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The Cycle of Clandestinity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

John Cawelti
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Extract

We live in a time and a culture that have become deeply obsessed with clandestinity and conspiracy. The extent to which “the torment of secrecy”—as Edward Shils called it—has pervaded our national life was recently dramatized by the revelations of the Watergate investigations; but this was, of course, only the climax of a series of developments in American culture, which had their roots in the aftermath of World War II. That conflict thrust America into a new global position where our power over other countries and our potential vulnerability to their economic and military strengths and weaknesses came to seem more important than ever. Intensified by the fear of atomic weapons and the cold war, both our political leaders and the man on the street became deeply concerned about the threat of secret conspiracies at home and abroad. While such obsessions have often appeared in the aftermath of wars—both the Civil War and World War I left a deep legacy of suspicion and suspension of due process in the attempt to counter secret conspiracies—it was only after World War II that Americans institutionalized clandestinity on a large and permanent scale. Our generation has harvested the first fruits of that major cultural change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 4 , October 1979 , pp. 559 - 576
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Shils, Edward, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956).Google Scholar

2. So far as I know there has been only one significant attempt at a general history of clandestinity in English, Richard Wilmer Rowan with Deindorfer, Robert G., Secret Service: Thirty-Three Centuries of Espionage (1939; rpt. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967).Google ScholarDulles, Allen, The Craft of Intelligence (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)Google Scholar, is a useful account of American espionage traditions, though its historical account is brief and its tone is that of a strong partisan of the CIA. The literature on particular clandestine episodes and figures is very large with a strong tendency toward the sensational. It will be a long time before all the facts about twentieth-century espionage have been sorted out. I have found Brown, Anthony Cave, Bodyguard of Lies (New York: Bantam Books, 1976)Google Scholar, Farrago, Ladislas, The Game of the Foxes (New York: David McKay, 1971)Google Scholar, and Kahn, David, The Codebreakers (New York: Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar, to be particularly impressive attempts to deal with the workings of military and wartime intelligence. For a strongly dissenting view see A. J. P. Taylor's review of four books on military espionage “Through the Keyhole,” New York Review of Books, 02 10, 1972, pp. 14–18.Google Scholar On the CIA, I have particularly depended on Marchetti, Victor and Marks, John, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell, 1975)Google Scholar, and Agee, Philip, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam Books, 1976).Google Scholar

3. I have taken most of the details of Aseff's life from the biography by Nikolajewsky, Boris, Aseff the Spy, trans., Reavey, George (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1934).Google Scholar One of the earliest, and perhaps the greatest, spy novels, Conrad, Joseph's The Secret AgentGoogle Scholar, has in the central character of Verloc many amazing parallels with Aseff. Ford Maddox Ford later remembered that he had told Conrad about Aseff, but this is doubtful as Aseff's exploits were not exposed until after 1907, when The Secret Agent was published. There is some evidence, however, that Conrad had Aseff in mind for certain episodes in Under Western Eyes. Cf. Hay, Eliose Knapp, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 224–28.Google Scholar Aseff was also the model by name for Gul, Roman's novel Provocateur (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).Google Scholar

4. Nikolajewsky, , Aseff the Spy, p. 25.Google Scholar

5. Marchetti, and Marks, , The CIA, p. 240.Google Scholar

6. Magruder, Jeb Stuart, An American Life (New York: Pocket Books, 1975), pp. 271–72.Google Scholar

7. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965), pp. 250–51.Google Scholar

8. McCutchan, Philip, Gibraltar Road (New York: Berkley Books, 1965), p. 68.Google Scholar

9. Deighton, Len, Yesterday's Spy (New York: Warner Books, 1976), p. 22.Google Scholar

10. Rowan, , Secret Service, p. 159.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

12. Deighton, , Yesterday's Spy, p. 29.Google Scholar

13. Halasz, Nicholas, Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), p. 257.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 5.