Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (73 page)

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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

BOOK: Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy
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Like the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel has suffered a major strategic intelligence failure. In 1973 Egypt and Syria achieved strategic surprise in the opening phase of the Yom Kippur War. In a still-controversial postwar investigation, the Agranat commission primarily faulted the military leadership and Aman for the surprise. The commission found that, although many signs pointed to an impending attack, the military was overly committed to an indications and warning (I&W) concept that led them to play down what they were seeing because not all of the conceptual indicators had been observed. In other words, they had created an I&W model and refused to react to the indications they were seeing because the Arab actions did not fit the I&W concept. Thus, even with an indications and warning model, the threshold had been set too high. This experience provided a valuable lesson on the possibility of surprise. Commenting on it nine years after the war, the staff director of the Knesset committee responsible for oversight of intelligence said: “The United States [during the cold war] has to watch every part of the globe. We know who our enemies are. We only have to watch six or seven countries—and still we were surprised.”
Israel has long faced a terrorist problem and is also deeply concerned about WMD proliferation, for which it has an active and independent collection effort. Israel has also shown a willingness to act unilaterally against suspected WMD threats. In 1981, Israeli jets attacked the Osirak reactor near Baghdad. In 2007, as noted above, Israel conducted an air strike against a site in Syria that some believe was a nuclear site, perhaps being supported by North Korea. Iran’s nuclear program is an obvious concern, especially given the hostility expressed by Iran’s President Ahmedinejad to Israel’s existence. Interestingly. Israeli officials disagreed with the published conclusions of the 2007 national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iranian WMD. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak agreed that the program had probably stopped in 2003 but said that the program had since been restarted. Such public disagreements about intelligence estimates are rare but the 2007 NIE was released in an unclassified form.
RUSSIA
 
More has been written about Russian intelligence than about any other except for that of the United States. Russian intelligence capabilities probably most closely parallel those of the United States, although the KGB and the CIA were not directly comparable during the cold war.
The now-defunct KGB was the last in a long line of Russian and Soviet intelligence services whose primary responsibility was to combat internal dissent. The following KGB directorates had foreign intelligence roles.
• First Chief Directorate (Foreign): responsible for all nonmilitary intelligence, foreign counterintelligence, HUMINT, foreign propaganda, and disinformation
• Eighth Chief Directorate (Communication): SIGINT, both offensive and defensive, the latter role shared with the Sixteenth Directorate (Communications Security)
 
