From Publishers Weekly
This compact study contrasts the fictional treatment of espionage with its real life machinations, and manages to be both informative and entertaining in spite of its modest size. The author, a former CIA officer now teaching at Johns Hopkins, focuses particularly on how living a double life affects the players’ personalities. Each part of the actual spies’ career—from recruitment (or recruiting others) to arrest or retirement—is studied in terms of how differing character traits often lead to different sets of decisions in the construction of a shadow self, and how spies re-train their physical and emotional instincts so that their new personalities feel natural. Such alterations are part and parcel of "tradecraft"; CIA traitor Aldrich Ames and the famous Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky may have been deadly, but they were sloppy in keeping their spy personae and actions consistent, while FBI mole Richard Hanssen was exquisitely careful except where one woman was concerned. (Yes, sex is a part of many espionage scenarios—though Hitz suggests that that these arrangements are more complex than any a novelist would dare create.) Hitz then goes on to analyze fictional spies, giving John Le Carre’s creations high marks, as well as Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, based on the author’s WWI experience with British intelligence. Hitz also has good things to say about Tom Clancy’s characters, notably Marko Ramius of Red October. As for the future of spying, Hitz believes that satellite-based snooping will exist alongside "human intelligence," but that even the office technocrats behind the controls will have tics that affect their work—and the information they gather.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The author of this sure-footed little book tells us that he originally intended "to produce yet another 'What's wrong with American intelligence tome' " but was persuaded by his literary agent to do something less boring and more constructive. The result is a lucid overview of 20th-century espionage that says more about the great game as it was played by Americans and their allies and adversaries than just about anything else ever published by someone who knew what he was talking about.Frederick P. Hitz is a former inspector general of the CIA who now teaches at Princeton. His book grew out of a freshman seminar in which works of spy fiction were compared to actual intelligence operations, but don't be alarmed. It reads less like Espionage 101 than dinner-party talk -- Kipling for starters, le Carré for the leftover indigestible roast beef of Old England, Maugham for the trifle, Conrad for the port. Not surprisingly, Hitz and his students "have concluded that . . . real espionage cases are more bizarre . . . than the fictional accounts." I wonder how many fans of the genre will believe that. The late Richard Condon, whose entirely implausible, irresistibly believable 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate is not mentioned by Hitz (though -- disclaimer -- one of mine is), advised thriller writers to eschew research and simply make it up. His point was that most readers just aren't gullible enough to swallow the truth. Now comes Hitz to tell us that a former CIA director, Robert M. Gates, and a legendary American case officer, Dwight "Dewey" Clarridge, "both acknowledged that they knew of no significant recruitments of Soviet spies during their long careers. The spies were all walk-ins, or volunteers." Volunteering to work for the Americans was no easy matter. Owing to a respect for the Soviet security services that amounted to paranoia, the CIA routinely assumed that every would-be agent might be a provocateur. Oleg Penkovsky and Pyotr Popov, who between them practically emptied Soviet safes of top-secret files, recklessly threw themselves at American and British recruiters for months, if not years, before being allowed by the West to commit treason. Conversely, the even more destructive American turncoats, Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Hanssen, were welcomed with open arms on first approach to hungry Russian intelligence officers. Interestingly, all four moles seem to have had similar motivations: narcissism, disgust with the system, bitterness that lesser men were promoted while they were ignored -- and, with the exception of Popov, a pure hater, money.As Orwell assured us, the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know. How much more credible than reality is the set-up, seduction and coercion of the Serbian dupe in Eric Ambler's classic A Coffin for Dimitrios. However, as Hitz explains, the real-life problem of weaving a web of blackmail and fear around an agent is that it almost never works. It's easier (and safer) to make it possible for a person to do what he wants to do than to force him to act against his will, in fear and trembling of both sides.James Bond notwithstanding, Hitz suggests that the West was finicky about employing sex as a recruitment tool. "By contrast, the Soviet [bloc] used women operatives to entrap Western[ers]," he reports. In fact, it wasn't all girls, girls, girls. Both sides used Lotharios, with marked success, to bed and then handle vulnerable females in sensitive posts. The crackerjack East German spymaster Markus Wolf raised this technique to an art form. Less cynical methods often worked better: Clarridge bound a Polish official to him by providing him with an abortion pill for his pregnant wife. Had her condition been discovered, the couple would have been shipped back to Poland. Instead, the husband became a productive agent.Some of the most informative passages in The Great Game deal with the problems the United States faced ("confronted" might be too strong a word) in the form of unfriendly members of friendly intelligence services. As a case in point, Hitz offers Anthony Blunt, the "fourth man," along with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in the ring of class renegades who famously penetrated British intelligence on behalf of the USSR. Hitz cites The Untouchable, a novel by John Banville, to suggest that their prime motive was not high-minded love of mankind and its tender friend, the "socialist" motherland, but hatred of America. "To many of us the American occupation of Europe was not much less of a calamity than a German victory would have been," says the untouchable himself, who is closely based on Blunt.Plus ça change. . . . Or as Kipling put it in Kim, "When everyone is dead, the Great Game is over. Not before." Reviewed by Charles McCarryCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Hitz, who has had a lengthy career in the Central Intelligence Agency, expounds in varied and interesting ways on how the literature of espionage compares with its actual practice. Copiously quoting from classics ranging from Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) to W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden (1928) to the cold war convolutions of Graham Greene and John le Carre, Hitz concludes that in most instances truth is more surprising and peculiar than fiction. Breaking the espionage trade into its components, such as recruiting spies, Hitz discusses the rarity with which recruitment pitches succeed in real operations; typically, spies are not seduced but voluntarily offer their services (e.g., Oleg Penkovsky and Robert Hanssen). Yet counterexamples, such as the Soviets' recruitment of mole Kim Philby, present models that le Carre crafted into his novels about mole-hunter George Smiley. Hitz feels that such creations, while reflecting the psychology of this secretive world, cannot keep up with the motivations that lie behind real-life betrayals and deceptions. Perfect for spy-story fans who crave an insider's assessment of the reality behind the entertainment. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“A lucid overview of 20th-century espionage that says more about the great game as it was played by Americans and their allies and adversaries than just about anything else ever published.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Absorbing . . . A hit for the avid spy-fiction reader. . . . A can’t miss for Clancy fans.” --Detroit Free Press

