The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (31 page)

A double agent is said by the FBI to be an agent “engaged in clandestine activity for two or more intelligence services who provides information about one service to another.” In his letter from Allenwood, Rick Ames offered a subtler definition: “A double agent may be of two sorts: one who was a bona fide agent of an espionage service but who was
turned, tumbled
or recruited by another without the first service’s knowledge or one who falsely gains the trust of an espionage service in order to serve another. A
dangle
would be of the latter sort, one who volunteers, walks in or brings himself attractively to the attention of the target service.”

I had asked Ames for the etymology of
wet work
. “This is a literal translation of the GRU/NKVD [former Soviet intelligence agencies] jargon for ‘killing’-assassination or elimination of people by murder. It’s never been used as CIA jargon, since no comparable operational programs existed. The closest to it would be
executive action,
under which assassination, physical violence of some sort or other extreme (and highly compartmented) action could be carried out.”

What about the fearsome euphemism
termination with extreme prejudice
? “The phrase
termination with prejudice
has nothing to do with extreme actions (ditto for
extreme prejudice
),” he notes, “but merely with the discharge of an agent and a notation not to rehire.”

There goes a nicely sinister phrase back into bureaucratic limbo.

What about
traces
? “The idea here is the product of an inquiry to a database,” Ames writes, “traditionally a card index in which the cards contain information on persons or things and usually a cross-reference to documents and files from which the index cards were prepared.
Trace
as espionage jargon surely was adapted from similar usages in the wider world:
skip trace,
or lest we forget Mr. Keene, tracer of lost persons.”

(
Skip trace
is the method of tracking down a missing person—one who has “skipped,” or run away—by checking credit-card and hotel registration records, as in “the girl in the
drop-dead
dress at the
dead drop
hired Mr. Keene to put in a
skip trace
to find the deadbeat dad.” My age group shares with Ames the memory of Mr. Keene, a radio character in the ’40s who came on between
Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy
and
The
Green Hornet.
)

And what of the linguistic workings of Hanssen’s mind, beyond the confines of spookspeak? If the file of correspondence between accused spy and Kremlin control is authentic, we have Hanssen writing to the KGB, “I have proven
inveterately
loyal.”

Inveterate,
its root the same as
veteran
’s, has a historical sense of “long-standing” but with a sinister connotation: Shakespeare’s Richard II was assured of “no
inveterate
malice,” and John Milton in 1645 questioned those who “grow
inveterately
wicked.” Even today, the synonyms are “obstinate, habitual, malignant, hardened.” Unless Hanssen was being exquisitely subtle about the evil empire for which he is charged with spying, he should not have modified
loyal
with
inveterately
.

Worse, the accused spy is an
inveterate
mixer of metaphor. “So far,” reads his purported letter to the KGB, “my ship has successfully navigated the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The last seven words are from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, wholly out of sync with the navigation of a ship. Literate spooks saw a sea of troubles in that; Hanssen would more suitably have navigated Scylla and Charybdis.

However, in sending a warning to his Moscow handlers about the FBI’s closing in on Felix Bloch, an American diplomat suspected of somewhat clumsily spying for the Russians, Hanssen wrote with dialectical accuracy, “Bloch was such a
shnook
… . I almost hated protecting him.”

Synonymous with
jerk
or the more recent
nerd, shnook
is an Americanized Yiddishism probably derived from the German
Schnucke,
“a small or weak sheep.” (Hanssen, Leo Rosten and I all spell it without the
c
.)

Shnook
is not proper spookspeak and surely confused the KGB control in charge of the
mole
. Unless, of course, some skilled dialectologist in the KGB concocted the file in order to place Hanssen in our hands as a grand
dangle,
but that is what spookspeak calls
sickthink
.

I do not believe you are correct in placing Mr. Keene between Jack Armstrong and the Green Hornet. When I grew up in the thirties, it was Jack Armstrong, Little Orphan Annie, and Superman that I listened to. Mr. Keene was for adults, and would have been post-dinner fare. However, since by the forties I was into baseball and disdaining of those kids’ shows and Mr. Keene, I have no proof you are wrong (hence my use of the word “believe” above).

I also believe that you were stretching in describing Mata Hari as “going to a
dead drop
in a
drop-dead
dress.” Why would she want to attract the attention
of every slobbering agent in the country while she was doing her dirty work? Ordinary clothing would have been far more effective.

George Gerson

Westfield, New Jersey

“SIS,” as used by Aldrich Ames and quoted in your column, does not stand
for “Senior Intelligence Service.” It stands for “Secret Intelligence Service,”
the British agency more widely known as “MI6.”

In spook history, it also stands for (a) the Special Intelligence Service of the
FBI, the WWII American overseas intelligence service in the Western Hemisphere; (b) the Signal Intelligence Service, the communications intelligence service of the United States Army; (c) Servizio Informazioni Segrete, the intelligence service of the Italian Navy.

Thaddeus Holt

Former Undersecretary of the Army

Point Clear, Alabama

A second column on spookspeak, and I’m happy to see my rather gray comments were of some use to you. And I’m sure you’re accustomed to your correspondents’ endless follow-ups!

I didn’t spell out SIS, unfortunately, it’s
Secret
Intelligence Service. Over there, the “Senior Service” is the Royal Navy (and I can’t resist the echo of “Silent Service” for the submariners in the U.S. Navy).

