An article entitled "An Emerging Trend in Spy Fiction: Retired James Bonds Become Ian Flemings" posted on SpyWise.net identifies a new development in spy fiction, that consists of spy novels written by retired intelligence professionals which portray the business of espionage the way it really is, rather than the way it is normally presented in literature, on TV, or on the silver screen.

The conclusions of the SpyWise article are especially relevant in the context of the recently published article ("CIA's Loss of Top Spies 'Catastrophic,' Says Agency Veteran") in "CQ Politics" that highlights the gap between CIA management and operations officers in the field. The "CQ Politics" article quotes from a new book, Human Intelligence, Counterterrorism & National Leadership, by Gary Berntsen, a former station chief who led one of the first CIA teams into Afghanistan after 9/11. Berntsen says, "the most ambitious officers in the Clandestine Service have sought minimal time in the field and burrowed themselves in the CIA headquarters bureaucracy to attain advancement."

The article on SpyWise.net has a similar quote from The Dream Merchant of Lisbon (2004) by Gene Coyle, a retired CIA operations officer. There the narrator says that the book's main character (Shawn Reilly) would have had a better career with the CIA, if he had "concentrated more on the bureaucratic side of the business and taken management positions" behind a desk, "but he was a street case officer at heart." The Headquarters-Field divide is an issue that is common to all four of the novels in the SpyWise article.

The SpyWise article points to reviews of Voices Under Berlin by T.H.E. Hill, and Edge of Allegiance by Thomas Murphy that characterize these two novels as "relevant for today," because the novels' main characters have the set of skills that made it possible to win the Cold War, remarking that this skill set is what is needed today to win the war on Terror.

Unfortunately, as Sam Faddis, who was running a CIA unit charged with preventing terrorists from getting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, says in the "CQ Politics" article, "at a time when you really need your most experienced people to run operations and mentor the new blood coming in, it's catastrophic" for all the experienced people to be leaving the Agency. "To me," says Faddis, "the real tragedy is there’s just a whole bunch of guys floating around here who are not in the building, but should be." The same point is made in the books discussed in the SpyWise article.

The conclusion of the SpyWise article is that "there is clearly more than just a 'war story' woven into the warp of words in these novels." While the novels discussed in the SpyWise review "may not speak to publishers’ and literary agents’ perceptions of what it takes to put their bottom line in the black in the dog-eat-dog modern literary marketplace, ... they do speak to those interested in the reality of the human condition of America’s spies". There's more truth in this subgenre of spy fiction than at first meets the eye.

In his paper ("Spy Fiction, Spy Reality")[1] justifying the teaching of a course on spy fiction at The National Defense Intelligence College [NDIC] (formerly known as the Joint Military Intelligence College [JMIC]), Jon A. Wiant, who holds the Department of State Chair at the NDIC, cogently argues that "spy novels are the stuff of history. Through the spy novel you an see and understand a number of factors that have shaped the contemporary world of intelligence," adding that spy fiction "has, in a very real and pervasive way, shaped the reality of intelligence officers in a variety of circumstances," and that the reality of the intelligence community "is deeply embedded in the fictional world of spies for both good and bad" (pp. 112, 113)." “[A]t its best the literature gives us a window into the organizational pathologies that complicate the lives of the modern intelligence officer” (p. 115), says Wiant.

NOTES:
1 - Jon A. Wiant, “Spy Fiction, Spy Reality,” Learning with Professionals: Selected Works from the Joint Military Intelligence College, Washington, D.C., 2005, pp. 111-123.