Christopher Hitchens

Every spring, American camera crews and sound-teams and the boys and girls of ‘the pencil press’ (as it is still quaintly known) load their equipment or stuff their notebooks in a pocket and set off for the unthrilling town of Punxatawney, Pennsylvania. The occasion is ‘Ground-Hog Day’, when a local creature named Punxatawney Phil is reputed to predict the coming season’s weather. I think it’s the angle of his shadow that is supposed to work the trick. A long time ago, this media ritual passed the point at which it could be called self-satirising, and became instead a ludicrous and embarrassing chore. The reading and viewing and listening public would not notice if this non-event went uncovered, and the media would be glad to be shot of the tedium of ‘covering’ it, but nobody quite knows how to stop the dance. Locked together and sobbing with boredom (as in They Shoot Horses Don’t They?), the numbed partners drag their way across the floor one more time. Russell Baker once wrote a brilliant column about these gruesome proceedings, which summarised for him the participation of the press in events that are staged only for the press’s benefit.

While I was still reading these books, and thinking about them, I chanced to have two annoying near-KGB experiences. A creepy individual named Yuri Shvets published a book called Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest. Its central allegation was that an old personal enemy of mine had been a key ‘agent of influence’ in Reagan-era Washington. I could believe anything of this man except that his ‘controllers’ had awarded him the hilarious code-name of ‘Socrates’. And every checkable allegation in the book turned out to be grotesquely false. So that was irritating, because it meant another portentous non-scare about a virtual non-person. Then, at a party in Georgetowm, I found myself being introduced to Mr Oleg Kalugin. Now apparently retired from his foul career as a secret policeman, Mr Kalugin gave me a card with the name of his consulting firm (offices in Moscow and Washington) on it. The outfit was called Intercon, which seemed more appropriate than was perhaps intentional. Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby … ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story … Yuri Modin – well, he’s a character …’ and so on. I found myself getting irrationally pissed-off. Here am I, a journalist and a free citizen of the Anglo-American world. But if I seek to know what was really done in the Cold War dark, I must attend upon someone who was a criminal in that war. My ‘own side’ has no intention of enlightening me, and the spook industry has built up such an oligopoly in journalism and publishing that no untainted rival – such as the old-fashioned idea of full disclosure – has been permitted to challenge the self-interested ghouls who pay out their ration of ‘secrets’ in a niggardly and mysterious fashion as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?’…

Forster’s apparently evergreen remark, about choosing to betray your country rather than your friends, has always seemed to me to be – as well as an exercise in moral casuistry – the father and mother of a false antithesis. I mean to say, who ever is actually faced, or has been faced, with such a choice? In 1917 or thereabouts, Siegfried Sassoon confided to his friend Robert Graves that he was planning to ‘go public’, as a decorated front-line officer, with what he knew about real conditions on the Western Front. Graves had him put away for ‘shell-shock’, for his own good. That was certainly a betrayal of a friend and, I would argue, also a betrayal of the country. Kim Philby, who actually did set out to betray a country as well as a class, was also strikingly disloyal to his friends (though they, almost irrespective of politics, seem to have been loyal to him). In order for Forster’s Choice to come up in your own life, you must be able to plead that there is something tremendously the matter with either a. your country or b. your circle of friends. When Willy Brandt put on the uniform of a country that was fighting his own – the action for which the German conservatives never forgave him – he was not thinking: ‘Pity about my friends, but I feel I have to betray my country.’ Nor, if he had elected to betray his friends, could he have argued that he was doing his country much of a favour.’

In the Thirties Wal Hannington, the Communist organiser of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, was leaving a committee meeting when an unknown comrade came up and pressed a letter ‘to be read later’ into his hand. Hannington soon removed the envelope from his pocket, opened it idly, and was astonished to find himself summoned to a secret meeting where all kinds of mayhem and sedition were on the agenda. The note was couched in terms that suggested the discussion would come as no surprise to him. He threw the letter away. Very shortly afterwards, he was stopped by the police (‘Just a routine enquiry, sir’) and given a very thorough search indeed. The investigating officers seemed to be looking for something in particular, and moreover to be disappointed at not finding it.