In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
effect today's operations would have on tomorrow's world.
As a young officer I had thought of the division chief in those
terms, presuming that everything he did, even some inane, drunken
instruction that I learn an obscure African dialect, must be part of
The Plan, rather the way it worked in Le Carre or Fleming's novels.•
Now I could see that Potts wasn't "M.'' And Colby clearly wasn't
either-he was only a disciplined, amoral bureaucrat, who fawned
over the politicians and game-players on the hill. Kissinger was
half-genius perhaps, and half-clown; he appeared to be the mastermind,
but consider his Angolan policy. Bobby Fischer would never
have blundered the Angolan pawn, even if his mind were focused on
the queens and rooks of our rivalry with the Soviets.
Even Shirley Temple Black, the ambassador to Ghana, had some
useful thoughts on the subject. In October 1975 she returned to
Washington on consultations, and had lunch in the CIA executive
dining room, after meeting with the director. Carl attended the
luncheon and returned impressed. "That's a lot of woman," he said.
Carl told us she had complained that no one seemed to be coordinating
America's overall policy in African affairs, no one was
considering what the Angola program might do to our relations with
Ghana, or other countries like Nigeria and Tanzania. She pointed
*British spy novels represent their intelligence organizations as being directed by a
faceless genius who, from an easy chair in his gentlemen's club gives a studied order
which launches operations, that move across continents for months until a planned
confrontation occurs and the desired objective is achieved, none of which is fully
understood by the chain of operatives involved. Only " M'' knows from the outset,
like Bobby Fischer launching a fifteen-move gambit, what the true objective is and
how it will materialize, out of the chaos of the operation itself, in the final drama.
This is the unreality, the fiction of British fiction, which separates their novels from
the bureaucratic realities of the modern intelligence business. CIA officers escape
into The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with the same enthusiasm as the average
reader. That's the way the intelligence business should be.
However, not all British spy novels are appreciated by the CIA. I was once quietly
reprimanded by the senior instructor down at the "Farm" when I recommended
that all student case officers be required to read The Looking-Glass War. Its story
was too close to real life: a pointless little operation, run solely because an army
intelligence unit remembered it still had a World War II charter to run agent
operations. The agent ignominiously dies, but in the final pages the intelligence
chiefs walk away, blithely planning their next operation. After all they still have
their charter, don't they?