"Myth and Reality of Espionage"
Former CIA inspector general leads freshman seminar based on life experience
by Ken Howard
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It will probably be all in your imagination, of course. But to students in Frederick Hitz's freshman seminar, The Myth and Reality of Espionage: The Spy Novel, it's a little closer to real life. It helps that their teacher, in addition to being a lifelong fan of spy novels, had a career with the CIA as a case officer running agents in West Africa, as deputy chief of the European Division and most recently as Inspector General.
In his course Hitz strives not only to show how fiction and reality can mirror each other but also to raise moral questions about espionage. In addition to "comparing the fantasy worlds of spy novels with the way it really happens, we're looking at the morality of espionage and how we justify this activity in the US democracy," he says. "The class finds out that fiction approaches reality in many ways."
Fact vs. fantasy
Hitz has put together a varied reading list which includes fiction (Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, Ian Fleming's Dr. No, Graham Greene's The Human Factor and Rudyard Kipling's Kim, among others) and nonfictional accounts of espionage, such as books about the case of double agent Aldrich Ames and a CIA report on the Bay of Pigs crisis.
He has also arranged for his students to come face to face with practitioners and observers of espionage, inviting such guest speakers as Jack Downing, former Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA; Paul Redmond, former chief of CIA Counter-Intelligence; and David Ignatius, Middle East reporter for the Wall Street Journal, whose book Agents of Innocence is also on the class reading list.
One of the first challenges for Hitz was to dispel any notion among his students that Ian Fleming's James Bond is emblematic of the espionage business. Bond, he acknowledges, is many people's first introduction to spying. "When I was a kid," says Sean Ir '03, "the whole reason I wanted to be a spy was to be like James Bond." But Hitz points out that Bond, like Clancy's Jack Ryan, is mostly fantasy. John Le Carre and Graham Greene, however, write about characters that can be very true to life, he says.
In helping his students to examine the legality and the ethics of espionage, Hitz draws on his training as an attorney. In the class, "A good number of students hone in on the moral issues," he observes. "They recognize a need to protect the national security of the US, but they also perceive that effort may break laws in the countries where the information is gathered."
Full circle
For Hitz, who retired from the CIA in 1998, teaching at Princeton brings things full circle. "When I was an undergraduate, Dean of Students Bill Lippincott thought I might want to explore the CIA. He was a spotter, a patriot. He performed this role for nearly a generation of Princeton undergraduates."
Hitz was intrigued, he says, but he didn't act on this interest for several years. After graduating from Princeton in 1961, he went to Harvard Law School. Then he and his wife, Mary Buford, went to Nigeria on a Ford Foundation program, and he taught at an African law school for a year. When they returned to the States, he joined a law firm in Virginia.
In 1967 Hitz decided to accept the deferred challenge of government service abroad by joining the CIA. For the next 31 years, he moved in and out of jobs with the CIA and other government agencies, including the Defense Department, State Department, Department of Energy and Executive Office of the President. In 1977 he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service and in 1978 the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Medal. In 1998, when he retired from the CIA, he was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency's highest decoration.
Vietnam, Watergate
At the CIA, Hitz's work was often dictated by the Cold War, he says. He was also part of the agency during the Vietnam War and Watergate, which shaped the attitudes of many of that era's college students toward government and secrecy.
Today's students have grown up in a different environment, Hitz points out. "Vietnam and the issues that flowed out of Watergate are historical for them. They didn't live through those events, and there's not a lot of ideology built up. They have a more open-minded approach to dealing with those occurrences and the issues they raise. It's fun to see how they react."
In 1990 Hitz was confirmed by the Senate as the CIA's first presidentially appointed Inspector General, a job that charged him with monitoring the CIA and reporting to the President. "Essentially, the office is a No Man's Land between the executive and legislative branches," Hitz comments.
During his eight years in this post, he conducted numerous investigations and issued reports based on those inquiries, including the assessment on how the CIA handled the Aldrich Ames case and why the penetration occurred in the first place. Five years after he took the job, the US Senate passed a resolution commending him and his office for their accomplishments.
What was appropriate
As a visiting lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School, Hitz not only teaches the freshman seminar on the spy novel but also an undergraduate policy conference. In the spring he will offer a graduate course on Accountability in the Public Sector, drawn largely from intelligence community examples.
Teaching, he says, is certainly less politically complex than his previous work, but he finds it equally fulfilling and important. "The history of the Cold War is coming out now in a wealth of newly declassified documents," he says, "and it's up to scholars and students to decide what was appropriate and what was not."
He also feels that these issues have continued relevance. "The kinds of change that we're going to see in intelligence gathering and analysis as the 21st century unfolds will be extraordinary," he says, "much of it related to how we acquire and process information."
Would Hitz recommend the CIA as an employer to current students, as it was recommended to him when he studied early European history at Princeton in the late 1950s and early '60s?
"If students are interested in foreign languages, foreign cultures or geopolitical issues," he says, "they might well explore the CIA as a career."
Or they could write fiction.
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