In the last respect, at least, I can belatedly try and mend matters. The story begins with the heroine, Ellen, at work in the Washington headquarters of the CIA. She is clearly a fairly senior and experienced officer, with an assistant of her own. She has worked overseas, we are given to understand, having been recruited into the Agency in the war years when it was the OSS (Ah, those first OSS arrivals in London! How well I remember them -arriving like jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsty old intelligence brothel! All too soon they were ravished and corrupted, becoming indistinguishable from seasoned pros who had been in the game for a quarter of a century and more.) Ellen’s current problem is to decide on the bona fides or otherwise of a defector from the Communists - a problem of whose complexity only those who have had to handle it will be aware; the truth being that the great majority of defectors are actuated by interested, rather than idealistic or ideological motives - money, a girl, that sort of thing - so that, as one is uneasily aware, should the balance of advantage swing the other way, they would be liable to redefect, and in that sense cannot ever be regarded as reliable.
Ellen is convinced - as it turns out, rightly - that her man is a phoney, a point which crops up several times in the course of the narrative. The suggestion seems to be that Ellen’s discovery of the man’s phoneyness is a point against her rather than for her; almost as though her superiors had a stake in his genuineness, resented his exposure, and took out their annoyance on Ellen. In the conditions of panic created by McCarthy in government agencies this is perfectly possible, especially if the defector in question had been somehow sponsored by the Wisconsin Senator’s ribald entourage. Such situations, in any case, are all too liable to arise in intelligence organizations the world over, all of them being abnormally subject to internecine conflict. I know of a case in the war of a very valuable source of information remaining unused because the man who turned it up happened to be personally disliked by a senior officer at headquarters. Again, there is the case of Cicero, the British Ambassador in Ankara’s valet, who extracted from the Embassy safe the full plans and order of battle for the invasion of France and sold them, as it turned out for counterfeit money, to the Abwehr. Himmler was so furious at a rival organization’s pulling off this coup that he arranged for the documents to be pigeonholed and never passed to the military. I often used to reflect, when I was an intelligence officer, that if only we could concentrate on the enemy the insensate hatred we directed at one another, the war would be won in no time.
While still grappling with the problem of the defector, Ellen is called away to the Internal security Department, where, to her amazement and chagrin, she discovers that she is a suspect herself. Then there begins a long, exhausting and distressing process of interrogation, day after day, week after week, in which the whole of Ellen’s life, her love affairs, her friendships, every tiny detail and nuance of her private existence are gone into by her two clottish interrogators. The interest and suspense are well maintained, as is the sense, almost overwhelming at times, of the unspeakable disgustingness of the whole procedure. Ellen, of course, as soon as she realized what was afoot, should have slapped her interrogators in the face for their impertinent curiosity, scattered their precious dossiers about the floor, and otherwise manifested her contempt for them and all their ridiculous, dog-eared tricks - the light shining in her face, the dark mentions of knowing more than they say, the elaborately staged confrontation, etc., etc. Then, with a sigh of relief, she should have got herself a job as a bartender or call girl, something nice and wholesome and fresh, and lived happily ever after. In America and the countries of the West we can still do this; in the USSR they cannot. It is one of the few remaining dividends of what we like to call our free way of life.
Actually, Ellen does nothing of the sort. Racked by anxiety, sleepless, distracted, she endures the humiliating procedure, tries desperately to prove her innocence -though without knowing what she is being accused of -searches through old papers and letters, goes over and over in her mind just what happened on such an occasion, what was said, who was present. She is a willing victim, and could not really be expected to be otherwise. After all, she is in the métier. She has lost her right to protest because she has participated in subjecting others to similar treatment. She, too, has framed the idiot questions, done the idiot research, taken the unpardonable liberty of violating that essential integrity of the person whose safeguarding is the basis of all civilization. The savage is vulnerable to the tribe; the civilized man may proudly claim that as long as he obeys certain specified and known laws, whose contravention carries equally specified penalties, his life is his own. The moment the state allows probing fingers to be intruded there, then barbarism has set in.
Poor Ellen has relinquished her own rights by virtue of her occupation. She has touched pitch, and now is being tarred herself. There she sits, relentlessly being questioned by two fellow Americans about all sorts of matters which have nothing whatever to do with them, or with the CIA, or the United States Government; matters which pertain to herself alone, and can be broached only in the intimacy of love or the ecstasy of faith - in bed or in the confessional. It is terrible to think of such things going on in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial -procedures and practices which are a denial of everything that our history, our religion, our literature and our traditions are supposed to cherish.
People forget that it has all happened so recently. I can just remember my father, before the 1914-18 war, going abroad. For money he had golden sovereigns which were acceptable everywhere; he did not need to take with him a single document. The only country where passports were required was - how significant - Russia. In what is often regarded now as the unenlightened nineteenth century, anyone could come to England who wanted to. To quote the opening sentences of A.J.P. Taylor’s brilliant volume in The Oxford History of England (English History 1914 - 1945):
‘Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and how he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.’
