The New York Review of Books (January 18, 2024) – The latest issue features Crime Fiction Addiction; Chantal Akerman’s Proust & Albertine; Toward and Ethics of Spycraft; Regarding the Pain of Avatars; Was Weimar Doomed to Fail? and The Truth About Tampons….

Ethical Espionage

What moral principles should guide our intelligence-gathering agencies?

By Tamsin Shaw

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton

Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence by Cécile Fabre

On October 7, as Hamas fighters roared into southern Israel from Gaza, bringing terror and death to anyone they encountered—Israeli soldiers, Bedouins, young people dancing and getting high together, kibbutzniks scooping up small children into desperate arms—I was sleeping in a comfortable hotel room in Georgia. All around me in the sultry darkness of a beautiful resort, many of the US intelligence community’s finest minds were also slumbering. We awoke with the expectation that we would be addressed by CIA director William Burns at the opening of the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference, a yearly gathering of national security professionals from the private and public sectors, plus a few academics and journalists.