The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [111]
It’s in the nature of our work that we never know how matters are going to turn out. We begin and end in the dark. There is an overlay of efficiency in everything we do. I’m convinced that there is no more intelligent or unemotional group of men on earth than ourselves. That, if I may say so, is our principal weakness. Because our people are so bright, because our resources are so huge, we consistently tinker with reality.
The Miernik operation is a classic example of this tendency. We began with a vague suspicion: that Miernik was being defected by the Poles. Tentative conclusion: Miernik is an agent. Obvious question: What is his assignment?
What we had at the beginning was a set of assumptions. It was proper to test those assumptions. After all, that is our job. But the testing process—calling up our own resources and those of friendly services all over the world—creates an almost irresistible psychological force. We are experts in suspicion. We search diligently for evidence that will confirm our suspicions. To transform a supposition into a fact is the sweetest reward a desk man can know. We do it all the time, and usually we are right. But sometimes we are wrong, and I believe that there is no possible way for us to know this.
You will recall, not without impatience, that I believed in the early stages of this operation that there was a strong possibility that Miernik was innocent. I am trained to regard all behavior as cover. At no time did I spontaneously believe anything Miernik said to me or indicated to me through his overt personal conduct. But I had an instinctive feeling that all the indications that he was an opposition agent were, just possibly, false. That attitude was also part of my training, and I am sure that Headquarters shared my reservations.
The difference is this: I knew Miernik personally. For you, the reservations were intellectual—routine professional skepticism. For me they were intestinal. There is no way to argue an intestinal case in cables and dispatches, or even in clandestine conversations with a case officer whose proper function is to discount the emotional reactions of his agent. We are, quite properly, interested primarily in information that is stripped of the background noise created by the personality of the source.
In the end, my training brought me around to the conclusion that Miernik was, in fact, an agent. There was no other rational explanation for many of the things he did: the book code, the contact with Sasha Kirnov, the heavy-handed dramatization of his plight, the expertise with weapons, the mixture of self-revelation in unimportant matters and obsessive secrecy in others. I never entirely got rid of the instinctive feeling that he was genuine, and therefore innocent. But in a conflict between instinct and what appears to be objective evidence, the latter must always win.
In order to go on with what I was doing to Miernik, I had to believe that he was an enemy. Otherwise my activity, for all its surface of cleverness and technique, was stupid. My conclusion that Miernik’s behavior confirmed our suspicions was not—as I believed it to be—a return to objectivity. It was a ffight from it. My change of heart turned me (and, to the extent my reporting influences its judgment, turned Headquarters) away from a search for the truth. Everything after that was an attempt to achieve operational results.
All the evidence said to us: “Yes, Miernik is a Soviet agent.” All the evidence, that is, which we saw fit to consider. Existing simultaneously with the information that confirmed our suspicions was a second body of evidence, like a planet identical to Earth on the other side of the sun, which just as conclusively demonstrated that our suspicions were incorrect. We hadn’t the technique to see it. This is no one’s fault; it is in the nature of our equipment.
What we overlooked was this: there was no purpose in what Miernik did. His behavior from beginning to end was