Bill Granger - The November Man

This book reflects a struggle going on in the world of intelligence between those who deny the usefulness of agents, contractors, case officers, and all the other personnel involved in the business of espionage and those who defend the worth of HUMINT (human intelligence and analysis) in the face of the technological revolution.

The New York Times gathered estimates by intelligence officials, who agree that 85 percent of all information gained by the various U.S. intelligence agencies comes from ELINT (electronic signal intelligence), SIGINT (signal intelligence), PHOTINT (photo intelligence), RADINT (radar intelligence), and all the “hardware” sources, opposed to the information gained by spies (HUMINT).

Intelligence analyst Walter Laqueur noted in A World of Secrets that “the need for HUMINT has not decreased, but it has become fashionable to denigrate the importance of human assets because technical means are politically and intellectually more comfortable. On the other hand, the opportunities for hostile intelligence agents operating in democratic societies are incomparably greater than for their Western counterparts.”

In 1985, there was a furious exchange of spies between East and West before the Reagan–Gorbachev summit. In every case of a mole’s “defection” to his true side, another agent in the field was picked up by the side sinned against. In one bizarre case, a Soviet KGB agent who “defected” West later “redefected” to the Soviet embassy in Washington, claiming he had been kidnapped. Central Intelligence Agency denied his claims. In 1986, a Chinese double agent buried inside CIA claimed he had worked for China for two decades to improve relations between the countries and not for monetary gain—though he had to take the money to convince the Chinese he was a legitimate traitor. He committed suicide, according to official reports, by putting a plastic bag over his head in his cell and voluntarily suffocating himself.

These things are all true; these things are all reflected in this book.

In a little while, she had to go away. There were assignments in the East, in the Philippines, then back to Washington… She gave him the itinerary, she fussed about him. It was a way of making love to him.

This was the other way. Rita moved beneath him and her belly bumped his belly. They were tangles of arms, they were tastes and smells; they mingled with each other. Devereaux was never so lost as when he made love to her. Never so abandoned. There were no cold places in him when he made love to her. He cried out like a lost child when he came. She held his shuddering body with legs, arms, hands, pressed him into her. She closed her eyes very tight to feel the wonder of this very common act they shared with nearly every other member of the species.

Let me be lost in you.

They shivered in pleasure in each other and then fell away like flowers thrown on a still pond. They never spoke when they made love; lovemaking was too true for words. He didn’t trust words. Words lied. You could say anything.

And they both heard the telephone ringing from the next room, though it was in the middle of the morning, in Lausanne, at the edge of the world they had fled from…

“Tired,” Hanley said on the third Tuesday in February. He repeated the word several times to himself, alone in his windowless cubicle that was the office of the director of operations. He blinked, looked around at the white walls of the cold, bare room, and said the word again. It was as though everything familiar to him had drained his life away.

He said the word again to Miss Smurtty in the outer office and by then he had his hat on. He shrugged into his overcoat as he walked along the hall to the elevator bank on the sixth floor. He repeated the word to the security policeman at the elevator bank. The policeman said nothing.

Hanley said the word like a man searching memory for words to a song at the edge of the mind.

He went home and it wasn’t even noon yet.

He took to his bed.

Each morning thereafter, he called in by nine. He talked to the same woman in personnel and recorded his absence. He said he was ill because he felt so tired. He explained to the woman in personnel how tired he felt. And he stayed out sick the rest of the month of February. It was the first time in twenty-one years that Hanley had missed a day of work.

He was the good civil servant. As director of operations for R Section, he had a love for the Section that transcended mere identification with a job or mission.

The tiredness colored all his thoughts. He would lie in bed at night and listen to the roar of traffic beneath his apartment windows. He lived on the third floor of a large apartment building at the juncture of Massachusetts and Wisconsin avenues in northwest Washington. The rooms were large and airy but all the light was gray because it was spring in Washington and always raining.

Hanley sat by the window in his apartment in the afternoons and looked down at the cars climbing up the hill from DuPont Circle and around the Naval Observatory grounds where the Vice President’s white house sat in splendid isolation. Hanley thought too much. He thought about the Vice President having a better view and neighborhood to live in than the President trapped in the tangle of the central city. Hanley thought the traffic was very thick and very loud; it was like undergrowth around a neglected house. The weeds had grown and grown until one day there was nothing to be done but burn them off and tear the old house down and start again.

Hanley wept when he thought such things.

He had been growing more and more tired for weeks before he decided to take sick leave. Dr. Thompson’s pills did not seem to help him but he took them with precise faithfulness. He was a man of habits. He was cold and thin and his voice was flat as the Nebraska plains he had come from.

He thought of the child he had been. He wept when he thought of himself.

Once in a while he thought he would have to get better. He was director of operations for R Section and that meant he was director of spies. The master of the marionettes. But he was ill now and the spies were being left to dance without direction. This couldn’t go on. It mustn’t go on.

On March 1, the doctor came.

Dr. Thompson was vetted twice a year. He had taken his annual lie detector test in January. He was thirty-four years old and very nearly incompetent, which is why he was only employable by a government agency. Before joining the Section, he had nearly been stripped of his license to practice in his native Oregon because of some damned business involving surgery on a woman where the wrong organs had been removed. It had not been his fault.

Thompson carried a top secret clearance and had access to secrets to the level of N. He was a jolly young man with a pink face and a hearty, almost English manner. He slapped his hands together when he talked; he resembled Alec Guinness in early films.