While some terrific espionage thrillers have been written in the last couple of years (see list below), spying in the 21st c. is not what it once was. First of all, it’s less Agents Running in the Field, the title of one of John le Carré’s late novels and more Analysts Staring at a Computer Screen. To use the intelligence field jargon, more “communications intelligence” and less “human intelligence,” Comint versus Humint.
Further, it’s almost impossible to stay hidden these days, with the proliferation of cameras, facial recognition, gait analysis (Keyser Söze, I’m looking at you), DNA, and AI document analyses. We watched the new movie Mastermind with Josh O’Connor last weekend, a story about an art heist that takes place in 1970, and I kept noticing all the ways in which a crime like that couldn’t happen today. Yeah, I know, tell it to the Louvre. Let’s just say it couldn’t be carried out in the same way. Of course, even in 1970, the Mastermind DID get caught, but that was through the time-honored technique of getting one of the criminals to rat out the others.
Le Carré made stories set in the old Soviet Union into an art form, and many people, me among them, lamented the loss of that old, familiar fictional antagonism. He had to reach far afield for new topics, as in The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener. Well, the world turns and the Russians are back. But during the 90s, the sense that the familiar enemy had evaporated blinded our leaders to the strengthening Al Qaeda.
After 9/11, they got it. And the professionals realized how deficient their assets were. It was disturbingly parallel to the situation at the beginning of the Cold War. Then we didn’t know much about the Soviets, what they were likely to do and whether they had the capacity to do it. In both instances, desperation for information led to torture. And more recently, to the disembodied terror of drone strikes, with the inevitably inexact targeting.
Most recently, the elimination of DEI programs has been especially calamitous for CIA. After years of trying to recruit Asian Americans, African Americans, and Arab Americans who can blend into countries and population groups where whites simply cannot, we’ve deliberately blinded ourselves. We need to know what’s going on in some of these countries, and now we won’t. If you want to read more about the travails of CIA over the years and its current challenges, try The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. Despite all these complications, authors continue to write award-winning espionage novels.
For great spy fiction, try:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley. A Russian translator must escape Moscow, but she knows too much.
The Protocols of Spying by Merle Nygate. Israeli security forces based in London, reeling after the Hamas attack, walk a tightrope.
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry. An American spy, working in Bahrain, takes on a final mission that goes badly awry.
The Tiger and the Bear by Philip Lazar. Journalists with a potentially explosive story must dig deep to find out if it’s true.
Moscow X or The Seventh Floor or, really, anything by David McCloskey.