Anyone out there remember James Bond’s funeral?  Yes, Bond died.  Sort of.

The burial at sea of MI6 ace spy comes early in “You Only Live Twice”.  Seems the cloak of having died was necessary for 007 to foil SPECTRE’s capturing of US and USSR spaceships, which threatens British high tea with the unsavoury effects of nuclear war.  Key to the plot is Bond going undercover, becoming a Japanese fisherman in a small island village (near the fake volcano island being used by Blofeld as a secret rocket launch station and underground base).  He marries a Japanese secret agent (named, as they are, Kissy Suzuki) and settles into village life with neither fanfare nor, apparently, the notice of any of the other villagers.

Are you following this picture?  Sean Connery circa-1967 disguises himself as a Japanese fisherman after a wee bit of surgery to make his eyes look slanted.  In fact, it looked like somebody put scotch tape on his eyebrows.  That’s the same Connery who emerged bare-chested from the surf in “Dr. No” and looked no less unlike a Japanese villager than Lassie.  That stretch of the imagination is called Hollywood.  See also, John Wayne playing Genghis Kahn.

Out here in the real world, though, spies probably don’t stick out quite so sore thumbly, as it’s bad for business; worse for health.  Spies in the real world probably look like people on TV, even reality shows.  They probably look like well, you or me (even if we would never agree to be on a reality show).  That means they probably look like NGO workers.  Recent news suggests that they may in fact be NGO workers.

First it was the Norwegian government admitting that its secret service had agents inside Pakistan, which was widely understood to mean NGO workers.  Then, last week, the Dutch government saying that it used journalists to spy on the Chinese.  Ouch!  Those are the good governments; the ones with actual moral scruples.

Well, that news fits the times.  I blogged on the CIA’s recent use of a fake vaccination campaign to identify and kill OBL.  Here’s how that myopic action is playing out right now, in Northwest Pakistan, where military commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur refuses to permit polio vaccination, because “spies could enter the region under the cover of vaccination teams to get information”.

Add on top of that the way we here in the West usually view NGOs as organizations where the NG means something, but NGOs in many parts of the world are very G, amply and expressly tied to the interests of the rulers or the State itself.  So it would be perfectly normal for people in the countries where we work to be suspicious of our self-proclaimed neutrality and independence to begin with.

What now?  It’s not like humanitarian agencies have policies on what to do with spies in the house.  Presumably, we’d strap them to a table with a laser beam inching its way towards their groin.  In the absence of a laser, we could terminate their contracts, although that’s not really the same thing as having a policy on the issue.  (Interestingly, we sometimes “know” that one of our national staff is a spy for the host country.  And what do we do?  Nothing.  It’s not a bad thing – helps create transparency (i.e., the security goons in the government can see what we’re up to)).

Do NGOs have responsibility to do a better job of protecting their integrity and neutrality against infiltration?  Do we have a duty to vet more robustly our employees?  NGOs typically perform a criminal records check, but I’m relatively certain there’s no website to verify if somebody isn’t a CIA assassin.  Random lie detector tests?  Push governments to publicly disavow this abuse?  Make it a criminal offense for a government to do this?  Ignore the issue until it becomes “common knowledge” that there are spies in the house?  Ignore it until our beneficiaries have suspicions about us?  Until they fear talking to us?  Until people warn them against talking to us?

Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Why would anybody with my background and training do this job for so little pay?  Well, I’m exposing this issue in a blog, so it couldn’t possibly be me.