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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In honour of Yalie and erst-while lit crit Doug
Henwood, I'm posting an article I wrote for today's Boston Globe, on the
influence of the New Critics on American counter-intelligence.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><A
href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/12/28/school_for_spies?mode=PF">http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/12/28/school_for_spies?mode=PF</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<H1 class=mainHead>School for spies</H1>
<H2 class=subHead>What the CIA learned (and mislearned) in the groves of
academe.</H2>
<P class=byline>By Jeet Heer, 12/28/2003</P>
<P>COUNTLESS BOOKS AND MOVIES have displayed the seedier elements of the spy
trade: the entrapments, the blackmail, the assassinations. Yet the analytical,
brainy side of the profession has always been of equal importance: There is a
reason why spies are said to belong to the "intelligence community." Just as
James Bond needs his boss M for guidance, real-life spies rely on armchair
accomplices to shape raw data into coherent and meaningful analysis.</P>
<P>But what kind of analysis? Attempting to distinguish "signal" from "noise,"
officials at the CIA and Defense Department debate competing methods of
data-sifting and weigh the aggressive, "hypotheses-driven" style of
interpretation favored by the Pentagon. Probability and risk are continually
assessed, and sometimes the talk can sound nearly philosophical. Referring to
the search for illegal weapons in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
declared on Aug. 5 that "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of
absence."</P>
<P>If such matters arose at a university, they would attract the attention of
philosophers of science or even theorists of literature, who study how to tease
meaning out of texts. And indeed, the academy has profoundly shaped the
rough-and-tumble espionage trade since the founding days of the CIA. In his
classic 1987 study, "Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961,"
Yale historian Robin W. Winks showed how professors took a crucial role in
creating and manning the agency and its forerunner, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS). No university played a greater role than Winks's own. "From
Yale's class of 1943 alone, at least 42 young men entered intelligence work,
largely in the OSS, many to remain on after the war to form the core of the new
CIA," Winks notes.</P>
<P>It wasn't just globe-trotting historians and social scientists who made the
leap. As Winks emphasized, Yale's literature specialists played a key role in
shaping the agency's thinking. Mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, the most
controversial figure in CIA history, began his career as an apprentice of the
New Critics on Yale's English faculty, and his literary training in "close
reading" may have shaped his hyper-skeptical (some would say paranoid) approach
to counterintelligence.</P>
<P>With their emphasis on wide-ranging historical research and, later, the
minutely detailed examination of language, Yale's literary scholars shaped the
CIA's understanding of the world -- for better and for worse.</P>
<P>Among the first of the New Haven intelligence specialists was Wilmarth Lewis,
a well-born dandy who guided Yale University Press's landmark 48-volume edition
of the letters of 18th-century British art collector and novelist Horace
Walpole. As many reviewers noted, the beauty of the Yale Walpole was not in the
actual letters, which tended toward the trivial, but in the footnotes, which
extensively detailed the overlapping networks of patronage and influence that
characterized Walpole's time.</P>
<P>On the eve of 1941 the poet, Yalie, and Librarian of Congress Archibald
MacLeish recruited Lewis into the embryonic intelligence agency being created by
future OSS chief "Wild" Bill Donovan. A Columbia alumnus, Donovan was busily
hiring both sturdy Eastern establishment types and erudite refugees from Nazi
Europe (including the Marxist social theorist Herbert Marcuse).</P>
<P>In late 1941, Lewis became chief of the Central Information Division (CID), a
government agency charged with organizing vast bodies of knowledge so that any
crucial military question could be answered quickly -- an effort reminiscent of
retired Admiral John Poindexter's recent attempt to create a "Total Information
Awareness" database. In the pre-Google world, CID collected postcards of German
cities, popular European newspapers and magazines, and other items, and stored
them on index cards and microfilm.</P>
<P>As University of Arizona professor William H. Epstein explained in a 1990
article for the journal English Literary History: "Lewis and his staff developed
a system for the storage and retrieval of this huge flow of material, a cross-
and counter-indexed catalogue which became the pre-computer model for other
government information systems. This monumental attempt to index the
contemporary world was based on the documentation techniques Lewis and his
sub-editors had devised for the Yale Walpole edition."</P>
<P>But even as it gained currency in Washington, back in New Haven Lewis's style
of extensive historical research was coming under fire from a new generation of
literary scholars. Influenced by the British scholars I.A. Richards and William
Empson, and by the towering presence of T.S. Eliot, the New Critics insisted
that too much historical context could distract the reader from the really
important question: the shape and intrinsic value of a work of literature
