Have you ever heard of HUMINT?
HUMINT is the acronym for Human Intelligence. Yes, this term is a contradiction in terms. But because bureaucrats ignore that obvious absurdity, we shall as well.
HUMINT refers to that quintessential guy who spies. I don’t mean that guy who operates a spy satellite from the safety of a control room, battling nothing but boredom. And I don’t mean the pilot of a spy plane whose aircraft’s snoopy gadgets scoop up a cornucopia of enemy radio signals and photo images. Nope, those types of spying are the result of sheer technological wizardry — the satellite, the snooper scooper — and therefore they are not considered HUMINT.
Real HUMINT is espionage at its most classic: a human spy doing all the work. Somebody with personal access and almost always a sweet-talking liar. Kind of a covert Casanova.
Casanova when he was young. Although he lived to a ripe old age, you might say he never grew up.
In fact, Giacomo Casanova himself was a spy. Likewise he was a lawyer, librarian, playwright, pundit, pamphleteer, doctor, diplomat, historian, novelist, naval officer, churchman, salesman, lottery-runner, bonds-trader, entrepreneur, alchemist, autobiographer, musician, gambler, and notorious ladies’ man.
None of those careers he practiced for very long, other than gambler and ladies’ man (which in Casanova’s case really were careers). “I have always loved truth so passionately,” he declared in his memoirs, “that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms… As for women, this sort of reciprocal deceit cancels itself out; for when love enters in, both parties are usually dupes.”
Giacomo Casanova was born in 1725, in Venice, Italy. Today, the seaport of Venice is famed for its charming canals, its graceful gondolas, its tantalizing tourist traps. All of which are situated close to the majestic Mediterranean — and getting ever closer as the entirety of Venice gradually sinks. (Enjoy it while you can.)
Once upon a time Venice was also a republic and major maritime power, its Venetian warships sailing far and wide to protect a prodigiously profitable Venetian merchant trade. Venetian glassmakers and their products were so prized that the Venetian Republic actually worried about industrial espionage — in other words, about glassmakers emigrating and taking their skills with them. So Venice also exported assassins. Really. (China did the same thing against renegade silk weavers.)
By Casanova’s time, though, Venice was in decline. Indeed, Casanova himself spent most of his adult life exiled away from Venice, wandering the royal courts of Europe in hope of finding favor. Preferably from pretty ladies. He was repeatedly successful, which meant he repeatedly got into trouble.
“All the French ministers are the same. They lavished money which came out of other people’s pockets to enrich their creatures, and they were absolute: the down-trodden people counted for nothing.”
If you missed that, that was Casanova complaining about the French government. Which employed him.
In 1757, the French government sent Casanova to Dunkirk, a northern port-city in France where a few of England’s Royal Navy warships had anchored for a visit. Casanova’s spy mission, which he later revealed in his memoirs, was to make “the acquaintance of the officers and of completing a minute and circumstantial report of the victualing, the number of seamen, the guns, the ammunition, discipline, etc., etc.”
To find good sources of information in Dunkirk, Casanova began at a private establishment where he could find properly respectable gentlemen. But alas, the bordello was closed. So he went to a tavern.
He later wrote:
Casanova at about the age when he was a spy.
“After we enjoyed an excellent dinner, several persons arrived and card play began, which I did not participate in, as I wished to study the manner of the place, and above all, particular officers who were present. By speaking with an air of authority about naval matters, and by saying I had served in the Navy of the Venetian Republic, in three days I not only knew but was intimate with all the Captains of the Dunkirk fleet. I talked at random about naval architecture, about the Venetian system of maneuvers, and I noticed that the jolly sailors were pleased more by my blunders than by my sensible remarks.”
I can just imagine.
“Excuse me, Sailor, but when I walked past your ship anchored at the dock, something appeared to be missing. If your ship really is a Royal Navy warship, a ship of His Royal Majesty the King of England — well then, Sailor, where is the Royal Seal? Out for a swim?”
“Uh, no. The Royal Seal is in the Captain’s cabin. Up on the wall.”
“Up on the wall? Climbing it?”
“No. Hanging there.”
“Hanging there? Mutiny?”
“Aesthetics.”
To continue his memoirs:
“Four days after I arrived in Dunkirk, one of the Captains asked me to dine on his ship. After that engagement, all the others did likewise. And on every occasion I stayed on the ship for the rest of the day. I was curious about everything — and Jack is so trustful! I ventured into the hold, asked questions innumerable, and found plenty of young officers delighted to show off their own importance, gossiping without any encouragement from me. I was careful, however, to learn everything which could be valuable, and in the evenings I committed to paper all the mental notes I had made during the day. Four or five hours was all I allowed myself for sleep, and in fifteen days I felt I had learnt enough.”
Casanova returned to Paris, offered his report, received the gratitude of his employers, and likewise a very pretty payment. Yet of his achievement, Casanova himself was modest. (Gosh, who knew?) His boss, he wrote, “might easily have procured all the information I gave him without spending a penny. Any intelligent young naval officer would have done it just as well, and would have acquitted himself with zeal and discretion, to gain the good opinion of the King’s ministers.”
Well, I’m not so sure about that. For in comparison to that connoisseur of comically captivating conversational confabulation we call Casanova, any young French naval officer seeking to seduce those salty seafarers from the British Isles — I mean seduce them semantically — would have found himself about as welcome as scurvy. When the Brits beheld Casanova, however, they beheld what appeared to be the walking remnant of a pathetically puny Venetian bathtub navy. A harmless oldster, a guy whose age marked him as long past his peak.
If only they knew. Certainly many ladies did. But that’s another story.
Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire
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