GOD'S SPIES

It has been from the start a dirty business. The first spies of whom we have record were wormed by Joshua into Jericho. They found a "safe house," as it is called in today's intelligence jargon; it was that of the harlot. The second-oldest espionage tale is that in Book X of the Iliad. It is a sordid episode of penetration and counter-penetration in the night, ending in muffled butchery. Appropriately, the narrative is regarded by scholars as a late addition, a bit of melodrama not by Homer. Yet the fascination of the genre is perennial. Among the first mature American fiction is The Spy. In it, James Fenimore Cooper lights on a characteristic modern motif: that of the actual or putative double agent. In the context of the American Revolution, with its shared tongue and frequent kinship between adversaries, the ambivalence of the secret agent was present almost by definition. This was again the case during the War Between the States, whose clandestine couriers and intelligence runners embodied in their own persons and murky ventures the rent of divided allegiance.
Incipient duality is the agent's demon. How could it be otherwise? The craft of spying is based on intimacy with the party being spied on. The agent must melt into the enemy city. The code-breaker insinuates his own being into the labyrinthine heart of the encoder. (John Hollander's arch and subtle long poem "Reflections on Espionage" allegorizes the mirror closeness between raveller and unraveller.) Snared in the arcane web of his own "cover," smoked, winkled out of his mask, the intelligencer is often offered the escape of a second treason. He now starts working for his captors while seeming to retain his first loyalty. He has, as the term goes, "been turned."
But further pirouettes can ensue. A double agent may in fact be just that: he may be delivering authentic goods both ways, thus becoming one of the mail drops or nerve synapses that keep even the most bitter of national foes in necessary contact. Often, the two masters, or "controls," know that they are being reciprocally but usefully betrayed. The agent is allowed the naked immunity of no man's land. At other times, only one of the paymasters will know that his man has "turned." (During the Second World War, such knowledge allowed the Allied "spooks" to filter false data into the main arteries of the German counter-intelligence network.) But there are numerous cases in which neither party to mutual deception can ever be certain where the agent's truth or falsehood finally lies. A seeming double-was the young Stalin working equally for the czarist Okhrana and the Bolsheviks; was he selling out more of the one than the other; had he turned back to his first recruiters after betraying them to the second?-burrows irretrievably into the maze of his own occult purposes. Does the spy himself, Joseph Conrad opines in The Secret Agent, recollect where his loyalties lie?
To this question, which can be made symbolic of the uncertainties of human identity, of those capacities for self-deception and selective forgetting which make men teeter or stumble when they descend the spiral staircase of the inward self, twentieth-century espionage and its fiction give a new answer. Even the treble agent, who sells both his employers to a third bidder, even the most venal and chameleon-like of peepers (spying, "private eyeing," is the art of the voyeur), does have an ultimate adherence. He is, in the nauseous hour before dawn when he waits for the torturer's decorous rap on the door, loyal not to the nation-states or governments that have bought and sold him; he is loyal to his profession, to the cobweb, incessantly torn, incessantly repaired, that knits in a common intimacy of mistrust all agents, all miniature-camera men in unlit filing closets, all calligraphers in invisible ink, whatever the flag under which they ply their trade. No spy ever wants to come in from the cold. His only home is the tundra of his shared craft. His only brotherhood is that of professional esteem as between hunter and hunted.
In British sentiment, this bleak paradox has taken on an obsessive edge. Kim Philby's penetration, on behalf of Soviet intelligence, to very near the top of the British secret service and the related treason of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, whose escape to Moscow Philby crafted, grow more haunting as time passes. Part of the reason is the ruthless effrontery of the coup together with the inefficacy of official response. (Was it worse than that-was there collusion or coverup in even higher places?) In its bumbling ugliness and high cost-United States intelligence has never again found it easy to coordinate fully with its "first cousins"-the Philby disaster has come to represent certain central infirmities of imagination and technique in British public affairs.
But there are deeper grounds for malaise. In their social background and schooling, in their idiom and guise of life, Philby and his minions embodied the genteel caste on whose absolute fidelity, on whose un-argued devotion to public service, Britain has based its trust in government through and by an amateur elite. Judas had belonged to the right clubs. Worse than that: he had been on the house committee. The shock of disclosure went to the heart. It induced E. M. Forster to put forward one of the most unsettling of all modern propositions: that a true gentleman and humanist is one who would rather betray his country than his friend (the inference being that the friend also is a "gentleman," that the betrayal of a cad poses no comparable crux). The Philby drama gives a special density-though, in the most recent case, a sentimental overblownness-to the spy novels of John Le Carre. It is the topic of Alan Bennett's current play The Old Country, in which Sir Alec Guinness gives a virtuoso performance as Philby in his Moscow repose. And it is, inevitably, the background of Graham Greene's twentieth novel, The Human Factor (Simon & Schuster), which, one understands, started out, a good many years ago, as a reflection on Philby.
Graham Greene has long been a master of the politics of sadness. In this, he is heir to Conrad, from whom the new novel takes its desolate epigraph: "I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul." Maurice Castle (the name points toward both Forster and Kafka) has formed a tie. He loves Sarah, his black wife, and Sam, his black stepson. Their escape from South Africa, from race laws that would have made life together and marriage impossible, was a dangerous contrivance. It could not have been managed without the help of Carson, done obscurely to death in a South African jail, and his anti-apartheid associates, Communists among them. This debt binds Castle closer to Sarah. He honors it by dishonoring his own trust and office. He is a double.
