Reconstructing the 'Ordinary Life of a Spy': A Case in Social History of Clandestine Services in the Twentieth Century

• In Event: Biographies and Post/Memories Discourses of the Communist Past in East Central Europe

Abstract

Declassified documents related to the study of intelligence during the Cold War steadily keep emerging from the vaults of the US government as well as from the opened archives in the post-communist states. While they offer an interesting dialogue, corresponding, or contradicting the existing accounts, they retain multiple silences and misinterpretations. They also tend to focus on their respective elites. The social history approach to study intelligence recently proposed by Christopher Richard Moran, Andrew Hammond invites scholars to engage with the bottom-up approach. This naturally involves biographies. There is not a shortage of spy stories of dare-devil men and women engaged in high-risk espionage operations, covert actions, or spy games. What is less common are biographies of those who gather, process, analyze, and share intelligence with decision-makers, the “unseen” intelligence staffers. The core of intelligence activities is thus neglected. Given the scarcity of sources, reconstructing the ordinary days of a person whose career was dominated by secrecy requires engagement beyond the archival trail, imaginative investment, projection, and creation. This paper presents an attempt to recreate a representative experience of “an ordinary spy” from the past.

Author

• Anna A Mazurkiewicz, U of Gdansk (Poland)