Bard Of The Downtrodden

Title: Dark Passage

Rating: 4 Stars

David Goodis is an author that has been, to a large extent, regrettably lost to time. When talking fiction noir, I think he belongs in the same conversation as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. 

As a young man, he got into writing for pulp magazines. In the 1930s and 1940s, these were the unquenchable content monsters of their day. In a 5 1/2 year period, writing sometimes 10,000 words a day, he cranked out an estimated five million words under many pseudonyms. That’s an insane pace. The only other author that I know that maintained a pace like that was L Ron Hubbard during his pulp days. Hubbard would be working so hard at his typewriter that sweat would pour off of him.

Ultimately, Goodis got out of the pulp grind by writing novels. Dark Passage was the novel that made him most famous. It led to the classic film noir starring Bogart and Bacall. This successful film led to a six year movie deal with Warner Brothers. For murky reasons, Goodis only lasted for three years.

That was his career highlight. In 1950, at the age of 33, he moved back to Philadelphia to live with his parents and his schizophrenic brother. From there he labored in relative obscurity. He continued to regularly publish novels. In the mid 1960s, interest in his work was renewed when Truffaut made Shoot the Piano Player. In 1967, shortly after being beaten in a robbery, he died of a stroke at the age of 49.

Another interesting fact about Goodis concerns the television series The Fugitive. For those that never saw the series (or the Harrison Ford film), it’s about Richard Kimble, a doctor wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. Sentenced to death, he’s on the way to prison when the train derails. This allows Kimble to escape. The series consists of his dogged pursuit of the real killer of his wife, the ‘one-armed man’, as the authorities try to capture Kimble.

Why am I telling you all about this? Well, Dark Passage is about Vince Parry, a investment clerk, who is falsely accused of killing his wife, is convicted, and is sentenced to life at San Quentin. Desperate to get out, one day he seizes an opportunity to climb into a barrel and escape in the back of a truck. The novel is about his attempts to escape re-capture. At first, he pretty much just wants to get away, but through a series of adventures he almost inadvertently discovers that his wife’s murderer (WARNING: 70 year old spoiler alert) was a woman named Madge that had become obsessed with Parry. The woman, after confessing to Parry, throws herself out her window, making it look like Parry murdered her. Thus, at the end of the novel, even though he’s solved the murder of his wife, he has no proof and has to continue to live life on the run.

Written in 1946, it predates The Fugitive by many years. Goodis, claiming that The Fugitive copied his premise, sued United Artists. Just as an aside, yeah there are similarities but still, is escaping from prison after being false convicted really all that unique of a premise? Be that as it may, after a protracted battle that ended after his death, it was found in his favor and his estate was awarded a grand total of $12,000. Regardless, it actually is an important copyright legal case.

I read a forward to Dark Passages that posited that Goodis’ relative lack of success informed the novels of his later period in the 1950s. In all cases, the protagonist is not really in any form a heroic figure. In Dark Passages, Parry is a nonentity. He’s a nameless clerk married to a woman that does not respect him or even particularly like him. He’s not particularly tall. He’s not particularly handsome. Even after he escapes from prison, he usually ends up swept by events. At times, he’s literally shaking in fear. People take advantage of him. Even the people that help him appear to help not because of any particular sympathy for him but because of issues of their own. His one act of violence only occurs as he is on the verge of being choked out.

These character traits seem to be hallmarks of Goodis’ protagonists. Perhaps once successful, they have fallen far. They live in obscurity. They live in poverty. They live in fear. They are driven by circumstance. They seems to exert relatively little control over their own affairs.

Featuring a protagonist from such a position of weakness is a refreshing change from traditional noir. Instead of a world weary, world wise, wise cracking private eye, Goodis’ characters react to their situations with shock and fear. You can almost see the gears turning in their minds as they desperately try to calculate their next small move to make it to the next moment’s crisis.

Writing from that perspective makes for a taut, suspenseful read.

Psycho-Biddy!

Title: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Rating: 4 Stars

This is one of those films where the making of it outshines the film itself.

It’s the story of two elderly sisters, Jane (Bette Davis) and Blanche (Joan Crawford) Hudson. Growing up in the 1910s, “Baby Jane” Hudson was an acclaimed vaudeville child phenom. As a child, knowing that she was the main breadwinner of the family, Jane became spoiled and petulant and Blanche was shunted to the side.

