Spy Stories
I saw Brad Feld's post about See No Evil which reminded me of a couple things I'd read or seen recently. Brad describes himself as "hugely cynical about the intelligence machinery of our government", which is not me. It seems to me that WWII gave the Allies such a string of resounding successes on the intelligence front, particularly in codebreaking and traffic analysis, that we've become somewhat unrealistic in our expectations of what can be achieved by pure intelligence work.
My father gave me a copy of Peter Wright's Spycatcher around Christmastime. It was a fairly easy and engaging read on Wright's career with MI-5, a somewhat unlikely path from shepherd to scientist to counter-intelligence. The key story in Wright's biography is his pursuit of a suspected high-level spy within MI-5, and this storyline dominates the entire book, but I was really struck by the number of intelligence failures Wright documents. In fact, it seemed to me that even when he documents a success, it's tempered by other failures. In the 50's through the 70's, it seemed that British Intelligence couldn't score an outright victory against the Soviets.
I'd contrast that with The Good Shepherd. This movie frankly bored me - it turned out to be mostly fiction. The movie was supposedly based on the life of James Jesus Angleton (incidentally, Peter Wright was supposedly good friends with Angleton), but I was left unsure of what parts were based in fact and what parts just made good story. The storyline made a great deal of the main character's failings as a husband and father, which are interesting character elements, but at the same time it seems like cheating to take a character like Angleton, with his own personal insanities, and substitute in someone else. Surely the story would have been improved by either making it more biographical, or by making the main character less of a fictionalization of a pivotal historical figure.