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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (71 page)

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A key component in British intelligence is the joint Intelligence Committee, which is part of the Cabinet Office and has management, oversight, production, and foreign liaison functions. It serves as a link between policy makers and the intelligence components to establish and order priorities, which are then approved by the ministers. The JIC also periodically reviews agency performance in meeting established requirements. The JIC’s Assessments Staffproduces intelligence assessments on key issues, which are roughly equivalent to U.S. national intelligence estimates. The JIC also has a monitoring and warning role in terms of threats to British interests. The JIC is, in many respects, akin to the functions that now fall under the jurisdiction of the director of national intelligence, but the chairman of the JIC does not have the same rank or authority.
Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, established in 1994, oversees all three intelligence components. The committee considers the budget, administration, and policy of MI5, M16, and GCHQ, but its oversight function is not as powerful as that exercised by U.S. congressional committees. The Intelligence and Security Committee submits an annual report to the prime minister. The report is publicly released after sensitive portions have been deleted. The government then issues a response to the report.
The close intelligence relationship between Britain and the United States is most evident in the dealings between GCHQ and NSA, but it exists elsewhere. Britain’s independent imagery intelligence (IMINT) capability is restricted to airborne platforms, but it receives satellite imagery from the United States. A range of intelligence products, both collection and analytical, also is shared. British HUMINT does not completely overlap that of the United States, with Britain having some advantages in Commonwealth countries. The 2005 WMD Commission (Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction) report gives some indication of how the two HUMINT enterprises work together.
During the cold war, British intelligence suffered several Soviet espionage penetrations. The most famous was Kim Philby, who, with four other Cambridge University associates, began spying for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Philby became MI6’s CIA liaison, an invaluable position for a Soviet spy. Other Soviet spies included George Blake, an SIS officer, and Geoffrey Prime, a GCHQ employee. Most known British spies were motivated by ideological, not monetary, reasons. Allegations were made that Sir Roger Hollis, a director general of M15, was a spy, but he was cleared after an investigation in 1974.
The British services do not conduct assassinations. However, British special forces units, the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS), have taken part in antiterrorist activities against the IRA that some people have charged were assassinations. The most famous case occurred in March 1988, when the SAS killed three IRA members in Gibraltar. The British government claimed that the IRA members were on active service, planning a series of bomb attacks. The SAS has conducted special operations for M16.
The British services, like those in the United States (and in Australia), came under scrutiny after the start of the Iraq war in 2003, when the expected WMD were not found. The Butler Report did not find substantial flaws in how the British intelligence on Iraq was produced. However, the report noted that the intelligence sources on Iraq had grown weaker and less reliable over time and that that fact was not properly conveyed. The report also said that no evidence existed that intelligence had been politicized, which was as serious an issue in Britain as it was in the United States. In response to the concerns raised about intelligence sources, MI6 created the position of a senior quality control officer to review collected intelligence for its credibility and veracity. The new officer is known as “R,” for reports officer. (The head of M16 has traditionally been known as “C,” in honor of the first head of MI6, Sir Mansfield Cumming.)
British intelligence performance has been the target of earlier investigations. In the aftermath of the Falklands War (1982), a probe by Lord Oliver Shewell Franks held that the changes in Argentina’s policy regarding the Falkland Islands should have been obvious through diplomatic and open sources. However, no basis existed to conclude that the Argentine invasion could have been prevented, although the Franks report criticized the Margaret Thatcher government for not paying enough attention to the issue prior to the war.
The main concern of the British intelligence apparatus today is terrorism. Given the fact that there have been three attacks or attempted attacks since July 2005, a great deal of effort must be given to discerning the depth of the threat within the indigenous Muslim population. Indeed, one of the main concerns in the aftermath of the July 7, 2005, attack was whether or not there were connections between the four bombers and al Qaeda. There is evidence that some of the bombers traveled to Pakistan but none about the plot being directed by al Qaeda. The review by the Intelligence and Security Committee urged that greater attention be paid to causes of radicalization within the British population and the “homegrown” terrorism threat.
British security services have also been more public in their concerns about foreign espionage against the United Kingdom. Russia and China are of concern. Intelligence relations with Russia center on the 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB)—Committee of State Security—who was fatally poisoned by exposure to polonium, a radioactive element. British authorities formally charged Andrei Lugovoi, another KGB officer, with the murder, but Russia refused to allow his extradition. In December 2007. Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, sent a letter to the leaders of the British banking industry, warning ofChina’s efforts to conduct espionage via computers.
As has been the case in the United States, British efforts to change the legal structure to combat terrorism have been controversial. In July 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed several new measures, including a border patrol police to cover airports and seaports and biometric screening (data derived from unique identifying sources, such as fingerprints) for all visa applicants. Most controversial, however, has been his proposal to extend the period in which terrorist suspects could be held without charges from 28 days to 56 days. (A 2005 proposal by then-prime minister Tony Blair to extend the period to 90 days was defeated in Parliament.) Brown’s proposal has run into opposition from civil liberties groups, as well as some officials involved in law enforcement.
CHINA
 
