Last evening, the CBC radio program "Ideas" featured a documentary on spies (Part II). No doubt it was triggered by the death of a former Soviet spy in London last month.
While I commended the effort, I was disappointed by its heavy reference to dialogues between characters in John La Carre's spy novels, which tend to overemphasize cynicism in western field agents. These novels no doubt carry a ring of truth of the world of espionage and their author is a very good writer. The know-it-all attitude and exaggerated cynicism radiated from those pages, however, is annoying.
Real world accounts of what happened is far more fascinating. And we learn from them that betrayals have more complex reasons. Surely the documentary could have been more interesting, had the author been an avid reader of the many memoirs of former spies of the Soviet Bloc and other publications that have benefited from the limited opening of KGB and other government archives, which have shed new light on events and people in the Cold War.
What is praise-worthy about this documentary is its inclusion of vocal comments of several heavy-weight players of the real world, who were veteran spy handlers and high ranking bureaucrats of spy agencies. Hearing their voices is a real treat. The former senior KGB official's command of English is impressive and listening to him is ten times better than trying to figure out Henry Kissinger's mumbling (on other occasions).
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