One can question the KGB’s effectiveness in its broader and more important internal security role. KGB leadership was involved in the abortive 1991 coup against Mikhail S. Gorbachev that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the KGB clearly misread—or failed to report—the depth of anticommunist discontent in both the satellite states and the Soviet Union itself.
The Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlnie (GRU)—Main Intelligence Administration—was and remains the military intelligence organization charged with the collection of a large array of intelligence related to military issues. The GRU has HUMINT, SIGINT, and IMINT capabilities. During the cold war, the Western services viewed the GRU as an occasional rival of the KGB. (Col. Oleg Penkovsky was a GRU officer.)
As with any other HUMINT enterprise, the records of the KGB and GRU are mixed. Successful penetrations of U.S. and British services include the cases of CIA agent Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, from the former, and Philby, Blake, and Prime, from the latter. At the same time, however, Western services recruited spies in the Soviet Union and, apparently, the post-Soviet state. Oleg Penkovsky is among the best known. It should also be noted that the damage done by Ames—and perhaps Hanssen simultaneously—involved at least twelve other U.S. agents. Moreover, Hanssen’s arrest apparently came as a result of information supplied by a U.S. intelligence source in Russia.
Like so much else in what was the Soviet Union, the intelligence services have been forced to undergo an unplanned transition. The KGB’s First Chief Directorate emerged as the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki (SVR)—External Intelligence Service. It is responsible for intelligence liaison, industrial espionage, and HUMINT and for the handling of Ames and Hanssen, carryover assets from the KGB period. The SVR has made much of the fact that it has reduced its overseas presence, attempting to portray itself as a more benign organization than its predecessor. Some observers believe this may have been largely cosmetic. Russia is now more open and accessible than was the Soviet Union, making it easier for the SVR to have contacts with agents in Russia instead of overseas. However, both Britain and Germany have reported the presence of large numbers of Russian spies. MI5 director Evans said there had been no decrease in “undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the U.K.,” and that their activities and those of the Chinese diverted resources from efforts against al Qaeda. Similarly, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service [Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz (BfV)—Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution] said that one third of all Russian diplomats in Germany (120 out of360) were part of the SVR, working against a broad range of topics. Finally, in July 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the SVR would have to increase its intelligence gathering and analytic efforts because of “growing imbalances” in the “international situation and [because of] internal political interests.”
The KGB’s counterintelligence function reemerged as the Federal’naya Sluzba Besnopasnoti (FSB)—Federal Security Service—which is responsible for internal counterintelligence. civil counterespionage, and internal security. Vladimir Putin was a former KGB officer and headed the FSB from July 1998 until his elevation to the position of acting prime minister in August 1999. In 2003, Putin gave the FSB control over the border guards and Federalnoe Agenstvo Pravitelstvennoi Sviazi 1 Informatsii (FAPSI)—Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information—which was the successor to the KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate, responsible for cryptography, SIGINT, and the Communications Troops. These functions are parallel to those of NSA, but FAPSI also controls internal electronic communications, again making comparisons imprecise. This consolidation under the FSB had led some to be concerned that the old powers of the KGB were being reconstituted.
It would have been unreasonable and impossible for Russia to scrap the old Soviet intelligence apparatus entirely and start anew. Inevitably some of the same officers would have had to be hired. The key question for Russian intelligence is part of the larger question of how far along a democracy in which laws and rights are respected by the government and its agencies has the country become. Russian historical experience offers little upon which to create such practices either in the intelligence services or the wider society. Also, Russia faces some internal problems—typified by the ongoing Chechen problem of revolt against Russian rule, which has led to terrorist attacks in Moscow and elsewhere—that create pressure against more restrained intelligence functions.
Russian intelligence services clearly prospered both economically and in terms of power under Putin. Russian intelligence officers sometimes refer to themselves as Chekists, harking back to the Cheka, the first intelligence service under the Bolsheviks. Putin is fond of using the quote: “There is no such thing as a former Chekist.” Putin relied very heavily on KGB veterans to staff key regional positions across Russia and, perhaps more significantly, to take over the various economic enterprises that have been wrested from the oligarchs who took control of them after the Soviet collapse. These include banks, media, and the immensely important energy sector, which has been the basis of Russia’s rebounding economic and political power. A Russian author, Yevgenia Albats, said: “The FSB is no longer just a police organization, it is a business.” According to
The Economist,
three out of four senior Russian officials have ties to former or current intelligence organizations. They are referred to as
siloviki,
roughly meaning “strongmen.” Thus, there has been a definite resurgence in the power of the intelligence services, whose future thus became closely tied to that ot Putin as he managed the political transition at the end of his second presidential term in 2008. This mutual dependence decreased the likelihood of there being significant political challenges to Putin within the political system.
Russia’s TECHINT capabilities come closest to those of the United States, although reports of deterioration in these capabilities had been persistent since the demise of the Soviet Union. Numerous press reports noted financial constraints affecting these collection assets, in terms of both the number of satellites in orbit and problems affecting ground facilities. It is reasonable to assume that, just as Putin put resources into reviving Russia’s long-range strategic forces (such as resumed strategic bomber patrols far into the North Atlantic), he probably did the same for Russia’s technical intelligence capabilities.
In October 2001 President Putin announced that Russia would close its major SIGINT facility at Lourdes, Cuba. Located within one hundred miles of U.S. territory, the Lourdes complex reportedly could intercept telephone, microwave, and communications satellite traffic and was also reportedly used to manage Russian spy satellites. It was a major irritant in U.S.-Russian relations and an added difficult aspect of the U.S.-Cuban relationship. The closing appears to have been motivated primarily by economics. Russia paid Cuba $200 million annually for the use of the site—a sum that one Russian general said could be better used to buy “twenty communications and intelligence satellites and 100 modern radars.” Two other factors that may have prompted the decision were the deterioration of the Russian spy satellite fleet, limiting the importance of Lourdes, and the steady shifting of U.S. communications from microwave to fiber-optic cable. Some Russian officials expressed the hope that the United States would reciprocate by closing some ground-based SIGINT facilities on the Russian periphery, particularly the one at Vardo, Norway. At the same time, Russia announced the closing of its base at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, which had been a major U.S. base during the Vietnam War. Soviet and Russian forces used it as a base for reconnaissance aircraft and a SIGINT facility targeting China.
The Soviet intelligence apparatus conducted assassinations, or what they termed “wet affairs.” The most famous was the assassination of Josef Stalin’s former rival, Leon Trotsky, in Mexico City in 1940. Some analysts believed that the Soviet Union was behind the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul 11 in 1981, but no conclusive proof has been uncovered. It is not known if Russian policy on assassinations has changed. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 via radioactive polonium is widely thought to have been a “wet affair.” In August 2007, ten persons, including former intelligence and police officers, were arrested for the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had been very critical of corruption and brutality under Putin. Interestingly, the Russian prosecutor argued the murder was motivated not by a desire to silence Ms. Polikovskaya but to embarrass the Russian government by suggesting its involvement—a doublethink motivation that hearkens back to the cold war.
The Russian services have lost important former liaison partners. The intelligence services of former Soviet satellites served, in effect, as subcontractors. The East German and Czechoslovakian services both had contacts with guerrilla and terrorist groups. The Polish service was used for industrial espionage in the West. The Bulgarian service was occasionally used for assassinations. Bulgaria also assassinated one of its own dissidents, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978. The East German state no longer exists; Poland and the Czech Republic are now part of NATO.
Putin has referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest political catastrophe” of the twentieth century. The renewed Russian intelligence services are unlikely to allow their power to be threatened as it was during the days of the Soviet collapse. At the same time, they no longer have the same internal mission or power that they had during the Soviet era to suppress dissent. Instead, they have a huge interest in the economic status quo but then also bear a responsibility if the economy falters, an area in which most of these officers have little practical experience.
CONCLUSION
 
When assessing different intelligence services, keep in mind that most have liaison relationships with other services, thus increasing their capabilities. The degree to which these relationships complement or overlap one another is important.
As should now be evident, comparing intelligence services with one another is an inexact and somewhat pointless endeavor. Each service is—or should be—structured to address the unique intelligence requirements of its national policy makers. Although the intelligence process discussed throughout this book is somewhat generic to any particular intelligence service, the specifics of key issues—such as internal versus external security functions, the relative safety of the state, the extent and nature of international relationships and interests—shape how the intelligence service functions and what its relationship is to policy makers. Some structures also reflect each nation’s distinctive national and political development. Skills and capabilities also vary from service to service. The key issue in assessing any intelligence service is the one that has pervaded this book: Does it provide timely, useful intelligence to the policy process?

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