This classic by Eliot Weinberger. Somehow seems to have some relation to
these times of list intrigue, dagger, and murder...

Kent

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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.


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