A spy story devoid of 007 thrills
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Maswood Alam Khan
When I was a school-going boy in the 1960s I can't remember now whether it was a report published in a newspaper or just a rumour spread through words of mouth with a motive to intensifying animosity towards India that an Indian spy was caught red-handed while he was transmitting secret information about Pakistan army from inside a mosque through a powerful miniature wireless set during India-Pakistan war in 1965. The story was a real thriller to me as I heard from my classmates that the Indian spy had been serving for more than 12 years as an Imam of the mosque located very much inside the belly of Dhaka cantonment! From that time on I was keen on stories about espionage and counter-espionage and even developed a boyhood fantasy to become one day a spy for my country. Later after passing my SSC examination I was kind of addicted to James Bond movies for their spying thrills.
Last month when I first read about 11 people accused by the United States for spying for Russia, like many readers and TV viewers who were young in the 1960s or the 1970s and then avid followers of spy stories of Russia and USA during Cold War I was excited and hoped to learn many thrilling stories about the arrested Russian spies' clandestine missions in the United States.
But on Friday night last as I was watching BBC TV news my enthusiasm was lost as the news said it took only a few minutes to swap the US and Russian spies in an unromantic exchange at Vienna airport. One plane, the Vision Airlines Boeing 767-200 from New York, brought 10 Russian agents deported from the US after a court hearing at which they admitted being agents for a foreign country. The other, the Russian Yakovlev Yak-42 plane, was said to have brought four people convicted of spying in Russia but given a presidential pardon after they signed to admit their guilt. Both planes, parked side-by-side at Vienna airport, took off with the swapped spies after about 90 minutes.
One Russian agent skipped bail and fled away from Cuba and the rest 10 Russian agents pleaded guilty in New York to "conspiracy to act as unregistered agents (not even spies) of a foreign country"; more serious money laundering charges against them were also surprisingly dropped.
Whereas such a swap of spies between Russia and America took years with a lot of dramatic and diplomatic twists and wrangles during the period of Cold War there was no buildup of hypes or tensions in Russia or America and nothing much one could find in their espionage activities like those classic elements of a Bond film: an unending suspense, a diabolical plan, a wild goose chase, an indestructible henchman, an exciting sequence, gadget-laden sports cars, implanting wireless earphones or a gun battle at the end between the good guys and the bad guys before the spies were handcuffed. No drama or diplomatic tensions we could watch or hear in the trading of spies like the thrills and shrills we in our old golden days were used to watching in 007 movies created by Albert Broccoli based on the Ian Fleming-authored fiction 'James Bond'.
Espionage is a part of international diplomacy since the first spy manual "The Art of War" was written by Sun Tzu some 2,500 years ago. A successful espionage can provide insight into intentions, plans, and human dynamics of a country that cannot be gleaned from intercepted communications or pictures taken from space and it is an open secret that since the end of the World War II there has never been a day that the Soviet Union or Russia was not spying on the United States, or vice versa.
Espionage will continue, no matter whether Russia and America have become friends or enemies. Espionages among allies are also essential as you never know when an ally may suddenly turn into a foe.
The timing of the arrests of 11 people accused of being part of an espionage ring under deep cover for Russia was however a little embarrassing as it happened right after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to America and at a time when Presidents Obama and Medvedev had "reset" the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Resetting relationship however did not mean that the U.S. and Russian interests or perspectives were aligned and that there was no issue of disagreement between them.
The two countries as usual will remain at loggerheads over many issues like that of Iran. Russia will always be tempted to continue their historical efforts to ferret out America's economic secrets and steal its weapons technology and America too will leave no stone unturned to glean info about Russia's secret deals with countries suspected of developing nuclear technology. In a world where even allies spy on one another, it would be sheer foolishness on the part of these two big powers or for other powers in the making not to eavesdrop on each other.
It is an enigma to us why the recently arrested Russian spies were termed as agents and were not charged with espionage and the grievous charges of money laundering against them were also dropped from their charge sheets---a kind of phenomena we are used to hearing taking place in a backward country run by a dishonest head where one having good connections with the high-up can easily sneak into an underworld of criminals to commit a crime and then creep out of a legal dragnet through an unnoticeable backdoor with the support of the law enforcement agencies.
As was evident from the news reports, the Russian spies perhaps would not have been arrested at all if only they could register themselves as Russian representatives or agents as additional conjuncts added to their business identities in USA. What a farcical cover-up easy to make to hide espionage! One may now wonder: "Were the Russian spies chummy with the FBI? Or, was it a show-off to burnish the FBI capacity for vigilance to make up for their recent failings in detecting terrorist plans in advance?"
