Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

But proper knowledge is in no way proper judgment. The one thing the soldier-life has taught me is a profound suspicion of professionalized knowledge. You can professionalize force. You can professionalize etiquette. You can even professionalize the erotic. But you cannot professionalize intelligence. Intelligence fails when the first shot is fired. Battle plans are everything, but worthless once the battle is joined. Von Clausewitz was right to say that unless you cross the battlefield, no permanent happiness can be yours; but he neglected to add that when you are in the midst of fighting it, the battle does not exist. Espionage is a lot like literature in that it is invariably about loss, and full of folks busily writing away for people who no longer exist. History is driven by failed artists. And the main lesson of the intelligence business is this — it takes a long time to learn just how much intellect to smuggle into any transaction without ruining it, and this is as true in love and art as well. The effortlessness of the smuggling is in direct proportion to the affect of the intelligence, a fact not widely understood by our illustrious higher pedagogy. It’s not exactly that the intelligence is mostly wrong. It’s that you have the capacity to believe, when the intelligence is right. In our business, strange to say, it is the most radical skepticism which often leads to the gravest errors, our pushing of metropolitan fancies to ridiculous extremes, just like the Russians.

Further, the essential strategy of intelligence has been misunderstood by the earnest moralizers who seem to take to American soil like soybeans. Breaking the code is just the first step. Secrecy, leverage, and momentum are only marginal effects. What you really want enemy intelligence to have is sufficiently accurate information to allay their paranoia and thus hold the more maniacal of their politicians at arm’s length. It’s easy enough to create disinformation, to mislead, to ensnare, to corrupt, to assassinate. What’s difficult is to create the illusion in the worried reader’s mind that he is getting the right information in spite of us, rather than with our specific assistance. Naturally, you will need a safe house on occasion to let down your hair and hatch a plot or two, but your real safety resides in the fact that your own agencies are riddled with your opposite number, that you know what they know about what you are doing. Wasn’t it Persius who said that knowing really means nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it.

The fact of the matter is that most agents never learn anything of consequence in their entire careers and so must continually inflate the significance of their observations — a driving force of history which makes the class struggle look like a game of whist. Young men seeking academic promotion, old men seeking publicity — all of it worthless rot, worthless, worthless. Thus, espionage is mostly the story of some poor fellow being shadowed by another, and who by throwing away his brown paper lunch bag invites a generation of tortured analysis and brilliant speculation. What was remarkable about Iulus is that he never inflated his own significance, never gave undue meaning to his dreary routines. To climb the ladder in this business you must entertain the last conclusion that you would expect your training and temperament to lead you to, and that is this: The world in fact does not depend in the end of the individuality of the speaker, but upon the transmission of other voices, which somehow overflow into our world.

Now the intelligence fraternity has taken a great deal of abuse in recent years, and while I can hardly add a laurel to their brow, I ought to point out that they were often ahead of their time. By this I mean that they were among the first to suffer from the affliction primarily responsible for the disintegration of the modern personality — when the ability to collect information greatly outstrips our ability to make any sense of it. I myself must confess that I do not know of a single decision, personal or political, which can be improved by more information. The modern way to keep a secret secret is, after all, to surround it with trivia. Information makes it easier to mask real events and hide meaning. Ours is the age of ultimate, unobtrusive continual surveillance. Never before have so many been overheard and so much written down. Never before has behavior been so closely observed and recorded. And yet never in history was there a vaster contrast between the extraordinary precision of our diagnosis, and the recalcitrance of the data from which nothing could be learned, much less prognosticated. The most difficult thing in history is to ascertain motive, and you will not find me trying to account for it. As the great Dickens has said, “Most people cannot read character, and the greatest of all their mistakes is to mistake shyness for arrogance.”

In any event, when I came to make summaries of Iulus’s work for my aegis of superiors — the inter-office memo is truly the cruelest art form — pressure began to mount. Various directorates came into conflict. The Office of Damage Assessment dismissed it as magical fantasy. The Office of Imagery Analysis believed it to be enigmatically coded reality. Now you won’t catch me pulling that Anaxagorian banality, that the world is a mixture of the real and imagined. It’s simply that all war reminiscences are exchanges of the fake with the genuine, and it’s quite impossible to tell the difference. My final task was to divide it up on a “need-to-know” basis between our specialized warriors, and to elicit their cramped annalistic initials in the proper box. But boxes are boxes precisely because they are meant to convey something besides boxes, and they did not appreciate my reminding them of this.

For my own part, it was difficult to police a project in which I was so thoroughly engrossed. Indeed, intelligence-wise, within Iulus’s larger candor, there was no hidden conundrum, enigma, or agenda. The deeper one went into it, there seemed to be nothing but more tact and more discretion. Even the most worried reading revealed no breaches of faith or security; it resisted utterly any allegorical partiality. The most bizarre matters were related in the most matter-of-fact manner, as if to remind us that it is only the most fantastical tales which have direct historical equivalence, while it is the banal tissue of everyday documentary coherence which is totally fabricated. If you really believe you have made something up, it only means that you haven’t looked far enough, in my experience. “Imagination” is simply the relation of another person’s memory that can’t be exactly retrieved. There was nothing, you will notice, not even a proper name, which might compromise a personality, much less an agent. (In the summaries made by the lady copyists, every human and place name was left blank to be later written in by hand at a higher directorate.) Whatever else it was, this was no crank’s fiction or self-serving confessional. It addressed itself to the seniormost level, yet it wore its authority easily and remained accessible to the most peripheral of participants. Its sheer number of heroes and heroines might well overwhelm the dubious and jaded contemporary reader, but Iulus was the only man I knew who lived a truly fascinating life and wasn’t a boring writer. His work made you forget the injunction whereby you had come to read it — the highest praise you can give a document.

In all honesty I have forgotten in the press of other duties exactly how it was further processed. What I never forgot was the effect of the whole — as when you read too profound a book at too early an age, and all you can recall about it was that it required a new level of concentration, that brief and glorious lost time in everyone’s life, when you are watching yourself get smarter. I understand that this will sound of exclusivity to contemporary ears, but at my age I cannot muster a suitable self-effacing apologia. My trembling hand is quite democratic enough. These days, I rather go in for being misunderstood.