It’s hard to write a credible historical spy thriller. You have to get the history right while fashioning a narrative that will keep the reader turning the page. Writing a literary historical spy thriller is even harder: you need to balance believable characters, well-crafted prose, and a consideration of larger themes while maintaining suspense.

Joseph Kanon achieves that balance in his latest novel, Istanbul Passage, which should be regarded as a tour de force for the genre. It’s no surprise that Kanon’s fiction is compared to that of John le Carré and Graham Greene—he tackles the same moral ambiguities that surface in the world of espionage.

Kanon sets his story in Istanbul just after the close of World War II. Turkey stayed on the sidelines for most of the war (entering on the side of the Allies only after it was clear that they would prevail) along with the other countries that remained neutral: Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

A few novelists have explored the tensions and ambiguity involved in neutrality: C.J. Sansom looked at life in Franco’s wartime Spain in Winter in Madrid, and Robert Wilson wrote two well-received mysteries set in Portugal during the war, A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers .

Istanbul Passage begins in the early days of the Cold War. The novel’s protagonist, Leon Bauer, is a businessman working for the R.J. Reynolds Company who has been helping American intelligence on the side (“An errand boy when I happened to be going to the right place”) and discovers not only does he find clandestine work exciting, but also that he’s good at it. When Bauer takes delivery of a Romanian defector and things go terribly wrong, he finds himself drawn deeper into the struggle between Soviet and American intelligence.

Kanon excels in his portraits of the people in the novel—the portly, amoral document forger; the well-connected Turkish socialite who began life in a harem; the bored diplomatic wives; the competing Soviet and American agents; the Mossad operative who must deal with local corruption, Western indifference, and British hostility. The novel brilliantly evokes the Expat world of post-war Istanbul—the foreign diplomats and businessmen who have created their own closed society. Kanon also weaves into the plot the efforts of Mossad agents to help Eastern European Jews evade a Royal Navy blockade and make their way to Palestine. And then there is the Turkish elite, caught between the two emerging powers, and trying to decide which side to land on.

Kanon touches upon some of the themes of accountability and expediency that surfaced in his 2001 bestseller, The Good German. Where should American intelligence have drawn the line when working with those who were part of the Nazi war-machine? What was the morality of making use of those in the Cold War struggle who could be tried on war crimes charges? (We know the answer in Europe: the Allies made use of the Gehlen organization despite its Nazi past). Should the “enemy of my enemy” be enough to justify making alliances?

My only (minor) quibble with Kanon’s book is that I kept waiting for Kim Philby, the infamous mole, to appear, and he didn’t. In September 1945, Konstantin Volkov, the deputy head of the NKVD in Turkey, walked into the British Consulate in Istanbul intent on defecting. He offered to expose Soviet agents in Turkey and Britain. Cold War history might have been different if Philby, the head of MI6’s Russian Desk at the time and a Soviet agent, hadn’t been the official tasked with handling the defection. Philby delayed his arrival in Istanbul long enough for word of Volkov’s planned escape to reach Moscow Center; a heavily-bandaged Volkov was then seen being hustled board an airplane bound for Russia. Had Volkov made it to London he could have exposed the penetration of the British Foreign Office and MI-6 (the Maclean-Burgess-Philby ring).

Copyright © 2012 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

Click to purchase The North Building, the new Cold War thriller by Jefferson Flanders. You can also find his critically-acclaimed Herald Square at Amazon.com and other online booksellers.

Veteran journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman have authored a compelling new book, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, that should become required reading for President Barack Obama and his National Security Council.

The White House has abandoned “nation-building” and opted for a “small footprint” strategy of special operations missions and drone attacks in the Middle East. If this is the direction for American foreign policy in the region (at least for the short-term), there’s a lot to be learned from the Israeli experience and Spies Against Armageddon offers a deeply researched account of how Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies operate when confronting threats to the Jewish state.

Take, for example, the sensitive topic of state-sponsored assassination (covered in detail in Chapter 22 of Spies Against Armageddon). It is a practice frowned upon by the international law community (which considers assassinations of suspected terrorists to be “extrajudicial killings”), but one that has been employed by the Mossad in its fight against terrorism.

