Circle of Treason

Aldrich Ames died the week before last, and I hope he’s rotting in Hell. For those of you who don’t know who Ames was, he was a career CIA guy who sold out to the Russians late in his tenure, and the dozen or more assets he gave up to KGB were executed. He did it for the money.

I wrote about him, and CIA’s internal manhunt, in a recent Substack column, linked below.

A chronology of what he did and how they caught him, and the poisonous legacy he left.

https://gatesd.substack.com/p/rock-paper-scissors

The story of the counterintelligence team’s mole hunt is very well told by Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille in their book, Circle of Treason.

Grimes and Vertefeuille were the lead investigators on the case, having worked together in the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division. They were well aware Moscow was rolling up CIA assets at a blistering pace, and their job was to plug the leak.

This, in itself, is fascinating inside baseball, at least for a spy groupie like me, but a couple of things stand out particularly.

One is that Ames was so careless. He was profligate with money, and tracking the cash is how Grimes eventually put him in the headlights. He was tripped up by his own arrogance. Another detail that caught my eye is that, at one point, Ames suggested to KGB that they could frame Jeanne Vertefeuille as the double agent. They’d given up Edward Lee Howard, a couple of years before, to protect Ames, but in that instance, Howard had already been burned.

What was attractive in making Vertefeuille the patsy was that because she worked in counterintelligence, she had access to secure, compartmentalized materials, and there was a certain circular logic to pinning it on her, the spy-hunter being the spy. At the least, it would sow doubts, and compromise her investigation. If later on, she accused Ames, it would look like sour grapes.

L. to R: Sandy Grimes, Paul Redmond,
Jeanne Vertefeuille, Diana Worthen, Dan Payne

If you remember, in le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor – spoiler alert - one the central narrative conceits is that Karla has instructed Bill Haydon to beguile George Smiley’s wife Ann into the sack (not that it takes much), so that George’s credibility is fatally weakened.

Karla knows Smiley is the chief threat to his mole inside the Circus, the canniest, most deliberate, and least assuming of Control’s senior deputies. But if Smiley were to suspect Haydon, and pursue it, he’d be accused of nursing a grudge, his suspicions dismissed as personal enmity.

This, to me, is an interesting meta synchronicity.

Not so much life imitating art, as that it’s so oddly private a gesture. It’s a recurring theme, in all of le Carré’s books, that the most personal, secret undercurrents are a malleable resource, to be manipulated, and put to use. Charlie, in The Little Drummer Girl, is an empty vessel, a mirror of desire, but she’s not allowed her own privacy, she can’t keep anything hidden from her handlers. Karla, in the end, gives himself up to Smiley – spoiler alert, again – but the leverage Smiley uses is the safety of the guy’s crazy daughter, whose life in a state facility would be unspeakable. (And in a twist of the knife, when they meet, Karla drops a cigarette lighter inscribed, from Ann, at Smiley’s feet, the same lighter George had handed him in a cell, twenty years before.) The most directly personal of the novels, from le Carré’s own point of view, and by his own admission, is A Perfect Spy, a brutal portrait of his dad, Ronnie. The hero of the book, Magnus, is a trickster, a shape-shifter, who can’t accommodate all the different shapes and faces and suits he’s worn, the only way he can represent himself to the world, all of them convincing, none of them authentic. Magnus is, perhaps, an avatar of the author, who was known to disguise himself.

I’m not suggesting Aldrich Ames was in any way interesting enough, or had the depth of character, to be reflective, or self-aware.

I just don’t credit him with the imagination. But like many narcissists, he would have thought he was the hero of his own movie. Trying to shift the blame for his criminal delinquency to Jeanne Vertefeuille has elements of dramatic irony, and maybe he saw it as a cute plot twist, but I don’t think he gave it all that much thought. It was just another throw of the dice.

We want, sometimes, to imbue these people with more class or grace than they deserve. Billy the Kid was morally vacant, and probably a mental defective. The romance is all in the telling. Ames is a generic cheap date, his soul for sale, and the Devil already has buyer’s remorse.

The Drummer Girl

 

I’m clearly coming late to the party, when everybody and their mum knows who Florence Pugh is but me.  I didn’t see her in Little Women – which probably got Greta Gerwig the greenlight for Barbie.  I haven’t seen a single picture in the Marvel superhero universe.  I didn’t have a clue that Cooking With Flo has 52K subscribers on Instagram.  And last but not least, I haven’t brought myself to sit through Oppenheimer, in spite of my admiration for Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders, and my fascination with the Manhattan Project.  So, watching Florence in the six-episode BBC adaption of The Little Drummer Girl (released in 2018, six years ago, already) was eye-popping.  She may be the hottest thing since sliced bread, as an influencer, but she took that part in her jaws, and shook it like a big cat.  It wasn’t one of those things where the actor is chewing up the scenery, not in service to the script, it was an actor completely inhabiting the character, no light between the cracks.  Florence was so much Charlie, in all her random willfulness, her hesitations and her fury, her heart on her sleeve, her transparent pretense, that you couldn’t keep up.  Charlie kept you guessing, Florence kept you guessing.  There was no disguise; it was all disguise.

A word about the story, and Charlie’s place in it.  The Little Drummer Girl is my favorite le Carré, and I think his most skillful book.  It has that extraordinary opening, the terror bombing in the Bonn suburbs.  “Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name.”  And then the introduction of the relentless Kurtz.  Charlie seems like a device, in the novel, a kind of Vanessa Redgrave avatar.  In the 1984 movie, which fails mostly because it’s compressed into a two-hour runtime and doesn’t have enough breathing room, Diane Keaton plays to Charlie’s naiveté, which isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s not enough.  Charlie is brittle, a shell of defense mechanisms, and her handlers break her, and then remake her in her own image.  That’s the biggest trick, or narrative reversal, that Charlie isn’t an empty vessel, who’s filled – or fulfilled – by her mission.  She’s already waiting in the wings, her role is only waiting to be cast.  The reason the mini-series works, and the reason Florence Pugh works so well as Charlie, is that everybody seems to understand the meta aspect of this.  Charlie isn’t acting the part, she’s reimagining herself.  It’s her audition for the theater of the real, but as Gadi Becker tells himself at the end of the book, the last thing he wants is to invent somebody. 

There was a lot of huffing and puffing, when the book was first published, because people took issue with le Carré’s sympathies.  Or what they assumed were his sympathies.  And that, of course, depended on what theirs were.  The book describes an Israeli deception operation – but for our Charlie’s recruitment to work, it’s the Israeli spy-runner, Gadi, who voices Palestinian grievances.  This doubling effect mirrors Charlie’s conflicted inner discipline.  The end public result, though, was that reviewers got their panties in a bunch.  If you had sympathy for the Palestinians, you thought the book was an apology for Israeli violence; if you sympathized with the Israelis, you thought the book was an apology for Palestinian terror.  The idea that le Carré was trying to give voice to both, in an intractable, Biblical struggle, was lost.

I don’t think the struggle is any less intractable; if anything, given Bibi Netanyahu’s worst instincts, it’s even more so.  (It has to be said that le Carré’s political sympathies were very much not in support of the Arik Sharon scorched-earth philosophy.)  On the other hand, after the October 7^th attacks, and in the wake of the pretty much complete collapse of Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, is it possible we might actually see some daylight?  I don’t know.  My point in writing this piece is only that the newer, more extended version of The Little Drummer Girl is an adult entertainment.  It’s not simple-minded, it’s ambiguous.  I admire the impulse of the people who made it, who clearly thought the time was right, and got the right people on board to make it happen.  It’s hard enough, these days, God knows.  I salute the effort.