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    Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying
    Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying
    Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying
    Audiobook10 hours

    Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying

    Written by James M. Olson

    Narrated by Joel Richards

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Revolutionary War officer Nathan Hale, one of America's first spies, said, "Any kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary." A statue of Hale stands outside CIA headquarters, and the agency often cites his statement as one of its guiding principles. But who decides what is necessary for the public good, and is it really true that any kind of service is permissible for the public good?

    These questions are at the heart of James M. Olson's book, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying. Olson, a veteran of the CIA's clandestine service, takes listeners inside the real world of intelligence to describe the difficult dilemmas that field officers face on an almost daily basis. Far from being a dry theoretical treatise, this fascinating book uses actual intelligence operations to illustrate how murky their moral choices can be. Listeners will be surprised to learn that the CIA provides very little guidance on what is, or is not, permissible. Rather than empowering field officers, the author has found that this lack of guidelines actually hampers operations. Olson believes that U.S. intelligence officers need clearer moral guidelines to make correct, quick decisions.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 20, 2018
    ISBN9781977375483
    Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying

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    Reviews for Fair Play

    4/5

    22 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The book is mostly 50 scenarios submitted for moral evaluation. Thus, it is just as much textbook as audiobook. Getting the most out of this book will require active personal moral philosophy exercises.
    • 3/5
      The author starts with a review of his career in the CIA. He then reviews moral thought on spying in Western philosophy. He then presents 50 moral dilemmas of spy craft to people (including ex-CIA operatives, clergy, journalists, PhD students (presumably from the courses he teaches), etc.) He then presents a summary of what intelligence agencies have done about the scenario in the past. Being the good ex-spy that his is, he gave the text to the CIA to censor, so usually his explanations are just getting interesting when they are expunged by big, black blobs of ink. He also has a tendency to make the US the good guys and the Russians and the Chinese the bad guys.When the review of Western philosophy didn't really come to any conclusions, I didn't have any expectation that the scenarios would either, and they don't. It is, as another reviewer remarked, really a random set of opinions on the scenario. The scenarios themselves are interesting and might be worth discussing in a general class on ethics or social studies in light of the Snowden revelations.One ex-CIA operative said in response to one scenario that she found in much easier to make ethical judgements now that she didn't work for the agency. She said that when she was working she got too caught up in the operation to actually question what was going on. And that's the real moral problem, people getting into a group-think situation where they let the mission trump ethics -- not to mention the law, and most especially common sense.