Intelligence In War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What The Military Can Learn About The Enemy - Plot & Excerpts
The image of the agent is strongly imprinted on the imagination of anyone who in childhood played the war game l’Attaque—a sinister civilian figure parting the grasses to spy on brightly uniformed soldiers honourably and conspicuously engaged in combat—and that image has been reinforced for over a century by the work of successful fiction writers. Joseph Conrad made the agent an enemy of society, Conan Doyle, in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a venal creature working for money; but most writers in English represented the agent as romantic and patriotic: Kipling’s Kim a servant of empire in the Great Game, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay bursting with Britishness in pursuit of his country’s enemies, Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond to whom all foreigners were objects of suspicion. Later writers, John le Carré foremost, refined the image, admitting the dubiety of the agent’s role and introducing the idea of the double agent, all too understandably in view of what the public then knew of treason among Britain’s university-educated class.
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