Weekly Standard
ERIC FELTEN

President Donald Trump persists in vulgarly describing long-time Cambridge professor Stefan Halper as a “spy.” Not so, insists official Washington—not because the old don wasn’t working to get secret information as part of an FBI counter-intelligence operation, but because spy is the wrong word. The FBI doesn’t use spies, tweets an outraged James Comey, it employs “Confidential Human Sources (the actual term).”

You have to like that parenthetical didacticism, which manages to convey Comey’s contemptuous attitude that the president isn’t just a usurper but an ignorant one at that.

But do we really want our thinking on questions of espionage and other unpleasant necessities circumscribed by language meant to obscure and deflect? Must we speak about spycraft only in the approved terminology of government euphemisms?

The great lexicographer of political life, the late William Safire, once took up the question of “spookspeak,” the language of U.S. intelligence agencies.

He found that the professionals don’t like it when journalists use colorful or vivid language not specified in the rulebook. One such professional chided Safire for having used the term “mole” to describe an intelligence employee “secretly in the pay” of the opposition. Mole isn’t a word that S.I.S. (Senior Intelligence Service) people use, but rather “the best example of jargon created by literary or journalistic use.” So wrote the helpful intelligence professional. Who was this stickler, by the way? No less a mole than Aldrich Ames, who had plenty of time to niggle about language, locked up as he was in Allenwood.

According to official FBI terminology, Safire wrote, there is no such thing as a mole. Instead, there is an “agent in place” or a “recruitment in place.” Such an agent is defined, by official FBI documents Safire had in hand, as “a person who remains in a position while acting under the direction of a hostile intelligence service, so as to obtain current intelligence information.” But please be correct: Don’t call the agent a mole.

The punctilious word-smiths at the FBI did allow “double agent” and specified it as such: someone “engaged in clandestine activity for two or more intelligence services who provides information about one service to another.” Note that the FBI doesn’t say “spying.” It says “clandestine activity.” That’s the sort of subtle linguistic nicety Comey has in mind when he talks about the correct words for secret agentry.


Since when do journalists roll over and accept the bloodless terminology of official euphemisms? Especially when it comes to the obscurantist vocabulary of Washington’s more unpleasant activities.

The sophisticates have long rolled their eyes at such clumsy efforts to elude reality. William Lutz gives an example in his essay on Doublespeak in the book “The State of the Language.” Lutz points to the State Department’s decision in 1983, “that in its annual reports on the status of human rights in countries around the world it would no longer use the word ‘killing.’ Instead, it would use the phrase ‘unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life.’” This change was met with outrage and ridicule, and the chastened State Department revised the phrase to “political killing.”

Where are all the sophisticates when it comes to the laughable insistence that “spy” is not the actual term? I suspect there is no one at Langley whose official job title or description is “spy.” That doesn’t mean there are no spies working for the CIA.

What we need to know more about is what Halper was up to with regard to the Trump campaign. We need to know who sent him, when, whom he approached, how, and what he found out. The facts, not some insistence on euphemism, should determine whether he’s cheered as a “Confidential Human Source” or derided as a “Spy.”

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