“Hitz . . . shows [that] nothing is certain in the shadow world of spies and betrayals, not even the truth.” --The New York Times

“Hitz is at his best when he reveals juicy details of intelligence lapses. . . . He has genuine insight into the inner workings of intelligence bureaucracy.” --San Francisco Chronicle

“A good read and good fun and quite informative. . . . By weaving together reality and image, the author provides insights into espionage unlikely to be obtained elsewhere.” –James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap
In this fascinating analysis, Frederick Hitz, former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, contrasts the writings of well-known authors of spy novels—classic and popular—with real-life espionage cases. Drawing on personal experience both as a participant in “the Great Game” and as the first presidentially appointed inspector general, Hitz shows the remarkable degree to which truth is stranger than fiction.

The vivid cast of characters includes real life spies Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky from Soviet military intelligence; Kim Philby, the infamous Soviet spy; Aldrich Ames, the most damaging CIA spy to American interests in the Cold War; and Duane Clarridge, a CIA career operations officer. They are held up against such legendary genre spies as Bill Haydon (le Carré’s mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Magnus Pym (in le Carré’s A Perfect Spy), Tom Rogers (in David Ignatius’s Agents of Innocence), and Maurice Castle (in Graham Greene’s The Human Factor).

As Hitz skillfully weaves examples from a wide range of espionage activities—from covert action to counterintelligence to classic agent operations—we see that the actual is often more compelling than the imaginary, and that real spy case histories present moral and other questions far more pointedly than fiction.
A lively account of espionage, spy tradecraft, and, most of all, the human dilemmas of betrayal, manipulation, and deceit.

About the Author
Frederick P. Hitz was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. He entered the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer in 1967, where Aldrich Ames was in his training class. After 1973 he served at the Departments of State, Defense, and Energy, leading to a second stint with the CIA from 1978 to 1982 as legislative counsel to the director of Central Intelligence and deputy chief of operations for Europe. In 1990, Hitz was appointed the first statutory inspector general of the CIA by President Bush and served in this post until May 1998, when he retired to begin a teaching career at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University.

Hitz has received medals for distinguished service in the Department of Defense and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Distinguished Medal. He lives in northern Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

One
Recruitment

To be blunt, leadership is the ability to dominate and get your way. To do that requires the ability to inspire and provide trust, self-confidence, recognizable professional skills, caring, and many other qualities.

I submit you need these same skills when recruiting an agent, whose cooperation with you, if exposed, holds risk of death, imprisonment, or at a minimum dishonor. As you move into the recruitment "pitch" and the full dimensions of what you are asking dawns on the prospective agent, he or she looks at you with consummate disbelief, even when he or she more or less expects something is coming. Although perhaps not articulated, their eyes scream that what you want is the most ludicrous thing ever requested of them. In the end you succeed through leadership, for through the development of the agent you have brought yourself into a position of dominance and trust.