London was full of subversives of every sort and description - anarchists, Communists, crackpots, Karl Marx in person - all busily plotting the overthrow of our and every other government in the world. At the same time, the United States was growing into the richest and most powerful nation on earth by similarly allowing everyone who had a mind to cross the Atlantic to come to New York to try their luck. Did people in those days wake up trembling lest subversives had got into the Home Office, or some diplomat of ours be contemplating defecting to another country? Not at all. Everything suggests that they slept in their beds a good deal more quietly than we do, though MI5 consisted then of at most seven elderly retired officers from the Indian Army, whereas today it is numbered in hundreds and the Secret Service in thousands, and both organizations together, at a rough estimate, cost the taxpayer about the equivalent of the total defence budget in the days of Gladstone. As for America - what the FBI and the CIA dispose of in the way of manpower and public money, God alone knows, but it must be astronomical.
At the end of her ordeal Miss Press’s heroine is fired as a security risk. Instead of having a great ball to celebrate this blessed release, she manages to get admitted to the head man - presumably Dulles - and begs him at least to tell her what she has been found guilty of. He murmurs something about ‘lack of candour,’ but it is obvious that he has not read the report of her interrogation, and that she is in some sort
a sacrificial victim offered up to appease Senator McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee. Cut off from all hopes of redress within the CIA, she settles down to write her own version of the affair. The result is The Care of Devils. Incidentally, I should point out that in England she would have been denied even this recourse. With our usual cunning we have devised a splendid instrument for shutting everybody up without expense or the risk of public scandal. This is the Official Secrets Act, which requires every employee in Defence and Intelligence Departments to give an undertaking that he will not disclose any information which comes to him in the course of his duties upon pain of a fine and/or a term of imprisonment. Thus, if Miss Press had worked for British Intelligence she would have been required to submit the manuscript of The Care of Devils to the department she worked for before it could legally be published. There, we may be sure, it would have come to rest.
The question naturally arises as to whether Ellen was guilty. Had she, in fact, done anything wrong? In the novel, she is constantly putting just this question to herself. It is a perfect Kafka situation; she is accused of nothing, yet is tormented alternately by a sense of guilt and of outraged innocence. Her whole moral fabric is corroded away. If she is guilty she must keep away from her friends lest she contaminate them. Anyway, who are her friends? Has she got any? If so, are they accomplices? Or secret enemies who will be brought out to accuse her? With the most extraordinary prophetic vision, in his novel The Trial Kafka foresees that this is going to become the human condition - to be accused of an unknown crime; to be investigated, interrogated, kept under surveillance, pressed to confess, even confessing, perhaps at last executed. Guilty or not guilty? Who can say? Since there is no crime. Only guilt.
Insofar as there was any cogent thought in the sick and vacuous minds of Ellen’s interrogators ,it was, presumably, that the man - Steve Lasker, with whom Ellen had had a love affair and been on a trip to Mexico - had some sort of bad security record which contaminated her. Let us assume the worst - that Lasker had been a Soviet agent, that Ellen in retrospect had vague suspicions of him, and that, because he had been her lover, consciously or unconsciously, she wanted to shield him, and so was sometimes evasive and less than candid in answering questions about their relationship. Is this really so very reprehensible? It is, in any case, a matter which could have been settled honestly and honorably in five minutes by just putting the point to Ellen. This was never done. It was skirted round, hinted at, touched upon, but never put. Right up to the end, and afterward, she had no means of knowing what, if anything, they had against Lasker. Nor, rather surprisingly, did she apparently make any effort, then or subsequently, to seek out Lasker and have it out with him. The central character in the melodrama is never brought onto the stage, perhaps because, if he were to be, the melodrama would turn into farce - which, in a sort of way, Ellen wanted no more than her interrogators did.
It will surely strike future historians as strange that we, who talk endlessly about freedom, who have drenched the world in blood and destruction to liberate so-called captive peoples, who look with a baleful eye at the nightmare of Stalin’s purges, should yet see fit, in the alleged interest of security, to subvert our own ostensibly prized liberties. In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it; that the vast clandestine apparatus we built up to probe our enemies’ resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that the practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves, and that the vast army of Intelligence personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences to them and us.
Miss Press’s novel is an excellent antidote to the Bond books, which delight Intelligence pros, as they dazzle the general public, by making an intrinsically sinister and sordid activity seem glamorous, exciting and honourable. The Care of Devils has precisely the opposite effect. Through the characterization of her heroine, herself in the web, and through the manner of her ejection from it, Miss Press shows how an organization like the CIA really works, and what it is about.
The Care of Devils will assuredly not please the pros. From their point of view it has the truly appalling disability of being true.
