Last summer, I visited the new International Spy Museum in Washington D.C., and I had a fun time looking at silly and serious spy gadgets in the museum itself and in the gift shop. Last week, I discovered that the International Spy Museum had started a podcast, in which former spies talk about the spy business, a couple months after my visit. They call it a SpyCast.
I had a long drive to make in the snow on Saturday, and I thought the SpyCasts would make good listening. Oh, how dreadfully wrong I was. I might have run into a ditch from the pure boredom of listening to these spies talk about their work.
The SpyCasts produced so far by the International Spy Museum don’t have any of the panache we have come to assume that the spy business involves. They are, instead, the product of people who spent most of their careers behind desks, or filling out paperwork, or attending meetings.
These spies are office workers, not story tellers. I’m sad to say that their podcasts have no more excitement than a podcast of retired General Motors executives talking about their old jobs would have. There’s a mix of slow, detail-focused rehashing of tired out stories and defensiveness against any who suggest that America’s spies are anything but honorable.
The lesson I get out of these podcasts is this: People imagine spies as adventurous individuals, but government spies are really just drones, working in organizations for the sake of the organizations. Yes, they break the rules. Yes, they’re dangerous. Still, it’s all with the permission of those in authority, with the support of authority, and with the purpose of maintaining social order. Spies are good at taking orders, and working by the book even as they intrude into our lives.
How boring. I won’t be listening to any more of these SpyCasts. A podcast about knitting would hold more excitement.
My dad was an undercover CIA operative for 25 years (one can say so now only because he’s long retired; during my childhood we all had to take part in the cover). He did not have panache. None of my friends’ parents who did the same work displayed any panache either. You’re right, it’s kind of sad, but we’ll have to stick to movies for panache.
Bob, I was thinking of you when I saw the movie The Good Shepherd about (fictionally? quasi-fictionally?) one of the men who started up the CIA. There were a few dashing characters, but for the most part they were played as kind of boring, stolid people.
Not that you’re a boring, stolid person. Here is the foot, here is the mouth… I was thinking of how you’ve described your dad.
Aw, it’s okay, silly.
I haven’t seen that movie, but how can a movie survive without panache?
Well, when Tracy and I left the movie theater (date, date, date!) and she asked me where we wanted to eat dinner, I did say, “What does it matter? The entire world is doomed, doomed, doomed!” Yeah, this movie was a real downer.
Well you got the right idea Jim, just don’t go all public about it. We don’t want to cause undo panic, now, do we? Let’s just let people come to the same conclusion in their own good time, you know, when it’s far too late to do anything about it. Now, back to shopping, watching tv and dining out!
Yeah, except that I was responding to a movie.
i felt that way when we left Children of Men, actually.
but reading this blog helps a bit.