This excerpt from Duane "Dewey" Clarridge's autobiography is an experienced spy runner's take on the qualities needed to effect recruitment of an agent. In order to collect secret information from foreign countries, which is the essence of spying, one must recruit human sources to gain access to that information. Clarridge has described the straight-up recruitment approach, at which he was adept, but that approach is obviously not the only way to acquire the keys to the secret kingdom. There are as many possibilities as there are human foibles and motivations to exploit. In the textbook case, recruitment occurs only after the potential spy has been identified as having access to the information being sought, has been assessed as vulnerable to a recruitment approach, and has been cultivated to bring him into a state of mind where he might consider a recruitment pitch without denouncing the recruiter to the authorities. The object of the recruitment pitch is to acquire control over the prospective spy so that he will accept direction from the spy runner.

Seldom does the saga unfold in the manner prescribed in the Sarratt (the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as SIS or MI6) or CIA training manuals. A good fictional illustration of this is contained in David Ignatius's account of agent operations in the Middle East, Agents of Innocence. The central character, CIA case officer Tom Rogers (who is loosely modeled on a real CIA officer killed in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983), cultivates the deputy chief of Fatah intelligence as a secret informant on terrorist threats to U.S. citizens traveling and working in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Rogers is an experienced Arabist with good Arabic-language skills who painstakingly establishes rapport with PECOCK, as the Fatah official is encrypted. (A recruited or potential spy is given a cryptonym in order to protect his identity in normal correspondence between the field and Headquarters.) Rogers's recruitment philosophy is remarkably uncomplicated. It is based on the simple observation that people like to talk: old politicians want to tell war stories and young revolutionaries want to explain how they plan to change the world. Rogers observes that they should not be telling him these things but they always do. All of them, all over the world, seek the ear of an interested American, he believes, and with his open, straightforward approach, just listening beats all the gadgets and formal contractual procedures for obtaining useful secret information.

Recruiting someone is about getting him to do what you want, rather than just forcing him to do what he doesn't want. I learned a long time ago that it's easy to manipulate people-if you know what you want from them and don't tell them why you're being so friendly.

Rogers's superiors do not share his philosophy. In order to secure PECOCK's cooperation as a penetration of Fatah, they want a more businesslike arrangement in which control is exchanged for money. When Rogers is unsuccessful in getting PECOCK to plant a bug in the conference room of a rival Palestinian terrorist organization, the recruitment issue comes to a head:

In the world of recruiting agents, playing by the book meant contracts that were clearly understood by both sides, ones that imposed on the slippery and deceitful world of espionage, some of the order of the legal world. Marsh liked relationships that were clear and straightforward. I buy your services for an agreed-upon price; you agree to deliver certain material in exchange; we both profit by the relationship. He understood that sort of arrangement, and he believed in it. Each side knew the risks and rewards. It was a transaction between adults. What troubled Marsh were relationships that were more complicated, where subtler and less orderly moti-vations prevailed. Those relationships-based on frail human emotions like friendship, respect, and loyalty-were the dangerous ones. And perhaps also less moral.

Marsh, of course, acts on his philosophy, and in a showdown meeting with PECOCK in Rome tries to put the harness on him, at which point, in an outburst of rage, PECOCK bolts from the meeting site in disgust. It turns out that PECOCK's relationship with Rogers had been sanctioned by the political head of Fatah from the beginning. It was never a unilateral recruitment into a clandestine relationship, but it had worked because there had been a useful exchange of undertakings by both sides. The United States had not joined the Israeli effort to eliminate Fatah, and PECOCK had kept the U.S. informed of terrorist plots against Americans-a beneficial bargain. When Rogers is able to reestablish the relationship on that basis with PECOCK, the two collaborate until they are both killed, in separate bombing incidents.

Sometimes intelligence services attempt a more coercive approach. In Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios, Karol Bulic, a Serbian employee of the Yugoslav Defense Ministry, is suborned by appealing to his self-conceit, greed, and zest for gambling. After the spymaster has established Bulic's access to Yugoslav plans to mine the Adriatic against incursions by the Italian fleet, Bulic is invited to a gambling den by an "international businessman" who implies a promise of future employment. Bulic is then lent some capital with which to gamble and maintain his pose as a worldly figure. He proceeds to lose badly, and the "businessman" pulls the string, forcing Bulic to steal the plans in order to satisfy his debt. The scheme eventually disintegrates into a farcical double cross by an operative named Dimitrios Makropoulos, but the point is established. In this espionage-for-hire caper, blackmail is the tool chosen to mount the recruitment. A Coffin for Dimitrios represents one of the better spy novels of the 1930s, after the epoch of the spy as protagonist and before the beginnings of World War II and Cold War spy fiction.

