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reporting on the real identity of an incompetent clerk who turns out to be
reporting on the real identity of an incompetent clerk who turns out to be
Hubbard himself ~shades of Oedipus!.
Hubbard himself ~shades of Oedipus!.
Hubbard manages to conceal his identity despite close dealings with Harvey. However, he never finds out the significance of his original inability to
locate the data requested. Perhaps the original missing information would
have provided Harvey with information about a double agent, reporting to
the East Germans about the secret construction of a tunnel, which would
have aided the West in spiriting information and people across the Iron Curtain. In other words, Hubbard’s failure might have been of real importance
in the Cold War. This distinguishes life in the CIA from other agencies or
bureaus of government or business, since the CIA is, to a very large degree,
in the business of directly intervening in history through the achievement of
accurate information or “intelligence.” Hubbard makes clear that he is
attracted to the CIA precisely because, as he explains in his CIA personal history statement, “I have been brought up to face ultimates” ~182!, which reflects
the belief that the CIA is the road to truth and effective action. However, truth is never so easy. Harlot argues to Hubbard that the successful completion of the tunnel would have been a disaster because it would have provided too much information about the real state of affairs in the Soviet bloc
~a weak level of military preparedness and a series of bankrupt economies!,
which would threaten CIA funding. Harlot prefers disinformation to accurate information because it justifies future government expenditures. Did he
set up Hubbard? Another possibility readers are forced to consider is that
Harlot himself is a double agent and therefore subverts the tunnel to aid the
Soviets. Readers, like Hubbard, never know for sure.
When Hubbard moves on to operations in Uruguay to fight communist
influence, he receives a secret message from a high-ranking KGB official that
there is a high-ranking double agent and he shouldn’t trust anyone—
particularly the Soviet Division of the CIA.When Hubbard is debriefed; that
is, interrogated by the Soviet Division, he decides not to report this part of
the message. His evasion sets in motion a prolonged series of questions: it
seems suspicious to the Soviet Division, experts on how the KGB works, that
a KGB agent would become a double agent for the US by fingering double
agents against the US without specifying who they are. And, of course, the
KGB does act exactly as expected to act, but Harry, not knowing how the
KGB is supposed to act, puts himself in jeopardy. If his omission is revealed,
Hubbard will appear as a double agent himself, but with the help of Harlot
he is able to get out of the jam. Harlot himself offers the theory that if Hubbard mentioned the Soviet Division, it would be taken, by the Soviet Division, as evidence that Harlot and Harry were intent on destroying the Soviet
Division.
This picture of CIA activities would be ridiculous if it didn’t present a
convincing picture of institutional logic. All of these gaps in knowledge are
typical of the novel. Indeed, they present a consistent picture of inherent, systematic obstacles to effective activity. As Hubbard puts it,“As an Agency officer, I ... encountered my fair share of plots ... but I was rarely able to see
them whole” ~109–110!. This conflicts with the “existential” quest for courage, freedom and effective action since for an individual to freely choose his
or her behavior, they must be able to understand their situation with a certain degree of accuracy. What prevents success in Harlot’s Ghost is not lack
of courage or unwillingness to face unpleasant truths, but rather the daily
functioning of compartmentalized, fragmented, and isolated individuals
pursuing their own local interests. Knowledge and effective action are revealed as impossible on a micro-level, despite the traditional claim that
competing interests in a market system result in maximum efficiency, fair
results, and the common good. Truth, if it exists at all in this fictional world
of espionage, can only be imagined as a whole picture looked at from the
outside of the multiple bureaus and interests. However, if we take these episodes as suggestive of American society more broadly with its logic of privatization and the market system, we are given a critical picture of how the
divergent interests that operate within American capitalist society serve to
frustrate the interests of the whole. The ultimate logic of capitalism and the
market ~where each individual pursues individual interests! are revealed as
leading to incoherence and flawed results. American society is in crisis,
unable to function effectively in the Cold War because so-called intelligence
gathering can never effectively provide more than limited and partial information, and truth is contingent upon pragmatic considerations.
The major characters and their problems also function more narrowly.
The CIA agents, determined to influence history, are all would-be authors;
they are not just writers-in-general, but the characters often articulate ideas
similar to Mailer himself.14 On the most general level, they are all ambitious
and determined, but are left in a precarious status in terms of their ultimate
contribution to history ~like Mailer!.
The novel opens with Hubbard reading over his memoirs. He opines that
under other circumstances he might have settled as a writer ~just as Mailer
states in the “Author’s note” that under other circumstances he might have
been a CIA agent, which reveals similarities between the two “spooky arts”!
but he wonders if anyone will ever read his document. We flash back to his
early life where, notably, there are many common features between the tradecraft of writing and espionage. Hubbard learns that espionage is an art. He
finds out that “codes” express and determine the life of an agent. Codes
change an individual’s name, and Hubbard expresses the view that “the
change of name itself ought to be enough to alter one’s character” ~196! and
that “even as shifting one’s cryptonym called forth a new potentiality for
oneself, so there was a shiver of metamorphosis in this alteration of appearance”~197!. Developing a code name is taken as the construction of a personality, one of the primary tasks of writers and CIA agents alike. Being an
effective agent is almost directly compared to the kinds of imagination and
creativity required for producing powerful literature. For example, Hubbard
describes his early training:
<blockquote>We were assigned a specific color for each number...
@n#ext, we were asked to visualize a wall, a table, a lamp. If the
first three digits of the telephone number were 586, we were to
picture a red wall behind a gray table on which was sitting an
orange lamp. For the succeeding four numbers, we might visualize a woman in a purple jacket, green skirt, and yellow shoes
sitting on an orange chair. That was our mental notation for
4216. By such means,586-4216 had been converted into a picture
with seven colored objects.... I became so proficient at these
equivalents that I saw hues so soon as I heard numbers. ~197–198!</blockquote>
Amylhester
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