2019 Lessons Learned

I am not going to reprise all the spies that I've read in 2019; first of all because I cannot remember everyone's name, and secondly, I was not reading them as biographies.  My motive for selecting espionage as a theme was only to see if there was a common trait or motivation urging them to spy.

The motive seems to be a variable of a couple of factors:  (1) the times and (2) patriotic idealism.

Spies come in several "flavors."  Those that I consider to be the most noble are those who put country over self, especially in those times of war.  By country, I mean those lands where freedoms come first, because spies will work for allies of their homeland.  Next comes those who choose espionage as a career, joining an organization to gather information either involved in encryption/decryption or in capturing information from their country's enemies.  (I prefer people with these responsibilities over those that strew disinformation, although I found the antics of Garbo in World War II to be almost as theatrical as a movie epic.)  Military personnel spies are also less attractive to me, but I find them more honorable if they are "on the winning side" and actually engage in acts of sabotage/destruction.

Maybe because she was one of the first I read about in 2019 was Virginia Hall.  Her drive to help the Allies during WWII was over-arching:  when the US would not advance her from her clerical duties both because she was a female "clerk" and crippled, she just offered her services to Britain.  She did everything:  running a large network of agents, getting pilots and radio operators into France, coordinating sabotage.  She eventually won the highest honors from France, Britain and finally the USA.  Because of the time/need, she did not undergo "spy academy" training a rigor that would have surely disqualified me.

See, when I was in high school and had to take a career aptitude test, the result was I should be a spy.  I guess I hit some of the qualifications:  I was good with languages, wrote creatively, and liked to perform on stage.  Obviously, the written test profile could not pick up my glaring disqualifications:  I would have royally failed any PE demands and I don't think I could shoot straight.   Maybe that's why I think I read these biographies looking for people who were intellectual giants, clever, creative and honorable.

Of course over the past twelve months I read about those "spies" who were double agents and conducting espionage for the enemies of my country.  What I was less conscious of before starting this theme was how much of it would be international history.  I read about how much George Washington relied on his spy network and how ruthless he was dealing with British spies.  I read about Britain's counsel in South Carolina during the Civil War.  Of course I read dozens of books about World War II spies, American, German, French and British  I read about the CIA infiltrating Russia and the KGB doing the same here.

But the ones I read about spying in the Middle and Far East affected me the most; mainly because of all the intrigue and interventions the US and its allies conducted in these regions.  I concluded people who live in these areas will never forgive or forget.  It explains a lot of the continuing hostility.  Spies cross the line when they advocate or provoke regime changes; that is insidious and ignores the will of the people who live there … they have to overthrow their own tyrants on their own terms.  (This tome quotes Dick Heuer's book, The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis:  "The U.S. perspective on what is another country's national interest is usually irrelevant in intelligence analysis.)

This morning (a day into the new year) I finally finished my "last" spy book, The History of Spying, all 760 pages of it (after renewing it two times and still incurring $1.00 of library fines).    The title of this book emphasizes my final perspective of this theme:  my reading about spying was once again an effort of better understanding history.  This scholarly author was motivated to write this comprehensive timeline of espionage (starting with Old Testament characters to Wiki leaks and cyber space spying) basically to combat what he calls "historical attention span deficit disorder," to me a real wide-spread epidemic that extends into a generational lack of American history across all disciplines.  The books includes a great quote from Churchill, "The further backward you look, the further forward you can see."

So yesterday when I stopped at the library to pick up some of the books I reserved for my 2020 theme, The Criminal Mind, I picked up only a few of those that were ready, first because I will be out of town for several days and don't feel like lugging books along with me, and second brought home only the shorter ones, one of which I finished this morning, reading it while the New Year's Eve fireworks where exploding and a neighbor was playing Auld Lang Syne outdoors on his coronet.  First post of the new theme to shortly follow.  Good bye 2019.