You Can’t Handle the Truth!

It’s not often that three disparate sources talk about the same issue, and when this happens, I like to sit up and take notice. 

This title for this posting came to me from the famous line that Jack Nicholson said to Tom Cruise in ‘A Few Good Men’. Although it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’s a great starting point for this topic which is: wars, spies, and the things we don’t know, or don’t want to know. 

 

 

 

Cameron Ortis, an elite member of the National Intelligence Co-ordination Centre(NICC), has been convicted of “intentionally and without authority” communicating “special operational information”. Apparently he was feeding useless information to enemy spies in the hopes of luring them into a more comprising situation. He was doing spy stuff.

Typically this is the kind of information that goes under the public radar, as it should. The whole point is that it’s not supposed to be public. If it was, it wouldn’t be spy stuff. And in fact, Mr. Ortis is having a Kafkaesque time mounting a defense, as the majority of the material he would need to defend himself is classified, he can’t access the internet to do research, and is restricted from pretty much all forms of modern communication. 

 

 

A Women of No Importance documents the life and times of Virginia Hall, posthumously recognized as a heroine of the French resistance, and from one point of view is credited with decreasing the length of WWII by 9 months.

However the part relevant here is her travels back to France after the war to meet with her old comrades from the French resistance. Most of these meetings did not go well, as the old resistance were now ostracized and sidelined from the new administration and some were even criticized for their activities during the war.

And make no mistake, some of their actions were dicey because, well, it was war. Day to day life threatening decisions were the norm. Sometimes these decision were at the expense of others in order to live and fight another day.

I’m a huge fan of the Phillip Kerr Bernie Gunther series. Starting with the Berlin Noir books, I think I’ve read them all. However, recently I came across one I hadn’t encountered before: ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’. Although it is fiction, I think Kerr perfectly captures the atmosphere, both physical and mental, in his main character, an intelligent non-Nazi German, attempting to survive the war. 

 

This book is set in Munich in 1957, twelve years after the end of the war, and part of Bernie’s plight (or Christof Ganz, which is his current nom de plume) is dodging his wartime past. Even though he was never a Nazi, he worked as a detective for Nazis including the SS, who forced him into that role on the threat of death.

The parameters of what is ‘normal’ during a war are not the same after the war has ended. Both Virginia’s friends and the (fictional) Bernie Gunther suffer for surviving WWII at the hands of those who came after and cannot fathom or justify the actions that were forced on them. Perhaps they (we) think they should have maintained their moral stance, and most likely been shot.

 

The Cameron Ortis story is different, but I see a similar thread. We trust our security professionals to ‘do things’ that are probably murky and it’s best not to ask too much about what is going on. It’s a Catch-22 situation: we can’t know what they’re doing, because if we were to know, they wouldn’t be doing it.

The key word is ‘trust’. Was Mr. Ortis trustworthy, and did he have the authority, which seems to be a key word in his trial, to do what he did. Probably, and maybe that’s as good as it gets.

Let’s give Jack Nicholson’s character the last word: 

“You have the luxury of not knowing what I know”. 

 

References: 

Jack: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104257/

Cameron: https://nationalpost.com/feature/secret-trial-of-canadian-spy-cameron-ortis  

Virginia: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40595446-a-woman-of-no-importance  

Bernie: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35621912-greeks-bearing-gifts