At the conclusion of John le Carré’s famous spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, British intelligence officer George Smiley recounts his questioning of Bill Haydon, an agent whose character in the book is loosely based on the exploits of one of Britain’s most notorious traitors during the early days of the Cold War, Kim Philby. Smiley managed to pry several nuggets of information from Haydon’s confession, including his contempt for Britain and rejecting his country for “aesthetic” reasons, only partly informed by morality.

In the annals of the world’s second oldest profession, why should Bill Haydon’s motives matter to the rest of us? After all, the Cold War has long been over, and one supposes that the huge corpus of espionage literature has moved on to juicier, more current topics. Still, this character’s reasons for switching sides retain their grip on our judgments, because Western educational systems have created breeding grounds for reaching similar kinds of conclusions. In fact, the contemporary relevance of Haydon’s thoughts is frightening.

However, it certainly is not necessary to throw oneself into a full-blown, Ann Coulter-like (Treason!), “loose lips sink ships” mode, and I am far from having any expertise in the sordid and convoluted realm of spying and national betrayal. Still, some back-of-the-envelope musing about this complex subject may generate some useful hypotheses about different ways of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, a phrase found in the Constitution. Here are a few to consider.