Spies Like Always

As the story of Aldrich H. Ames' $2.7 million, 7 year spying spree comes to light in dribs and drabs, James "Jesus" Angleton must be doing cartwheels in his grave. Angleton, only posthumously biographized, but long lengendary in the spook community, was the CIA's both hopelessly paranoid and devastatingly effective spy-catcher. He was a man who for thirty years drove himself (and others) crazy trying to stop spy scandals before they got started.

Angleton would rightly be appalled at how Ames aimlessly drifted past CIA monitoring. Though he took frequent trips abroad, including to that eternal city of spies, Vienna, and though he bought a $540,000 house on a $70,000 salary, Angleton's successors barely took notice.

What Angleton would not be upset about is the very fact that the Russians had trolled for information. Even an assiduously suspicious CIA man like Angleton realized that spying is an international fact of life, an integral and inescapable part of the relationship of states.

Not so, a gaggle of hawkish Senators, who quickly denounced the Russians and clamored for a cut-off of foreign aid. The tacit recognition of the ubiquity of spying, it seems, has turned into petulant indignation, while at the same time, the vigilant oversight that characterized the Cold War has collapsed into bumbling blindness.

Why should the Senators be angry with Russia? After all, Ames' most opprobrious crime seems to have been betraying the identities of his Russian counterparts. The Senators cry that we and the Russians are now allies, so that their spying is all the more perfidious.

Ignoring the fact that we are doing the exact same things, one may remember that our allies, the Israelis, employed Jonathan Pollard to snatch U.S. secrets; and our close European allies, though thoroughly apprised of security issues, are masters of anti-U.S. industrial espionage. Damn the spy all you want, there is still no sense in taking umbrage at the country who employs him.

Spying is the faint echo of overt international relations. It is game that, for every player, it pays to play. Every country wants to maintain uncertainty about its plans and actions in the eyes of every other. And every country wants to be as certain as possible about the designs of friends and foes alike.

A constant undercurrent of spying and counterspying makes sure that the uncertainty never becomes so great as to set the world stage for unpleasant and dangerous surprises. States will always strive to stay one step ahead of each other, but the inevitable presence of moles makes sure that they never get too far out of synch.

What in wartime might risk thousands of lives, in peace-time is really quite innocuous; the assurances potential allies receive from spies' information is far better cement for budding relationships than blind trust alone. The Senators have it exactly backwards.

So is it wrong for us to begrudge Mr. Ames his Swiss bank accounts and Arlington digs? Should we instead pin a medal on his chest and send him on his way? Certainly not.

Peacetime spying useful only as a murky undercurrent, which if more common would throw international affairs into a worse turmoil than if spying didn't exit at all. The keen moral disapprobation we feel for the individual spy is a key rule of the game. And, aside from that, Ames' leaks led to the executions of at least eight men.

No, Ames will soon be off to the basement of the Marion penitentiary, and well it should be. There he will join Jonathan Pollard, and the two of them can ponder their peculiar predicament--suffering a deserved fate, while the countries that put them up to their crimes continue to receive copious American aid. It may sound strange, but its the way of the world.

Benjamin J. Heller's column appears on alternate Saturdays.