Espionage is the humanities part of the intelligence collection business. Most of the information that goes into the collective mental processes of the community of anaylysts comes from "technical means." Signals intercepts, satellite and aircarft imagery collection, and a wide variety of other techniques too wonky and too secret to talk about. All of that is essentially the province of people who think, talk and act like engineers.

Espionage, defined as the recruiting of foreigners for the purpose of having them spy on their own governments or armed forces, is different. Espionage is about seduction, seduction through the use of charm, money, promises that may or may not be kept, hopes truly or falsely encouraged and sometimes the possibility of a great goal achieved. People who wanted to contribute "to the liberation of my country" come to mind in memory.

Most of the information needed in strategic intelligence should come from from "technical means," but the elusive 5% of the truth that lies beyond the grasp of "technical means" will always have to come from spies in the adversary's camp. There will always be espionage. Sometimes it is done well and often it is done poorly, but it will always be done.

Having been a talking head for some time, I usually relish the opportunity to attack the intelligence community because I know our spies can't defend themselves without blowing their covers (or violating their oaths). They're totally defenseless -- unless, of course, they totally fail in their mission, democracy collapses, and I lose the latitude to abuse my First Amendment rights. So over the years I have delighted in pointing out how every big security development (the Tet Offensive, collapse of communism, 9-11, etc.) seems to come as a collossal surprise to the intelligence community, or how the CIA can't seem to find the tallest guy in Afghanistan.

At some point, though, people like me have to acknowldge that our spy agencies have managed to track down and kill just about everybody who matters in Al Qaeda except Osama, and that a fair amount of that success is traceable to human intelligence rather the listening in on cell phone conversations from remote sensor platforms. The recent spy exchange is an amusing summer diversion from the Gulf oil spill, but it probably doesn't tell us much about how spycraft is unfolding in the era of Facebook and Android. I tend to think that for all the new technical methods of intelligence-gathering that emerging technologies have enabled, they have also foreclosed older technical approaches to collecting information.

How much use can traditional eavesdropping or imagery satellites be against the kinds on unconventional adversaries we face today? The fiber lines carrying internet messages are buried and cell phone signals seldom reach more than 50 miles -- a dozen miles when they are detuned for urban environments. Electronic exchanges are so cleverly encrypted that we have to resolve Fermat's theorem before we can break the code. And Russian missile silos are a wee bit easier to find than 20 pounds of plutonium sitting in the back of a 1996 Toyota 4-Runner on the outskirts of Peshawar.

In the kind of security environment we all inhabit now, human intelligence is more valuable than it used to be, not less. Not only are we searching for more diverse and arcane kinds of information, but out adversaries are engaged in a variety of non-traditional tactics. Maybe foreign spies can't penetrate the innermost sanctum of the Pentagon, but if they get to know the lady who oversees the internet-linked digital switches for the building's power supply, that could be pretty useful in wartime. It's true there won't be much need for trenchcoats in the future -- maybe during monsoon season in the the places where we now fight wars -- but the right kind of spying will always be in demand. And, of course, assassination never goes out of style in some places.

The American religion puts its faith in Divine Progress. But we now begin to look like ancient Greeks and Romans who looked backward to a lost Golden Age. Consider Jack Kennedy and James Bond: 1962, Dr. No.

Granite-gray three-button suits, Bronzoni silk ties, very thin, unfiltered cigarettes, and selbtlade pistolen, caliber very small. A missile crisis over Cuba, averted by JFK, and another atomic incident averted by Bond — and Honey Ryder — who emerged into our consciousness like Venus arising, borne on ocean shell.

Contrast Ursula Andress to today’s Rossiya Face book Baby Doll, and we have our aperture to loss — determinedly pointing rearward to untouchable Golden Age.

Keystone Cops, Ham ‘n-eggers, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” — such embarrassment goes beyond Russia’s Stepford sleeper-cells. What about amateur night follies with the Mossad?

What happened to the glory of espionage?

Shift back to 1962, the year of Dr. No. If Rod Serling and Richard Matheson were writing The Shelter and Third from the Sun — If Twilight Zone spoke to our Cuban Missile fears of imminent apocalypse, it must be remembered that the 1984 vision of perpetual mobilized war between East Asia (PRC), Eurasia (USSR), and Oceania (Western Alliance) had fizzled a decade before in Korea. The prospect of forever wars in Asia was in some ways more frightening — because this prospect promised the eventual corrosion of civilization itself.

Instead Ike make the 1950s safe for Beach Blanket Bingo and Viva Las Vegas through the amazing dispensation of “apocalypse deferred.” The terrors of sacred blood wars of religious nationalism were magically declared impossible, and at one stroke Napoleon and Hitler and two world wars became antique possibility.

