BERLIN — The Captain Renaults of old Europe expressed “shock”
in late February over allegations that the British had bugged the
conversations of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Tony Blair
responded by saying (a) the UK abides by domestic law; (b) Great
Britain adheres to international law; and (c) London does what it
must to protect the interests of the nation. Bingo. Word last year
was that the Bush administration was up to the same sort of thing.
Imagine. Spying at the U.N. How shocking.
Don’t get me wrong. Spying can be unpleasant. The CIA was once
set up to bug the suite of a friendly Arab leader at a Gulf summit
when, at the last minute, there was a change of rooms and the U.S.
president ended up residing in the pre-wired space. But let’s face
it, indignation over spying is pretty silly. Most of us find this
spying stuff intriguing, even entertaining. Search Google for
“weird spy stories” and you get 156,000 hits. Try “How to Become a
Spy” and there are 1,280,000 entries. “Is My Friend a Spy” gets you
1,360,000 items to peruse. They say spying is the second oldest
profession. There are at least 100 mentions of spying in the Bible.
Historians date spying at least as far back as 500 B.C. Google
yields 4,410,000 hits for Ian Fleming’s character James Bond. We
celebrate the mystery and, yes, the deception. So do those
Renaults, I bet.
There are different kinds of spying, of course, with countless
methods, both “legal” and “illegal.” Ethically there are a thousand
shades of gray. Companies spy daily on employees to make sure they
are not using work time to play computer video games or download
porn. As a student I once sold books for Time-Life over the phone.
I quit after day one when I learned that my phone calls — to
maintain “customer quality control” — were being “monitored.”
Things are getting more complicated. Now Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) tags may help you, through use of a simple
card, to gain entrance to your office. Or surveil your activity if
you keep the card in your wallet.
True, there’s also a form of innocent spying — call it harmless
snooping — of which nearly everybody is at one time or another
guilty. Like peering for a moment at the screen of the fellow’s
laptop across the aisle on the plane. I once sat behind Strobe
Talbott, Madeleine Albright’s deputy secretary of state, on a
flight from Washington to Frankfurt. Strobe was on his way to
Russia. Only my sterling character kept me from sneaking peeks as
the Deputy typed away. (Was it a memo to his friend the President
on a new bold arms control initiative?)
We Americans are funny about these things. In some states, “fuzz
busters” for cars are legal. A 1971 New York lawsuit prevents
police today from going into a Mosque under cover, even if the imam
has been spewing pro-bin Laden rhetoric. You see, we can act
preemptively in Iraq, but in New York the crime needs to be
committed first before law enforcement can respond.
Among nations, the most curious spying is called “friendly
spying,” what we allies do to one another. A few years ago our
European friends fumed over allegations that the U.S. was using
intercepted phone calls and e-mails to advantage American
companies. The French have a similar system, which intercepts
around three million messages per minute. First class seats on Air
France have always been thought to be bugged (with tidbits of
business gossip passed on to hungry French competitors). In 1971 a
former French spymaster actually admitted in his memoirs that
Paris, having learned that the U.S. was about to devalue the
dollar, used the information to profit handsomely by currency
speculation.
Now America has a special relationship with Israel. We spy on
Israel. Israel spies on us. Ditto Germany. During the Clinton
administration I stayed in a Berlin hotel that sources later
reported was bugged by the German government. That explained why
our German friends just knew too much, too precisely, during trade
negotiations, the day after the American team had stayed up all
night privately, it thought, plotting strategy in its suite.
Shocking. What? Gambling in Las Vegas?
