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Spying on Sparrows et al.

THE SUPER SPIES by Andrew Tully. 256 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Everybody loves a spy—unless, of course, he happens to be real. Then
nobody likes him or his dirty work, and fewer still want to tell about
it. Partly as a result, James Bond is a household word while
practically nobody knows the names and numbers of the actual players in
the cold underworld of international espionage. A journalist-author
named Andrew Tully airs this situation in a provocative and detailed
new book that claims to reveal a dark cloakful of hitherto secret tales
of derring-do.

Tully’s most startling assertion is that months in advance of the event
a Polish traitor handed a U.S. Defense Department agent detailed plans
of last year’s Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Intelligence
strategists, Tully asserts, then imaginatively suggested making the
plans public in an effort to force a Russian change of heart. As Tully
tells it, Washington overruled the idea on grounds that the U.S. could
not afford such dangerous brinkmanship during the Viet Nam war.*

Button Microphone. Tully, a Washington columnist, has specialized in
books that “reveal the truth” about Government agencies. His purpose
this time is to demonstrate the pervasive and gigantic nature of the
U.S. espionage establishment. Tully credits U.S. espionage experts with
remarkable success. To hear him tell it, hardly a sparrow falls to
earth in the world without a U.S. spy taking note. The book is filled
with what might be called incidental intelligence. In Jordan, a U.S.
agent was told a week in advance of the date of the planned 1967
Israeli offensive. (The U.S. believed the information, but Nasser, who
heard it independently, still had most of his planes on the ground on
the fateful morning.) In Viet Nam, when an ARVN officer was suspected
of duplicity, special buttons were secretly sewn onto his uniform: the
top one contained a microphone, the second a transmitter, the third a
battery; when his guilt was confirmed by the hidden equipment, he was
perfunctorily executed (with no Green Beret-style aftermath).

Finding out so much in so many places costs $4 billion a year, Tully
estimates, and involves 60,000 people. The CIA is not even the largest
(or most expensive) spy shop, according to Tully. That honor falls to
the National Security Agency, which takes care of both making and
breaking cryptology codes on a budget twice that of the CIA’s. Why is
so much effort necessary? Tully is not sure that it is. Even if it is
accepted that the U.S. should secret-police the world, there is
obviously much wasteful duplication among the agencies. Tully’s
popularly aimed book is hardly conclusive. The author raises questions
far better than he explores them. Congress itself has shirked the job
of keeping any real tabs on the intelligence funds it votes. It is
possible that the only complete accounting of the elaborate U.S.
espionage establishment lies in some busy and bulging file in Moscow.

* Both the State Department and the Defense Intelligence
Agency refuse to comment officially. Unofficially, they say that they
had considerable advance knowledge about the degree of preparedness of
Red Army units —and how the attack would be made if it came—but no
advance warning about whether or not the Kremlin would actually
authorize an attack.
Spying on Sparrows et al.
TIME

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