You Forgot Your Double Security Check

Abstract

Just three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the British historian Phillip Knightly published an unconventional history of western espionage entitled The Second Oldest Profession. The title cleverly ranked the sordidness of espionage just shy of the dirty secrets of prostitution (the oldest profession) and foreshadowed one of the book's central theses. The secret history of intelligence communities, Knightly argues, remains untold not because it is comprised of classified material. The history remains untold, he argues, because it is comprised of unimpressive, exaggerated successes accompanied by countless failed performances and because a full critical assessment of this history would counter the very justification for the existence of intelligence communities as such. While a questionable use of the veil of national security is certainly a plausible reason that this history is obscured from the critical scrutiny, my paper argues that however unimpressive the record of the intelligence community might be, intelligence communities thrive not because of a clever ability to obscure their short-comings but because they appeal to a more basic cultural desire to believe in performance, particularly performance shrouded in mystery and particularly mystery that performs as a surrogate for memory. They themselves are not immune to this desire.

Examples from the history of espionage that illustrate this point are numerous, but my paper suggests that there are few better examples than that of Great Britain's “Special Operations Executive,” or SOE during WWII. As a focal point, I am specifically interested in the frequent capture of SOE agents by Germans in Holland and France who then coerced the captured SOE agents into transmitting false reports to London that seduced the British into sending more agents who, in turn, were met, captured and also coerced by the Germans into transmitting false reports. Drawing upon an odd configuration of theories about performance, encryption, radio drama and poetic discourse, my essay explores how the multi-layered performances that these false transmissions required played against agreed upon protocols for signaling capture. In short, my paper explores the question of why the authorities in London repeatedly chose – indeed, were culturally predisposed – to believe the radio performances and forget the signs designed to signal capture and failure.

Notes

¹ An online version of Kipling's short story can be found at: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/traffics/chapter7.html

² For historians like Philip Knightley, such moments are typical within intelligence communities and are part of masking its closely guarded secret history. Indeed, the secret history of intelligence communities, Knightley argues, remains untold not because it is comprised of classified material but because it is comprised of unimpressive, exaggerated successes accompanied by countless failed performances and because a full critical assessment of this history would counter the very justification for the existence of intelligence communities as such.