On spooks

Whatever be the outcome of battle between Trump and 'deep state', there is an indisputable fact - the FBI is still haunted by the ghost of Hoover

Spook, according to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, has two meanings: 1. A ghost. 2. Chiefly North American, a spy. This column is about both, but primarily about spooks in the American sense, with the spook in the ghostly sense being primarily the shade of the legendary FBI director J Edgar Hoover which still haunts his agency. 

First, spies. My first encounter with a spy was when as a lowly Third Secretary in Tokyo in the early 1960’s, my First Secretary Mani Dixit asked me to look at a report on Japanese politics that our resident spook had produced. As a lifelong subscriber to The Economist, I found it had an uncanny resonance which on looking at a recent copy of the magazine was due to its being a verbatim copy of its report. On noting this, our spook was hauled up before the ambassador Badruddin Tyabji and given a deserved dressing down. This led me to be sceptical of reports produced by spies. 

The second was an encounter with the ‘ghost’ of the UK secret agent, Kim Philby. In the late 1960’s, a friend and I had rented a house in Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia from Philby’s former American wife Eleanor Brewer. Philby had vanished from their apartment in Beirut, being whisked away to Moscow after his treachery was about to be exposed. The amazing thing about the house was that its walls were covered with matchbox labels with written messages. This was how Eleanor and Kim communicated with each other in Beirut. Seeing them as her wallpaper was heartbreaking. Clearly, spies were not of “good character”— as my mother would have said. Philby knew John Le Carre who portrayed him in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  Le Carre’s career in the UK intelligence services was ended by Philby’s betraying him to the Russians. Clearly one must be wary of spies.

My third encounter with spies was with the CIA top brass in the late 1990s. I received a call at my home in Los Angeles, soon after my Unintended Consequences, based on Ohlin lectures, was published, from someone who didn’t give his name and said that ‘they’ had been reading my book, on the recommendation of a common friend at the World Bank. He asked me to come and give a talk on it at Langley. I duly arrived and was met by a gaggle of the top CIA brass. They said they were interested in my chapter on Islam. I said I was surprised as the chapter was based on secondary materials and they would not find anything they did not know. One of them answered that they ‘didn’t do the Middle East’. Subsequently, I did not believe anything about the CIA intelligence before the second Iraq war. By contrast, after the publication of my book In Praise of Empires, the American Historical Association asked me to give a keynote lecture on it at their annual meeting. At the lunch, after the lecture, I was sitting next to a young man, who said he taught at a well-known military academy. I asked him what he taught. He replied: Rome! I have since trusted anything from US military intelligence but not its civil intelligence agencies. 

This sets the scene for the extraordinary press conference that President Donald Trump held in Helsinki with the former KGB agent, President Vladimir Putin. As  I had noted in my column “The Trump Trauma” (February 21, 2017), one of the clouds on the Trumpian horizon was the ‘deep state’ of the intelligence services. Their anti-Trump bias was evident in the recent report of the US Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report revealing email text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, in late 2015 and early 2016. “Page asked regarding Trump, ‘He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!’. Strzok responded, ‘No, No, he’s not. We’ll stop it’”, (“7 Takeaways from FBI Agent Strzok’s testimony before 2 house committees”, www.dailysignal.com/ 2018/07/12). When Special Counsel Robert Mueller found out about these texts in May 2017, he removed Strzok from his investigation. 

President Trump had evidently listened to Strzok’s interrogation. Before he answered the question: Who did he believe, his intelligence agencies or President Putin about Russian interference in the US election, he launched into an attack on the FBI for not taking the server. He said, “I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it is Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would (subsequently changed to wouldn’t) be, but I really want to see the server”, (Full transcript of the Helsinki press conference. www.vox.com/2018/7/16). As most of his replies were questioning the FBI’s actions during the election and implying that they were trying to discredit his victory, clearly the change from ‘would’ to ‘wouldn’t’ was to quell the domestic uproar his answer provoked. But, as with so much else today, there is a yawning partisan divide on the issue. 

As Financial Times (Big Read. US Politics, 21/22 July 2018) reported: “An Axios/Survey Monkey poll conducted this week found that 85% of Republicans believed the allegations of Russian interference were a ‘distraction’ and that 79% of members approved of the way Mr Trump handled himself in Helsinki.”  Equally interesting was Putin’s answer: “I’d like to add something to this. After all, I was an intelligence officer and I do know how dossiers are made up”. Here is one spy impugning the integrity of his rival spies. 

Whatever might be the outcome of the ongoing battle between President Trump and his ‘deep state’, there is another indisputable fact about the FBI. It is still haunted by the ghost of its founder J Edgar Hoover. He led it from 1924 till his death in 1972. His secretive abuses of power — “exceeding the FBI’s jurisdiction, using the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten sitting presidents”, (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover). Though there have been various Congressional reforms to tame the FBI, it would be only human for FBI directors as they enter the building named after him to seek the power Hoover had in his day.

What is the relevance of this for Indian spooks?  A fascinating series of dialogues between two past spymasters A S Daulat (of RAW) and Assad Durrani (of ISI) (in The Spy Chronicles), besides providing various nuggets about their operations, contains much contempt for diplomats and most politicians in Indo-Pak relations. Most breathtaking is their proposal for an Indo-Pak “Council of Spies”. For the reasons given in this column, this would be disastrous for democracy and international relations.