Henry Patterson, better known to millions of fans over the decades as Jack Higgins, introduced me to the spy novel. The Eagle Has Landed first came to me as a movie when my late father took me to watch it at a Wan Chai cinema. I didn’t want to go. Thanks to the utter linguistic and pedagogical incompetence of my English teachers at a so-called elite primary school, most of us could barely speak five words of the language. A foreign movie in English would have been completely incomprehensible to me. And at 10 or 11, I much preferred to watch Japanese cartoons on TVB. But I was pleasantly surprised by the action and gunfights, especially towards the end when a platoon of US Army Rangers raided the church where the German paratroopers were making a last stand. Of course, I didn’t know what the story was about, let alone who Hitler was, or why he wanted to kidnap a fat guy with a fat cigar constantly in his hand or in his mouth. I only knew the story when I picked up the novel in Canadian high school. Even back then, I thought it was peculiar to have referenced Jungian depth psychology and the notion of synchronicity. Now, I think that Jungian notion was central to the whole novel, and turned what was apparently a World War II spy thriller into a tragic-comedy of human fallibility and superstition. Jung, by the way, believed that the I Ching was the bible of synchronicity, both as theory and practice. The ‘Kindleberger Trap’ for China and the United States Consider this exchange at the beginning of the novel when Colonel Radl disclosed to his underling that Hitler wanted to kidnap Winston Churchill to Berlin. Radl blew a cloud of smoke and looked up at the ceiling. “Are you familiar with the works of Jung, Karl?” “The Herr Oberst [Colonel] knows I sold good beer and wine before the war.” “Jung speaks of what he calls synchronicity. Events sometimes having a coincidence in time and, because of this, the feeling that some much deeper motivation is involved.” “Herr Oberst?” Hofer said politely. “Take this affair. The Fuhrer, whom heaven protect naturally, has a brainstorm and comes up with the comical and absurd suggestion that we should emulate Skorzeny’s exploit at Gran Sasso by getting Churchill, although whether alive or dead has not been specified. And the synchronicity rears its ugly head in a routine Abwehr [German military intelligence] report. A brief mention that Churchill will be spending a weekend no more than seven or eight miles from the coast at a remote country house in as quiet a part of the country as one could wish. You take my meaning? At any other time that report of Mrs Grey’s [a German spy living in Britain] would have meant nothing.” [Spoiler alert!] Being a reader of Jung sealed the colonel’s fate and that of the crack team he put together for the mission. Radl’s direct order from his boss, the chief of Abwehr Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was to carry out no more than “a feasibility study” of Hitler’s hare-brained idea. Canaris was sure the Fuhrer would have forgotten the whole thing by the end of the week. But Himmler was present at the meeting, and the Abwehr needed to cover themselves – with a feasibility study – in case he raised the idea again. Clearly, Canaris’ instruction was to bury the whole plan in bureaucratic paperwork. But Radl decided to carry out the plot to kidnap Churchill anyway because of a piece of useless intelligence the Abwehr received just days before from a sleeper spy in England to whom no one paid attention. The spy’s insignificance makes him even keener to carry out the ridiculous plot because he notched it up to Jungian synchronicity, or a significant coincidence. [More spoiler alerts!] When the whole operation went south and Radl was arrested and executed, his sentence was “exceeding his orders to the point of treason”. In the event, the judgment was not unjust or unreasonable, as the whole operation was never officially sanctioned down the proper chain of command. There was no synchronicity; all the auspicious connections were in his head only. That’s what many people call superstition. But an educated man and man of action, Radl wrapped it all in a Jungian jargon to execute what his boss knew from the start was an absurd and unworkable idea. His doomed soldiers were going after a double. The real Churchill was on his way to Tehran to meet Stalin and Roosevelt. It’s intriguing that Tom Mankiewicz, the scriptwriter of the movie, saw fit to add the following line to the exchange we quoted above that was not in the novel. He had Radl say: “[Jung was] a very great thinker, a rational man, and yet he speaks of something called synchronicity.” Mankiewicz clearly realised the centrality of the Jungian references to the story. But did he think there was implicitly a conflict between rationality and synchronicity, something he wanted to make clear in the movie script? More importantly, did Jung? The world is against Western dominance, not democracy Over decades, Jung has alternately defined synchronicity as “an acausal connecting principle”, “meaningful coincidence” and “acausal parallelism.” He believes two or more events may be connected without any known or knowable causal link. And he thinks the I Ching is the first and deepest account of such phenomena, if they exist. Things happen by chance, but chance, according to the I Ching, is the acausal connecting principle, not pure randomness or meaninglessness. But, in his commentary on the I Ching , Jung admits he found it hard to enter its world or understand it. “I do not know Chinese and have never been in China,” he wrote. “I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of thinking. “In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind.” Actually, I doubt such a “casting off” is even possible. To appreciate the I Ching , Jung finds it necessary to oppose it with the quintessential Western notion of causality, or cause and effect, as expressed in classical or Newtonian physics and in Kant’s philosophy. But then, he was already using a Western intellectual frame to cast the chance happenings (past, present and future) of the I Ching as “a-causality”. He needed a contrast, and Western notions were all he had. Our eyes may deceive us, but in seeing, they are all we have. The I Ching itself, of course, entertains no such principles as causality or a-causality. I doubt that you and I, or Jung – as modern, postmodern, modern-primitive, Chinese, or Western and what not – could really access the I Ching as it was in its ancient primordiality, any more than we could truly understand the pre-Socratics in the ancient Greek world. We could, however, always fool ourselves into thinking we can find meaning in a chance encounter, coincidences as preordained and unrelated events as being linked. The more intellectually or spiritually inclined may even think the I Ching offers enlightenment in that regard, and read it by projecting their own thoughts and inclinations as divinations. All that can be harmless and even comforting; or it can be fatal, which is exactly the moral of the fate of Colonel Radl in The Eagle Has Landed .