In real life, the British and American intelligence services have seldom banked on coercive recruitments because such recruitments contravene Anglo-Saxon legal and cultural norms and have been found, by and large, to produce unsatisfactory results. Whether that is because we are simply inept at blackmail, one can only conjecture. By contrast, the Soviet and

Eastern European intelligence services have used women operatives to entrap Western businessmen and government officials in sexual liaisons in order to secure their cooperation in intelligence tasks. This technique, in spy vernacular a "honey trap," was particularly prevalent in Berlin and Vienna from 1946 on, but it was utilized most effectively in Moscow in the 1980s to ensnare U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Clayton J. Lonetree. After he was confronted with photographs of his sexual dalliance with a female Soviet intelligence officer, Sergeant Lonetree was induced by the Soviet intelligence service to open the vaulted area of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to the Soviets for espionage purposes.

In addition to the traditional fee-for-service espionage recruitment, coerced or voluntary, there are some specialized versions. For example, Clarridge talks about "false flag" recruitments. While serving in India in 1963, he targeted a minor weekly newspaper which was espousing a strong pro-Chinese line in the ideological struggle between Soviet and Chinese Communism then taking place in southern India. He proposed to push the paper further and further to the left with the hope of prompting government intervention to suppress it. The publisher was Tamil, so to get in touch with him, Clarridge "borrowed" a support agent named Petros from outside India.

Petros didn't look Chinese, but on the other hand, he didn't look Indian either. "Eurasian" might fit. I brought him to Madras and gave him specific instructions: "Go see the pro-Chinese publisher. Tell him you have come from Beijing, or "the Center," as they call it. Offer him this stipend that he can't refuse, and recruit him on behalf of Beijing."

This would be a "false flag" recruitment-when an intelligence service recruits a target while pretending to represent another nation-a common piece of tradecraft. When you finally recruit the target, he believes he is providing information to some other nation. The Israelis have often used this technique by impersonating CIA officers when trying to recruit Arabs.

In the event, the scheme worked brilliantly. The pro-Chinese publisher took the bait and was proud that his work had come to Beijing's attention. Again, the Soviets made abundant use of this technique during the Cold War. They succeeded in getting Soviet Bloc intelligence services to make recruitments on their behalf-West Germans were recruited by their East German brethren, for example. It permitted the sponsoring service to insulate itself from blowback if the recruitment attempt failed, and achieve greater success as well.

Some recruitment approaches stand very little chance of success but are mounted anyway, because the downside risk is dwarfed by the potential gain if the pitch is accepted. These are pitches where the case officer has had little or no opportunity to become acquainted with the target, to develop him to see if he might be amenable to such an approach. They are thus styled "cold pitches" or "gangplank" recruitment attempts. Clarridge describes a pitch to a Mongolian diplomat posted to India in 1961, who was about to be rotated home to Ulan Bator. The United States had no diplomatic relations with Mongolia at the time but was anxious to establish contacts with Mongolian officials, in order to prepare the way for formal ties. Clarridge made the pitch, without success, but confessed that although he had been called upon to make such cold approaches later, from a vantage point at the end of his career, he did not know of one that had succeeded.

In the world of spy fiction, who can forget the attempt by George Smiley in India in 1955 to recruit his career nemesis, Karla, in John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? Karla was being summoned home to Moscow to face the music after the failure of an illegal's radio-connected espionage scheme in San Francisco. Smiley had a go at trying to get Karla to defect, from a stifling jail cell in Delhi, where the Indian intelligence service was holding him temporarily at the request of the British. Fruitlessly, he tried to appeal to Karla's humanity:

"To sum it up, Karla was the proverbial cold-war orphan. He had left home to do a job abroad. The job had blown up in his face, but he couldn't go back: home was more hostile than abroad. We had no powers of permanent arrest, so it was up to Karla to ask us for protection. I don't think I had come across a clearer case for defection. I had only to convince him of the arrest of the San Francisco network-wave the press photographs and cuttings from my briefcase at him-talk to him a little about the unfriendly conspiracies of Brother Rudnev in Moscow, and cable the somewhat overworked inquisitors in Sarratt, and with any luck I'd make London by the weekend."

Karla, of course, made no response to Smiley's offer, beyond walking off with Smiley's gold cigarette lighter and a pack of Camels. In answer to a question as to whether Karla had ever really thought of coming over:

"I'm sure it never crossed his mind," said Smiley with disgust. "I behaved like a soft fool. The very archetype of a flabby Western liberal. But I would rather be my kind of fool than his, for all that. I am sure," he repeated vigorously, "that neither my arguments nor his own predicament at Moscow Centre would ultimately have swayed him in the least."