itself. Like appraisers of jewelry, literary critics would examine poetry and
prose in fine detail; only an intensive reading of the poem itself could show
how a great work such as John Donne's "The Ecstasy" wove its conflicting
meanings into a coherent whole.</P>
<P>In 1942, erstwhile Yale student Donald Downes recruited English professor
Norman Holmes Pearson into the OSS. As Winks explains, Pearson knew how to read
materials "as intently as possible for hidden messages" because the Yale
Department of English taught him "how to read, really <I>read</I>, closely,
without interruption, how to interrogate a manuscript. . .." (After the war,
Pearson would resume his scholarly career, which included collaborating with his
friend W.H. Auden in the editing of the five-volume anthology "Poets of the
English Language.")</P>
<P>None of the New Haven alumni would be more significant or controversial than
James Jesus Angleton. As a Yale undergraduate in the late 1930s and early `40s,
he distinguished himself as an active supporter of both the New Criticism and
its cultural ally, literary modernism. Furioso, the little journal Angleton
cofounded with poet Reed Whittemore in 1939, published modernist writers like
Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Angleton also invited
Empson to campus.</P>
<P>Following Pearl Harbor, Angleton joined the OSS, where he served with
distinction. In Italy after the war, he organized the covert anticommunist
campaign that secured victory for the Christian Democrats in the crucial
election of 1948. He carried out this task with such flair that he quickly rose
in the CIA, becoming Chief of the Office of Special Operations in `49. In that
capacity, Angleton was responsible for all counterintelligence. But in his
increasingly obsessive search for a "Big Mole" inside the agency, he alienated
colleagues and eventually reached what many considered the outer limits of
paranoia before he was fired in 1974.</P>
<P>The key to understanding Angleton's genius, or madness, may lie in his
training as a literary theorist. Angleton once defined counterintelligence as
"the practical criticism of ambiguity." (As William Epstein observes, this
phrase is "derived from the titles of two of the most influential texts of
formalist criticism, Richards's `Practical Criticism' and Empson's `Seven Types
of Ambiguity."')</P>
<P>The New Critics famously attacked the "intentional fallacy," arguing that the
meaning of a text could not be identified with its author's intentions. They
also put a high value on paradox, indirection, and all the many ways in which a
written artifact does not mean what it seems to mean.</P>
<P>In his rigorous questioning of Soviet defectors, Angleton was a New Critic
par excellence. He almost never took them at their word, fearing as he did that
they might be double agents sent to spread disinformation. "The more solid the
information from a defector, the more you should not trust him, and the more you
should suspect he has something to hide," he once observed.</P>
<P>For Angleton, history resembled a novel by Ford Madox Ford or Henry James,
with a plausible surface story that hid a very different and more troubling tale
if you read it closely enough. He speculated that Joe McCarthy might have been a
KGB agent sent to make anticommunism look bad, and believed the Sino-Russian
split was a ruse. Convinced that a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko was a fraud,
Angleton and his followers at the CIA went to elaborate if fruitless lengths to
get him to admit the "truth" about his deception: They held him in isolation for
at least two years, tortured him and injected him with truth serums. As a
massive wave of suspicion engulfed the agency, many began suspecting that
Angleton himself was the Big Mole.</P>
<P>Now that the Cold War is history, it's clear that Angleton's refusal to
accept straightforward explanations led him seriously astray. The Soviet Union
did penetrate the CIA, but Aldrich Ames was not the Big Mole of Angleton's
theorizing. But even though he is generally dismissed as a crank, Angleton does
continue to have his admirers. New York Times columnist William Safire likes to
recall meeting Angleton and has fondly imagined him "cultivating the orchids in
Spook Heaven." (Angleton died in 1987.) In National Review Online, Michael
Ledeen, a conservative thinker involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, has written
columns imagining what Angleton would say about the war on terrorism. (Karl Rove
has cited Ledeen as one of the chief intellectual influences on the current Bush
administration.)</P>
<P>Both Safire and Ledeen are proponents of a grand unified theory of the Middle
East. Safire believes that Osama bin Laden had ties with Saddam Hussein whereas
Ledeen has argued for connections between the Iranian theocrats and Al Qaeda.
They are, in their way, heirs to the Angleton tradition.</P>
<P>Angleton once described the intelligence world as "a wilderness of mirrors",
a quote taken from one of his favorite poets, T.S. Eliot. For all his reputed
brilliance, Angleton got lost in that wilderness.</P>
<P>Perhaps the moral of Angleton's story can be found in another work of
literature. Norman Rush's recent novel, "Mortals," tells the story of a CIA
agent and John Milton scholar whose cover is his job teaching literature at a
university in Botswana. At one point, Rush's scholar-spy reflects: "The past is
a forest of signs. The problem was that you could only read them when you turned
around and looked back, unfortunately."</P>
<P><I>Jeet Heer is a regular contributor to the National Post of Canada and the
Globe.</I></P>
<P>. . .</P></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>