My handwriting is at fault at another point. You quote me on a double agent as “one who was turned, tumbled or recruited.” I meant my scribble to read “doubled.” But “tumbled” is very nice, indeed, a serendipitous discovery which would be a lively addition to the jargon. If you’re working on another spy novel, maybe you can help it along.

Secret, special
and
sensitive
are adjectives beloved of espionage bureaucrats. They allow boxes of organizational charts representing unmentionable functions to be given names. (Angleton’s CI staff [James J. Angleton and CIA counterintelligence] was a prolific user.) So when you see the “S,” be careful.

As I re-read my comments on “wet work,” I wonder if you’ve already heard protests about my phrase, “since no comparable operations [CIA] programs existed.” It’s my belief that the agency’s assassinations have always been ad hoc efforts, organized usually at the behest of policymakers above the agency—and usually unsuccessful. I suppose I would be a bit less shocked today were we to learn otherwise, than I was in the early ’70s by the ad hoc operations. I had been assured for years, secretly and solemnly by senior and working-level agency officers, that while accidents and violent political events can kill, the agency had not and would not embark on an assassination.

The “in place” term is rather old-fashioned; we must remember that the FBI is a counterespionage service, and picks up espionage jargon only at second hand and often not quite with the same understanding (I should say that the FBI has a really fine and vivid jargon of its own). “In place” originated as a way of contrasting an agent with a defector. “Defector in place” or even “to defeat someone in place” was common usage in the late ’50s and into the ’60s, but is pretty much dead today. But the “in place” was attractive because it suggested that the agent was where the action was, inside an institutional target. “Penetration agent” is a good variant on this idea. But at this point I am trying your patience, so will close.

Aldrich Ames

White Deer, Pennsylvania

The Yiddishism
shnook
is not derived from German
Schnucke,
“a small or weak sheep.” This derivation, from Rosten’s
The Joys of Yiddish,
is wrong, as Rosten himself acknowledged in his later book,
Hooray for Yiddish!
Yiddish
shnuk
means, “an elephant’s trunk, a snout.” And the transferred sense of “jerk” is a slangy American innovation.

Sol Steinmetz

New Rochelle, New York

Moral Clarity.
“No great nation can abandon the obligations of
moral
clarity,
” said Senator John McCain last month, “for the convenience of situational ethics.” In his speech to the American Israeli Political Action Committee, he repeated the phrase
moral clarity
three times. (McCain’s speech led with “There’ll always be an Israel,” a paraphrase of the 1939 song by Ross Parker and Hugh Charles, “There’ll Always Be an England.”)

This followed some 1,100 hits on
moral clarity
in the Dow Jones database over the past twenty-two years, almost 550 since September 11. On the morning after the Qaeda attacks, the phrase appeared in the monthly column written by Robert Kagan, the hard-liner at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the
Washington Post
. Kagan said he hoped that Americans would respond to the attacks “with the same
moral clarity
and courage as our grandfathers did.”

Later that day, William Bennett, conservative author of
The Death of
Outrage,
used the phrase five times in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s
Hardball,
beginning with “This is a moment for
moral clarity
.” (Six months later, it appeared as the subtitle of Bennett’s new book,
Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism
.) Charles Kraut-hammer’s column in the
Washington Post
the week after the attacks was headlined “We Need
Moral Clarity
” because, he wrote, “we are already beginning to hear the voices of moral obtuseness.” The voice he had in mind was Susan Sontag’s in the
New Yorker,
where Sontag denounced those writers outraged by the terrorist attack for what she called their “self-righteous drivel.”

As these usages show, the ringing phrase
moral clarity
has a clearly conservative political coloration. The
Chicago Tribune
noted that White House officials saw President George W. Bush’s plain talk about “evildoers” as a virtue: “He is bringing ‘
moral clarity
’ to a convoluted world, aides said, just as President Ronald Reagan did when he declared the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.’”

Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman agreed last month that Bush “has brought a
moral clarity
to the conflict we are in.” However, by pressuring Israel “not to do exactly what we ourselves have done to fight terror in Afghanistan, … I’m sorry to say the Bush administration has recently muddied our
moral clarity
.”

(A tangent: Lieberman’s prepared text reads
muddied;
many newspaper accounts of the speech reported his verb as
muddled.
He may have used both, at different times. To
muddy,
from the metaphor of beclouding clear water with earth, thereby to make turbid and obscure vision, now has the extended sense of “to confuse.” To
muddle,
with the same origin, has a more Mr. Magoo-like quality, defined in the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “to busy oneself in a confused, unmethodical and ineffective manner.” End tangent.)

The earliest use of the phrase
moral clarity
I can find is by the University of Chicago philosophy professor James Hayden Tufts, who said in a 1934 speech to the American Philosophical Association that “the law is often thought to be the most conservative of institutions. It is necessarily conservative, for it uses compulsion and therefore may well hesitate to move in advance of general
moral clarity
.” The phrase was picked up in the ’80s and increased in usage in the next decade. The
Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, describing the pope’s meeting in 1999 with President Clinton, observed that the pontiff may have received a public-opinion boost from the president: “
Moral clarity
is all well and good, but you’ve got to keep those poll numbers up.”