The spies are coming in from the cold

Formerly secretive agencies are putting on a public face with their fate in the balance following November's election

Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, a once-secretive company that was partly funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm, talked extensively about its work Friday on Bill Maher’s show. He touted its use of “weapons-grade software” to help national security agencies identify threats, win wars and keep the peace, boasting, “We had the biggest impact on anti-terror of any company in the world.”

In London, the chiefs of the CIA and MI6 made their first-ever joint public appearance at a Financial Times event this month to warn of risks to the international order.  

And even the once highly-secret National Security Agency is getting in on the act. It has come out with a podcast whose title spoofs the agency’s long history of avoiding the public eye: “No such podcast.”

Spying in the 21^st century is a far different business than it was when John le Carré wrote his novel, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” in 1963. In a preface written 50 years after it was first published, le Carré rec…