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Stalking the Great Spy Novel
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11389 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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11 / 1986 |
2,483 Words |
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David Atlee Phillips
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I concluded my 25 years with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975 and blithely embarked on a second career as a writer. Since then, I have submitted four book-length manuscripts to the agency for security review. The clearance process, I found, was entirely consistent with the CIA's public image: murky and at times disconcerting, but, on balance, a necessity. I also sensed along the way that on the agency's scale of preferential occupations for ex-employees a second career in writing has plummeted to a cut above double agents and a shade below gun runners.
The intelligence establishment has prevailed in its efforts to leash ex-agents who have ignored the rules of its literary game. Landmark legal cases involved CIA whistle-blowers Victor Marchetti, John Stock-well, and Frank Snepp. The courts upheld the secrecy agreement and the requirement of pre-publication clearance of manuscripts, including fiction. In 1980, the legal principles were applied to Snepp's Decent Interval, an account of his Vietnam tour and published without an agency imprimatur. First Amendment considerations aside, the ruling also deprived Snepp of his revenues.
Ex-intelligence writers, frustrated by the real problems of clearing nonfiction, often express themselves in the espionage fiction format. Marchetti and Stockwell have written novels, and Snepp has submitted one ~ to his publishers. Their fiction was cleared by the CIA, and their manuscripts were among the 85 reviewed by the agency since 1977. Only one work of fiction was rejected, the CIA says, because it was an almost verbatim account of an actual operation.
Verbatim accounts of secret operations are not required to make espionage fiction realistic. Realism, I believe, is the essential element that separates first-rate spy novels from potboilers, but the CIA's mandatory review has not caused the genre to suffer. I've had no problem in translating real-life episodes into fiction, which, despite other shortcomings, is accurate and plausible; CIA censors can only nitpick a novel.
Spy-novelists and the spy novel
Will the quality of American espionage fiction be enhanced as retiring or resigning intelligence professionals swell the ranks of spy novelists? Absent any government intervention at all, are ex-spies better espionage novelists than those who have never skulked in a dark alley?
In the case of the English writers, the answer to the second question is yes. If I were forced, by some circumstance, to thin my collection of espionage fiction of all but a few favorites, only novels by British authors would remain: Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, Erskine Childer's Riddle of the Sands, Compten MacKenzie's delightful spoof Water on the Brain, Somerset Maugham's Ashenden: The British Agent, and several novels by Graham Greene and John Le Carre. Except for Conrad, all the authors were intelligence agents. I suspect Conrad was, too. I would guess that British spymasters recruited any literate sea captain who sailed in and out of exotic ports for two decades.
British ex-intelligence writers have been bound by severe security strictures, and they have found an avenue of escape in fiction. Compten MacKenzie's classic novel was written in retaliation after he was prosecuted for
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