Early industrial espionage...........

 

     His tour of midland and north England in the company of two fellow scientists gave Franklin the chance to study the Industrial Revolution that was booming there.  He visited an iron and tin factory in Rotherham, the metal casting shop in Birmingham, and a silk mill in Derby where 63,700 reels were turning constantly "and the twist process is tended by children of about 5 to 7 years old." . . .

     Franklin had denounced English mercantile trading laws, which were designed to suppress manufacturing in her colonies, by arguing (a bit disingenuously) that she would never have to fear that America would become an industrial competitor.  In his letters from his tour in 1771, however, he sent detailed advice about creating silk, clothing, and metal industries that would make the colonies self-sufficient.  He had become "more and more convinced," he wrote his Massachusetts friend Thomas Cushing, of the "impossibility" that England would be able to keep up with America's growing demand for clothing.  "Necessity therefore, as well as prudence, will soon induce us to seek resources in our own industry."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Leadership............................

     The U-2 program was the game changer.   It revealed that the USSR was testing missiles but was not able yet to deploy them.

     The political problem for the administration that attached to the Sputnick "shock" rested with the fact that Eisenhower, and only a handful of other key officials, knew about the top-secret U-2 program that was capable of providing aerial surveillance of the USSR's missile installations and other military capability.

      Numerous U-2 flights since 1956 has shown Eisenhower and his small team that the Soviet Union was by no means ahead of the United States in any major category.  Given this knowledge, the president fought back attempts to remedy our vulnerabilities with crash military programs—and expenditure of more money—as the primary way to salve the nation's bruised ego.

      As Eisenhower thought about how to manage the valuable U-2 program, he was convinced that it would be a more effective means of intelligence gathering if it remained secret.  Nevertheless, the information could have removed much of the political heat the president faced; even Secretary of State John Foster Dulles encouraged him to use the U-2 information as a way to reassure the public.  But as Barry Goldwater later observed, "Ike took the heat, grinned, and kept his mouth shut."

-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led:  The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions

      

Opening paragraphs..................

Our meeting was not contrived.  Not by me, not by Ed, not by any of the hidden hands supposedly pulling at his strings.  I was not targeted.  Ed was not put up to it.  We were neither covertly nor aggressively observed.  He issued a sporting challenge.  I accepted it.  We played.  There was no contrivance, no conspiracy, no collusion.  There are events in my life - only a few these days, it's true - that admit of one version only.  Our meeting was such an event.  My telling of it never wavered in all the times they made me repeat it.

-John Le Carré,  Agent Running In The Field

Opening paragraphs..............

It was Beatrice Kenton who first questioned the identity of the new girl.  She did so in the staff room, at a quarter past three, on a Friday in late November.  The mood was festive and faintly rebellious, as was the case most Friday afternoons.  It is a truism that no profession welcomes the end of the workweek with more anticipation that teachers—even teachers at elite institutions such as the International School of Geneva.  The chatter was of plans for the weekend.  Beatrice abstained, for she had none, a fact she did not wish to share with her colleagues.  She was fifty-two, unmarried, and with no family to speak of other than a rich aunt who granted her refuge each summer at her estate in Norfolk.  Her weekend routing consisted of a trip to the Migros and a walk along the lakeshore for the sake of her waistline, which, like the universe, was ever expanding.  First period Monday was an oasis in an otherwise Empty Quarter of solitude.

-Daniel Silva,  The New Girl

Opening paragraphs........................

     None of it would have come to pass - not the desperate quest for the traitor, not the strained alliances nor the needless deaths - were it not for poor Heathcliff.  He was their tragic figure, their broken promise.  In the end, he would prove to be yet another feather in Gabriel's cap.  That said, Gabriel would have preferred that Heathcliff were still on his side of the ledger.  Assets like Heathcliff do not come along every day, sometimes only once in a career, rarely twice.  Such was the nature of espionage, Gabriel would lament.  Such was life itself.

-Daniel Silva,  the Other Woman

And forget making good use of it..............

artist here               source here

Opening paragraphs....................

     For something so unprecedented, so fraught with institutional risk, it was all handled with a minimum of fuss.  And quietly, too.  That was the remarkable thing about it, the operational silence with which it was carried out.  Yes, there had been the dramatic announcement broadcast live to the nation, and the splashy first Cabinet meeting, and the lavish party at Ari Shamron's lakeside villa in Tiberias where all the friends and collaborators from his remarkable past - the spymasters, the politicians, the Vatican priests, the London art dealers, even an inveterate art thief from Paris - had come to wish him well.  But otherwise it came to pass with scarcely a ripple.  One day Uzi Navot was seated behind his large smoked-glass desk in the chief's office, and the next, Gabriel was in his place.  Absent Navot's modern desk, mind you, for glass wasn't Gabriel's style.