So rather than a dark world “where ignorant armies clash by night” we now could enjoy our newly-discovered Hula Hoops and French Haute Cuisine — an America living large thanks to the deterrence-power of “massive retaliation.”

Yet the grand competition continued — the “Great Game” of nations jockeying for History’s brass ring — and ideology aside, we were still “going toe-to-toe with the Rooskies.”

But this time, not with armies in super-Kursk panzer battles — and certainly, thanks to massive retaliation, not with nukes. So what was left?

Bond. [Deploy Ronson] James Bond.

In a world whose conservatism was enshrined in apocalypse deferred, an anointed hero was required who would represent in his person and in his ritual behavior — even in stylized single combat — the essence of the nation-state paradigm and its religious insistence on Darwinian competition.

You have heard of medieval single combat rituals: Where two armies who really would prefer to forgo the evisceration of battle and instead mutually agree to choose two champions to decide the issue? The very best cinematic realization is in El Cid — also of our Golden Age — How we also sought to substitute a man “licensed to kill” for “the dogs of war.”

We know how this story ended. It ended in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, in Angola, in El Salvador, and in the scores of wretched places where champions became the simple killer-instruments of the state itself — America in Vietnam and now Afghanistan, and Soviets in Africa and also, Afghanistan.

Grand national religious enterprises — US, USSR — began to see their vaunted legitimacy waste away. At the beginning of the 21st century the vision of religious nationalism — the heart of modernity — had itself fatally betrayed the sacred center of national identity itself.

Which brings us to the naked heart of espionage itself.

If Bond represented a Cold War compact of apocalypse deferred, what did his predecessors and personal archtypes represent?

In the 20th century’s terrible wars of religious nationalism the great spies were like Christian martyrs, sacrificing for the eternal hope of national transcendence.

Hence,

· Burnham

· The vision of Mata Hari

· Sidney Reilly

· Kim Philby

· Oleg Penkovsky

These were heroes. They gave of themselves and sacrificed themselves, for the cause, the greater good, and the magnificent “imagined community” that defined their sacred identity.

Their moral counterpoint — in invidious comparison — are the American traitors of recent times: And how many there are! Dunlop (who sent Penkovsky to his death), Ames, Walker, Hanssen, and yes, my friend Jay Pollard, these were great spies in the sense that the Devil is great. They sold their souls (again, in the relentless context of religious nationalism) for mere money (there is even a prize meter for those “million dollar” winners, check it out). Jay was always passionate with me, back in Fletcher Days, about how committed he was. Back then his commitment was to South Africa — against the dark evil of Communism and, well, the Dark. Then his passions fastened on Eretz Israel. But Jay was no Kim Philby — he was in it for the narcissism: the narcissism of commitment in an age of falsehood. I thought his patter was harmless Walter Middy fantasy — how wrong I was!

So we have something to consider after all. The “great” American spies of the last generation are not, Burnham-like, sacrificing themselves for civilization. They are in fact venal narcissists ready to sell-out their country for a nickel and dime.

This sorry descent from James Bond is a sunset sign of the decline of religious nationalism and surely, also, an explanation of the sorry state of espionage.

We have come full circle from James Bond to the faux spies of today. In modernity the spiritual completeness of the individual citizen was inextricably bound to the “imagined community” of the nation.

Today this claim on us has so declined that the Russian state apparat seeks to assuage bruised and fragile national sensibilities by making its goal keeping a young Russian family together. Spies are part of the national family.

In the West espionage has become a lifestyle choice. In those places still driven by unreconstructed religious nationalism — like China or Korea — espionage may still retain its promise of spiritual glory and transcendence in sacrifice. But such promise is dead in the West.

Back to Bond. Bond is now enslaved to the New American vision. Try out his reinterpreted, muscular films. How well they fit the post-9-11 American Way:

For the US today “licensed to kill” means doing so daily with joyless, joystick enthusiasm. “Intelligence” is just data secured to make a good kill. America has a world to tame, and a million deadly drones to make it happen.

Bond: Not. Just: Killer.

The “Comatose Sleeper Cell” mystery shows us that the ability of the country’s security services to waste resources is matched only by the media’s ability to dramatize trivial material. The only surprise is that the exchange did not take place at a Checkpoint Charlie scene set in the presence of Attorney General Holder intoning that the United States remains ever vigilant to safeguard us from enemies domestic and foreign. But mainly foreign types, such as Russians whose evil ways we recall from the last film. I suspect that “the redhead” is destined to reemerge as a centerfold pin-up in some gentlemen’s magazine - published in both English and Russian, of course.

