"We Distorted Our Own Minds"

By WALTER ISAACSON and JAMES KELLY John le Carre

Q. If you were the director of the CIA, what priorities would you set for the next decade?

A. What I would require of my intelligence service would be a real liaison with major existing intelligence services on shared targets. That would include terrorism and nuclear weapons, all these loose cannons we've got sloshing around in Ukraine. If some crazed national movement got hold of nuclear weapons, then I think there should be a joint effort among intelligence agencies that should be pooled by the United Nations.

Q. Won't countries be reluctant to share intelligence data with one another through the U.N.?

A. Those are barriers which somehow or another have to be dismantled. Those ( are our cold war manners. Of course, all intelligence services like to retain their mystique. The first thing the Americans do if they get a wonderful report from the Israelis is edit it, retitle it, put all sorts of stamps all over it and shove it upstairs. This is another reason, incidentally, why intelligence assessments are so frequently distorted: the same source can fund a whole lot of seemingly separate intelligence documents. Let's say, the Israelis prepare a document which they're prepared to give to an American liaison. They're also prepared to give another version of this same intelligence to the French. The French receive it and immediately signal some of it for economic gain to the Syrians. Then the National Security Agency comes in, intercepts France to Damascus, and there you get corroboration of the intelligence which has already come through from the same source. It's the proof cooked three different ways, but has actually come from the same source.

Q. Intelligence gathering by human spies is now coming back into vogue. Wouldn't that be far more effective than satellites in a place like Somalia?

A. That would be great, but you've really got to buy somebody who is there. You've got to deal through intermediaries you know. You're going through a whole ladder of contacts -- you end up sending a gold vase to a motel on the road to Mogadishu -- you never see the gold vase again -- you never get any intelligence. It requires a street wisdom suddenly in a particular area which is terribly hard for an intelligence service to produce when the President suddenly says, "Get me that damned warlord."

Q. One of the great intelligence debacles of the cold war was the overestimation of the Soviet Union's capabilities. How did that happen?

A. I think it was a failure of intelligence and, in a curious way, a failure of common sense. The overkill of coverage was so immense that they literally started counting the cows twice, that when you have huge amounts of data coming in, it's very easy to lose count as simply as that. But the failure of common sense is absolutely weird in its stupidity. Any good journalist who'd been living in Moscow in the later years of Brezhnev would know that nothing worked anymore. The knight was dying inside his armor, and somehow that human perception never made itself felt in intelligence analyses.

Q. Is there something inherent about spying that causes spies not to see the bigger picture?

A. Absolutely. If you live in secrecy, you think in secrecy. It is the very nature of the life you lead as an intelligence officer in a secret room that the ordinary winds of common sense don't blow through it. You are constantly looking to relate to your enemy in intellectual, adversarial and conspiratorial terms. It is absolutely necessary to the intelligence mentality that you put the worst interpretation upon your adversary.

Q. Did our obsession with secrecy hurt our own governments?

A. I believe that's exactly what we did to ourselves. We really did entrench anticommunism and enforce it in ways that in my view were catastrophic. We distorted our own minds; it was almost a precursor of political correctness in its worst form.

Q. Catastrophic is a pretty strong word.

A. It is a strong word. The post-cold war trauma that we identify in the former Soviet Union, perhaps less dramatically and less scarily, is among us too. We've had removed from us a system of priorities in thinking and responding which has left us for the moment rather inarticulate and undirected in our collective thinking. We have squandered the peace that we've won with the cold war. We had some kind of vision in the cold war; we got a crusade going even when we were mistaken and crude about it.

I think there was never a time when we needed rhetoric so badly, when we needed a new romantic dream. I see at the moment, and I hope it's only an intervening moment in our world history, a time of absolute moral failure by the West to perceive its own role in the future. Since we have now contrived to unscrew the binding shackles of communism, I think we have to be ready to pick up the bits, and I think we have to be ready fairly often to respond extremely quickly to brush-fire wars and things of that sort.

Q. In the end, was cold war espionage counterproductive or productive in helping us preserve our national security?

A. If I had to cast a stone into one bucket or the other, I would say it was counter-productive. Now if we had been angels, if we had been superwise, we would have realized that our resources would have been much better deployed showing ourselves to be constitutionally impeccable and not worrying about the few traitors and fewer spies you inevitably let through the net. It was a war that had to be fought, but it was not the war that won the whole campaign. Indeed, what espionage looks like now is what it always was: a sideshow got up as major theater.

Where I kick myself is where I think I actually contributed to the myth of the intelligence services as being very good. When I wrote The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the head of operations at the Secret Intelligence Service remarked that it was the only bloody double agent that ever worked. The mythmaking that went on all around us contributed to the kind of ingrown and corrosive self-perceptions that were at the heart of our undoing.

Q. You worked in British intelligence as a young man. How do you look back upon those years now?

A. I was recruited almost when I was still in diapers into that world. My really formative years, the years when one should be having nice little love affairs and doing different jobs and finding out who one shouldn't be and that stuff, they were all taken over by the secret world. The moods that I remember, the self-perceptions I had, were very positive, very negative; I was brilliant, I was a complete idiot. I entered it in the spirit of John Buchan and left it in the spirit of Kafka.

Q. Was there a particular incident that formed your view of espionage?

A. I remember one episode where I was obliged to interrogate a British official about his alleged involvement in an espionage ring, and he lied to me. He just lied all the way through. I made a very reasoned submission to my superiors and went on to other things and discovered to my astonishment a few months later, this man had been promoted. So I was terribly worried, and I started to shake the bars. Finally I was taken aside and told to ask no more questions about the matter. And of course years later I realized that he had been our man, our informant, inside the ring that we had penetrated. Therefore I was actually simply part of his cover story. All they wanted me to do was rubber-stamp him so he could get on with his life again.

Q. How do you ensure that the spies remain honest brokers of intelligence and don't try to distort it for their own ends?

A. What we've seen again and again, when there's been a Watergate or there's been something else, is this curious mixture that includes the real zealots who believe they can repair the inadequacies of the democratic system by doing unofficial things. They think they're the heroes. Then you see the total misfits who need to take shelter in secret rooms and who actually get off being secretive.

It is actually only very excited, overstimulated men on very short sleep, together with all the toys of supersecrecy and the helicopters and the special passes, that inevitably produce irrational behavior. But those people, when they began, were ordinary guys; they were like us. Noel Annan, who was in British intelligence for years, said nobody should be allowed to do it more than three years, that one way of keeping an intelligence service sane is to have it run entirely by temporary people.

Q. When the cold war ended, did you feel any nostalgia?

A. I didn't have nostalgia, but I went through some of the trauma that the spooks had definitely been through. Was there nothing there? Maybe it was all a waste of life. Maybe I should have just been running a boy's club. I had this weird kind of sub-life in some part of my head, where I sort of kept up with events from a spy's-eye view. I was never a very good spook; I was definitely a writer who took up spying rather than a spy who took up writing.

Q. So you were happy to see the cold war end . . .

A. Yeah, I was thrilled. Part of my present indignation is that I want the world to be a better place now. I think the Americans have the energy and the record and the right to conduct the altruistic crusade. I think it's totally incorrect politically to suggest it, but a new period of altruistic white colonialism is upon us.

Q. Pax Americana Moralistica?

A. Yes, a little bit, although I don't think it need be as expansive as we fear. I don't see you sort of ferrying your armed police all over the world keeping order. I think it's much more how you throw your weight in the world arena politically, and how you demonstrate your outrage at flagrant misbehavior in places where it can be stopped.