Historically American political leaders have been queasy about endorsing assassinations and confronting the difficult legal and moral questions they raise, especially when the targets are far from armed conflict zones. After the revelation of CIA involvement in assassination plots in Cuba, Vietnam, the Congo and elsewhere, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning assassinations in 1976. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush Administration relaxed prohibitions against “targeted killings” arguing that they were a form of self-defense*. Predator drones began firing Hellfire missiles at Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama has dramatically expanded these drone strikes, making them the central tactic in American counterterrorism efforts.

In fact, Obama’s enthusiasm for, and acceleration of, “drone wars” has disturbed many of his liberal supporters. The revelation that Obama himself reviews the “kill list” of targeted terrorists, and decides their fate, has been an unsettling image for many. In his Esquire piece “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” Tom Junod directly challenges the President’s current direction: “You are the first president to make the killing of targeted individuals the focus of our military operations, of our intelligence, of our national-security strategy, and, some argue, of our foreign policy.” Junod adds: “Since taking office, you have killed thousands of people identified as terrorists or militants outside the theater of Afghanistan. You have captured and detained one.”

In contrast, Spies of Armageddon argues that the Israelis take a more restrained approach to targeted killing. They prefer the scalpel to the hammer. Raviv and Melman note that:

• The Israelis are very selective in their use of assassination as a foreign policy tool, despite the public perception (aided by movies like Munich) that they rely on hit squads. Raviv and Melman claim that since the creation of Mossad in the early 1950s “it has been involved in only a few dozen killing operations—certainly fewer than 50.”
• Their targets tend to be key operational players in terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or technical support people (bomb-makers, nuclear scientists). Spies Against Armageddon made headlines around the world in reporting that it was Mossad agents, not Iranian rebel groups, responsible for the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists.
• They don’t go after top political figures.
• They won’t, and don’t, kill Israeli citizens.

In contrast to this selectivity, the drone programs operated by the U.S. military and the CIA have been aimed at thousands of militants in an increasing number of countries. Drones have been employed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia. And most disturbingly, President Obama and his surrogates have claimed the authority to kill American citizens deemed to be terrorists without judicial review or due process. Attorney General Eric Holder has argued that administrative due process is enough—a bizarre position for the nation’s top legal official to take.

It’s not hard to see why the Obama Administration has turned to drones to counter Islamic jihadism. It avoids the costly, and unpopular, use of American combat troops in the Middle East. It does keep Al Qaeda and the Taliban off balance. And it does protect Obama politically from right-wing attacks that he is soft on terrorism.

Yet it doesn’t appear that policy makers have thought through the practical, legal, and moral issues surrounding their reliance on targeted killing. The Obama Administration’s position on targeting American nationals without judicial oversight is a terrible one, arrogating to the President the “power of kings” to unilaterally kill his subjects. There’s also the question of how long this approach can be sustained. Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich, for one, has questioned this continuing “whack-a-mole” approach: “How many Hellfire missiles do we launch from drones before the last violent Islamic radical is either dead or decides that the cause is futile and puts down his arms and goes home?”

These aren’t easy issues to address. Spies Against Armageddon makes it clear that within the Israeli government there is a continuing debate over the limits of action and the ethical boundaries for intelligence agencies in a democratic state. It’s heartening to know that such debates are taking place in Jerusalem. We can only hope that they are happening in Washington as well.

*Lethal force may be employed in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Copyright © 2012 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

Deep Throat never really said “follow the money.” †

Nor did he consciously intend to bring down the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

And Nixon and his closest aides knew in mid-October 1972 the name of the FBI insider—W. Mark Felt—who was leaking details of the agency’s ongoing Watergate investigation, but hesitated to move against him for fear that he would expose White House-ordered wiretapping of journalists. (Felt didn’t publicly acknowledge his role as Deep Throat until 2005.)

Those are just a few of the many intriguing historical insights found in journalist and author Max Holland’s superb new book Leak: Why Mark Felt became Deep Throat, a meticulously researched look at Felt’s instrumental, and misunderstood, role in the Watergate scandal.

