Spy stories appeal to us, in part, because they make visible the reality that every relationship entails risk and every stance entails sacrifice.
What makes the spy lonely isn’t lack of connection, but lack of transparency. Within a family or among friends, the spy’s secret work remains a barrier to trust, an unbreachable silence. On the flip side, a spy’s relatives can become liabilities-hindrances to secrecy, or even hostages held to ensure the spy’s cooperation. Even the dog might be in on the game, providing cover for visits to outdoor drop sites in bad weather. The wives and children of British and American intelligence officers picnicked in Moscow parks during the Cold War, sometimes receiving boxes of candy (actually filled with military intelligence) from Russian assets. More tellingly, spying is often a family business. A team of specialists provide the costumes and tools that enable her to gather and transfer intelligence. Our spy might work alone, but she acts in concert with a network of agents and assets. And yet, spying is rarely a solo endeavor. Spies are notorious loners-tech savvy, self-sufficient world-travelers who thrive on solitude and danger. In my journal I describe failing to complete this ritual as a “tactical sin”. I hunker down at my desk, hiding from potential interruptions. I circle the neighborhood with my dog, I shuffle seemingly at random through my notes, looking for a place to begin. And must shake off a social tail of distraction. The writer too must carve out time to practice her craft.
#Beach scavengers crossword code#
To think like a spy, one must adopt a changed and charged relationship to language, trusting code names, fetishizing prearranged phrases.)Ĭertain, now, that she is alone, the spy uses her time in obscura to collect or drop intelligence. The Soviets called this ‘dry-cleaning’ the Americans called it a ‘blackout’. All to ensure she is not being followed or watched. The spy seems to walk at random, entering a café and exiting through a second door, doubling back, circling a church, zigzagging across a park. For me, though, the spy’s true appeal lies in her ability to move with stealth-even grace-between inner reality and outer world. A spy must assume she is being followed, being watched. The spy’s loneliness, her paranoia and caution, her purposeful anonymity, compel. We watch our spy cross the bridge, cross the street, and vanish by rapid turns: left, right, and left again. I venture forth as a kind of double-agent-ambivalent in my deceit, but seeking relevant intelligence. Having returned to my hometown mid-pandemic, I am trying to embed myself in weekly routines. Even among family, I catch myself hesitating, masking my loneliness, scripting a performance of sociability. In 2021, every encounter feels fraught and choregraphed. Spies confess to their handlers writers to their readers. In a world with lots of information and little privacy, I find myself obsessed with pre-digital espionage-both the cloak and dagger myths and the formal protocols hedging the release of secrets. Lies fold neatly into details, into facts. Spying, like the effort of writing, is a performance that succeeds by going unobserved.
Undetected spies operate under meticulous cover their stories are perfect, their pasts at once vague and watertight. And, of course, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is so implausibly sleek and visible he functions as a kind of smokescreen, a mesmerizing legend, obscuring the discreet habits of active case officers and agents. Most notorious spies were invented by other spies: Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (alias Somerville), Graham Greene’s double agents, and John LeCarre’s. We see spies drink their iconic martinis, recognize them by acronym and wink. What we imagine we know is rendered through film and fiction, laced with sex, driven by gadgets. The writer plants the spy on a bridge we watch her cross and vanish.
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