***
A favourite contemporary illusion is that the only virtuous and interesting people in the world are whores, thieves, junkies, perverts, liars, cheats, and others that used to be considered undesirable characters. On this basis, criminals have a special claim to be regarded with sympathy, if not admiration, and those whose business it is to deal with them - judges, police, prison warders, etc., etc. - become the particular targets of contempt and derision. My own experience, such as it is, suggests the contrary. I have found the conversation of whores even more tedious than that of female dons (whom in some respects they resemble), and criminals I have known have one and all been notable for their insatiable conceit and propensity for lying. However, the public taste points in an opposite direction ,and a considerable literature has grown up designed to exemplify the moral, spiritual and intellectual excellence of the criminal classes.
A classic in this genre is Henri Charrière’s Papillon which, we are told, has already sold a million copies in the French edition, and is now offered in English, in a translation by Mr Patrick O’Brian. It is an account of M. Charrière’s experiences (‘Papillon’ was his underworld nom-de-crime) in prison in French Guiana and Devil’s Island; of his various attempted escapes, and ultimate liberation to literary stardom and the affluence that goes therewith.
GK Chesterton once remarked that the lights of Broadway would look marvellous if only one couldn’t read. Similarly, I might say of Papillon that it would make marvellous reading if only I believed it. Alas, I don’t. Like other such exercises in self-appreciation - Casanova’s Memoirs, for instance, or Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves - it leaves me with an unbridgeable credulity gap. However, a proneness to fantasy is no obstacle to literary repute. Witness TE Lawrence.M. Francois Mauriac finds Papillon true, and ‘a good book in the deep meaning of the word.’ So, like Genet, M. Charrière has a sponsor of impeccable credentials.
In 1931, M. Charrière was convicted of murdering a ponce and sentenced to penal servitude for life. M. Charrière is insistent that the evidence offered by the police was perjured; that the public prosecutor was a malignant brute, and that the jury were ‘12 bastards brought up to Paris from some perishing village in the country . . . small shopkeepers, pensioners, tradesmen’ who couldn’t possibly ‘understand the life you lead in Montmartre or what it’s like to be 25.’ It is significant that no one in M. Charrière’s narrative who, in conventional terms, could be regarded as respectable, has a good word said for him or her, with the exception of an occasional bishop, priest, nun or Salvation Army worker. There are also some lepers who meet with approval, but they perhaps compensate for their respectability by the disfigurements of their disease.
It is not difficult to see why a ‘good old curé’ gets a honourable mention. As a result of reciting ‘Our father which art in heaven . . .’ together, M. Charrière’s eyes filled with tears. ’The dear priest saw them and with his plump finger he gathered a big drop as it ran down my cheek. He put it in his mouth and drank it.’ This amiable gesture led to the following exchange:
‘‘How long is it since you wept?’
‘Fourteen years.’
‘Why 14 years ago?’
‘It was the day Mum died.’
He took my hand in his and said:
Forgive those who have made you suffer so.’’
Such sentimentality, combined -as is invariably the case - with a total absence of humour, gives the book a syrupy flavour. At the same time, the notion that Papillon’s misdemeanours and the punishment they brought him are entirely due to the machinations of others, is highly acceptable. It relieves him of any sense of gu
ilt, and allows the rest of us the luxury of wallowing in a sense of collective wickedness about which we are not called on to do anything except publicly beat our breasts. Everyone is virtuous because everyone is guilty. The same thing was noticeable in the reception of the television programme ‘Cathy Come Home.’ Cathy’s misfortunes,like Papillon’s were seen as resulting from circumstances beyond her control. It so happened that a televised version of Tolstoy’s ‘Resurrection’ was being shown at the same time. Here, too, a woman was victim of social injustice, but because Tolstoy was a great artist and Christian it was made clear, additionally, that every human soul, however wronged, carries a private burden or moral responsibility, and is vested with the hope of moral regeneration.
One may be grateful that M. Charrière, unlike Genet, eschews any account of his erotic life while in prison. On the other hand, he exceeds Genet in his descriptions of violence on the part of warders and of the prisoners among themselves. His adventures while on the run are wild and wonderful indeed, and should provide good material for a film script in due course. I liked particularly his experiences with a tribe of Indians who - need I say it? - in their artless goodness and simplicity put to shame the pretensions of more civilised and sophisticated folk. He was fortunate enough to acquire the affection of two of the female Indians - Lali and Zoraima - both of whom he left pregnant on his departure: ‘Farewell, Lali and Zoraima, you incomparable women, so spontaneous and uncalculating, with your reactions so close to nature - at the moment of parting they simply swept all the pearls in the hut into a little linen bag for me.’
In such idyllic circumstances who will question his conclusion that the Indians’wild,savage way of living and protecting themselves taught him something very important for the future - ‘that it was better to be an untamed Indian than a legal official with a degree’?
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