When covert activities go wrong, governments are supposed to respond with what James Bond author Ian Fleming called ‘The Big Lie’: responsibility for them had to be denied. For Fleming, this fundamental dictum of espionage had ‘been so ever since the man from the opposition crept under the tent flap in the desert and listened to the plans of the enemy tribal chiefs’. And so it had remained a fundamental part of the conduct of US covert activities. That is, at least, until the coming of the 1960s.

It began with Gary Powers. On 1 May 1960, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia. Cunningly, Khrushchev waited for Eisenhower to issue ‘The Big Lie’ before revealing to the world that the pilot – Powers – and pieces of his plane were in Soviet custody. Eisenhower refused to apologise. His secretary of state, Christian Herter, unconvincingly invoked the ‘circuit breaking’ mechanism that provided bureaucratic distance between the President and the decision-making process that led to Powers’ downed flight. ‘The insulted but jubilant Russians had a show trial and put on a U-2 exhibition in Gorky Park, thus treating the episode as a propaganda victory.’ In the short term, the event led to the cancellation of an East–West summit, scheduled to take place two weeks after Powers’ flight came down. In the long-term, however, its significance resided, as CIA historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones put it, in its demonstration ‘to a startled American public that their president would lie to them’.

For Ian Fleming, the US Government's partial and piecemeal admission represented a ‘majestic mishandling’ of the entire affair. James Bond's boss, M, Fleming postulated, would have handled the affair quite differently by issuing the following denial: