THE DEFINITIVE SPY VS. SPY

By Jesse Birnbaum

Military historians Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen probably wish they had waited a month or so before publishing Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (Random House; 633 pages; $30). If they had, they could have sneaked in a page or two on the spectacular story of veteran CIA officer Harold Nicholson, who was arrested a few weeks ago for selling secrets to the Russians.

Apart from that stroke of bad timing, this authoritative reference book rides the espionage headlines exceedingly well. The Soviets' CIA mole Aldrich Ames is here, as is hot-off-the-press documentation gleaned from the long-secret U.S. "Venona" decrypts of Russian intelligence, which pretty much confirm the guilt of the late Alger Hiss. More than 2,000 entries deal with the history of spying, the complexities of cryptography and trade jargon (dry clean: to determine whether one is under surveillance; pianist: a clandestine radio operator; swallow: Russian term for a female agent assigned to seduce a target; raven: the male counterpart of a swallow). Beyond these terms are detailed entries about notable spies of yesteryear (Daniel Defoe, Christopher Marlowe), as well as those of more recent vintage (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Whittaker Chambers, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Jonathan Pollard).

Casual readers will be most interested in the many stories of inspiring derring-do, as well as cautionary tales of derring-don't--the weight of which tends to suggest that they don't make fabulous spies, or spy catchers, the way they used to. For instance, Josephine Baker, the storied American cabaret star who made her home in Paris, spied for the Allies during World War II. She slipped out of Vichy France with intelligence information written on her music in invisible ink and with photographs hidden in her clothes. In Belgium a group of women known as Dames Blanches seemed to be innocently knitting day after day as they sat at their windows, yet all the while they were counting the cars of passing Nazi troop trains.

To launch Operation Mincemeat in 1943, the British commandeered the corpse of a man who had just died in England. They dressed him in a military uniform, stuffed his pockets with small change and the bogus personal papers of one Major Martin, and chained a briefcase to him that contained disinformation about Allied "plans" for a Balkans invasion--when the real target was Sicily. Then they set the body adrift near the Spanish coast. As expected, Spanish officials retrieved the body and passed the briefcase to Nazi agents. They read the plans and alerted their masters, who duly diverted their troops and warships from Sicily.

Nowadays, alas, the espionage racket lacks class. Ambition is driven by hubris and shabby moneygrubbing. Pollard gets a job with Naval Intelligence and sells out to the Israelis. Ames succeeds thanks to the "incredible malfeasance" of colleagues who do not think it suspicious that he banks more than $1 million and drives a $40,000 Jaguar on a $69,000 salary. Nicholson, charged with, among other things, selling the Russians the names of CIA people he trained, flunks his own course in dry cleaning: he never suspects that for months he has been taped, wiretapped and photographed by counterintelligence agents.

If ever idealism played a role in espionage, people like Pollard, Ames and Nicholson killed it. Newcomers to the game who want romance will have to find it in the novels of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and John le Carre. Those chaps knew their craft: they were all successful spies.

--By Jesse Birnbaum