So much has been said, in reams of newsprint and hours of radio and television time, about 1985 as the "Year of the Spy" that is seems nothing remains to be said; but is that so?
By the year's end, and into 1986, the government and the public had much to say about two angles of the conventional espionage triangle. Everyone had dumped on the spies themselves, most of whom were pathetic characters who had succumbed to financial, marital, and/or personality problems. Likewise, everyone had bemoaned the damaging loss of vital secrets and had something to say about now best to prevent further losses. However, little, if anything, was said about the third angle, the spymasters and those who manage them.
In the first place, there was no denunciation of the spy handlers who serviced the Walkers, the Pollards, Chin, and Scranage. No one in the White House, in the intelligence community, on Capitol Hill, or in the press or public zeroed in on them. With diplomatic immunity, they were quickly allowed to head for home.
In the second place, no one in or out of government zeroed in on the embassies, which, with their diplomatic privileges, were centers of espionage supporting the spymasters. No one denounced those embassies for housing, directing, financing, supporting, and sheltering the spy handlers who daily went about their clandestine and illegal business of spotting, recruiting, training, directing, servicing, and paying the spies who were selling them this country's secrets.
Finally, no one called upon the governments behind those embassies to cease and desist from spying on this country. It has not occurred to anyone to call for a great war against spying, to call for the outlawing of espionage, to stop what is really international thievery on a grand scale. No, there has been an unbroken silence about this aspect of espionage.
There has been silence because, of course, the United States also plays this game, also runs spies, and is in no position to call the kettle black. This fact is well known to the American public, which accepts it as a regrettable necessity. In this they are joined by the other powers of the world, great and small; and the smallest, the ministates, live off their powerful allies by trading secrets for services rendered. They all have one or more intelligence, espionage, counterespionage, and security services. Their names, like Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, Israel's Mossad, Iran's Savak, and South Korea's Central Intelligence Agency, are sometimes well known, but any one country's organizations can be so many and so well concealed that identities give way to such imprecisions as "British intelligence," "French intelligence," and "Bulgarian intelligence."
Whatever the names, today's espionage services are markedly different from those of a century ago when the world was smaller, states fewer, and services (as distinct from adventurous free-lancing spies) were often crisis-born, ad hoc affairs. Today they are permanent, government-run, professional organizations. What largely gives them this status, and accounts for their activity, is the tremendous growth, especially in this technological era, of what a World War I German intelligence chief, Colonel Walther Nicolai, called "real military secrets," that is, something worth stealing. In the United States alone (probably the only country
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