Holland has crafted a page-turner—which in itself is quite a feat after the saturation media coverage of the Watergate story and the popularity of the book and film versions of All the President’s Men. At the center of Leak are two men: Bob Woodward, the Washington Post cub reporter whose career skyrocketed because of Watergate, and his secret source, Felt, a high-ranking FBI executive who was nicknamed Deep Throat (a moniker borrowed from the title of a notorious 1972 pornographic movie).

In 200 tightly-written pages Holland retraces Felt’s steps during the crucial initial Bureau investigation of the bungled black-bag job in the Democratic National Committee Watergate complex offices. Relying on interviews, transcripts of Nixon White House conversations, and memoirs from many of the participants, Holland carefully reconstructs Felt’s actions and possible motives—borrowing from, Holland says, a technique used in the world of counterintelligence to determine “in whose interests the suspected double agent was genuinely working all along.”

Motive and means

Holland shows convincingly that Felt acted solely in his own self-interest; he was not motivated by any principled need to defend the Republic against Oval Office lawbreaking or to preserve the FBI’s independence. Instead, the reader is introduced to an ambitious bureaucrat, a careerist consumed by office politics following the May 1972 death of J. Edgar Hoover. The infighting over who was to succeed Hoover became what Holland dubs the “War of the FBI Succession.”

When Nixon passed over veteran Bureau executives and named L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official without law enforcement experience, as interim FBI director, an embittered Felt resolved to derail the appointment. He had a powerful motive to leak. Thus Felt became Gray’s Iago, appearing to support the new FBI head while secretly undermining him.

The ongoing Watergate investigation gave Felt the opportunity—the means—to damage Gray’s credibility by leaking to Time magazine’s Sandy Smith and to Woodward the false notion that Gray was impeding the FBI’s inquiry into the break-in. Felt hoped to so tarnish Gray’s reputation that the Administration, anxious to avoid a Senate confirmation battle, would instead turn to an agency insider—Felt, the No. 2 man at the agency—as an alternative.

Felt proved quite good at the double game. He lied convincingly to Gray, who never doubted his loyalty, even when warned repeatedly about Felt by the White House. Felt personally launched several half-hearted internal investigations to try to uncover who was leaking to the press, careful to keep his own role hidden. He successfully manipulated both Smith and Woodward, feeding them the information that advanced his ends while disguising his contempt for the media.

Deep Throat as double agent

Holland’s portrait of Felt is telling: an icy personality, ambitious, vain, calculating, capable of flattery and of deception. (Some in the Bureau had nicknamed Felt the “white rat” for his shock of white hair and “tendency to squeal whenever he thought it might help his own agenda.”) After decades at headquarters in Washington, Felt had an insider’s knowledge of all things FBI and, Holland suggests, recruited confederates in the Bureau to assist him in leaking to the press.

For those familiar with the history of Cold War espionage, Felt’s sense of entitlement, his lack of empathy or remorse, and his smooth duplicity match the characteristic traits of a double agent. Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist and psychological profiler for the CIA, noted in his (now-declassified) paper “Anatomy of Treason,” that narcissism, or extreme self-absorption, is found in many moles; further, Post noted, these figures “… feel they are destined to play a special role, have an insatiable appetite for recognition and success.” And it is not that hard to imagine Felt meeting his underlying psychic needs for control and a sense of superiority by passing secret information to the Soviets, instead of the Washington Post.

In the end, Felt failed in his scheme to succeed Gray. When it became clear that Gray didn’t have the votes in the Senate, Nixon instead chose William D. Ruckelshaus in May 1973 as the interim director, again bypassing Felt. (In his memoir Felt noted that he technically became head of the FBI, “if only for two hours and fifty minutes” —the period of time between Gray’s resignation and Ruckelshaus’ appointment.) Ruckelshaus wasted no time in forcing Felt into retirement after a confronting him over leaks and what Ruckelshaus saw as Felt’s attempts to undermine his authority.

After Felt’s role as Deep Throat was exposed, an FBI contemporary of his, John McDermott, called him “the Bureau’s Benedict Arnold…Arnold betrayed his oath, his country, and his fellow-citizen soldiers to pursue his own ambitions. Felt did no less to the Bureau and his fellow agents.” McDermott noted that Felt had no evidence that the FBI investigation of Watergate was “impeded or thwarted” by Nixon, the Justice Department, or Gray. “Some have called Felt a hero,” McDermott wrote in 2005, “but heroes don’t lurk in the shadows for 33 years.”

