If the CIA does plunge into the industrial espionage business, the first question will be: How will it divvy up the product? If the agency manages to steal an automotive breakthrough from Honda, will it go to Chrysler, General Motors or Ford? Or will it be secretly auctioned off-thus defraying some of the cost of the U.S. I’m almost sure that Harry, a true professional, would as soon have risked his life for IBM as he would have for flag and country-providing the pay was the same. If he were still with the agency today, I know Harry would be keen to try his hand at what some claim will be the CIA’s most promising new venture in years: industrial espionage. He was dumped after 20 or so years of flitting about the world as an agency labor specialist, fomenting strikes, I suspect, or if need be, breaking them.
Harry had been one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s contract hires, which meant he had no Civil Service protection or pension.
But then the Barbouzes were originally Nebraska lads and perhaps that’s the way things are still done in the heartland. I assured him it had been a gift and marveled to myself that there are still brothers who go around cleaning up the messes left by their feckless siblings. The letter was not so much to inform me of Harry’s death as to inquire, rather diffidently, if the $600 I had dispatched by Federal Express several years ago to Harry at that same motel was a loan or a gift? If it had been a loan, the brother would make sure Harry’s estate ( estate? ) repaid it. But we live in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes,” I wanted to telephone the last living ex-CIA spook I knew to ask who the new snakes are and why Woolsey finds them so bewildering.īut I didn’t call, and now I wish I had, because a few weeks later I received a letter from the brother of my friend the spook, Harry Barbouze, which is not his name, saying Harry had died alone in a Lafayette, La., motel room, presumably of the drink. James Woolsey, the new director of Central Intelligence, told a congressional hearing in March, “Yes, we have slain the dragon.
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