Following my thoughts on the matter back in March at reference 1, I felt the need this morning to put hands to keyboard again. So in no particular order...
The door knob business must have been an accident in the sense that the Russians thought that they could get away with it, without our working out that there had been some funny business. Which they got wrong, partly because we are not yet a banana republic, we still have effective police forces and still have places like Porton Down which can smell out funny business. Maybe they would have got away with it if the target had lived in somewhere like Panama or Uzbekistan. And if they did expect to get caught anyway, why not do something a bit more straightforward like wrapping his feet in fresh concrete and dumping him out at sea? Sub-contract the whole business to some of those nice people living in and around Naples?
It was also a bit crude in the sense that a dirty door knob could be touched by all kinds of people, not just the primary target. Perhaps they thought that the daughter was fair game too. Guilt by family association certainly flourished in both Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. No doubt parts further east too.
Even cruder in the sense that they appeared to have dumped the dirt's container in an ordinary litter bin, despite it seeming very unlikely that they don't they have dumpster divers in Russia too. Soviet Union maybe no, but Mother Russia certainly yes.
Moving on, I wondered about the sort of people you might get to do this sort of work. From where I associated to the story that when we pressed (Saint) Margaret Clitherow to death, down and outs were hired off the streets to do the dirty work, decent folk being able to pass sentence, but not to do the deed. According to Wikipedia, Good Queen Bess denounced the execution after the event, just as she was to do a few years later in the case of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. I think something of the same sort had happened in the case of Thomas More, during the reign of her father.
Contrariwise, in some times and places, the office of (Lord High) Executioner has been entirely respectable, although often untouchable to the extent of being hereditary.
Speaking for myself, being a double agent is a bit of a dirty business and one can understand why the Russians are not happy - despite having done a deal over this one to recover some agents of their own. I think we were a bit more relaxed about Philby in Moscow, despite the things that he had done, with respectable British journalists paying him visits and bringing him news and gifts from the homeland - which he no doubt missed. Perhaps going to a smart school and a smart university made all the difference.
And then I started to wonder why we bother with this spying lark at all. It all seems a bit old-speak and I dare say military secrets are better hidden and better guarded than they were back in the glory days of spying in the 1950's. But I suppose, to the extent that we see negotiating with the people with whom we have to co-exist as a zero-sum game with winners and losers, there is some point to trying to get one over the other side by being better informed, perhaps by being better informed about their negotiating position than they are about ours. And given the propensity of statesmen - thinking here of two statesmen in particular - to lie about all kinds of things, maybe we do need to bit of spying to get at whatever truths there might be lurking behind the lies.
From where I associated to several remarks of Simenon, in course of his Maigret stories, to the effect that there are people for whom lying becomes a way of life. They have been doing it for so long that they just carry on doing it, even when there is no more point or need at all. Just a habit, or worse, just a game.
Maybe one day, hopefully before we blow ourselves up or boil the planet away, we will take to negotiating together for the greater good of us all. A hunt for a common solution, rather than a hunt for the killer punch.
Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-spy-who-stayed-out-in-cold.html.
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