Questions of journalistic ethics

Bob Woodward is also not cast in the most flattering of lights in Leak. Felt found it relatively easy to steer Woodward and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein toward stories that would damage Gray. He fed Woodward “plain untruths—things Felt didn’t know because the FBI didn’t know them; exaggerations or misrepresentations of facts the Bureau had developed; and falsifications of what Felt knew to be the truth.” The Post published two such false stories: that Gray had essentially blackmailed Nixon into appointing him FBI acting director and that the White House was behind the “Canuck letter” that damaged Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign.

Perhaps Felt’s wildest claim (made right after his confrontation with Ruckelshaus) was informing Woodward that “everyone’s life was in danger” and the CIA had instituted wide-spread wiretaps. This fabrication prompted the dramatic scene in All the President’s Men where Woodward summoned Bernstein to his apartment and—now worried about electronic surveillance— typed out the disturbing claims from Deep Throat. It did make for great drama, even if (as Holland reminds us) one Washington Post editor wondered at the time whether it was “a kind of paranoid delusion of persecution.”

Holland also raises questions about the ethics of the relationship between Woodward and Felt. Woodward’s decision to include Deep Throat in All the President’s Men represented a violation of the deep background agreement the two men had made in 1972. As Holland notes: “The fascination, if not fixation, over Deep Throat obscured the unilateral abrogation of the agreement…”

This expedience paid off: All the President’s Men made Woodward a celebrity (being played by Robert Redford in the film version certainly didn’t hurt) and he and Bernstein benefited handsomely from book sales and film rights. The decades-long guessing game about Deep Throat’s identity also translated into financial rewards: Woodward pocketed a healthy advance for his 2005 book The Secret Man about his relationship with Felt, and the Felt family sold his story to Hollywood for an estimated $1 million.

Deep Throat’s legacy

Holland’s painstaking scholarship in Leak makes it impossible to see Mark Felt/Deep Throat as a principled whistleblower determined to expose the “dirty tricks” of Richard Nixon. Yet Holland’s correction of this Watergate myth comes decades after the mysterious figure of Deep Throat captured the American imagination.

For many, Deep Throat made leaking honorable, even glamorous. Deep Throat appeared to have been motivated by a higher morality, one that justified his violating whatever secrecy oaths he had sworn. The public perception was that without his furtive meetings with Woodward in that darkened underground parking garage Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate would have succeeded (a conclusion sharply challenged by Holland and other historians of the period).

This meme of Leaker as Hero had an impact in Washington in the post-Watergate years. Government officials, whether career bureaucrats or political appointees, got the message: if you don’t like a Presidential or departmental policy, or consider it legally suspect, you have the right to anonymously leak sensitive or secret information. Anonymous leaking is a less risky course of action, as well. Resigning in protest means losing your job. Pursuing a formal complaint through official legal channels can jeopardize a promising career. Leaking is the safer route.

Yet while it is true that too much government information is routinely classified as secret, there are secrets—especially those involving national security—that should be kept. The problem, of course, is who decides what exactly should remain secret. The Leaker as Hero suggests that individuals can unilaterally make those decisions based on their own ethical principles (while avoiding any unpleasant legal consequences).

This approach to secrecy has some obvious flaws. If Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and Deep Throat are both heroic figures, what about Bradley Manning (accused of leaking confidential U.S. diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks)? What about the outing of Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, as a CIA agent by Richard Armitage/Scooter Libby? In all cases, the leaker can plead conscience as a defense.

Power has a way of changing attitudes. The liberal-left apparently no longer automatically accepts the Leaker as Hero construct. How else to explain the Obama Administration’s aggressive legal pursuit of leakers? As Adam Liptak of The New York Times has noted the Eric Holder Justice Department has “brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.” (Critics have noted that many of these leak prosecutions have not been confined to national security matters). No doubt Richard Nixon would have appreciated the irony, if not the double standard.

† According to Holland, Felt never gave that famous advice “at least according to Woodward’s contemporaneous notes, and now it appears likely that this useful thought was actually dispensed by Henry E. Peterson, or possibly Edward Bennett Williams.”

Copyright © 2012 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved