The spy game catches everyone who plays it

It’s been a good month for spy commentators. Experts on espionage have been popping up everywhere in the news media, offering views, news and background information on secret intelligence. The exposure of a Russian spy-ring operating in the United States, followed by a spy-swap in which America retrieved four of theirs in return for Russia retrieving ten of theirs (but ‘we got back really good ones’, explained the US Vice President, Joe Biden) has brought the whole business of Great Power intelligence-gathering to the forefront of media attention. Almost everybody loves a good spy story, as spy novelists will attest.

But listening to John Le Carré on the Today programme talking most absorbingly about what the Russian spies embedded in America might actually have been doing (Mr Le Carré thought they had been left more or less marooned by post-Cold-War shifts in the spying game) reminded me of a doubt I’ve had all my adult life: a doubt that has troubled me ever since first encountering the work of ‘Our Friends’ as a young diplomatic officer.

The doubt goes beyond the work of spies, and extends to all those priesthoods upon which, until one has been initiated into them, it is hard to offer any useful comment; but about which, once one becomes an initiate, one is unlikely to remain objective. Where do we turn for dispassionate, disinterested commentary when a specialism has effectively captured all its specialists?

Let me put it like this: all the journalists, correspondents and authors I’ve encountered who know enough about the world of secret intelligence to offer a useful analysis have seemed to me to find an almost boyish excitement in the whole thing, and to have developed a taste for it.

But what’s the causal sequence, because that’s what counts? Is it the case that the more you learn about espionage, the more gripping it becomes for you and the more its importance becomes clear? If so, fine: opinion is based on expertise.