Spy Culture and the Making of the Modern Intelligence Agency: From Richard Hannay to James Bond to Drone Warfare by Matthew A. Bellamy A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2018 Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Susan Najita, Chair Professor Daniel Hack Professor Mika Lavaque-Manty Associate Professor Andrea Zemgulys Matthew A. Bellamy [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6914-8116 © Matthew A. Bellamy 2018 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to all my students, from those in Jacksonville, Florida to those in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is also dedicated to the friends and mentors who have been with me over the seven years of my graduate career. Especially to Charity and Charisse. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii List of Figures v Abstract vi Chapter 1 Introduction: Espionage as the Loss of Agency 1 Methodology; or, Why Study Spy Fiction? 3 A Brief Overview of the Entwined Histories of Espionage as a Practice and Espionage as a Cultural Product 20 Chapter Outline: Chapters 2 and 3 31 Chapter Outline: Chapters 4, 5 and 6 40 Chapter 2 The Spy Agency as a Discursive Formation, Part 1: Conspiracy, Bureaucracy and the Espionage Mindset 52 The SPECTRE of the Many-Headed HYDRA: Conspiracy and the Public’s Experience of Spy Agencies 64 Writing in the Machine: Bureaucracy and Espionage 86 Chapter 3: The Spy Agency as a Discursive Formation, Part 2: Cruelty and Technophilia 124 Bureaucracy and Cruelty in Spy Fiction: A Most Wanted Man and Sicario 129 Torture, Cruelty, and Spy Fiction in the “War on Terror” 144 Technophilia, SIGINT, and the Attack on Privacy 155 Chapter 4: Hannay, Burgess, and Bond: Drone Masculinity and the Making of the Modern Intelligence Agent 182 The Public School Boy Goes to War: Buchan, Hannay, and Sandy Arbuthnot 186 The Foreign Sodomite Becomes Domestic 197 iii The Wilde/Lawrence/Auden “Type” in the Inter-war Period 202 The Cambridge Spy Ring and the Lavender Scare 212 James Bond, Drone Masculinity and the Making of the Soldier-Spy 221 Chapter 5: The Bond Effect: James Bond, Drone Masculinity, and Spy Fiction Masculinities 242 Drone Masculinity, Covert Action, and Drone Warfare 245 Spy Fiction, Anti-Bonds, and Alternate Masculinities 258 Chapter 6: Drone Orientalism: A Discourse of the Other in the Culture of Intelligence 287 Drone Orientalism 306 The PlayStation Mentality and War at a Distance 339 Coda 348 BIBLIOGRAPHY 356 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The Circus’ top floor (Tinker, Tailor) 101 Figure 2: Smiley’s Iconic Glasses 103 Figure 3: Emily Blunt as Kate in Sicario 141 Figure 4: Special Forces Silhouetted In the Colors of a Faded American Flag in Sicario 143 Figure 5: The Ticking Clock from 24 (Pinedo) 152 Figure 6: Wiesler the Conflicted Ear from The Lives of Others 161 Figure 7: Ben Whishaw as Q from Skyfall 163 Figure 8: Ben Whishaw from Skyfall, Julia Stiles from The Bourne Supremacy, Alicia Vikander from Jason Bourne, and Kit Harrington from Spooks 166 Figure 9: An establishing shot from Spooks portraying the gleaming modernity of the Dock District, and the cast of Spooks season 1. 167 Figure 10: Christoph Waltz as Blofeld in 2015’s Spectre 293 Figure 11: Bolshevik Scott Towel Ad (Wilson) 299 Figure 12: St. John Philby, as photographed in his book The Heart of Arabia 330 Figure 13: The Drone-View from Spec Ops: The Line 344 Figure 14: Civilians burned by white phosphorous in Spec Ops 344 v ABSTRACT Despite the sometimes fantastic nature of spy fiction, the relation between espionage practice and its cultural reproductions is not as distinct as intelligence agencies might wish. My dissertation breaks from traditional literary analyses of the genre by interrogating how authors, policy makers, and the general public talk about spycraft has influenced what that spycraft actually entails. Spy fiction and intelligence work are connected in a web of incentivization, influence, and reference, and this connection is not merely uni-directional. This dissertation examines critical moments of this cross-connection, beginning in the early 20th century with the formation of MI6 in relation to William Le Queux’s invasion literature and continuing through today’s issues and imaginings of the intelligence community: specifically, torture, drone warfare, and domestic surveillance. Throughout, I draw attention to how shifts in masculinity facilitated by cultural representations, especially James Bond, have affected intelligence work. I also contextualize the role of the “Other” within spy fiction. As a part of this analysis of the Other, I trace the lingering Orientalism that has adhered within spy fiction and spy agencies since the late 19th Century. The alternating give-and-take of intelligence work and its fictionalized representations, or, as I term it, the cultural discourse of espionage, is ripe for exploration and analysis at the present moment. This combined literary, cultural, and historical approach