The narrator’s underground intelligence operative identity

The narrator’s underground intelligence operative identity depends on a double arrangement: he must conceal what he knows while remaining in places where he can observe power at work. Man explains that the narrator was chosen as a mole in part because he was not much of an organizer or agitator. His work therefore takes the form of watching, reporting, and passing within the structures he is meant to monitor. The role is not simply a hidden identity. It makes visibility itself a condition of concealment.

Selection and Method

The narrator recalls that committees above Man and him decided he would serve as a mole. The contrast with Man is practical: Man is described as an organizer and agitator, while the narrator is not. This assignment gives his relative lack of aptitude for mobilizing others a different value. Instead of leading a committee, he can occupy a position from which he watches people and institutions without announcing the purpose of his attention.

Man’s explanation distinguishes the mole as an intelligence operative from the image of an animal hidden underground. A spy who disappears entirely cannot see what is happening around him; the narrator’s task is instead to hide in plain sight, where other people can see him and he can see them. The work thus joins exposure to concealment. His cover must appear ordinary enough to pass, while his attention and reports serve an underground purpose.

Reports and Cover

The narrator sends reports in letters to his aunt, taking care not to make their tone alarming. The reports themselves are coded, and the cipher troubles Man. The arrangement places clandestine information inside routine correspondence: the letter can appear to belong to family life even as it carries intelligence. The narrator also codes the names of officers in The General’s vanguard, extending the system of concealment to the people identified in his reports.

One report engages with Richard Hedd’s highly esteemed Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction. The passage the narrator presents describes the Vietnamese peasant as apolitical and focused on feeding a family, then treats bombing as a means of persuading that peasant to reject communism. The narrator reports his decision to accept the Hamlet war film director’s offer as an effort to undermine enemy propaganda. His intelligence work therefore includes not only recording names and movements but also placing his own public activity within a political account of what the opposing side is trying to represent. The report’s use of Hedd’s argument makes the supposedly authoritative description of Vietnamese peasants part of the information he is transmitting.

Refugee Mail and Public Identity

The letters must also survive the possibility of surveillance. The narrator considers that unknown censors may be reading refugee mail for signs of dejection or anger, or for evidence that refugees cannot or will not imagine the American Dream. He accordingly writes in an upbeat manner about life in Los Angeles, presenting himself as one more immigrant glad to be in a country that formally guarantees the pursuit of happiness.

That cheerful presentation is a calculated public identity rather than a transparent account of private feeling. The narrator distinguishes a guarantee of happiness from a guarantee of the opportunity to pursue it: the latter, he observes, resembles the chance to buy a lottery ticket, in which a few may win while millions pay. This reflection complicates the optimistic tone he adopts for possible readers. The letter has two audiences and two functions: it performs the expected gratitude of a refugee while carrying coded reports for Man’s aunt, and it allows the narrator to register skepticism without presenting that skepticism openly to a censor.

The Visible Mole

Man asks the narrator to consider what everyone else can see about him that he himself has ceased to notice. The narrator goes to a mirror, with Man looking over his shoulder, and recognizes a feature that has long been part of his appearance. Man recasts that mole as the beauty mark on the nose of power itself. The bodily mark becomes an image for the intelligence role: the narrator is not concealed by being invisible, but by being so visibly present that his presence can seem unremarkable.

The image also defines the limits of the narrator’s control over his cover. The mole is part of himself, familiar enough to escape his notice, yet available to others as a sign. Man’s interpretation turns that ordinary feature into a figure for proximity to power: the operative must remain close enough to observe, while the significance of his position remains unreadable to those around him. The narrator’s identity is therefore made from both deliberate devices, such as cipher and coded names, and an embodied visibility that he does not experience as exceptional until Man directs his attention to it. The account establishes the logic and early practices of this underground role; it does not, in these passages, describe its eventual outcome.