Duane Clarridge: A spy for all seasons

WASHINGTON: Duane Clarridge died this past weekend in Leesburg, Virginia, at 83, and there are numerous tributes in the US media calling him everything from a "brash spy" (New York Times) to "a legendary CIA officer" (Fox News). Most obituaries mention only in passing that he served undercover in India and Nepal before moving on to headliner career operations, including messing around in Latin-America, getting enmeshed in the Iran-Contra affair (for which he received, not a Presidential medal, but a Presidential pardon), and late in his life as a private citizen, dabbling in the Af-Pak theater.
"Dewey" as he was nicknamed and called by friends, fancied himself as "A Spy for All Seasons".Indeed it was the title of his memoir about his life in the CIA, an organization he held in much disdain late in his life. One of his early postings was in the sub-continent, and it was a theater that held him in much thrall and introduced him to the Cold War spy v spy skirmishes that he recounted with much relish later.
Dewey arrived in New Delhi in 1960 with Washington worried about the inroads the Soviet Union was making into Nehru’s India. The mandate for Clarridge and his spook associates in New Delhi was clear: stop the Communist advance.
It all began with the formation of Kerala state in 1956 and the first election that brought the communist party to power in the state - for the first time in a free and fair election anywhere in the world. The US was rattled, and the CIA was asked to undermine the Kerala government by bankrolling the Congress Party with clandestine funds, because, it was argued, the Soviets were funding the Communist regime.
In fact, the operation was considered so important that Washington moved out Harry Rositzke, who was the first chief of the CIA’s Soviet division, to New Delhi as the station chief in 1957. In his memoirs, Clarridge recalls his admiration for the meticulous Rositzke and his methods in New Delhi, including asking his agents to be constantly on the beat and not bother coming into office for shuffling papers.
In one hilarious passage, Clarridge recounts the bane of all spycraft – the central role played by alcohol. "The trouble is you cannot ply your target with alcohol while you take notes over iced tea," he writes of his efforts in New Delhi, including trying to recruit agents from the Mongolian Embassy. "What you do is you excuse yourself, go to the bathroom and write notes like crazy. The next morning, you tend to your hangover, go to the office, and write up what you can decipher from your notes of the previous night."
There are other moments worthy of Keystone Cops. Clarridge recalls an incident where a CIA agent stationed in the New Delhi embassy accidentally drops what in CIA parlance was called the “Who Me?” vial – a stink bomb that emitted a foul fecal odor that they had been supplied by Langley to disrupt Communist gatherings in India. The entire embassy had to be aired out to clear the odor, which was attributed to Delhi’s nallahs (sewage gutters).
Rositzke was eventually expelled New Delhi, reportedly after a State Department code clerk named John Discoe Smith, who had served with him in India and defected to the Soviet Union, claimed that he (Rositzke) had been involved in the 1955 bombing of a plane carrying the Chinese delegation to the Bandung Nonaligned Conference in the mistaken belief that Zhou Enlai was on board (India was still chummy with China at this point).
Rositzke returned to Washington and was eventually made coordinator of operations against Communist parties abroad (until his retirement in 1970), but Clarridge goes on to serve in Madras, where he recounts further escapades, mainly trying to bring about mistrust between the various communist factions in India.
Although he did not return to the India theater after his return in the mid-60s, Clarridge remained sentimental about the subcontinent. "Many westerners who serve there get hung up on the bone-crunching poverty of India, the filth and the flies and the begging," he wrote in his memoir. "To me there was so much beauty and fascination in the people and the country that the squalor paled. Although even today I cannot account for it, I never felt like an outsider during my stay in the subcontinent."
Washington DC, and Virginia counties adjoining Washington DC, are crawling with retired and superannuated CIA folks, and some of their memoirs, memories, and recollections needs to be taken with a fistful of bicarbonate. Clarridge’s account itself is suitably salted and spiced, and even in his later years, his bravado was received skeptically in the capital’s spook circuit.
He and many of his contemporaries feel the glory days of Pax America are gone and they have a hard time dealing with America’s new demographics. Some of them see Obama variously as an enemy, an interloper, a fifth columnist ,or a Manchurian candidate and they find it difficult to reconcile to a changing America.
At a ripe age of 82, Clarridge himself became something of an "adviser" to the Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson – evidently other GOP candidates did not find him compelling enough in a town full of geriatric spooks and superannuated generals. He plied his domain expertise on the African-American surgeon who briefly counted for something in the Presidential election. The engagement ended disastrously.
After Clarridge went public about Carson’s poor grasp of geo-politics and his failed efforts "to make him smart" ("Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East," Clarridge said publicly), Carson disowned him. His campaign called him an "elderly gentleman" who was only providing some foreign policy inputs to the candidate.
That elderly gentleman died of complications from cancer in a Virginia retirement home on Saturday - a spy whose season ended.