Some Thoughts of Canada Day: Forces More Powerful than Nations

Just as I was finishing John LeCarré's thriller Absolute Friends, comes the news of the arrest of 10 people, apparently Russian spies in deep, deep cover. The book is vintage LeCarré: Ted Mundy, a Brit sucked into the spying game through student protests of the 1960s becomes life-long friends with Sasha, a stunted German radical student. For years they pass secrets back and forth across the Iron Curtain, but when the Soviet Union breaks up they lose contact with each other since their services seem no longer to be wanted. But three or four years into the Second Iraqi War they meet up again, with Sasha playing recruiter for a shadowy movement that aims to change the world.

All is not what it seems, of course, and the end is extremely complicated. It's a pretty grim look at the way certain, mostly extra-governmental powers control the world. When I put it aside, I shook my head in admiration at LeCarré's invention. But, I thought, while this kind of shenanigans may have gone on during the World Wars and the Cold War, what LeCarré paints must be passé.

I was wrong, it seems. The New York Times reports that the suspects picked up all had been undercover for years. They were supposed to be looking for various kinds of sensitive information, but there weren't many secrets for them to send back, it seems. Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser write: "The assignments, described in secret instructions intercepted by the F.B.I., were to collect routine political gossip and policy talk that might have been more efficiently gathered by surfing the Web. And none of the 11 people accused in the case face charges of espionage, because in all those years they were never caught sending classified information back to Moscow, American officials said."

This makes one wonder if the Russians got tired of supporting the whole structure, and so allowed the FBI to pick them up. I doubt if I would have thought that, had I not just finished Absolute Friends, but certainly LeCarré suggests that in the spy game, if what you're doing is not profitable for your handlers, you're strung up for the dogs to take down.

Apparently one of the couples arrested was pretending to be Canadian. The Globe and Mail reports a former KGB general saying that Canada has been a favoured point of departure for Russian (and before that Soviet) espionage forays in to the US. That may have been because Canada was seen as being slightly less uptight about the Cold War, or because small differences in accent and comportment could always be put down to "Canadian-ness."

I wonder, though, if the current swing to the right in Canadian politics hasn't made pretending to be Canadian less attractive for Russian spies, and that might have contributed to their cover being blown. We'll probably never know. What is clear, however, is that there are forces in the world that are bigger than individual nations, as the difficulty in getting BP and other oil companies to be responsible attests. And it is in contemplating these facts that LeCarré's book becomes truly scary.