If USA was so eager not to strain the newly 'reset' relationship with Russia, as was apparent by the hurried swap of the spies, was it at all necessary to arrest the spies so publicly in the first place when it was clear that they were not involved in any dangerous activity like getting access to deeply classified information or passing out any information that was not easily available for a person visiting or residing in the USA? In fact the info the agents gleaned through their social connections and shenanigans are reportedly accessible to anyone who knows how to browse internet websites from any corner of the world at any distance.
The best we have come to know about the activities of the Russian agents are their partying in clubs and their hobbies of posting comments and photographs on Facebook.
The agents were so lackadaisical that they had left their critical password written on a piece of paper that was easily picked by FBI; the Russian agents found it perhaps too tiresome to memorize the password. What a contrast between modern-day Russian agents and those glamorous agents like Gary Powers, the CIA U-2 spy plane pilot for whom Rudolph Abel the Soviet spymaster was exchanged in 1962 or the famous Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky who was swapped for the husband-and-wife Czech espionage team of Karl and Hana Koecher in 1986! The ideological edge, the sense of honor the spies in the last century used to feel while undertaking the risk of spying for their country tragically seems to be lacking in the modern-day intelligence jobs.
Shorn of any scope to dig thrills out of the arrested Russian spies journalists in their attempts to spice up the new spy story became desperate to discover in Anna Chapman, one of the arrested ten, a Mata Hari, the femme fatale, to quench the newspaper readers' thirsts for spy thrills.
Daughter of a Russian diplomat the green-eyed, red-haired 28 years old damsel Anna Chapman, born Anna Kushchenko, may captivate thousands of young men and women by her sexy poses on Facebook, but her appeal will remain many light years away from the magical aura or the mystical tumult Mata Hari (Malay for "Eye of Dawn"), the legendary Dutch lady, could create during the first World War. Perhaps the most sensational female spy in the espionage history Mata Hari spied for either France or Germany as the courtesan of powerful men in the government and the military; but she was poignantly executed in 1917 by France despite her passionate defense that she was a double agent and was truly loyal to the French.
I can only feel pity for the young generations who through internet can instantly take in their laptops or cell phones snapshots of scenes from any corner in the world by a simple click of a button but are deprived of the thrills and spills we in our salad days could enjoy while watching in a spy movie our favorite hero Cary Grant or our favorite heroine Audrey Hepburn sniffing around, wearing a coat with a camera concealed in a button.
E-mail : maswood@hotmail.com
When I was a school-going boy in the 1960s I can't remember now whether it was a report published in a newspaper or just a rumour spread through words of mouth with a motive to intensifying animosity towards India that an Indian spy was caught red-handed while he was transmitting secret information about Pakistan army from inside a mosque through a powerful miniature wireless set during India-Pakistan war in 1965. The story was a real thriller to me as I heard from my classmates that the Indian spy had been serving for more than 12 years as an Imam of the mosque located very much inside the belly of Dhaka cantonment! From that time on I was keen on stories about espionage and counter-espionage and even developed a boyhood fantasy to become one day a spy for my country. Later after passing my SSC examination I was kind of addicted to James Bond movies for their spying thrills.
Last month when I first read about 11 people accused by the United States for spying for Russia, like many readers and TV viewers who were young in the 1960s or the 1970s and then avid followers of spy stories of Russia and USA during Cold War I was excited and hoped to learn many thrilling stories about the arrested Russian spies' clandestine missions in the United States.
But on Friday night last as I was watching BBC TV news my enthusiasm was lost as the news said it took only a few minutes to swap the US and Russian spies in an unromantic exchange at Vienna airport. One plane, the Vision Airlines Boeing 767-200 from New York, brought 10 Russian agents deported from the US after a court hearing at which they admitted being agents for a foreign country. The other, the Russian Yakovlev Yak-42 plane, was said to have brought four people convicted of spying in Russia but given a presidential pardon after they signed to admit their guilt. Both planes, parked side-by-side at Vienna airport, took off with the swapped spies after about 90 minutes.
One Russian agent skipped bail and fled away from Cuba and the rest 10 Russian agents pleaded guilty in New York to "conspiracy to act as unregistered agents (not even spies) of a foreign country"; more serious money laundering charges against them were also surprisingly dropped.
Whereas such a swap of spies between Russia and America took years with a lot of dramatic and diplomatic twists and wrangles during the period of Cold War there was no buildup of hypes or tensions in Russia or America and nothing much one could find in their espionage activities like those classic elements of a Bond film: an unending suspense, a diabolical plan, a wild goose chase, an indestructible henchman, an exciting sequence, gadget-laden sports cars, implanting wireless earphones or a gun battle at the end between the good guys and the bad guys before the spies were handcuffed. No drama or diplomatic tensions we could watch or hear in the trading of spies like the thrills and shrills we in our old golden days were used to watching in 007 movies created by Albert Broccoli based on the Ian Fleming-authored fiction 'James Bond'.
