Darkling Plain The Secret War. By Sanche de Gramont. (Deutsch,
30s.) THIS is a most interesting and important book. It is a study of the unending struggle between the Russians and the West, particularly the Americans, each to obtain intelligence about the other while denying intelligence about them- selves. Mr. de Gramont evaluates the strength, methods, successes and failures of these two huge intelligence and counter-intelligence sys- tems, and gives clear and fascinating summaries of their principal publicised clashes of the last few years, such as the U2 incident, the Blake case, the Abel case and many more. Certain aspects of recent and contemporary history which, to this reader at least, had hitherto been obscure now fall quietly and obviously into place. It is hard to see how a more lucid book could have been written on this dense subject at this time, for Mr. de Gramont has of course not had access to secret, unpublished material. His book is a very real contribution to our under- standing of the dangerous world in which we live.
Or so it seems to me. But of course I cannot judge the factual accuracy of much that he says. Indeed, were I able to do so I should hardly be foolish enough to be writing this review. But so far as my superficial and out-of-date knowledge of the subject goes, I only found one mistake, and for this Mr. de Gramont is perhaps not to blame. Writing about General Geblen, head of one of the West German intelligence agencies, he says: 'The East Germans charge that he was a Nazi and a leader of the "foreign army of the East," a ragged group of Soviet deserters and other non-German anti-Communists.' This is a nonsense. In the Second World War Gehlen, then a senior staff officer, headed a bureau of German military intelligence called Fremde Heere Ost, or 'Foreign Armies East': it was responsible for evaluating and collating infor- mation about the Russian, Polish and other Eastern European armies.
The techniques employed by the Russians and the Americans are fundamentally different, in that the Russians can, and do, employ agents on a massive scale (there are said to be 16,000 Com- munist agents actively spying in Western
Germany alone) while the West has the greatest difficulty in maintaining any agents in the Soviet Union at all. On the other hand senior officers of the KGB and the GRU quite often defect to the West, usually with information of enormous value. Whether this phenomenon, a direct out- come of the Stalin purges and of the post-Stalin struggle for power, will continue remains to be seen. Meanwhile the West has to rely for most of its hard intelligence on cryptanalysis and on overflights. We may thus take it that the recent exploit of Nick and Pop, the crooning cosmo- nauts who so delighted the British press, is a military operation; the Russians hope that one day, perhaps at a time of acute world crisis, they will be able to destroy the American reconnais- sance satellites and thus blind the Western world.
But by then, we trust, the Americans will have evolved alternative methods of counter-measures. Mr. de Gramont has some harsh, and it would seem on the whole justified, criticisms to make of the Central Intelligence Agency with its billion-dollar budgets and its scores of thou- sands of employees. The basic criticism is that, unlike MI6 or the Russians' GRU, the CIA
under Allen Dulles showed an unfortunate ten- dency to depart from its assigned role as a fact-
finding agency and to stray into the slippery paths of policy-making. This was most marked during the Eisenhower administration. Today, and with John McCone in charge of the CIA, there is reason to believe that this unfortunate tendency has been checked.
He is critical, too, of Russian methods. Many of their agents are of inferior quality, psycho- logically unstable as was `Lonsdale,' and some- times inclined to send in reports to please rather than enlighten their superiors. Besides, men trained to think 'dialectically' have a hard time distinguishing truth from falsehood. Perhaps to counteract this, the Centre in Moscow keeps its agents on a very tight rein, and initiative suffers.
There is much else, of great interest, in this book, such as the psychology of Western defec- tors (many are fantasists: some escapists defect the way other escapists get drunk), such as the role of western Communists in the apparats (in general, used for sabotage and propaganda, and not as spies), such as the use of sex in espionage (the Russians have schools for training lady-spies in the amorous arts: the American attitude is that its easier to put a microphone into his
drawing-room than a girl into his bed), such as the payment for secrets (no fixed rate), and much else as well. It is all well worth reading.
CONSTAN INE FIIZGIBBON
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