The worlds of spies have always been secretive, revealed most often as the stuff of fiction. On Friday and Saturday, Feb. 26 and 27, former CIA officials, historians, novelists and scholars will bring those worlds out of the shadows as they examine the subject of espionage and its intellectual, ethical, artistic and institutional implications.

"The Matter of Espionage" is being organized by three Yale faculty members who have studied the subject: Robin W. Winks, the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History and author of "Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War 1939-1961"; John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, whose books include "We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History"; and John Hollander, Sterling Professor of English, who wrote the book "Reflections on Espionage."

"The study of espionage and intelligence -- always fascinating -- is well on the way to making the transition from the realm of spy stories to that of serious historical scholarship," says Gaddis. "This conference will reflect the best of this new work, much of which is reshaping our understanding of what really happened during the Cold War."

John Deutch, a former head of the CIA who is now a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give the plenary address on "Espionage and the Universities" at 5 p.m. on Friday at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

Other conference participants are William Bundy, former deputy assistant director of the CIA and author of "A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency"; Newsday editor David Kahn, who is the author of the book "The Codebreakers"; George Kateb, professor of politics at Princeton University; novelist Charles McCarry; novelist and former counter-intelligence officer William Hood; historians Chris Andrew, Peter Grose, Nicholas Cullather, Wesley Wark and Timothy Naftali; and former Senior Intelligence Service staff members Helene Boatner, Susan McCloud and Jeanne Vertefeuille. Yale faculty members Ruth Wedgwood, Paul Kennedy, Gaddis Smith and Bradford Westerfield will also take part.

In addition to Deutch's address, there will be four panel discussions over the two-day period. These are titled "Espionage and Literature," "Espionage and History," "Intelligence, Morals and Politics" and "Doing Espionage." The discussions will explore such questions as: "What is the traditional relation of espionage to institutional diplomacy as reconsidered in a post-Cold War period? What revisions can be made in historical assessments of secret political activity given voluminous new evidence? How have genres of spy fiction centered on particular historically placed concerns in order to engage moral questions of loyalty and betrayal? How have universities, and the intelligentsia generally, variously figured in the planning, execution and subsequent study of espionage?" and "What can be said of the respective moral situations of field agents and analysts?"

"The pragmatic fictions employed by gatherers of what is called HUMINT, or espionage using human agents, and the literary ones of novelists and dramatists are interestingly parallel," says Hollander of the conference's inclusion of literary topics. "Their domains intersect in the fictional genre of the spy thriller, but problems such as personal identity, authenticity, self-deceptions, loyalty and betrayal speak to broader literary and philosophical concerns as well, some of which this conference will explore."

In conjunction with the conference, there will be an exhibit at the Sterling Memorial Library. The exhibit, also titled "The Matter of Espionage," was designed by Margaret K. Powell, librarian for literature in English and Commonwealth studies.

"The conference comes at a crucial moment in our history, for the relationship between intelligence work, the university as a liberating institution, and history as a discipline, is interesting," says Winks, who notes that the role of universities in helping to create intelligence officers is perhaps less significant today than in the past.

Conference sessions will take place 2:15-6:30 p.m. on Friday and 9:45 a.m.-6:30 p.m. on Saturday at the Whitney Humanities Center. All events are free and open to the public. For further information on "The Matter of Espionage," send e-mail to Katherine Kearns at katherine.kearns@yale.edu.

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