CIA novel brings Sun Tzu philosophy to modern war

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BODY OF LIES

By David Ignatius

W.W. Norton, $24.95, 349 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN WEISMAN

"All warfare," the Chinese philosopher and tactician Sun Tzu wrote almost 3,000 years ago, "is based on deception." History's greatest warriors understood this simple yet profound exhortation to think outside the box.

Odysseus, who breached Troy's walls by constructing a huge hollow wooden horse, certainly personified the rare breed of outside-the-siege-tower thinkers. During World War II, a Royal British Navy lawyer named Ewen Edward Montagu pushed the Sun Tzu envelope when he mounted a clever sleight-of-hand operation to convince Germany the Allies were planning to invade the Balkans in 1943 (in fact the target was Sicily). Montagu's Operation Mincemeat was later chronicled in the book and Clifton Webb movie "The Man Who Never Was."

More recently, legendary CIA operations officer Duane "Dewey" Clarridge ran an ambitious deception that provoked psychotic paranoia in terrorist Abu Nidal's mind, causing him to destroy his own organization. "On a single night in November of 1987, approximately 170 [of his own people] were tied up and blindfolded, machine-gunned, and pushed into a trench prepared for the occasion. Another 160 were killed in Libya shortly thereafter," Mr. Clarridge writes in the 1997 autobiography "A Spy for All Seasons."

Lately, however, deception operations seem to have fallen out of favor. Whether this vacuum is due to the tsunami of risk aversion that swept over the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1990s (detritus from which still unfortunately clutters headquarters today), the culture of political correctness that eschews the sorts of amoral operations that might offend self-righteous congressional Democrats or the fact that it has become virtually impossible to keep a secret in Washington anymore, is unclear.

The bottom line, however, is simple and unsettling. For reasons unfathomable to a large segment of our most seasoned intelligence professionals both active and retired, we have abandoned a valuable weapon in our arsenal. This deplorable situation is the jumping-off point for David Ignatius' complex, intricate, Byzantine CIA novel "Body of Lies."