Does this skepticism imply that all espionage is passé? I think not. Human intelligence is a necessary complement, if not antidote to excessive reliance on our omnivorous electronic and video surveillance. We supposedly learned that lesson from Iraq and Iran. I am not in a position to know what we have done to fill the void and how effective that has been. Still, this latest bit of hyped spy cum security threat does require us to ask the question: what is the value of “intelligence” in the national security equation?

“Intelligence” failures often are failures of intelligence. Operation Barbarossa; the German airborne assault on Crete; the Yom Kippur War; the Iranian revolution; 9/11; the great financial meltdown of 2008 – 2009. In every instance, there was ample information available to have anticipated and to have forestalled the resulting disaster for the parties affected. The causes lay with leaders who were blinded by hubris and/or dogma, distracted, disorganized or simply lacking in the awareness and perception needed to make sense of what they knew.

This is not to say that rigorous “intelligence” gathering is insignificant. At the tactical level, it can be crucial on the battlefield or in tracking down elements of a serious conspiracy. It also can provide the raw data that senior decision-makers need to digest, e.g. the two reports from FBI field officers that Arab men with green cards were learning how to fly jet aircraft without regard to take-off or landing. In that case, neither the digestive system nor the neurological system was working.

The United States’ two most immediate security problems – Afghanistan, and Iran – illustrate the greater importance of intelligence. As to the former, President Obama had two millennia of data to draw on that underscored the improbabilities of success in reaching the audacious goal of remaking the country so that al-Qaida and the Taliban would disappear forevermore. He had more recent data about the Pakistan-Taliban connection; and he had direct experience of the Iraq fiasco in so-called nation-building. Yet he went ahead for electoral reasons and a weakness of character that made him prey to the Pentagon hawks and the Washington punditocracy. Moreover, as soon he made it clear that Afghanistan was slated to be his war, the foreign policy community swung en masse behind him to make sure that they weren’t left out of the game.

On Iran, there is a similar phenomenon wherein those “intelligence” people (and intelligent people) with knowledge of the country have been nearly unanimous in the judgment that Tehran never will foreclose the nuclear option unless there were an historic understanding reached about all aspects of security in the region – an agreement that afforded them a legitimate place in such a regional system. All the rest, on our part and their part, has been posturing designed to avoid meeting an exceedingly difficult diplomatic challenge. Here again, the current standoff after years of sterile policies should have come as no surprise. Here again, the failures have been ones of faulty strategic intelligence, political timidity and group think. Yes, it would be helpful to know the exact disposition of all the country’s nuclear relevant facilities (and the same for their missile program). Still, if we had that knowledge there would remain wide confidence margins on answers to the key questions of what their future intentions are, what are reasonable time horizons and what repercussions we should expect from military action.. Hence, the same critical strategic judgments would have to be made.

Reflective thinking is out of fashion in Washington. It soon will qualify to be placed on the endangered species list. No compensatory measures or mechanisms exist or can be devised – certainly not better “intelligence” gathering. Our senior foreign policy people can fly unceasingly in swarms to Baghdad, to Kabul, to Islamabad or to wherever without their wanderlust changing the harsh realities one iota. They can play word games about “obsessing with withdrawal dates,” about “Iranian intransigence having consequences,” that “Iran must stop interfering in Afghanistan and Iraq” – two neighboring countries we invaded and occupy ; about “making future generations of Americans safe from terrorism” as long as their breath and political mandate hold out without changing the harsh realities one iota.

Perhaps what we need is to designate one day a week when Washington – official and unofficial -is required to observe absolute silence and to go nowhere except for incursions to the deeper reaches of their minds.

Because so much about intelligence is necessarily secret and opaque, we tend to form our impressions about it based on whatever narratives come our way that have sufficient dramatic or literary quality to make an impression on us. It doesn’t seem to matter whether those narratives are ostensibly nonfiction or fiction, or whether those who purvey them are taking license with reality to achieve dramatic effect or to grind an axe. It thus should not be surprising that popular conceptions of intelligence are in large part misconception.

One of the most common misconceptions is to associate much of what intelligence involves—or of what we think we know intelligence services do—with the Cold War and U.S.-Soviet competition. We make that association partly because it was in a Cold War context that the narratives about intelligence that first struck our fancy were spun. An associated misconception is the commonly heard theme that the objectives and challenges of intelligence drastically changed once the Cold War ended. In fact, there is far more continuity than change in the nature, objectives, challenges, and methods of intelligence, and even in many of the specific issues that are the focus of it. From Washington’s point of view, intelligence never was, even at the height of the Cold War, anywhere close to being solely focused on U.S.-Soviet competition. From Moscow’s point of view, there is nothing peculiarly Soviet rather than Russian in the methods that its intelligence services use, and there are plenty of national interests of the Russia of today that Moscow believes those methods would serve.