Later, in the 1930s,  Jane’s star had long since faded. Instead, Blanche became a major motion picture star. Even though she took care of Jane, Jane became resentful and alcoholic. This flared up one night and apparently Blanche was run over in a car by Jane, leaving her paralyzed.

Now in the year 1962, the two live interdependent solitary lives. Jane cooks and takes care of her paralyzed sister as they subsist on Blanche’s earnings from her films. Jane has become an even heavier drinker and is starting to exhibit signs of mental breakdown. Will Blanche be able to escape from the clutches of Jane? Will Jane be able to re-launch her career by singing her old childhood standards as an elderly woman?

This is a classic Gothic horror drama film. Similar to films like Rear Window or the later Misery, the protagonist is somewhat powerless. You feel her helplessness as she tries to figure out a way to send a distress signal to the outside world. Each time that she looks like she’s about to succeed, Jane is there to thwart her, sometimes murderously.

It’s fair to say that Bette Davis goes all in. Knowing no makeup artist would dare to make her look hideous, she did her own makeup. Hideous she does look. Davis described the character as the kind of woman that never removes makeup. She just keeps adding on additional layers. Her voice is shrill and raucous.  Bette Davis’ eyes have never looked so malevolent.

Joan Crawford wasn’t quite as willing to give up on her movie star glamour. Supposedly a starving, rapidly fading invalid, she fought most attempts to de-glamorize herself.

The film that this is most reminiscent of is Sunset Boulevard. Made in 1950, it starred Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a faded silent film star lost in irrelevance but still believing that she can make a comeback. Like Jane Hudson, Desmond has descended into a Gothic madness.

Regarding the title of the blog, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? actually did kick off a new genre of films known as, I kid you not, Psycho-Biddy (which also went by, and again I assure you that I kid you not, Hagsploitation). Since Psycho-Biddy is close in name to one of my favorite forms of music, psychobilly, I found this quite amusing. Such films were horror/thriller films that centered around older mentally unstable women.

This brings me to an interesting point about Hollywood’s treatment of women. Once women reach a certain age, parts simply disappear for them.  I think that things might be better now, but certainly in the 1960s, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for women past the ingenue phase of their life. After all, in 1962, Bette Davis is only 54 years old. This is not quite old hag territory. Davis (and that matter Crawford) was a strong, smart, at one time powerful member of the film industry. The fact that they were both enticed to take roles as washed up actors when they were still in their 50s says something about how the film industry treats women.

Having said that, it is amusing to me that the psycho-biddy genre bled just a bit into both of the women’s personal lives. Joan Crawford, most famously, was the target of a poison pen biography by her daughter named Mommie Dearest. Not to be outdone, Bette Davis’ daughter wrote a similarly harsh biography of her mother called My Mother’s Keeper.

It’s a justifiably famous over the top darkly comic Gothic thriller featuring an actress chewing every piece of scenery that she can reach.

Wha’s That Noshin’ On My Laig?

Title: In Harm’s Way

Rating: 4 Stars

In Harm’s Way is the story of the WWII sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the struggle of the survivors as they endured four to five days in the Pacific Ocean.

On a top secret mission, the USS Indianapolis delivered the nuclear weapon to Tinian that was later dropped on Hiroshima. Successfully making that delivery, it was ordered to report to the Leyte Gulf in preparation for the planned invasion of the Japan islands. Told that the area was safe, it sailed off alone without any protection from destroyer class ships that could protect it from submarine attacks. Due to communication / bureaucratic snafus, Navy headquarters essentially lost track of it.

On the night of Sunday, July 29th, 1945, it was hit by two Japanese torpedoes. Nearly 300 of the sailors on board were immediately killed. The ship was damaged so severely that it sunk in about ten minutes. Consumed by flames and sinking so quickly, the remaining sailors were cast into an oil soaked sea. Many sailors were lacking life preservers. Only a couple of the rafts were released. Even on those rafts there was no food or water.

Due to damage to the radio station, a distress signal was barely able to be sent. Since there were no ships expected in the area and the Japanese navy apparently would send out bogus distress signals, these signals were ignored. The ship’s absence was noted, but due to the dynamic nature of wartime, all who noted it missing simply assumed that the ship was diverted to another mission. For days, no search / rescues were attempted.

