SPYING: THE WRITERS' PERSPECTIVE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300056-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 56
• Publication Date: May 22, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300056-0
w i ju Arrmamip 7
~;ti ' WASHINGTON POST
22 May 1986
Spying: in : The JtWters ' Perspective
The Word From Ndvelists Who Said It Could Happen
By Sandy Rovner
Washington Poat Staff Writer
It was espionage writers who convinced
most of us that spying is a dirty business, no
matter what side you're on. Even John Le
Carre's poor old George Smiley did things he
wouldn't want to write home to mother-his
real mother-about, and his KGB counter-
part Karla shared more than a career choice
with the British intelligence chief.
So why are we surprised when Ronald W.
Pelton is charged with betraying a high-tech,
highly successful U.S. eavesdropping opera-
tion? Why are we surprised when John An-
thony Walker Jr. pleads guilty to selling
cryptographic paraphernalia to the Soviets?
We're surprised, all right. We're down-
right shocked.
But some of the writers whose flawed he-
roes and noble enemies have kept millions
reading into the wee hours or quivering a
the edges of their cinema seats will tell you
they knew it could happen all along.
Spy vs. Agent
"Let me tell you something about termi-
nology," says Tom Clancy, author of "The
Search for Red October."
"A guy who works for the Central
Intelligence Agency is an 'officer.'
The foreign national he recruits to
work for him is an 'agent.' And the
guy working against us, for the other
side, is a 'spy.'
"Traditionally, the Russians make
pretty good spies," Clancy says, but
"the thing they have working against
them-well, let's say you're a KGB
recruit. What you see on Russian TV
is the Ku Klux Klan and poor misera-
ble people, all this while they're teach-
ing you 'what you need to know.'
"Then you come to this country and
see what it's really like, and that has
to be really disorienting. Take a su-
permarket, for example. They don't
even have the concept."
For strongly ideological reasons,
Clancy believes that "because we have
the truth on our side," the Russians
lose a lot more officers and agents
than we do. He pauses briefly at the
thought of Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB
colonel who asked for asylum here last
summer, turned over a passel of his
"agents" and then, in an apparent am-
orous contretemps, returned to the
Soviets in November.
"Oh," Clancy says, "I'm sure he's
dead by now."
Spy vs. Spy
"There are, generalizing very
crudely, of course, two kinds of
spies," says novelist W.T. Tyler
("The Ants of God," "Rogues
March"), who is also retired U.S. for-
eign service officer Samuel Hamrick.
"One spies for ideals and principles,
and the other for material things like
money.
"Now the difference between the
two is the difference between, well,
maybe a professional and an amateur.
But let me put it even more crude-
ly-the difference between d courte-
san and a prostitute.
"Both sell themselves, but the
courtesan is really imperial property.
She belongs to the court and she
stays in place. But the prostitute
wanders. She sells herself one night
at a time, and you never know where
she will be tomorrow. It's a very
crude distinction, but it is something
you should keep in mind, because in-
telligence services distinguish on the
same sort of basis.
"They make their distinctions a lit-
tle bit more gentlemanly, of course.
That is to say, an agent who spies for
ideals or principle is controlled by
what they call 'positive factors.' The
agent who isn't moved so much by
principle, who works like the prosti-
tute, presents problems because he's
motivated by what the services call
'negative factors'-I mean the need
for money, or women, or grudges or
resentment-and these are pretty
fickle motives. They can change
overnight, like Yurchenko changed.
"They are very difficult to control.
Once his motive is gone, so is he."
Spy of the Month
James Grady, author of "Six Days
of the Condor" (shortened to "Three
Days" in the movie) and "Hard Bar-
gains," sees the spy of the '80s as a
logical extension of the "me" decade.
It's a "new kind of cynicism," he
says. "You see more now because the
market is bigger and the opportunity
greater. And despite the Reagan rev-
olution, the era of ideological purity is
gone ...
"Nobody thinks anything he does is
going to change the course of history,
although spies used to feel that way.
But since the splitting of the atom,
they kind of see themselves outside
of the ebb and flow of civilization."
Now, he says, "getting your money
or your kicks that way is an act of
psychic rebellion against an anony-
mous society where even your be-
trayal is pretty meaningless."