Castle occupies a mildly senior niche in a dusty dead end of British intelligence. He keeps a sad eye on former African colonies. He detests South African policies and passes to his Soviet contacts whatever information might help to inhibit the spread of apartheid and the further suppression of liberal and left-wing resistance within South Africa itself. when Sarah speaks of "our people," he experiences a momentary at-homeness more immediate, more vital to his graying heart than that of his native Englishness or official function. A leak is detected in Castle's department. Counter-intelligence suspects a "mole"-the word used to designate a traitor in one's secret midst, a burrower from within who is working under the mandate of a foreign espionage organization. The logic of suspicion, casual at first, then mendaciously coherent, points to Davis, Castle's drifty, gently careless second. Colonel Daintry wants solid proof before proceeding, but Dr. Percival, who looks after health problems in "the firm" (the intelligence team), is less sentimental. Davis dies of poison.
Meanwhile, Castle has been ordered to collaborate closely with the very man in the South African secret service who once hounded him and Sarah. Uncle Remus is the code name for one of those anti-subversion, mutual-advantage schemes in which South Africa and the United States pursue their common anti-Red interests. Castle transmits one final dossier of crucial information and, knowing that the sappers are closing in on him, presses the eject button. He is spirited out of England. At the end of the novel, the phone line that had, momentarily, brought Sarah's voice goes dead. We are left to infer that it will be a very cold time indeed before Castle will see her and Sam again. In the limbo of his Moscow flat, he is reading Robinson Crusoe. How long was the mariner marooned in the solitude of remembrance? "Eight and twenty years, two months and nineteen days ... " But Moscow is an island more remote.
Throughout, we are in the spare, diminished ambience that Greene has made his own. The note is one of terminality. Castle is sterile. British spies and counter-spies operate from a base of drastically diminished power or relevance. The dreams of Marxism have turned to nightmare or staled to a set of gestures and metaphors as vacant, as corrosive as are those of classic Western liberalism. (Here Greene is even more disenchanted than Le Carre, who has made the "missing center" a constant element of his plots.) What élan there is resides either with the purposeful brutality of BOSS (the South African intelligence agency) or the distant pushiness of American naiveté. In Daintry, the high code of the English gentleman and public servant has withered to ineffectuality. (The one scintillating set piece in the book shows a fumbling Daintry routed at his daughter's déclassé marriage by the hectoring wife from whom he has long been separated.) In Dr. Percival, this same code has decayed to bland murderousness.
Of the faded clubs on St. James's, of the bookstores with their line in erotica, of whiskeyed suburbia, Greene makes images of a whole society wheezing its way toward some faintly nasty future-this vision being already seminal in Brighton Rock, in 1938. An exchange between Castle and Davis early in the tale voices the low- keyed sardonicism of the entire narrative:
"What was the most secret information you ever possessed, Castle?"
"1 once knew the approximate date of an invasion." "Normandy?"
"No, no. Only the Azores."
There is mastery in that "approximate."
But although this is a lean, finely governed piece of work, it is not one of Greene's major achievements. The text is replete with self-reference. The reader is asked to flesh out the shorthand of motive and characterization by recalling closely similar episodes, snatches of dialogue, motions of pathos in Our Man in Havana and The Honorary Consul. As often in Greene, the treatment of marrried love, pivotal to Castle's treason, is fitful. The dialogue between Sarah and Castle goes wooden; their aching intimacy is stated, not realized. It is the rapid vignettes that stand out: Bellamy ("Philby") dropping in on Castle in Moscow.
By far the most interesting motif in The Human Factor is Greene's suggestion that both Roman Catholicism and espionage provide an instrument of truth and of solace which neither Protestantism nor secular rationalism (its fated offspring) can match. There must be eavesdropping upon the soul; there must be occult listeners empowered to chastise and console. The agent reporting to his controller and the Catholic kneeling before his confessor are in the same perilous boat. But via that traverse, with its stripping of the spirit, with its acquiescence in penitential labors, lies solidarity. Greene enforces the parallel. Castle once saw a genuine priest, a ministering servant of God in the Soweto shanties, and knows that there are human faces to Communism, too-that some last truth in the Communist vision has survived Prague and Budapest even as Catholicism has survived the Borgias. And in the crucial scene in the book, a scene written in explicit recall of Greene's finest work, The Power and the Glory, Castle, who has no church, seeks to purloin the comforts of the confessional. Like Kierkegaard, Greene knows that the loneliest of men is he who has no secret-or, more exactly, who has no one to whom to betray a secret. Thus there is a bizarre communion in all treason, and a theology echoed in Lear's mysterious admonition to Cordelia: let us be "God's spies" and sing like the birds in their cage.
The notion has its sombre spell, as do those fantasies of clandestine identity with which so many of us shore up our daydreams. It is poor Davis who lets the cat out of the bag: "What a damn silly profession ours is" (wherein "profession" carries, as always in Greene, the pull of its etymological roots). But it is just this realization that Greene, Ie Carre, and their swarming tribe evade. There are devices rumored to be capable of detecting the heat from a tank exhaust at seventy thousand feet. Investigative journalism and the now universal ethos of gossip flood the newsstands with top-security information. Popular magazines have diagrams on how to assemble nuclear bombs. Is there anything genuinely new or decisive in the stuff spies peddle to their clients? Did Joshua need four hooded eyes to tell him that Jericho had walls and that its denizens would not welcome invasion? It may be that the whole espionage industry has become a fatuous game, a homicidal hopscotch in a house of mirrors.
"I wish all the lies were unnecessary," Castle confides to Boris, his Soviet control. "And I wish we were on the same side." Perhaps we are, and perhaps Mr. Greene is whispering to us that it is, nonetheless, the losing side. Confiteor.
May 8, 1978
G. Steiner