At first, the survivors were convinced that someone would come to rescue them. As days went by, their hopes plummeted. As did their hopes, so did their life expectancy. Some grew tired and gave up. Most became hypothermic as they continued to spend days in the ocean water. Everyone suffered from open sores as the saltwater broke down their skin. Some grew so thirsty for water that they couldn’t help themselves and began drinking the saltwater. A few hours later they would die horrible deaths. Many would hallucinate and would sink into the water thinking that they were still on the ship. A large group of sailors became convinced that the Japanese were in their midst and would hack each other to death with their knives.

And then they were the sharks. Constantly cruising the clots of sailors, the sharks would have a feeding frenzy at night. On average, some fifty soldiers a night would be eaten by the sharks. In the morning, a sailor would tap the shoulder of a sailor in front of him and the sailor would flop over, his bottom half been eaten by a shark during the night.

The missing ship never did cause an alarm to be raised. Four to five days after the ship sunk, a US plane hunting for Japanese submarines just happened to see the oil slick. Getting a closer look, the pilot realized that there were still survivors. Raising the alarm, this immediately brought about a major search / rescue operation. Many of the sailors on the water refused to believe that they were being rescued. Of the 1200 members of the USS Indianapolis, a bit over 300 survived.

Apparently embarrassed by losing a ship and causing unimaginable sufferings upon the survivors, the Navy sought a scapegoat. It found one in the ship’s captain, Captain McVay. Surviving the ship’s sinking, he was court martialed. Despite the fact that the area was known to have Japanese submarines in the area and he was specifically not told about them (due to the top secret nature of how the knowledge was acquired), he was criticized for not taking a zigzag route.  He was convicted even though he was told that the area was safe, that it wasn’t a real clear night, and that both US and Japanese submarine commanders testified that it wouldn’t have made a difference anyways. He was tried on the second charge of not abandoning the ship in an expeditious manner. Given that the ship sank in ten minutes, not even the court martial could stomach a guilty verdict on this charge. Some twenty years later, McVay would end up taking his own life. Even now, the few remaining survivors still living are trying to clear his name.

About the title? This is actually the second blog entry with this title. It’s probably inappropriate to joke, but as I wrote in my blog entry about Jaws, the author Peter Benchley struggled to come up with a title for his novel. His father, also a writer, jocularly suggested “Wha’s That Noshin’ On My Laig?” To make the connection to Jaws even tighter, the character Captain Quint (in the film version) gave a monologue where it’s apparent that he must have served on the USS Indianapolis and endured the extreme suffering of its aftermath. To make the connection yet even more tighter, one of the survivors that tells his story in this book is Bob Gause. He spent his postwar career as a commercial fishermen. Some of that time was spent shark hunting. Some have said that he served as the inspiration for Captain Quint.

I’ve now read several books on surviving desperate conditions during war. They are horrible and haunting tributes to the suffering that a person can endure and survive and the almost unimaginable will to live that some possess. If this sounds like an interesting topic, please also take a look at Hampton Sides’ On Desperate Ground, the story of the battle on the Chosin during The Korean War, and David Howarth’s We Die Alone, a must be read to be believed account of a Norwegian surviving a botched raid during WWII.

Checking All Of The Postmodern Boxes

Title: Breakfast of Champions

Rating: 4 Stars

Postmodern authors can be difficult to read. Look no further than Thomas Pynchon. Even with a detailed page by page guide, reading Gravity’s Rainbow is a daunting prospect. When I read it, the guide at one point says something like, “and here the narrative disintegrates”, which is literary critical analysis speak for we don’t know what’s going on here either.

Kurt Vonnegut is without question an author that writes in a postmodern manner. However, I find his style to be quite accessible. Even as his novel jumps around in points of view, settings, or even time, I typically don’t have much of a problem keeping up. This might be a reason for his lingering popularity relative to other postmodern authors. If you’re looking to dip your toe in the oftentimes treacherous postmodern waters, Vonnegut could be a good starting point.