The spy-of-the-month phenome-
non, says Grady, reflects "the sort of
overkill mentality of the intelligence
communities, where the idea of ca-
reerism is the most important ele-
ment. The Soviets are paying for in-
formation they probably don't even
want.
"Intelligence works this way: An
officer advances his own career by
recruiting agents. If the agent is a
jerk, it doesn't matter, because it
doesn't make the- statistical flow
charts. It's a Dale Carnegie night-
mare.
"I've dealt with some of the real
old ideologues who actually joined the
CIA and the FBI to fight the evils of
communism, but now you see Ameri-
can oil companies in league with the
Angolan Marxists, and it.becomes a
.little difficult to draw those lines any-
more. Labels are meaningless.
"At the end, maybe, espionage will
be a much cleaner game, but until
then what you have, basically, is one
bureaucracy fighting another bureau-
cracy for almost the fate of the
world."
Supply-Side Spies
Today's spies are "untraditional"
for a number of reasons, Tyler says,
"but not really new. Most spies or
agents are grubby and unreliable, the
kind who are moved by negative fac-
tors like money.
"In fact," he says of the recent
crop, "they weren't so much agents
as self-starting hustlers. They saw
their opportunities and they capital-
ized on what access they had.
"They were," he says, "supply-side
agents out for a quick turnover-
spot traders. They wanted to turn a
quick profit and get out. That is com-
pletely different from the traditional
spy, a little guy who stays in place,
year after year. No Mercedes, no Ja-
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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300056-0 ~'
cuzzi, no mistress, just a brownbag-
ger-and he's still there ...
"So there is nothing really new
about these agents that have turned
up with such frequency. They've al-
ways been there, and are essentially
the meat and potatoes of the intelli-
gence trade."
Tyler points out that most of the
alleged spies arrested in the last
year-the Navy's Walker-Whitworth
gang, for example, and Pelton, the
retired National Security Agency
communications specialist, "were no
longer government employes and no
longer had direct access to secret
materials when they were in contact
with the Soviets.
"In fact," he says, "they joined the
service for the reason most people
joined the military-they were
looking for government careers. It
just so happened that during the
course of their careers, they discov-
ered the stuff they were dealing with
had a pretty high value out in the free
market."
Entitlement Spies
"Now," says Tyler, "let's nut all
semiclassified stuff with him when he
left office so he could rewrite recent
history for us. It's the same thing
that sends the admirals over to Gen-
eral Dynamics after they finish in the
Pentagon ... Alexander Haig, David
Stockman selling all those years of
gnawing frustrations to a publishing
house.
"There is also a much less respect-
able counterpart to this sort of enti-
tlement program, you really don't
hear so much about it," he says. "It's
really a sort of blue-collar entitlement
program, because these guys have no
real entitlements except a pension
and maybe some VA benefits.
"These. are people like the former
Green Berets ... who peddle their
combat experience in El Salvador or
with the contras ... chief executive
officers with.high overseas exposure
who do business with the Arabs ...
"But," Tyler continues, "particular-
ly in the case of Pelton, whoadmitted
approaching the Soviets after he left
the agency, he essentially sold his
memoirs-doing the same thing, at a
much cheaper price, as Kissinger was
J- 11
this in perspective in terms of the
times. Spy Vs. High Tech
"Because," he says, pausing, "there Finally, Tyler says, it is the im-
is a perfectly respectable precedent mensity of the military-industrial
for what these guys did. It's what I complex in this country that provokes
call the Washington Limousine Exec- the massive Soviet espionage effort.
utive Entitlement program. "The Soviet effort is really the
"What it really means is that any price they pay for their own techno-
Washington executive or politician, logical backwardness," he says.
those entitled to limousines by the "What bothers them is that things
nature of their offices-secretary of may be happening in U.S. technology
state, chief of naval operations, na- from Massachusetts to California
tional security adviser, for example, which they can't really contend with
even an ex-president or so-has a
God-given right, after he leaves of- "Some little shop scientist at Hon-
fice, to sort of capitalize on his expe- eywell is working on a new micro-
rience and to turn his recollections wave oven and he comes up with a
and his expertise into hard cash." hand-held laser beam that can zap
Tyler warms to his explanation. Moscow from Macy's basement.
"This," he says, "is what let Henry "And that," pronounces Tyler, "is
Kissinger take all this classified and what really scares the Soviets."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605300056-0