Another common misconception based largely on getting our perceptions of intelligence from dramatic narratives is an inflated sense of what any professional intelligence service worth its salt ought to be able to do. John le Carre probably isn’t to blame for most of that. Maybe Ian Fleming is, but probably the Mission Impossible guys are even more responsible.

The inflated expectations provide a backdrop for another pattern in how we tend to form our perceptions of intelligence in the face of that inherent secrecy and opacity—viz., our habit of jumping to all sorts of larger conclusions based on whatever is the latest incident or revelation to part the curtain of secrecy even a little bit. Hence the reactions to the story about the Russian spy ring: first bemusement over why Moscow would still be doing that sort of thing (given that the Cold War is over) and then surprise that the ring so far did not seem to be very productive (given our expectations that intelligence pros like the Russians ought to be able to accomplish more than that). A correct lesson to draw from the story is that much of intelligence—the dramatic narratives notwithstanding—is long-term, mundane stuff, including a lot of efforts that don’t pan out. An operation involving deeply imbedded illegals carries this pattern to an extreme, but the pattern is found to varying degrees in most parts of the intelligence business.

And before we jump to the conclusion that the Russians might not be at the top of their game anymore, let us remember that a really successful ring of illegals would be one that we still don’t know about. Public glimpses of intelligence give an inaccurately negative impression of the level of competence, because it is the less competently conducted operations that are more likely to be rolled up or otherwise to become publicly known as failures.

As for the Israeli assassination in Dubai, it doesn’t tell us much one way or another about the competence of Mossad—at least Mossad as an intelligence collection service, not as a Murder, Inc. hit squad. It does remind us that all intelligence services have bad days as well as good days. Possible the incident reveals some Israeli carelessness stemming from arrogance.

Of course espionage has a future. It has a very long past, going well back before the Cold War, which is why some consider it the world’s second oldest profession.

In 1897, Mark Twain read his obituary in the paper. Still in relatively good health, he fired a note to the mistaken publisher of the article saying, “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” So it goes with human spying thought by many Americans to be dead and buried with the end of the Cold War. The latest example of the busted Russian spy ring in New York and Washington is but a small indication that the game is still alive and well.

Now, I have my biases as an aging Cold War era spy. Yes, before you ask, I enjoy James Bond as the spy porn that it is. Still prefer Connery to the rest of them – though Daniel Craig is rather good, if too serious.

However, on a more serious note, the DNA of spying is not about glamour and games. It is about gathering intentions and information. It is also about suspicion and questioning motivations. As the old saying goes, it is about smelling the roses and looking to see where the funeral is. As long as people keep secrets, there will be spying.

In the 1990’s, the Clinton Administration, in the flush era of the initial post Cold War period, wanted to reduce or eliminate human spying on behalf of the United States. Electronic means were more thorough and you didn’t have to associate with disreputable characters to gather information. The big threat of the USSR was gone. Who could really challenge us? We cut back on our spies.

Our enemies, like Russia, China and non-nation states like Al Queda, did not quite see it that way and continued to spy on us. Their world, like most of the rest of the world, is a dangerous one filled with potential enemies within and without. The great fantasy of world peace and love ended for America on 9/11. We did have enemies and they did want to kill us. And we needed to find out when and how and why.

Ultimately, human intelligence is about getting inside someone’s mind. What are there motivations? Why are they doing the things they are doing? Who are they associated with and what do those people think? You are trying to determine the DNA of decision-making and the directions in which it leads whether within a group of non-nation state players like Al-Queda or nations like China, Russia or us.

Many people have questioned why the Russians would do what seems like such a stupid thing to us. It is, however, very logical in their mindset. The Russians have lived with external threats for over 500 years. They have had an internal police for about that long looking at whether those external threats have come home to roost. The Russian knows the State is always looking at them. Russian does not trust and they view the world around them as a dark and dangerous place. The more knowledge for them, the better.

As has been noted publicly, the use of “sleeper networks” is but one of many tools they use to obtain this information. According to press reports, these people were planted in areas were they would have access to American opinion leaders and political players. Could they get the same information from the New York Times?

Not really. Remember again, when you are trying to get into the mindset of your opponent, what he puts out in the public press is always up for interpretation. Why was the article placed? Who was trying to spin what issue in what direction? Direct or indirect contact with American “leaders” or up and coming leaders and their friends allow you a clearer viewpoint and insight into motivation and possible future actions.

To Americans, whose ethos is one of “being straight forward,” all this convoluted stuff of spies and such seems strange and from another time. Sadly, we need to wise up. The rest of the world does not work this way and it did not stop spying because the Cold War ended. There will always be a need for spies and people who search for spies. That is the way of the world.