Having established the traditional parameters of the recruitment game, do we find that recruitment pitches play out according to these precepts? In the search for direction and control of a reporting agent, the understandings reached between recruiter and spy are as varied as human nature and the diverse cultures of the principal players. Dewey Clarridge pursued a Polish trade official posted in Istanbul for years before patience and a lucky opening permitted him to reel him in. By sheer persistence, Clarridge was able to get the ball rolling. He was able to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Adamski (fictitious names used in Clarridge's autobiography to protect the official and his wife because they are still alive) to come to dinner at the Clarridge apartment and to maintain social contact for a time. Even in the West, and in a benign environment such as existed in Turkey in 1968, merely maintaining contact with a Soviet or Soviet Bloc official was a chore. An American official had to assume that if the Communist official continued to accept invitations, it probably meant that he was an intelligence officer deputed to try to recruit the American. Clarridge looked for indications that Adamski was simply what he appeared to be, a senior Polish trade official without an intelligence brief, and he found one when he encountered Adamski "unexpectedly" on a fishing expedition and Adamski clearly recognized him but concealed that fact from his embassy companions. Subsequently, Clarridge prevailed upon Adamski to meet with him alone over a bottle of scotch (the mother's milk of spy recruitments, but more on that later), only to discover that the Adamskis had completed their tour in Istanbul and were returning to Poland in several months' time. By this time, Clarridge was fairly certain that Adamski was what he appeared to be, a trade official, but it made no sense to pursue a recruitment attempt in May 1969 when the Adamskis were due to return home so soon. Years passed, and, as luck would have it, the Adamskis were assigned to Ankara in August 1971 at the same time as Clarridge became the CIA chief there. Despite several attempts, it took Clarridge more than a year to reestablish contact with his target, and in the event, the telephone call came from Adamski. He asked for an urgent meeting, and during the meeting he revealed to Clarridge that his wife, Irina, was pregnant. The significance of this revelation was not lost on Clarridge. If Irina was pregnant, the Adamskis would be required to return to Poland, which they emphatically did not want to do. Adamski asked Clarridge for help in obtaining an abortion. That was the hook. Over the objections of CIA headquarters, Clarridge sought and obtained abortion pills from the Agency's regional medical officer and passed them to Adamski.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In this analysis, Frederick Hitz, former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, contrasts the writings of well-known authors of spy novels - classic and popular - with real-life espionage cases. Drawing on personal experience both as a participant in "the Great Game" and as the first presidentially appointed inspector general, Hitz shows the remarkable degree to which truth is stranger than fiction." "The vivid cast of characters includes real life spies Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky from Soviet military intelligence; Kim Philby, the infamous Soviet spy; Aldrich Ames, the most damaging CIA spy to American interests in the Cold War; and Duane Clarridge, a CIA career operations officer. They are held up against such legendary genre spies as Bill Haydon (le Carre's mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Magnus Pym (in le Carre's A Perfect Spy), Tom Rogers (in David Ignatius's Agents of Innocence), and Maurice Castle (in Graham Greene's The Human Factor)." As Hitz skillfully weaves examples from a wide range of espionage activities - from covert action to counterintelligence to classic agent operations - we see that the actual is often more compelling than the imaginary, and that real spy case histories present moral and other questions far more pointedly than fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jeff Stein - The New York Times

… as [Hintz] shows in these tidy, lively and imaginative essays, nothing is certain in the shadow world of spies and betrayals, not even the truth.

The Washington Post

The author of this sure-footed little book tells us that he originally intended "to produce yet another 'What's wrong with American intelligence tome' " but was persuaded by his literary agent to do something less boring and more constructive. The result is a lucid overview of 20th-century espionage that says more about the great game as it was played by Americans and their allies and adversaries than just about anything else ever published by someone who knew what he was talking about. — Charles McCarry

Library Journal

Hitz, a former inspector general of the CIA and now director of the Project on International Intelligence at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, has written a fascinating primer on 20th- (and 21st-) century espionage that reads like a novel. In part, this achievement results from a close reading of several fictional espionage classics and a comparison with the characters' real-life counterparts: the famous British spy Kim Philby, for example, emerges from the pages of John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Works by Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth, and David Ignatius are also critiqued at length and their possible real-life roots examined, while various other writers are briefly considered (e.g., Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, and even Tom Clancy). Separating espionage myth from reality, Hitz explores the motivation of spies and examines the "tradecraft" and bureaucracy of espionage. His study is made relevant to contemporary events with considerations of political terrorism and the recent cases of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Highly recommended for true espionage fans as well as general readers.-Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews