Wonderful, Kent, except for:

a) the suggestion of a relationship between this and the list too noisiness
of the last few days

b) Weinberger's lack of analysis of what social forces were at work: he
falls onto :

> Angleton surfaced in the news in the late 1970's when he was revealed to
be
> the chief of C.I.A. counterintelligence, known as the "ultra top secret
deep
> snow" unit. He was noted for his deathly pallor, his chain-smoking, his
> cryptic allusions to conspiracies and an office piled with papers, the
> windows never opened and the curtains always drawn.

which sounds hilariously like the X-files character 'smoking man'

That 'high literary culture' and the spooks do get mixed up is obvious, but
the suggestion of a _necessary_ reationship that the article would, I think,
imply is unfounded. Nor is it a justifiaction for destabilizing a list that
has left the Cold War, the Counter Reformation and the Hundred Years War
somewhat I hope behind it.

Yup, these things happen, one of the barmiest associations was that Patrick
White worked in war-time intelligence services, I can just see 'The Solid
Mandala' paving the way for Reaganism. Presumably nobody told the Murdoch
papers whose side he was on.

And I love the image (implied) of HD at the centre of international
espionage. Must get out my decoding books on 'Trilogy'.

PS  Chaucer was married to John O'Gaunt's lass Phillipa about 400 yards from
where I sit now in St Mary de Castro in Leicester. Maybe I'm a spook too.

The swine! They never pay me!

Not that I doubt things do still go bump in the night.

I don't disagree that some of the issues touched on are valid, but what does
that justify?

Flaming a list?

Best

David









----- Original Message -----
From: "kent johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 10:30 PM
Subject: Spookpo (from NYT)


