The Spike
Borchgrave, Arnaud de & Moss, Robert
THE SPIKE Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss / Crown / $12.95 Mitchell S. Ross The Spike is old news by now but before long it will be back on the racks in paperback and browsers will have their...
...Docto-row's Ragtime, and, perhaps more to the point in the present case, the Allen Dulles-Dean Acheson scenes in William F. Buckley, Jr.'s spy novels...
...In Doctorow and Buckley, however, the real-life characters are drawn larger than life, whereas in The Spike they are without exception smaller than life...
...I won't take the space to recite the many instances of this practice in The Spike...
...Big deal...
...Truly fine style involves a marriage between powers of observation and powers of language...
...It is not enough for the authors to hide behind name changes when the inferences are so clear...
...The territorial imperative was enforced with a vengeance at Elaine's...
...Resolving to improve the world through journalism, he endeavors to expose the deviltries of the CIA for a radical journal called Barricades...
...Young Bob Hockney, an admiral's son, is radicalized while a student at Berkeley in the late sixties...
...Otherwise there is no fresh psychological or sociological insight to be found here...
...4) Stylistic distinction: none...
...I recognize that this is a tricky business...
...Particularly fetching is the proposition that Hockney's oldest friend is the biggest traitor of all...
...Far from being a book that every budding anti-Communist should have on his shelf, The Spike can be warmly recommended only to those who are paranoid beyond recall and to those who keep a Frank Church dartboard in their basement...
...Certainly it is an aesthetic atrocity...
...Enough...
...This is perhaps the aspect of the book which forced Osborn Elliott to start scratching his head...
...But by grafting the media's version of Angleton onto an outlandish fictional plot, injustices are surely committed against both the real Angleton and the integrity of the art of fiction...
...A decent short essay might be strung together out of them...
...We never learn, for example, why Hockney's friend, who rises to the position of Deputy National Security adviser while all along working for the Russians, sells his soul in this way...
...I used to live around the corner from Elaine's: The place is not all that exclusive...
...Here is Ross's Rundown on the celebrated thriller, offered by a stern critic in highly categorical terms: 1) Plot: Ranges in quality from predictable to lamebrained...
...The answer it provides to Richard Helms's question-can the Soviets destroy the West without firing a shot?-is: maybe, if Fred Harris were to be elected president and Billy Carter were to become his chief of staff...
...There are after all some good recent examples of real-life characters being successfully introduced into fictional narrative...
...De Borchgrave and Moss are content to reenforce prejudices formed while reading newspapers...
...Once converted, Hockney becomes a burden to his editors at the World and parts company with them...
...3) Journalistic usefulness: extremely limited...
...And an opinion from Osborn Elliott, former editor of Newsweek, where he was Arnaud de Borchgrave's boss, now Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University: "The Spike is so convincing that it's hard to tell where fact leaves off and fiction begins...
...He makes it to Vietnam and to Elaine's restaurant...
...And, as for Osborn Elliott's inability to tell "where fact leaves off and fiction begins," this is no more troubling than our own inability to tell where Elliott the editor left off and Elliott the doddering dean began...
...The Spike is dim in both respects...
...He becomes a celebrity in his own right...
...Despite his shabby tailoring and a case of acute alcoholism, the ex-spook manages to turn Hock-ney's head with tales of Soviet espionage and American traitors...
...Hockney merely wonders, and so do we...
...This injects a spirit of petty vulgarity into the tale which the sophisticated reader ought to resent...
...The authors are two well-connected international journalists who received aid in selling their book from blurb-ists in high places...
...also into bed with an actress whose half-wittedness finds full expression in radical politics...
...The prose is bestseller-breathless with a few truly awful adornments...
...2) Characterization: Dull at best, as in the rendering of Hockney, who is little more than so much ideological jello, re-refrigerated in mid -saga...
...Poor in pocket but rich in self-esteem he carries on, ultimately vindicating himself and shattering the bumpkin presidency of one Billy Connor by assisting in the defection and public unveiling of a leading KGB man...
...Two which come to mind are E.L...
...His first major piece inspires the suicide of a CIA operative, and Hockney is recruited onto the staff of the New York World, a great liberal newspaper...
...Hockney is almost always the focus of the narrative, and so the tale as a whole reads as a sort of potboiling pilgrim's progress...
...Here is an opinion from Richard Helms, former director of the CIA: "The Spike is a well-written, fast-paced novel dealing with what the Russians call disinformation...
...It deals with a challenge posed to America and the Free World: Can the Soviets destroy the West without firing a shot...
...Far worse than the portrayal of Hockney, however, is the depiction of many characters with real-life models...
...Of disinformation as a whole, we learn more or less what it involves, and we are left to suppose that it exists...
...There are a few passages, usually confessions, which give off an authentic ring...
...Was this a beneficial development...
...The Spike is not a serious expose" of Soviet disinformation hung on a novelistic peg...
...Kill this book...
...THE SPIKE Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss / Crown / $12.95 Mitchell S. Ross The Spike is old news by now but before long it will be back on the racks in paperback and browsers will have their thoughts sandblasted by advertisements and displays which suggest that reading The Spike is good for your political health...
...It is a novel-and not a very good one at that-which exploits the disinformation theme for its own sensational purposes...
...A good roman a clef will entice and charm the reader by dropping spicy hints about familiar folk...
...Many reviewers took the same tone and The Spike became respectable reading for highbrows interested in public affairs...
...He reflected that just as in the wilds animals will defecate to warn off potential intruders from the territory they have staked out for themselves, so at Elaine's the babble of voices must warn off outsiders who did not belong to the tribe" (This by the way is incorrect...
...Thus the aforementioned CIA coun-terintelligence chief is a dead ringer for James Angleton, as portrayed by the press during his brief (and no doubt extremely painful) hour in the sun a few years ago...
...The book's great success in hardcover derived in large measure from its having been convincingly promoted as more than just another thriller...
...They are numerous and they are annoying without exception...
...Finally, in the mid-seventies, while the Senate is busy slashing at the CIA, Hockney meets up with the freshly deposed CIA chief of counter-intelligence...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
