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Simple and basic questions

Thursday, July 1, 2010

THERE’S LITTLE BETTER than a good old-fashioned spy-ring story - one complete even with a Mata Hari figure (pictured left, “Anna Chapman” from her Facebook profile) - to grab and titillate the press, especially the tabloids.

Such stories also excite TV news producers, of course, in love with gauzy dramatizations of dead-letter drops and the like. And perhaps pre-eminently these days, such news-breaks compellingly engage the blogosphere’s legions of armchair intelligence analysts, eager to show off their lexicons of George Smiley-style "tradecraft", updated as they must now be with the jargon of Lisbeth Salander-style cyber-tactics as well.

 

This week’s alleged Russian spies, with their decidedly old-school approach (nostalgic plot devices like invisible ink …  encrypted Morse messaging …  a hole in the ground for caching cash) have been guaranteed a full court press that’s behaving like besotted fans of the quaint conventions common to classic spy fiction.

 

(Other traditions seem to be maintained, too. Cypriot friends have objected to my suggesting in recent editions of THE MEDIA BEAT that their island home often functions as something of a Byzantine spies’ nest. But where was the ring’s alleged paymaster Robert Christopher Metsos arrested – though promptly released on bail – while apparently fleeing back to Eastern Europe? In Cyprus, of course.)

 

The undeniably colorful attractions of these supposedly “deep cover” agents and their intriguing modi operandi have in fact been a bit distracting.  It’s fascinating for instance that FBI-intercepted messages can be quoted to show objections from “C”, the all-too John le Carre-ish label they employed for central headquarters in Moscow, to one couple in the group getting a mortgage on a New Jersey suburban house, on the grounds that it was “a deviation from the original purpose of our mission here”.

 

All this detail - and bureaucratic disputes over such detail, as convincing as in any novel - has diverted many journalists from a simple and rather basic question of fact to answer. What did the group comprising (according to the Feds) a “practiced deceiver” and “an extraordinary agent” actually achieve? The forthcoming trial may, just possibly, reveal more than the criminal complaints have, but for now the answer seems to be: Not Very Much.

 

Before all the established media and freelance commentators get too carried away with the wealth of fictional parallels ... let’s remember that for all the charges of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign power, and conspiring to launder money, not a single one of those arrested actually stands accused of espionage.

   

 

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SIMPLE AND BASIC QUESTIONS lie at the heart of all the best journalism.  And there’s nothing like a couple of weeks spent away from home in the US (as I just enjoyed in Europe) for getting a journalist to focus on such simple basics.

 

In a few months the war in Afghanistan – where earlier Russian spies, long before the Soviets’ KGB or today’s SVR - had their formative exposure to what they called “Bol'sháya igrá”, the “Great Game” of international rivalry – will enter its tenth, yes tenth, year. It already has lasted more than twice as long as the American involvement as in World War I and World War II combined.

 

In Europe, which after all supplies most of the non-US element to the NATO-based international force in Afghanistan, I heard the following comment from a seasoned NATO-watcher:
“If the US can’t now even rely on the ever-loyal Poles, who worship Washington, then that’s the end … the Americans are going to be on their own, and for a long time”. 

 

And indeed Poland’s continuing commitment to the Afghan War is under severe question in the country’s second-round Presidential election taking place next Monday.  They want out by 2012. And Britain’s new government, with the second biggest troop share, has said it wants out during its intended 5-year term in office.

 

In the week after the overly-candid General Stanley McChrystal (being oblivious in his Rolling Stone interview, or just miscalculating) blew his command over the Afghanistan campaign, he’s now been replaced, with a fast and groveling confirmation process in the Senate, by General David Petraeus (pictured above right).

 

The new commander was prompted during his Armed Services Committee hearing to emphasize he’d essentially continue the counterinsurgency strategy of his predecessor (no surprise, since it was largely Petraeus-designed) and that any changes would entail only seeing “if there are tweaks needed in various places”.

 

(One imminent "tweak" looks like being a greater elevation of the general’s proclaimed “moral imperative” of protecting his own troops – a none too cryptically coded suggestion that Afghan civilians can expect to be in correspondingly increased danger, as current Rules of Engagement designed to protect them get “reviewed” under Petreaus.)

 

What no-one reporting on the hearing could cover, because it didn’t happen, was any questioning of how long the war could really end up lasting  ... even as President Barack Obama’s date “to begin the transfer" of US forces out of Afghanistan is now, in theory at least, exactly one year ahead from today - July 2011.

 

In particular there was of course no simple and basic question of the kind that the very recently deceased Senator Robert Byrd used to ask in his powerfully probing days. Indeed did ask, of this same General Petraeus in a previous command, in a Senate committee room three years ago: “Why should we keep on giving you more and more time? Why?”

 

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