> This classic by Eliot Weinberger. Somehow seems to have some relation to
> these times of list intrigue, dagger, and murder...
>
> Kent
>
> ----------
>
> Tinker, Tailor, Poet, Spy: Tales of Literary Espionage
> Date: October 4, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
> Byline: By Eliot Weinberger;
> Lead:
>
> ON his strange mission to America in 1939 to persuade Franklin D.
Roosevelt
> not to enter the European war, Ezra Pound took time from his meetings with
> low-level bureaucrats and high-level avant-gardists to travel to New Haven
> to visit a Yale student named James Jesus Angleton. Angleton, still an
> undergraduate, was an energetic litterateur. He had visited Pound in
> Rapallo, Italy, had shared his enthusiasm for Mussolini. He was chummy
with
> E. E. Cummings, met Marianne Moore, lunched with Thomas Mann and had
brought
> in the ambiguous William Empson to lecture; he helped James Agee with the
> manuscript of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Now, with his roommate, E.
> Reed Whittemore Jr., he was editing a poetry magazine called Furioso.
> Pound's one-page "Introductory Textbook" had appeared in the first number,
> and the poet was as eager as ever to tell the young editors whom to
publish.
>
> Details of that encounter are not known; the major Pound biographies
either
> grant the incident only one sentence or don't mention it at all. After
four
> issues, Furioso suspended publication, to be resumed after World War II
with
> Whittemore as sole editor. Angleton was published only once, in The Yale
> Literary Magazine: a bad poem with a prophetic title, "The Immaculate
> Conversion." In the middle of the war, Angleton was converted -- "turned,"
> he would say -- by his English professor, Norman Holmes Pearson, from
poetry
> to its twin, espionage.
> Text:
>
> Pearson, a Boston aristocrat, is now remembered for his writings on
> 19th-century American literature, for the extraordinary "Poets of the
> English Language" anthologies he edited with W. H. Auden, and as H. D.'s
> editor and literary executor. In 1943, although he had been a Nazi
> sympathizer until the invasion of Poland, Pearson was sent to London to
> become the head of X-2, the counterintelligence branch of the Office of
> Strategic Services, the wartime spy network. There he learned the British
> "double cross" system of psychologically coercing captured enemy agents
into
> working for one's own side. Pearson's counterpart (and nemesis) at the
> British M.I.6 was Kim Philby; his code name was Puritan; in espionage
> literature he is called "the father of American counterintelligence."
>
> Angleton turned out to be Pearson's greatest find. Their relationship
during
> the war was close: father-son, or master-disciple. After work at the
London
> O.S.S., Angleton traveled in the Pearson circle: T. S. Eliot, the
Sitwells,
> Benjamin Britten, Graham Greene, E. M. Forster, Ralph Vaughan Williams,
> Norman Douglas, Elizabeth Bowen, Compton Mackenzie. He was a frequent
dinner
> guest of H. D. and her companion, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman).
>
> The O.S.S. station itself was no less literary. Angleton had, in turn,
> recruited two close friends: Edward Weismiller, the Yale Younger Poet of
> 1936, and Richard Ellmann, the future Joyce scholar. Fellow agents
> included -- along with superspook William J. Casey (Ronald Reagan's
Director
> of Central Intelligence) -- Donald Gallup, the future Pound bibliographer,
> and Louis Martz, the Milton scholar who would later edit H. D.'s
"Collected
> Poems." Angleton's secretary was H. D.'s daughter, Perdita. (H. D. seems
to
> have been surrounded by spies. It is curious that Bryher was apparently
the
> only person outside the O.S.S. to know Pearson's code name.)
>
> After the war, Pearson returned to Yale, where he continued to recruit
> students for the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. He served on
the
> board of advisers to Pound's Square Dollar Books, which folded in the
> mid-1950's after its publishers, John Kasper and Thomas Horton, went to
jail
> for instigating riots against school integration in the South. In 1975, on
a
> tour of the Far East, Norman Holmes Pearson fell ill in Seoul and died
soon
> after at the age of 66. His wife believed that he had been poisoned by
North
> Koreans -- proof that he was still working for the Company.
>
> Angleton surfaced in the news in the late 1970's when he was revealed to
be
> the chief of C.I.A. counterintelligence, known as the "ultra top secret
deep
> snow" unit. He was noted for his deathly pallor, his chain-smoking, his
> cryptic allusions to conspiracies and an office piled with papers, the
> windows never opened and the curtains always drawn. He had files on two
> million Americans, had directed an operation that infiltrated the United
> States Postal Service and opened and photographed 200,000 personal
letters,
> believed that Lee Harvey Oswald and Henry Kissinger were K.G.B. spies and
> that the Black Panthers were a North Korean front operation. He had been
Kim
> Philby's best friend. For 20 years after the defection of Philby's
partners
> Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Philby and Angleton were locked in a deep
> game of double and double-double crossing -- a "wilderness of mirrors,"
> Angleton called it, quoting Eliot -- as Angleton decimated the ranks of
the
> C.I.A. in search of double agents, the "moles." Angleton's long-term boss,
> Allen Dulles, was kept uninformed of these maneuvers, and Angleton's wife,
> after 31 years of marriage, had never known her husband's position.
>
> Angleton, who kept reading poetry all his life, claimed in later years
that
> he had always tried to recruit agents from the Yale English Department. He
> believed that those trained in the New Criticism, with its seven types of
> ambiguity, were particularly suited to the interpretation of intelligence
> data.
>
> Consider, after all, the ways a spy's message may be read:
>
> 1) It is written by a loyal agent and its information is accurate.
>
> 2) It is written by a loyal agent but its information is only partly
> accurate.
>
> 3) It is written by a loyal agent but its information is entirely
> inaccurate.
>
> 4) It is written by a double agent and its information is completely
false.
>
> 5) It is written by a double agent but its information is partly true, so
> that the false parts will be believed.
>
> 6) It is written by a double agent but its information is entirely true,
so
> that the allegiance of the agent will not be discovered.
>
> Moreover, the message is written in code, and liable to the vagaries of
> translation. And it is written in a highly condensed language, whose
> meanings can offer varying interpretations. Like a poem, the message is
only
> as good as its reader. Roosevelt refused to believe a report on the
imminent
> attack on Pearl Harbor; the Federal Bureau of Investigation thought that
> Pound's "Pisan Cantos" were the encoded communications of a spy.
>
> There is a book to be written on poetry and espionage. A spy must know
where
> the best information is, collect it without being discovered and safely
> transmit it. In antiquity, the bards and troubadours were perfect for the
> task: they were free to wander, they had access to the royal courts and as
> poets they relied on their powers of observation to compose and their
> memories to recite. The first literary spy is the creation of such a bard:
> Odysseus, who (in Book IV of "The Odyssey") disguises himself as a beggar
to
> gather intelligence in a Trojan city.
>
> CHAUCER was a spy on the Continent for John of Gaunt. Christopher Marlowe
> was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham -- Elizabeth's great spymaster and
> Sir Philip Sidney's father-in-law -- to inform on English students who
were
> enjoying Catholic hospitality in Rheims. (And later, according to some
> scholars, Marlowe was murdered by Walsingham's men because of his
> involvement with Sir Walter Raleigh, another spy, in a plot to depose the
> Queen -- a murder that was neatly staged to look like a barroom brawl.)
> Wordsworth was a spy in France, the English poet Basil Bunting a spy in
> Persia. Whittaker Chambers started out as an Objectivist poet, a member of
> Louis Zukofsky's group.
>
> Split between the power of the poem and the powerlessness of the poet in
> society, poets have lived the lives of spies. They have believed they are
> the unacknowledged legislators, a secret police. They have been attracted
to
> secret societies, from the (possibly apocryphal) Elizabethan School of
Night
> (Raleigh, Marlowe and George Chapman as well as the alchemist Walter
> Warner) to Yeats's Golden Dawn. They have preferred to publish anonymously
> or under pseudonyms. They have been -- like Milton writing his elegy
before
> he had a suitable corpse -- masters at the counterfeiting of emotions.
They
> have banded together into groups and movements that, like Angleton's
C.I.A.,
> become obsessed with betrayals from within. They have encoded private
> messages and secret formulas into their poems. They have believed they are
> serving great powers: Stalin, Mussolini, the revolution, the church. They
> have walked, like Charles Baudelaire in Paris, Federico Garcia Lorca or
> Charles Reznikoff in New York, invisibly through the city, watching and
> listening. They have sat alone in their rooms, imagining the great plots
> unfolding outside.
>
> Mina Loy once wrote: "To maintain my incognito the hazard I chose was --
> poet." When Angleton died in 1987, aged 69, The New York Times reported in
> its obituary that his favorite poets were Eliot and Cummings.
>
> This essay is adapted from "Outside Stories," a collection of essays to be
> published this month by New Directions. An earlier version appeared in
> Sulfur magazine in 1987.
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
>