Breakfast of Champions is a case in point. Despite all of the postmodern characteristics (of which there are many, see below), it’s actually a pretty simple read. The plot features the little known author Kilgore Trout and the wealthy businessman Dwayne Hoover that is losing his mind. They have a chance meeting that pushes Hoover over the edge and leads him to acts of violence.

The plot really is pretty much as simple as that. As can be imagined, there are significant ideas running through the story. Racism, suicide, free will, and the nature of art all make appearances here.

What makes a novel postmodern? Breakfast of Champions is a good example because it contains so many attributes of what is considered postmodern. Let’s discuss each in turn.

Irony / black humor: This is a hallmark of Vonnegut’s writing. He has, to put it charitably, a dark view of humanity. He’s suspicious of free will and sees us as mere functional robots. He writes with a darkly mordant point of view and sense of humor.

Intertextuality: This is one of those annoying words that crop up in different contexts that doesn’t have an obvious meaning. In literature, the idea is that novels do not exist by themselves. They exist in some larger universe with other works of literature. In the case of Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout is part of the Vonnegut universe that appears in multiple novels. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy benefactor that kicks the novel into gear by being a fan of Trout’s work and sponsoring him, also appears in several of Vonnegut’s novels.

Metafiction: Metafaction is embedding the writing of the fiction within the fiction itself. Vonnegut does that here by literally making himself a character in the novel. Not only is he a character, but he’s an omniscient character that can direct or change the action as he fits. At one point, he interacts directly with Trout.

Poioumena: This is an even more difficult word than intertextuality. This is a subset of metafiction that directly comments upon the act of creation. In Breakfast of Champions, the character Vonnegut is very much aware of the fact that he is creating the universe that he is currently inhabiting. He comments on it. He criticizes it. When talking to Trout, he chaotically changes the universe to convince Trout that he is the creator of it.

Temporal Distortion: Nonlinear plots are a hallmark of postmodern literature. Vonnegut often employs this in his novels. In the telling of Breakfast of Champions, he seamlessly switches narrative between Trout’s somewhat torturous journey to Midland City with Hoover’s day in the life. Several other characters have their own separate timeline.

Pastiche: This is the combining of disparate elements. In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut intersperses his own hand drawn pictures within the text, giving it a 1970s era flavor of multi-media.

That’s just a quick list. I’m sure that there are other elements / supporting text that I can come up with if I try a little bit harder.

The bottom line is that postmodern literature can be challenging. If you want to investigate the form, my advice would be not to start with John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. As a writer, Vonnegut is a much more digestible writer. You can start with him and determine if this is a style that appeals to you.

Winston Churchill – Action Hero

Title: The Splendid and the Vile

Rating: 5 Stars

Erik Larson’s writing process is kind of insane. He writes narrative history. I’ve previously read The Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, and Thunderstruck. His novels all read like fiction thrillers. They’re full of fleshed out characters, intense plot, and fascinating conversations.

Here’s the thing. Everything that he writes about actually happened and he can prove it. He gets conversations from diaries or other first hand sources. He dives deep into historical sources to get the original story.

He does this for every sentence that he writes. For example, if in one of his books, he has a sentence that reads something like, “As he walked down the street, he wiped his brow in the early morning heat as he breathed in the fresh aroma of coffee and oranges.” He will have a weather report for that day that will tell him if it was hot enough at that hour of the day to induce a sweat. He’ll have a map of businesses on the street (from the early twentieth century, these would be sourced from fire departments since they needed to know what kind of fires they might be fighting). From that map, he’ll see that there’s a coffee roasting company. From a newspaper from that day, he’ll read that a horse drawn cart full of crates of oranges tipped over that morning on that street. From those three different sources, he managed to construct the one sentence.

He does this essentially for every sentence in the book. The Splendid and the Vile is about 500 pages. I personally find that attention to detail to be mind boggling.

If that’s not impressive enough, not only does he manage to write an entire book using this method, but he manages to tell a compelling, at times breathtaking story.

Of course, it helps to have a compelling story to tell, and it’s hard to find a historically more fraught time than Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister. Begrudgingly approved by the King, he took office in May, 1940. At that moment, the British Expeditionary Force was in full retreat from a ferocious Nazi offensive. The British was counting on the French to hold back the Nazis to allow them time to prepare for the looming war. Instead, the French were just days away from surrender.

