the chief spy is a one-item dossier

The man who runs the American surveillance state is himself perfectly surveilled, reduced to a single exploitable secret — a daily dawn penis-measurement he has performed "like clockwork; has since twelve," complete with a "telescoping travelling model of the ruler" for the road. The book's joke is structural: the Chief of Unspecified Services, whose whole profession is the compilation of other people's blackmailable facts, is himself a dossier of exactly one entry, and the narration opens his file for us as coolly as his own agency would open anyone's. The watcher is the most legible person in the room.