Espionage is a part of international diplomacy since the first spy manual "The Art of War" was written by Sun Tzu some 2,500 years ago. A successful espionage can provide insight into intentions, plans, and human dynamics of a country that cannot be gleaned from intercepted communications or pictures taken from space and it is an open secret that since the end of the World War II there has never been a day that the Soviet Union or Russia was not spying on the United States, or vice versa.
Espionage will continue, no matter whether Russia and America have become friends or enemies. Espionages among allies are also essential as you never know when an ally may suddenly turn into a foe.
The timing of the arrests of 11 people accused of being part of an espionage ring under deep cover for Russia was however a little embarrassing as it happened right after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to America and at a time when Presidents Obama and Medvedev had "reset" the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Resetting relationship however did not mean that the U.S. and Russian interests or perspectives were aligned and that there was no issue of disagreement between them.
The two countries as usual will remain at loggerheads over many issues like that of Iran. Russia will always be tempted to continue their historical efforts to ferret out America's economic secrets and steal its weapons technology and America too will leave no stone unturned to glean info about Russia's secret deals with countries suspected of developing nuclear technology. In a world where even allies spy on one another, it would be sheer foolishness on the part of these two big powers or for other powers in the making not to eavesdrop on each other.
It is an enigma to us why the recently arrested Russian spies were termed as agents and were not charged with espionage and the grievous charges of money laundering against them were also dropped from their charge sheets---a kind of phenomena we are used to hearing taking place in a backward country run by a dishonest head where one having good connections with the high-up can easily sneak into an underworld of criminals to commit a crime and then creep out of a legal dragnet through an unnoticeable backdoor with the support of the law enforcement agencies.
As was evident from the news reports, the Russian spies perhaps would not have been arrested at all if only they could register themselves as Russian representatives or agents as additional conjuncts added to their business identities in USA. What a farcical cover-up easy to make to hide espionage! One may now wonder: "Were the Russian spies chummy with the FBI? Or, was it a show-off to burnish the FBI capacity for vigilance to make up for their recent failings in detecting terrorist plans in advance?"
If USA was so eager not to strain the newly 'reset' relationship with Russia, as was apparent by the hurried swap of the spies, was it at all necessary to arrest the spies so publicly in the first place when it was clear that they were not involved in any dangerous activity like getting access to deeply classified information or passing out any information that was not easily available for a person visiting or residing in the USA? In fact the info the agents gleaned through their social connections and shenanigans are reportedly accessible to anyone who knows how to browse internet websites from any corner of the world at any distance.
The best we have come to know about the activities of the Russian agents are their partying in clubs and their hobbies of posting comments and photographs on Facebook.
The agents were so lackadaisical that they had left their critical password written on a piece of paper that was easily picked by FBI; the Russian agents found it perhaps too tiresome to memorize the password. What a contrast between modern-day Russian agents and those glamorous agents like Gary Powers, the CIA U-2 spy plane pilot for whom Rudolph Abel the Soviet spymaster was exchanged in 1962 or the famous Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky who was swapped for the husband-and-wife Czech espionage team of Karl and Hana Koecher in 1986! The ideological edge, the sense of honor the spies in the last century used to feel while undertaking the risk of spying for their country tragically seems to be lacking in the modern-day intelligence jobs.
Shorn of any scope to dig thrills out of the arrested Russian spies journalists in their attempts to spice up the new spy story became desperate to discover in Anna Chapman, one of the arrested ten, a Mata Hari, the femme fatale, to quench the newspaper readers' thirsts for spy thrills.
Daughter of a Russian diplomat the green-eyed, red-haired 28 years old damsel Anna Chapman, born Anna Kushchenko, may captivate thousands of young men and women by her sexy poses on Facebook, but her appeal will remain many light years away from the magical aura or the mystical tumult Mata Hari (Malay for "Eye of Dawn"), the legendary Dutch lady, could create during the first World War. Perhaps the most sensational female spy in the espionage history Mata Hari spied for either France or Germany as the courtesan of powerful men in the government and the military; but she was poignantly executed in 1917 by France despite her passionate defense that she was a double agent and was truly loyal to the French.
I can only feel pity for the young generations who through internet can instantly take in their laptops or cell phones snapshots of scenes from any corner in the world by a simple click of a button but are deprived of the thrills and spills we in our salad days could enjoy while watching in a spy movie our favorite hero Cary Grant or our favorite heroine Audrey Hepburn sniffing around, wearing a coat with a camera concealed in a button.
E-mail : maswood@hotmail.com