The UK was about to face the Nazis alone. They would continue to fight them alone until the Nazis made the ill fated decisions to invade the Soviet Union and to declare war on the US upon Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

During the time that it stood alone, it seemed inevitable that a Nazi invasion of the British island was imminent. The aerial attacks, now known as the Battle of Britain, that killed tens of thousands of English citizens, was fought during this period. 

So, this is a thrilling time. All of the major figures show up on these pages. Members of Churchill’s family like his daughter Mary, son Randolph, wife Clementine, and daughter-in-law Pamela are all here. American’s such as Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman that were helpful to the British war effort fill the pages. All characters are richly described and come vibrantly to life.

At the center of it all is Winston Churchill. To put it mildly, he is a complex figure. At times he was ebullient, dancing and singing to a gramophone. Other times, he is disconsolate, barely able to get out of bed. With little personal vanity, he would walk around No 10 Downing wearing nothing but a silk robe or an absurd one piece air raid suit that everyone called his jumper. He had an early conversation with President Franklin Roosevelt completely naked (well, except for his ever present cigar and glass of whiskey).

Whatever his faults, he was exactly what the British needed. His speeches on the radio never minimized the desperate struggle that they were in but gave the people confidence that they will see it through. His tours of bombed out cities brought the shelled out citizens running out to this car just to be in his presence. Despite his apparent lack of concern for his own safety (watching nearby bombings from the roof of No 10 Downing or speeding through the streets of London at breakneck speeds), he was the indispensable leader of the West during that first year of combat.

This reads like an action novel. Following the format of such novels, this is a work of many short chapters (101 chapters over 500 pages). Following the same format, most chapters end with a cliffhanger that make you want to dive into the next chapter. I found myself easily plowing through 100 pages at a sitting.

And just like any good action novel, you have to have a good villain. Here, you have the words of Goebbels. Head of the Nazi propaganda ministry, at first he has only contempt for Churchill and the British. He keeps waiting for Churchill to be thrown out and to bring the British to their knees. At first furious with their intransigence, by the end he has developed something approaching a begrudging respect for both the British leader and their people.

And, best of all, like in all good action novels, the good guys win.

Florida Crime Fridging

Title: The Green Ripper

Rating: 2 Stars

John D MacDonald was writing Florida crime noir in the 1960s. As one of the OGs of what is now a popular genre, he bequeathed an impressive lineage including writers such as Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey. The crime series that he’s most known for are the Travis McGee novels. Each title features a color (a precursor to such connected series as Sue Grafton’s alphabet novels). Due to all of that, he’s generally recognized as one of the more significant figures in the crime genre.

This is my first entry into the Travis McGee series. This is one of the later entries but it seemed to be one of the higher rated ones.

Travis McGee is a war veteran (due to the length of this series, this seems to have changed over time from the Korean War to the Vietnam War). He lives on a boat that he won in a poker game. He seems to really not have a job. Periodically someone comes to him to ask to recover something. He gets half of the value of whatever he recovers. As is usual with such long running series, he appears to be a man in at least his forties that has no longer attracting young, nubile women from book to book.

The Green Ripper is different. As I mentioned, this book is pretty late in the series. In the previous book, MacDonald decided that McGee should settle down with a woman, perhaps as part of some character growth.

Well, he apparently couldn’t figure out a way to continue the series with McGee in a stable relationship. So, his love interest, Gretel, is murdered within the first couple of pages. McGee’s revenge drives the rest of the novel.

This brings us to the term fridging. The term was first used by feminist comic book fans to protest the common use of the death or rape of a girlfriend to drive a plot / motivate a superhero. The term fridging originates from a Green Hornet comic where the Green Hornet’s girlfriend is murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. At best, it’s a lame and lazy plot device, much like the 1970s or 1980s drama series that nearly inevitably had an episode where the protagonist got amnesia.

The novel, written in 1979, is very much of its era. The plot involves a religious cult going around wearing white tunics (ala Hari Krishna). They are led by a mysterious woman with hypnotic eyes. Of course, there’s a sinister plot behind the apparently harmless cult. They have a secret revolutionary group bent upon violence that has been recruited from organizations like, and I kid you not, the PLO and the Weathermen. There’s a nameless and faceless group of government men desperately trying to foil them. Around all of this are predictions of a looming economic collapse. Gretel is murdered by a poison pellet identical to that killed by real life Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, so throw in some KGB iron curtain action as well.

