| 22 November 2006 Shaken, Not Stirred Thank God James is back. The real one. The other Bonds had become pretty, a characteristic you definitely do not need in a clandestine operative. There really used to be ways of doing business that were quite remarkable, and Bond's author Ian Fleming knew they were true. Things got hard for the real spy business that used whiskey and romance as tools of the trade. There were echoes of that in the Watergate allegations that a prominent actor in the Watergate Burglary was acting to protect certain information that might have compromised a spouse. Those records are all gone now, as is the memory of some of the honey-pots where the baser side of human nature was exploited to great effect by many of the services that operate in Washington. It was sometimes difficult to determine who was who, what with MI6, the Duxieme Bureau, the Israelis, Russians, Chinese and a host of others running different schemes against different targets. One of the worst was during Operation Condor, which was conducted by an association of Latin intelligence services to repress leftist movements in their countries. Perhaps it was facilitated with a central communications architecture located in Panama, provided from some friendly superpower. Orlando Letelier was a Chilean who had been a senior official in the Aliende goverment in Chile. After detention and torture back home, he moved to Washington and worked for the Institute for Policy Studies here in 1976. Going to work one morning with his assistant Ronnie Karpen Moffitt and her husband, a bomb was detonated in his car near Sheridan Circle. He and Ronnie died, and it was quite spectacular. There is a monument on the spot, today, to help us remember the consequences of very bad karma. One does not do such spectacular things in the capital of your patron, and there was much embarrassment for all concerned in the investigation that followed. you coudl say things were both shaken and stirred. The old joke in town was that President Alliende committed suicide by repeated bursts of automatic weapons fire, and a self-inflicted air strike. That was on the eve of the dramatic revelations that resulted in the Church and Pike Commissions in Congress, which spilled the beans on the "crown jewel" list of special operations against Fidel Castro and the others. Thereafter any such activity by the American services became quite unthinkable. People went to jail. That is one of the reasons Bond was so popular, even if he became as flabby and gaudy as the American cars of the 1970s. He was British, and thus some of the hi-jinxs might be plausible. Certainly the Americans couldn't do things like that! As to "watching your back," most old spies don't worry about it. One of the Deans of the Directorate for Operations is the brother of a close family friend. His brother never knew anything except that he "worked for the State Department," which was sometimes the only cover you needed. To avoid hurting careers and families, the Major Services had an effective truce, and worked through surrogates. Thus, CIA and KGB could work the same streets, and the worst consequence of a blown operations was to be declared "Persona Non Grata," and given the boot out of the country. It used to be a badge of honor, or a sort. But just because the Americans were out of the assassination business, not everyone was. It was pretty clear that the truce did not apply to your own agants, and the Soviets had a tradition of punishing erroneous thinking, You could start the tradition with the murder of Leon Trotski with an Ice pick in Mexico. In 1978, they killed .Bulgarian dissident and BBC radio journalist Georgi Markov in London. They used the poisonous agent ricin, which was emplaced in pellets fired from a device in the ferrule of an umbrella. There have been other strange poisonings of those who crossed the Kremlin, so I would not be surprised one whit to find that Alexander Litvinenko was filled with the toxic metal thallium on the orders of someone back home. As it said, there is long tradition. Ask the former Prime Minister of the Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, who mysteriously sickened and almost died when he ran against Moscow's man in the orange Revolution. He was defeated the old fashioned way, with abuse of absentee ballots, barring of opposition representatives, and inaccurate voter lists. But old habits die hard. As to the need for a new James Bond, some old traditions are reborn here, too. The "take the gloves off" message after 9/11 put some vigor back in the Directorate for Operations at Langley. There are other rough men (and women) who were empowered to do some extraordinary things. Art imitates reality, or so they say, and it is good to see that James Bond is back on the right track. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |