In Espionage and War, Secure Communication Is Key. Just Ask These Spies.

Given all the press attention and congressional hearings, the recent leak of war plans in strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen may feel like a singular event. And mistakes aside, as the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, asserted before Congress, the operation itself “was very successful and continues to be very successful.” So why worry?

But consider the career highlights of some of the world’s most noteworthy spies in these three new books.

The Determined Spy

By Douglas Waller

The biggest surprise in Waller’s lively biography of Frank Wisner, THE DETERMINED SPY: The Turbulent Life and Times of CIA Pioneer Frank Wisner (Dutton, 645 pp., $36), is how stunningly naïve U.S. covert and martial operations have been at times. As Waller shows, Wisner’s tenure provides one of the harsher lessons of the world of espionage: What appears to be a success at the time may not prove so over the long run.

Wisner was a major figure at the C.I.A. in the 1950s, when the agency toppled the governments of Iran and Guatemala. Washington was so pleased with those results that it contemplated doing the same in Cuba. That’s how, in 1961, we ended up with the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs.

That leads to a second harsh lesson that intelligence agencies don’t like to talk about much — how frequently their people in the field are incompetent. For example, during part of World War II, the chief of American spying in the continental crossroads city of Istanbul — perhaps the most fruitful location for spies at the time — was Lanning “Packy” Macfarland, a former savings and loan executive from Illinois who was fond of wearing a trench coat and slouch hat. This “dangerous buffoon,” as Waller calls him, had two lovers: One worked for the Germans, the other for the Russians.