-Daniel Silva,  House of Spies

Opening paragraphs.........................

     It was Toulouse that would prove to be Hannah Weinberg's undoing.  That night she telephoned Alain Lambert, a contact at the Interior Ministry, and told him that this time something would have to be done.  Alain promised a swift response.  It would be bold, he promised Hannah, boldness being the default response of a fonctionnaire when in reality he planned to do nothing at all.  The following morning the minister himself paid a visit to the site of the attack and issued a vague call for "dialogue and healing."  To the parents of the three victims he offered only regrets.  "We will do better," he said before returning hastily to Paris.  "We must."

-Daniel Silva,  The Black Widow

In my limited reading experience, rare is the author (the only exception that comes to mind being Patrick O'Brian) who can carry his hero through sixteen books and have the sixteenth be the best yet.  This is a really good very good stay up all night book.

Opening paragraphs....................................

     It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first  alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv.  Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive.  Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that be then had settled over them all.
-Daniel Silva, The Secret Servant

It is a complicated world.....................

Ben Casnocha spends some time in Germany.   Here is his report.  A wee excerpt here:

NSA spying on German officials, including Merkel’s cell phone, came up over and over again. All of the Americans on the trip were surprised at how upsetting the spying scandal was to the German government and German people. Although I don’t know what the Americans gained through the spying operation, it seems incredibly unlikely that the benefits outweighed the costs. The damage to the trust and cooperation between the two countries appears to be immense. “Are we friends or just partners?” This is a question Germans asked over and over. There’s a difference in their minds. Friends cooperate in all sorts of ways that partners would not; friends do not spy on each other.

Opening paragraphs..............................

In the small hours of a blustery October morning in a south Devon coastal town that seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants, Magnus Pym got out of his elderly country taxi-cab and, having paid the driver and waited till he had left, struck out across the church square.  His destination was a terrace of ill-lit Victorian boarding houses with names like Bel-a-Vista, The Commodore and Eureka.  In build he was powerful but stately, a representative of something.  His stride was agile, his body forward-sloping in the best tradition of the Anglo-Saxon administrative class.  In the same attitude, whether static or in motion, Englishmen have hoisted flags over distant colonies, discovered the sources of great rivers, stood on the decks of sinking ships.  He had been travelling in one way or another for sixteen hours but he wore no overcoat or hat.  He carried a fat black briefcase of the official kind and in the other hand a green Harrods bag.  A strong sea wind lashed at his city suit, salt rain stung his eyes, balls of spume skimmed across his path.  Pym ignored them.  Reaching the porch of a house marked "No Vacancies"  he pressed the bell and waited, first for the outside light to go on, then for the chains to be unfastened from the inside.  While he waited a church clock began striking five.  As if in answer to its summons Pym turned on his heel and stared back at the square.  At the graceless tower of the Baptist church posturing against the racing clouds.  At the writhing monkey-puzzle trees, pride of the ornamental gardens.  At the empty bandstand.  At the bus shelter.  At the dark patches of the side streets.  At the doorways one by one.
-John Le Carre,  A Perfect Spy

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote....................................

" The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Kevin Drum writes:

"You might not know this if you subsist on a diet of cable news shouting matches, but it really is possible to believe two things at once:

• Intelligence agencies are a necessary fact of life and governments have a legitimate interest in keeping their operations secret. Anyone who works in the intelligence community knows this, and knows that security breaches are a serious business that will lead to prosecution.
• Americans have recently learned a lot about how pervasive our surveillance operations are, and it's laughable to think we would have learned any of it if Snowden hadn't done what he did. In the end, even if he's made some mistakes along the way, he's done a public service.

I believe both these things."

Me too.

Snooping............................

Walter Russell Mead pens a long, interesting, and insightful essay on the domestic phone surveillance and eavesdropping being employed by the Obama administration.

"The answers are anything but easy; the dangers of terror and the dangers of tyranny are both very real."

Choices, choices, choices.  I suspect the real damage inflicted by the IRS/Tea Party brouhaha is that it has taken the option of the President saying "Trust me" totally off the table.  

1963..........................

John le Carre's third work, and first best seller, was published in 1963.  It is the novel Ian Fleming never would have written.  There was the time I spent a year or two lost in the world of George Smiley, and was always grateful for it.  Interesting book review is here.

Speaking of the spy game..................

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