Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

“Careful not to get too involved with the wrong man. Careful not to let things get out of control.”

“What do you mean by ‘out of control’?”

“You know. Scary. Vulnerable. Like a roller coaster with no brakes.”

“Um-hum,” said Dr. Marcus, nodding gravely.

And so it went, hour after hour, these meandering analytic dialogues. At first Anna had been curious about Dr. Marcus and wanted to please him by giving appropriate answers. Then she began to find his questions intrusive and boring and decided that she disliked him. Finally, by the third day, she found herself relaxed and floating on a tide of self-revelation, saying whatever fell into her head without the slightest embarrassment. Whereupon Dr. Marcus seemed at last to grow tired of the exercise, and began focusing the sessions more closely on matters of tradecraft.

Anna had not realized, until these meetings with Dr. Marcus, the extent to which CIA operations were shaped by psychology. The more he talked, the more obvious it became that modern intelligence work was about understanding vulnerabilities and predispositions, about knowing how to spot the particular traits that made one person a perfect recruit and the other a walking disaster, and ultimately about using the positive and negative reinforcements that allow one human being to condition the behavior of another.

“The Soviets teach their case officers that there are four methods of recruiting an agent,” Dr. Marcus had said one day. “They use an acronym: MISE. It stands for Money, Ideology, Sex, Ego. But the Soviets are wrong, Anna.”

“Why?” Anna had asked. It sounded sensible enough. Money, ideology, sex and ego seemed as inescapable as the four points of the compass.

“Because there is only one motivation that really matters, and that is ego. That is what leads someone to become a spy, to defect, to betray his country. He may rationalize it in other terms. He may see himself as serving a higher cause. Or he may be dreaming about all the money he’s been promised. Or he may think he wants to screw teenage girls in California for the rest of his life. But these are merely the conscious expressions of something deeper. Ideology is not a deep motive. It may be how an agent rationalizes his defection, but the real motivation is something more basic, involving response to authority.”

Anna remembered the lecture almost word for word. And as she lay there in bed in her little flat in Notting Hill Gate thinking about what she would do the next day, she went back through Dr. Marcus’s advice the way a football player might review the play book in his mind the night before a big game.

“There is a life cycle of treason,” Dr. Marcus had said. “Have you ever read Passages?”

Anna nodded. Everybody had read Passages.

“Then you know a lot about how to recruit an agent, because the same factors are at work. I’ve looked at the cases of dozens of spies and defectors, and I’ve found that the ripest time for someone to commit treason is when he’s in his late thirties to mid-forties. The time when he’s hitting mid-career and mid-marriage and taking stock. It’s a passage, of sorts.”

“So treason is the ultimate mid-life crisis,” Anna joked. But Dr. Marcus didn’t laugh. She had it exactly right. Treason was the ultimate mid-life crisis.

“If you spot a man who is doing well in his career,” Dr. Marcus continued, “who’s happily married and doesn’t seem to be having any mid-life anxieties, he’s probably not a likely target for recruitment. Treason happens when a man is frustrated. His ego is blocked. He decides he hasn’t accomplished all he had hoped to in one system, so he chooses another.”

“How can you tell if someone is ready to jump?” Anna had asked.

“You look for the indicators of mid-life blockage. A marriage that isn’t working. A career that isn’t rising as fast as it should. When you spot someone with those characteristics, you look more closely and try to find out what makes him tick, what he really wants out of life. Then you try to give it to him.”

“How?”

“In whatever ways you can think of. The Soviets once recruited a Swedish military officer who was angry that he hadn’t been promoted to colonel. The first thing they did when they had him on the line was to hold an elaborate secret ceremony where they made him a general in the KGB and gave him a medal. You do whatever it takes. Medals, plaques, testimonials. Whatever the ego craves. The point is to answer, in the mirror relationship you are creating, the particular need that is not being met in the man’s ordinary life.”

“But how do you know who will make a good agent?” Anna had wondered.

“You don’t,” the psychiatrist answered. “But you can make some good guesses. Treason is about rejecting authority, so you obviously need someone who is prepared to do that. But the particular form the rejection takes is extremely important, in operational terms.

“Some people want to confront authority directly. An extreme case is someone like Solzhenitsyn, who hates the system and wants to tell the world about it, regardless of the risks. That sort of person is very brave and admirable, and might make a good novelist. But he’d make a lousy intelligence agent, because he’d be so obvious.”

So much for recruiting Solzhenitsyn.

“Then there’s the sort of person who wants to break with authority, but who isn’t quite so bombastic. Someone who would leave his wife or quit his job if he was unhappy. He’ll be a good defector—he wants out—but a lousy agent in place.”

“What kind of person makes a good agent in place?” Anna asked.

“Here’s a hint. Consider two men, both with bad marriages. One has noisy fights all the time. The other is completely calm on the surface, doesn’t tell a soul about his problems, but in secret is seeing a mistress. That man is your candidate for agent in place. He is showing you an ability to live with contradiction and a