The headline shocks came rapid-fire. There was hardly time to catch one’s breath. First came espionage charges against FBI agent Richard Miller. The unthinkable: for the first time in the bureau’s proud history, an agent betrayed his trust.
Next was the bizarre tale of ex-navy warrant officer John Walker, alleged ringleader of a spy ring that included his half-brother and young sailor son.
Days later, a covert operator for the CIA in Ghana, Sharon Scranage, was indicted on 18 counts of espionage.
Then FBI agents arrested Col. Wayne Gilespie, West Pointer and Vietnam veteran, for selling weapons to Iran.
The spate of cases sent tremors through Washington. Military brass promised a tightening of security, while Congress quickly voted on a capital punishment statute for spies.
The cases brought concern to the country as well. In VFW halls and hard-hat bars, in the churches and living rooms where folks still talk unashamedly about things like patriotism and duty, grief was mixed with anger. It seemed an epidemic was sweeping the very institutions most Americans revere as bastions of our values and liberties. Why?
Most commentators saw the scandals as simply individuals succumbing to age-old temptations. That is certainly plausible in a society that relentlessly pursues power, pleasure, and possessions; and such motives were apparent in each case.
John Walker played James Bond with gusto, dashing about in his plane, sailing his sloop in the company of glamorous women. His arrest crowned his fantasy, as Walker crowed giddily, “I’m a celebrity!”
Greed might have snared Wayne Gilespie. The colonel, a 29-year veteran, was about to retire and enter the arms business. Other retired officers landed cushy jobs with defense contractors, so why shouldn’t he get a head start? After all, only a fool doesn’t take care of himself in our “look out for number one” society.
Or take FBI agent Richard Miller. Father of seven, stuck in a paper-pushing post and unable to meet his mortgage payments, he was no match for a modern Mata Hari, the sultry Russian woman who offered sex and money.
So it was with the CIA’s Sharon Scranage, stationed at a lonely outpost in Ghana, swept off her feet by a businessman who just happened to be a cousin of Ghana’s Marxist leader.
But payoffs and passion don’t tell the whole story. These incidents are symptoms of an insidious cancer that has pervaded the values undergirding our public institutions.
This disease is not confined to the U.S., as recent scandals in Britain and West Germany reveal, but it is part of a general malaise erupting in the West wherever spiritual values are being sapped.
To understand it in the United States, one must return to the mid-60s. Even as John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” rang in our ears, and Green Berets defended our “noble vision” in Southeast Asia, an undercurrent of protest churned. Campus flower children had another vision—easy sex, hard rock, hard drugs, and peace. Peace, no matter what.
Then the “noble vision” bogged down in bloody rice paddies. With 55,000 of their buddies in body bags, the vets returned—not to ticker-tape parades, but to derision. And after Congress cut off aid to the nation they fought to save, the ex-soldiers witnessed the shame of panicked Americans dangling from the skids of overloaded helicopters, the U.S. flag burned in Saigon’s streets.
The point here is not the wisdom or morality of American involvement in Vietnam. But this tragic war left millions disillusioned, and fueled growing discontent with our national purpose.
In the early seventies, the media intensified the assault on authority. Then came Watergate—a breach of trust at the highest levels. Respect for institutions hit new lows. And what began as a campus movement became the age of the anti-hero. Disillusionment replaced the American dream.
In the light of this, should we really be shocked by today’s spy cases? Consider Wayne Gilespie again. Ordered to fight, perhaps to die, in Vietnam, he returned to a nation that taunted its military for committing moral crimes against humanity. No wonder government lost its legitimacy, or that he might decide to rescue something from his career for himself. And since one war is no more moral than the next, why not sell a few arms to Iran?
Such reasoning is the inevitable result of our wholesale evisceration of values. Belief in “self-evident truths,” fixed standards by which right and wrong can be judged, has been replaced. Relativism, long lurking below the surface, emerged as the prevailing philosophy of the “me decade” of the seventies; it reigns still in the yuppieism of the eighties.
We may still give lip service to traditional values, but in practice, the right is whatever is good for me. Emptied of meaning, words like duty and loyalty no longer have the moral force to restrain our passion for self-gratification.
C. S. Lewis did not live to see the America of the eighties. I doubt he’s sorry he missed it. But he foresaw our situation today when he argued in 1943 that mere knowledge of right and wrong is powerless against man’s appetites. Reason must rule the appetites by means of the “spirited element”—learned desires for the good, or “trained emotions,” said Lewis. He likened reason to the head, the appetite to the stomach, and the spirited element—the essential connecting link—to the chest.
Aren’t today’s spy cases merely the consequence of a nation’s loss of its spirited element? This is a sobering question for Christians, who have a special responsibility for a people’s spirituality.
And if we are a nation of men without chests, so to speak, Lewis’s description is all too apt: “We remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
