Hitz, who has a long history of service with the CIA, knows this and says it is confirmed by former CIA director Robert M. Gates and case officer Dwight Clarridge. In _The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage_ (Knopf), Hitz gives an overview of 20th century spying, comparing fiction to the real thing. It will be a book best appreciated by those who are familiar with the work of such authors as le Carré and Graham Greene, but it can be appreciated not just for the comparisons between fact and fiction, but for the many observations of fact about the spying game.

Rather than recruitments, there were walk-ins by Soviets; a spy (or potential spy) literally walked in to an embassy and offered his services. Changing sides comes from diverse motivations. Some Soviet walk-ins disliked the repression of the Soviet state. Others needed money. Aldrich Ames walked into the Washington Soviet embassy in 1985 with what he estimated was $150,000 in CIA and FBI secrets, ready to sell because he had a lot of bills for his extravagant way of living. Frequently spies have resentment towards their own bureaucracies and failures to rise in them. Sometimes people are tricked into spying. Even the James Bond novels describe a specific sort of "honey pot" entrapment, whereby the sexual liaison would be filmed and the victim forced to spy if he wanted to avoid exposure. The Soviets could apparently insist to attractive female workers that their bodies belonged to the state and had duties as lures, not the sort of order that western countries could make to their female employees. It is interesting that honey pots did not work in the opposite direction for another reason. Entrapped westerners would fret about exposure, but when such entrapment was tried on Soviets, they "...would invariably laugh off the threat of exposure as not very compelling in their country." Gadgets so beloved by the movies are downplayed here. There have been, for example, extraordinary advances in miniaturization of microphones and transmitters, but a cat equipped with a microphone makes too many sounds of its own; thus the "Acoustic Kitty" of the Technical Support Division "died a deserved death as technically infeasible."

Spy reality has affected spy fiction. Where the heroes used to be unsung good guys doing their patriotic duties, after Vietnam and Watergate, novelists like le Carré and Clancy wrote about obsessives, misfits, and power freaks who were interested in playing the spy game for itself rather than for national interest. The end of the Cold War and the effect of terrorism have potential for bringing back the hero spy. Perhaps we have hero spies now and Hitz simply is not able to sing their praises because they are still spying. His book is good at giving details of such things as the treasons of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, and also the contributions of Soviet double agents to the information Kennedy needed to decide on the Cuban blockade. It is in giving these inside stories that Hitz succeeds in conveying his thesis: leaving aside the more fantastic Bondian conceits, "...real espionage cases are often more bizarre, more deserving of a place in Ripley's than the fictional accounts."

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A pretty good book, June 22, 2004

By	Joseph Biskup (Sunnyvale, ca United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I enjoyed this book, though it has several frustrations. It is a relatively small book, and a relatively quick read. Overall, the text is very approachable and the subject matter broad but not deep. Each chapter is for a particular aspect of spying such as: sex, tradecraft, gadgets, recruitment, betrayal, retirement, etc. Each chapter is presented in an artificially independent manner; rarely does one chapter refer back to a reference in another chapter. I suppose this can help keep things straight, but it makes it more difficult to create a continuous thread of understanding through the whole book.

Throughout the book, Hitz compares his experiences (rarely explicitely said or rarely a specific incident cited) to about 10 fictional accounts and about 5 true-life books previously written. There are many extended quotes followed by a short interpertation by Hitz. Most of the book focuses on what the author deems an accurate (versus inaccurate) portrayal. If you are not familiar with most of the sources he uses then you may have a difficult time keeping keeping the references straight throughout the book (as I did).

I had a difficult time deciding whether to give three or four stars. The book is a nice read, but not to deep. I felt myself constantly looking for more; wondering what Hitz was leaving out, what he couldn't say and what is still classified "secret" by the government. In the end, I am not a spook so I have to give Hitz the benefit of the doubt and assume he is relatively thorough and honest.