Given all the press attention and congressional hearings, the recent leak of war plans in strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen may feel like a singular event. And mistakes aside, as the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, asserted before Congress, the operation itself “was very successful and continues to be very successful.” So why worry?
But consider the career highlights of some of the world’s most noteworthy spies in these three new books.
By Douglas Waller
The biggest surprise in Waller’s lively biography of Frank Wisner, THE DETERMINED SPY: The Turbulent Life and Times of CIA Pioneer Frank Wisner (Dutton, 645 pp., $36), is how stunningly naïve U.S. covert and martial operations have been at times. As Waller shows, Wisner’s tenure provides one of the harsher lessons of the world of espionage: What appears to be a success at the time may not prove so over the long run.
Wisner was a major figure at the C.I.A. in the 1950s, when the agency toppled the governments of Iran and Guatemala. Washington was so pleased with those results that it contemplated doing the same in Cuba. That’s how, in 1961, we ended up with the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs.
That leads to a second harsh lesson that intelligence agencies don’t like to talk about much — how frequently their people in the field are incompetent. For example, during part of World War II, the chief of American spying in the continental crossroads city of Istanbul — perhaps the most fruitful location for spies at the time — was Lanning “Packy” Macfarland, a former savings and loan executive from Illinois who was fond of wearing a trench coat and slouch hat. This “dangerous buffoon,” as Waller calls him, had two lovers: One worked for the Germans, the other for the Russians.
Waller, the author of several books on national security, reports that when Wisner replaced Macfarland in Istanbul, he had almost as little experience, but apparently a great deal more native intelligence and drive. Wisner even stood a good chance of becoming the head of the C.I.A. until he suffered a series of manic highs caused by bipolar disorder. He left the agency and, in 1965, killed himself. The results of his coup in Iran live on even today, with the government there regarding the United States as “the Great Satan.”
By Steven R. Ward
Today’s C.I.A., trying to adjust to the mixed directions that come from President Trump, Elon Musk and the president’s other assorted appointees, likely would get a bit of quiet sympathy — but not much — from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. As described by Ward in IRAN’S MINISTRY OF INTELLIGENCE: A Concise History (Georgetown University Press, 195 pp., paperback, $26.95), Iranian intelligence has frequently found itself torn between the country’s unelected supreme leader and its elected president. In 2011, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to push out the intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi, supposedly for wiretapping the president’s chief of staff. The supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s displeasure bubbled up through the media, and the chief spook went back to work while Ahmadinejad pouted at home for a week. Two years later, Moslehi was in trouble again, allegedly for spying on a legislator.
The country also has intense interagency rivalries, much like the well-documented one that has long persisted in America between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. The Iranian intelligence ministry, which conducts foreign operations but mainly focuses on suppressing internal dissent, is frequently overshadowed by Iran’s more ideological and militaristic Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In 2016, for instance, there was squabbling over who ran better background checks as each agency independently vetted parliamentary candidates ahead of that year’s election. By 2023 the tension between the two organizations was so persistent that Khamenei told them in writing to be more cooperative with each other.
Overall, Ward’s book is thin gruel, featuring only a few interesting tidbits, such as the fact that the details of the Iran-contra scandal — that is, the astonishing report that the Reagan administration was sending weapons to Iran in exchange for American hostages held in Lebanon — were first leaked to a Beirut magazine by a senior Revolutionary Guard official who was unhappy with the shadowy deal. (This dissenting hothead was executed for his intervention, Ward notes.)
But the single biggest revelation for me in this book was the author’s mention — in an aside — that despite having been a C.I.A. analyst for nearly 30 years specializing in Iranian security issues, he neither speaks nor reads Persian. Imagine an Iranian trying to be an expert on the United States without being able to watch American television and movies, read its books and magazines, and converse with its officials and citizens. Have we learned nothing from the exploits of Packy Macfarland?
By Daniela Richterova
In intelligence, sometimes the most illuminating information comes from unexpected quarters. Of several recent books on covert operations, the most enlightening is WATCHING THE JACKALS: Prague’s Covert Liaisons With Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries (Georgetown University Press, 350 pp., paperback, $39.95). Richterova, a political scientist at King’s College London, lived a researcher’s dream: 99 percent of the existing files of the intelligence agencies of Communist Czechoslovakia have been released — and, what’s more, without any redactions. She describes how she was the first to read many of these “freshly declassified files and sift through them as they were brought into the archive reading room on heavy-duty trolleys.”
The odd factoids alone are worth the price of admission, demonstrating just how minutely detailed and vivid these documents can be. In 1966, when Che Guevara visited Czechoslovakia for three months as he prepared for his ill-fated mission to Bolivia, he and his companions had only two records to listen to, one by the South African singer Miriam Makeba and the other by the Beatles. In 1977, Abu Daoud, one of the planners of the Munich Olympics massacre five years earlier, checked into Prague’s Hotel Intercontinental just as the International Olympic Committee was meeting there — apparently just a macabre coincidence. Two years later, when the volatile Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal accidentally locked himself out of his room at the same hotel, he angrily walked the hallways of the establishment brandishing a large revolver.
The heart of Richterova’s surprising work lies in the uneasy relationship between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the “plodding” Czech intelligence services. Czechoslovakia’s relationship with the P.L.O. began uncomfortably and worsened with time. “It was characterized by dissonance — a mismatch in expectations, objectives and preferred tactics,” she writes. Among other things, she adds, this tends to emphatically disprove the allegations made by the journalist Claire Sterling and others in the 1980s that there was extensive cooperation between the Communist Warsaw Pact states and terrorist organizations.
The Palestinians, their skills honed by their ongoing fight with Israeli intelligence, ran circles around Prague’s operatives. Richterova notes that the Arabs were veterans in espionage tradecraft, using multiple disguises and passports. Some, working for Carlos the Jackal as bodyguards in Prague, were so bold as to detain and question a Czech intelligence officer who was tailing them.
The P.L.O. did try to please Prague, partly by proposing a variety of risky operations. Among these was an offer to kill or kidnap Czech exiles who were critical of the Communist regime, including a former chief of the country’s state-run television network. The P.L.O. also said that it could attack the Munich headquarters of Radio Free Europe. Prague listened, but was wary of carrying out such schemes, given the potential blowback from the West.
The country’s leaders might have had other concerns as well: Czech spies deemed P.L.O. agents especially weak on clandestine communications. At one point in 1983, they suggested a course in cryptology. As Trump administration officials have learned lately, communications security may seem like a minor issue — until it blows up in your face.