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…
…One likes to think that the antifascist fanaticism that helped tempt many into secret service work at the outbreak of World War II was less ugly than the atmosphere of moral nihilism that overhanged in many ways, the analogous activities of the Nixon plumbers right down to our present day or moral ambiguity regarding cyber-warfare and all the tracking mechanisms available to a software driven, digital society with regard to information gathering and surveillance.
—I prefer Secret Agent—er, the Hitchcock film, not the Conrad novel—almost entirely due to the marvelous supporting performance from Peter Lorre, who steals every scene he’s in. Set during World War I, Lorre aids fellow spies John Gielgud and Madeleine Carroll, who are posing as a husband and wife in Switzerland and are tasked with killing a man whose identity they do not know. When Hitchcock planned the making of the film, he told Francois Truffaut, “I asked myself, ‘What do they have in Switzerland?—
A similar plea could no doubt be made for the equally fanatical, and equally sincere, anti-Stalinism that lured a certain number of liberals into the CIA during the agency’s early years, before the American secret service ethos had degenerated into the crypto-imperialist dream of world policemanship and economic hegemony, and, if recent revelations can be trusted, into the obsessive dread not merely of revolution but of any social change anywhere.
But fanatics, no matter how high minded, are generally blind to the contradictions between the ends they pursue and the means they employ, and it can legitimately be feared that many of the conspirational squalors of the present were implicit in the conspirational idealisms of the past.
—The action film is about Ethan Hunt, a secret agent who comes out of retirement when one of his trainees is captured by a sadistic arms dealer. Like the first two films in the series, part three is directed by a well-known filmmaker – J.J. Abrams (however, unlike parts one and two, this is actually a really good movie). Abrams co-wrote the script with his Star Trek and Fringe collaborators Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. —click image for source…
Two things in particular- both essential elements of the secret agent mystique in its democratic version- misled many during the struggle first against the Nazis, then against Stalinist totalitarianism and now against Islamic terror whether from the extreme left or religious zealots. One was the heady feeling of belonging to an elite of secret guardians of the republic, like the protagonists in Kathryn Bigelow’s movie on Bin Laden. We fail to reflect that republics so guarded in the past have generally turned into empires. The other error was the belief that because the republic appeared to be- and probably was- threatened by subversion, it could only be saved by conspiracy.
For conspiracy, whether practiced at home or abroad, for private advantage or for what is conceived to be the public welfare, becomes a habit that grows on those who practice it. As we have seen and continue to see.
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