reveals spy fiction as a site to explore broader conceptions of the critic’s role in public discourse. vi Chapter 1 Introduction: Espionage as the Loss of Agency Here are two spy stories. One: In order to assassinate one of the world’s most wanted “terrorists”—Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka “Carlos the Jackal”—the CIA created a false identity for an operative, brainwashed him into becoming a killer, and asked him to engage in violent political action of his own. After drawing Carlos’ attention and being recruited into the Jackal’s organization, the CIA hoped the operative’s training and mental conditioning would take over, ostensibly preparing him to kill the Jackal. In actual practice, his mission ended in failure when the agent’s conscience got the better of him. Two: In order to assassinate one of the world’s most wanted “terrorists”—PLO leader Yassar Arafat—the Israeli Mossad created a false identity for an operative, brainwashed him into becoming a killer, and asked him to engage in violent political action of his own. After drawing Arafat’s attention and being recruited into his organization, the Mossad hoped their operative’s training and mental conditioning would take over, ostensibly preparing him to kill Arafat. In actual practice, his mission ended in failure when the agent’s conscience got the better of him. These stories are almost parallel in their structures, but the first story is the plot of 1980’s The Bourne Identity, while the second story is of an actual operation carried out twelve-years earlier, in 1968, by the Mossad. The Mossad did not base their plan on the yet-to-be-written Bourne novel; how preposterous to think that one of the world’s leading intelligence agencies would design an operation based on a book. They based it on a film. According to historian Ronen Bergman, Mossad commander Binyamin Shalit had seen the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and felt that it made a good model for turning unwitting civilians into trained assassins (Bergman 118). The Bourne novel calls to mind the Arafat 1 attempted assassination, which was an idea that stemmed from The Manchurian Candidate. What the imbricated nature of these examples points to is the entanglement of the reality and the fictions of espionage. Here are a few more examples: The story of a high-level Communist traitor in MI6 revealed by his former best friend is the true story of Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliot, but also the fictional story of Bill Haydon and George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Also, two secret agents have actually peeled off a wetsuit to reveal a tuxedo—James Bond in Goldfinger, Dutch agent Pete Tazelaar during WWII. When an MI6 source makes up a doomsday weapon to improve the life of his family, does one think of Wormold in Our Man in Havana or Source Curveball in the run-up to the Iraq War? Was the CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro via poisoned wet suit and exploding cigars a real CIA plan, or did it happen in a spy spoof from the 60s? (It was real.) Despite the revelations that all our digital communications are being scanned by NSA algorithms, the general public still has very little direct experience with espionage as a real profession. We primarily experience it as a cultural representation of itself, through the pages and screens of spy fiction. Evidence like Binyamin Shalit’s Manchurian Candidate-inspired assassination plan indicates that this out-sized reliance on cultural representation can extend to members of the intelligence world itself. Combined with the secrecy and lack of public accountability within spy work, the temptation to enact fantasies into reality has manifested itself in some incredibly outlandish plans. But what if these fantasies began to shift from the absurd and cartoonish, towards fantasies that devalue the human components of intelligence work—both the human agents that make up the intelligence agency and the common humanity those agents share with the spied-upon? Fantasies in which incentives for efficiency in intelligence work stack one on top of the other, 2 until they form an obscure bureaucracy? Or fantasies for big, splashy, quick results that can end up incentivizing more and more spectacular violence? Fantasy enters into the world of action as ideology. Examining how these fantasies form, who holds them, and how they become codified into policy can give us insight into how the institution of intelligence relates to the cultural idea of intelligence. In fact, the two are not separate nor are they separately analyzable. Espionage is a discursive entity, one that operates across multiple realms of influence simultaneously. This dissertation tracks that influence in fiction, in policy, in public conversation, and in the personal histories of quite a few individuals—intelligence agents, spy fiction authors, and intelligence agents who became spy fiction authors—who have shaped how the public thinks of spy work.