The cult of the secret agent. In fact as in fiction the spy is the indispensable person of our time. Yet their activity poses a deadly threat to the open society. We should not make the mistake of assuming that democracies are immortal. After all, in the long-run, republics have not had a high survival rate. Governments do change, and not always for the better, and countries do sometimes vanish from the map….
…The cnspirational dream world that E. Howard Hunt lived in was clearly bult on his identification with the romanticized and idealized image of the secret agent, one of the most characteristic projections of twentieth-century mass culture. This glamorous figure has served as the hero of countless films, plays, comic strips, pulp magazine stories, and novels, including the forty odd written by Hunt himself under various pen names. It is an industry in itself, self perpetuating in films today Like Zero Dark Thirty, Argo and the series Homeland.
—But after the war, the British were told that a short, blue-eyed, Irish-English officer named T.E. Lawrence had donned Arab robes and led an audacious and dashing Arab revolt against Britain’s enemies in the Middle East. They were told this tale most compellingly by a young American journalist, Lowell Thomas, whose multimedia show — part of which was titled “Lawrence in Arabia” — played in front of three million people from 1919 to 1924 in New York, London and across much of the English speaking world, and more than 4 million people in all. —click image for source…
James Bond, the steel-thewed sexual athlete, jet-set brand name dropper, and bureaucratized killer invented by In Fleming, himself a WWII British intelligence officer, is probably the most famous and enduring of these synthetic modern heroes, but Hunt’s fictional doppelganger, Peter Ward, an ace CIA operative with a special, not to say compulsive, gift for conducting flawless “entry operations,” is equally illustrative- and in certain respects, one fears, more authentic.
—Richard Sorge
German journalist and a spy for the Soviet Union in Japan before and during World War II
—click image for source…
Fictional depictions of the secret agent as hero are validated in the public mind by an almost equally abundant flow of non-fictional accounts- in memoirs, biographies, histories, studies, exposes- of real intelligence operations and real secret agents. Much of this material, even when technically factual, is hardly less mythologized in its presentation than the purely imaginary adventures of a James Bond or a Peter Ward. Some real-life heroes of the secret service world, while remaining within hailing distance of historical truth, have shown themselves to be masters of self-romanticization. T.E. Lawrence is the supreme example, but others, like Richard Sorge, the World War II Soviet secret agent in Japan who scored, albeit to no avail, one of the great intelligence scoops of modern times, or Sidney Reilly, a British undercover operator in early postrevolutionary Russia who was possibly the most audacious, and probably the most unpleasant, spy of any time – had accomplished feats that stimulated the journalistic or novelistic imagination and at the same time enhanced their credibility. Still others have captured the public imagination because their stories sounded like something out of a book- usually a pretty bad one. ( to be continued)…
COMMENTS