SURVEILLANCE: AGELA
MERKEL DOESN’T PLAY POKER
John Rhys-Davies (who played Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy) once opined that:
‘Spying is like chess: sometimes you have to withdraw,
sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win – preferably a knight
rather than a king or a queen.’
Unfortunately Rhys-Davies was wrong on two counts.
The first is mechanistic: you can’t sacrifice your king in chess. But the
second is more philosophical.
When you sit down to play chess you can see ALL the pieces – those
belonging to yourself and those
controlled by your opponent – and, moreover, you both know the rules governing
the playing of the game. This was not the case in the topsy-turvy world of espionage.
Here each side does its damnedest to hide its pieces from the opposition and
the breaking of rules was not only expected but positively encouraged. Further,
in espionage there is never only one opponent: a nation’s enemies are numerous and even those who evince
friendship might, if push comes to shove, reveal themselves as in league with
the bad guys.
Espionage is a game of bluff and counter-bluff.
Thus espionage is more akin to poker than to chess with every
player desperately trying to keep his opponents from having a peek at the cards
he or she is holding.
Of course, as in real-life
poker, everyone is trying to get an advantage (fair or otherwise) and
religiously searches their opponents for ‘tells’, the signals regarding the strength or
weakness of a player’s hand that are sent by the player’s body language or by
changes to their physiological condition. How a player holds himself, how he
stacks and plays with his chips, the way his hands move, his facial expressions
… all these and many, many others can give clues
as to the player’s state of mind and what their intention is vis à vis their
hand.
I suspect that the reason why in the last twenty
years we’ve seen such a blanding out of our politicians (in Britain,
post-Thatcher, all the leaders of our political parties have been youngish,
white, sport a full head of hair but no beards or moustaches, have an athletic
frame, are neatly if conservatively dressed, have a family life of yawning
conventionality and speak in a neutered, indeterminate accent. Only one
deviated from that template, Brown, and look what happened to him!). The reason
isn’t wholly to do with this being the ‘image’ of a leader opinion polls tell
the party gurus will best secure victory in an election but also because it is
indicative of a person who is willing to sublimate his personality to the political
process … a person who can maintain an impassive
poker face.
But there is another aspect of poker playing which
has a wider relevance to the espionage world-at-large: card counting. Card
counters in poker keep a mental record of all the high and low valued cards played and
this allows them to assess the probability of a high or low value card being
played next (for anyone interested I recommend Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich).
Surveillance is card counting writ large, the means
by which espionage agencies seek to tip the cards in their favour. The problem
is that to do this surveillance must be directed at ALL the players, friendly
and unfriendly alike, because their actions are intertwined and what one player
does influences what other players do and so on. Thus it is no surprise that
America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been eavesdropping on the German
government. Germany is a powerful nation and what it does has major international
political and economic repercussions, therefore for Angela Merkel to say
(following the disclosure that the NSA had accessed her ‘phone records) ‘Spying
on friends is not on at all’ is breathtakingly naïve.
For her to say she didn’t know what was going on is pure bullshit. Back in 1998 the
European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report which
advised ‘The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States
for making private messages via the global communications network assessable to
US intelligence agencies’. The report urged the NSA’s activities in Europe be
scaled back or be made more transparent. They did neither, so for Merkel to
pronounce ignorance is hokum.
The report also castigated Britain’s involvement in
this snooping. Just as NSA and GCHQ have circumvented domestic controls by
indulging in reciprocal surveillance in order that they can monitor (all?) their
country’s citizens (‘Hi there GCHQ!) so they have done the same thing in
Germany (and Spain and Italy …).
Methinks that Merkel’s outrage wasn’t triggered by moral
indignation but rather by the thought that she wasn’t one of the Watchers but
one of the Watched.
Welcome to the club, Angela. Maybe you should take up
poker?
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