Welcome to 1979!

The plot, reading it in 2020, is laughable. It goes without saying that McGee kills everyone. By the end of the novel, revenge apparently sated and grief requited, he is happily carrying on with a wealthy woman in an exotic locale on her large yacht.

All is well again in the world of McGee.

Who’s The Spy? Who’s The Traitor?

Title: The Spy and the Traitor

Rating: 4 Stars

This tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky. Born in the Soviet Union to a KGB father, he was destined to join the service. While still young, he became horrified by the building of the Berlin Wall and the crushing of the Prague uprising. Believing that the USSR system was fundamentally rotten, he resolved to do what he could to bring about change. While stationed in Denmark, he allowed himself to be recruited by the English MI6.

While still spying on behalf of MI6, he rose through the KGB ranks. Not only did he provide valuable information to the West regarding KGB structures and systems, he made some key political contributions as well. He communicated the paranoia that Soviet leadership felt regarding the West’s first strike intentions (specifically Reagan’s bellicosity). He provided advice to the early summits that Western leaders had with Gorbachev.

He was just about to be take over as head of station of London (and possibly be promoted to be a KGB general) when he fell under suspicion. Called back to Moscow, he underwent severe interrogation, including being injected with some kind of truth serum. Never confessing and with the KGB not possessing enough evidence / confidence to convict him without it, he lived in a state of suspension in Moscow. 

He used this time to execute an escape that MI6 had long planned for him. Despite traveling vast distances and a couple of close calls, he was able to escape to Finland, and ultimately to London.

This is all interesting, and at times, thrilling stuff.

Along with that story is an abbreviated tale of Aldrich Ames. He was a CIA spy. Deep in debt, stalled in his career and bitter about it, alcoholic, he actively sought out the KGB to spy on their behalf. He had no notions of a higher calling. He wanted money and lots of it. Even with his mediocre career, he was in a position to view all Soviet counterintelligence agents. He was able to provide the names of all assets that the CIA had in the Soviet Union. Many were caught, tortured, and executed. Gordievsky probably missed that fate by a matter of days.

Although this book focused significantly more on Gordievsky than Ames, it does bring about an interesting question. The book is called The Spy and the Traitor. That implies that one is the spy and the other is the traitor. Which is which? Macintyre clearly makes a bid that Gordievsky is the spy while Ames betrayed his country.

The book would have been more interesting if that question had been treated a little more seriously. I would have loved to have read a more fleshed out biography of Ames. Macintyre puts his thumb on the scales by portraying Gordievsky as a principled hero and Ames as the mustache twirling villain. By doing so, it makes the story much more of a conventional one of good triumphing over evil.

If you read a bit between the lines, I would say that reality is a bit more complicated. Both Gordievsky and Ames first married to advance their careers and then later discarded their wives and married for love. They both actively took steps to betray their country that they swore an oath to. By the time of Gordievsky’s escape, he was nearly continually drunk. Although Gordievsky ostensibly betrayed his country to destroy the socialist system, the fact is that MI6 started a savings account in his name and added to it. After he escaped to London, he was put up in a house with constant security. This continues today even into his 80s. He was treated with great respect and was consulted by powerful people. For someone that apparently had no ambition beyond destroying a system, he seemed to have landed in a pretty profitable spot.

The Soviet Union fell. Gordievsky is living a comfortable life in retirement. Ames will die in federal prison.

History is written by the victors. This has never seemed more true than while reading this. It’s clear that Gordievsky cooperated extensively with Macintyre. His statements and actions are presented in the best possible light while Ames is presented at best as a two dimensional character.

As usual, whenever I read a spy history, I walk away from it wondering if spying is really worth it. Certainly a country needs a robust security apparatus to protect its own secrets. What is the benefit of sending spies out to steal other countries’ secrets or to try to double up other countries’ spies? It seems as if this complexity leads to ruin. While Gordievsky was a treasure to the British, he was a nightmare for the Soviets. Similarly, Kim Philby was a treasure to the Soviets and a nightmare for the British.

It’s still not clear to me that spies are a net strategic positive for any country.