In the past few years, the press has written much about Chinese intelligence, stemming largely from allegations of espionage activities against the United States. Intelligence in China, as in all communist states, has a twofold purpose: internal security activities against dissidents and foreign intelligence operations. As was the case with the Soviet KGB, the internal suppressive function is an important distinction between the Chinese intelligence service and those of the United States or Britain.
Chinese intelligence is run by the Ministry of State Security. As with all other security issues in China, however, the most powerful body in the state is the Central Military Commission (CMC) of the Communist Party, which has much greater influence than its title would imply. (Control over the commission was a sore point between outgoing president Jiang Zhemin and his successor, Hu Jintao. Hu became president in 2002 but Jiang did not give up his chairmanship of the CMC until 2004. Their struggle underscores the importance of the commission as a key lever of control in the Chinese government.) Five Ministry of State Security bureaus are of greatest importance in intelligence.
• Second Bureau: intelligence collection abroad
• Fourth Bureau: technology development for intelligence gathering and counterintelligence
• Sixth Bureau: counterintelligence, primarily against Chinese communities overseas
• Tenth Bureau: economic, scientific, and technical intelligence
• Foreign Affairs Bureau: foreign intelligence liaison
 
Although much controversy surrounds allegations of Chinese espionage, its existence is not in doubt. China has a well-developed HUMINT program that relies on the large overseas Chinese population. For example, Larry Wu-tai Chin was a Chinese spy who worked for the CIA for decades before being discovered in the 1980s. A more controversial, and ultimately inconclusive, case was that of Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos Laboratory scientist who downloaded thousands of pages of sensitive material. Chinese espionage puts special emphasis on scientific and technology targets, both civil and military. These activities were the major focus of the 1999 report of the Cox Committee (U.S. House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China), especially allegations that China had stolen an array of information about nuclear weapons and satellite-related technology. Some observers have also expressed concern about the large number of Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges and graduate schools, many of them in technical areas (physics, computing) that might indicate national security concerns. There have been several prosecutions of individuals on charges of spying for China since the Wen Ho Lee case, suggesting—at least anecdotally—a robust Chinese espionage program.
In addition to HUMINT, China has an array of Earth-based SIGINT platforms, some of which are located in Cuba, where China began operating in the mid-1990s. China also has a space-borne imagery capability. More problematic, from the standpoint of the United States, was the Chinese ASAT (antisatellite) test in January 2007. Not only do U.S. military and intelligence activities depend on satellites; so do large portions of the economy, beyond that of telecommunications itself. In August 2007, Lt. Gen. Kevin Campbell, head of the U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, also warned about Chinese jamming and computer attack capabilities as a threat to U.S. space-borne systems.
Allegations of Chinese computer intrusions have become the other main concern, alongside classic espionage. As noted, the head of Britain’s M15 warned British firms about this specific threat. There have been many press reports over the last few years about computer hacking attacks and intrusions alleged to have emanated from China, including against defense and national laboratory sites. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell, in his February 2008 threat assessment, listed China as one of two main cyber threats. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in its counterintelligence role, has put increased emphasis on Chinese economic espionage, which the FBI says focuses on ways to gain access to Western technology and then use China’s cheaper labor market to “leapfrog” foreign rivals in that sector. In 2007, Geng Huichang was named the new minister of State Security. According to press accounts, Geng has expertise on the United States, Japan, as well as commercial intelligence. [The head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) told a Canadian Senate committee that China was Canada’s top intelligence concern, with half of Canada’s counterespionage effort devoted to Chinese spies. Technology and corporate secrets were again seen as the main targets.]
In November 2007, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan congressional group formed in 2000 to monitor the national security implications of U.S.-China economic relations, said that Chinese espionage was the largest threat to U.S. technological secrets. (In December 2007, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said that China opposes hacking attacks, that China itself had been the victim of such attacks; a spokesperson said that the M15 warning was “slanderous.”)
The U.S.-Chinese intelligence relationship serves as a barometer of the larger political relationship. The United States and China were hostile until President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. That event, plus the shared fear of growing Soviet power, led to some level of intelligence cooperation. Gaining access to sites in far western China, the United States was able to recover capabilities it had lost in Iran, after the fall of the shah’s government, to track Soviet missile tests. China and the United States also cooperated on the operational level, both supporting the Mujaheddin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to new fears on the part of China about U.S. hegemony, leading to a deterioration in relations. Chinese assertiveness prompted the prolonged captivity of a U.S. reconnaissance plane crew, which was forced to land in China after colliding with a Chinese military jet. The incident occurred after the bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in May 1999—a mistake caused by the use of outdated information on that city, which did not record the embassy’s new location. In January 2002 news reports alleged that the United States had planted multiple listening devices in a plane being outlitted in the United States before delivery to China’s president. China played down the reports, bolstering the view that such intelligence incidents were largely a means of expressing official attitudes about the relationship with the United States. According to subsequent press reports, some U.S. analysts believed that the listening devices were Chinese in origin, part of an internal power struggle.
President Hu Jintao has emphasized China’s “peaceful rise,” meaning that China will become more powerful without threatening any other powers. At the same time, China’s economic growth, its increased international economic influence—which also translates into increased political power, suggests the more natural occurrence of friction between China and other powerful states. An aggressive intelligence effort would be a natural adjunct to this.
BOOK: Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy
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