The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage

In this fascinating analysis, Frederick Hitz, former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, contrasts the writings of well-known authors of spy novels—classic and popular—with real-life espionage cases. Drawing on personal experience both as a participant in “the Great Game” and as the first presidentially appointed inspector general, Hitz shows the remarkable degree to which truth is stranger than fiction.

The vivid cast of characters includes real life spies Pyotr Popov and Oleg Penkovsky from Soviet military intelligence; Kim Philby, the infamous Soviet spy; Aldrich Ames, the most damaging CIA spy to American interests in the Cold War; and Duane Clarridge, a CIA career operations officer. They are held up against such legendary genre spies as Bill Haydon (le Carré’s mole in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Magnus Pym (in le Carré’s A Perfect Spy), Tom Rogers (in David Ignatius’s Agents of Innocence), and Maurice Castle (in Graham Greene’s The Human Factor).

As Hitz skillfully weaves examples from a wide range of espionage activities—from covert action to counterintelligence to classic agent operations—we see that the actual is often more compelling than the imaginary, and that real spy case histories present moral and other questions far more pointedly than fiction.
A lively account of espionage, spy tradecraft, and, most of all, the human dilemmas of betrayal, manipulation, and deceit.

Frederick P. Hitz was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. He entered the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer in 1967, where Aldrich Ames was in his training class. After 1973 he served at the Departments of State, Defense, and Energy, leading to a second stint with the CIA from 1978 to 1982 as legislative counsel to the director of Central Intelligence and deputy chief of operations for Europe. In 1990, Hitz was appointed the first statutory inspector general of the CIA by President Bush and served in this post until May 1998, when he retired to begin a teaching career at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University.

Hitz has received medals for distinguished service in the Department of Defense and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Distinguished Medal. He lives in northern Virginia.