The Craft of Intelligence (25 page)

THE SOVIET SUPER SPY

Nobody minds being portrayed as invincible. I imagine the Soviets derive a good deal of satisfaction from the popular image of their intelligence officers and agents that exists in the minds of some Westerners. The value of the image is that it tends to frighten the opponent.

If I seem to have lent any support to the myth of the Soviet super spy in my earlier characterization of the Soviet intelligence officer, I would like to remind the reader that I was then writing of his training, his attitudes and his background rather than of his achievements. The examples of Soviet failures are legion. Their great networks of the past, often too large in size, eventually broke up or were exposed, both as a result of the vigorous measures of Western counterintelligence and as a result of their own internal weaknesses. Their best-trained officers make technical slips, showing that they too are fallible. Often, in situations where there is no textbook answer, no time to get instructions from headquarters and when individual decision and initiative is required, the Soviet intelligence officer fails to meet the test.

Soviet training of both intelligence officers and agents tries to drill the wayward element out of intelligence work, but it cannot be done. Harry Houghton endangered his position by spending the extra money he earned from spying on real estate ventures. He wanted to amass a fortune. Vassall spent it on fancy clothes. Each lived beyond his regular income, and this was bound, sooner or later, to attract attention. Hayhanen, the associate of Colonel Abel, one of Moscow’s best spies, was an alcoholic. He was bound eventually to break up, to talk—and he did. Stashinski, the murderer, on Soviet orders, of the two Ukrainian exile leaders fell in love with a German girl and came into conflict with his KGB bosses over this relationship. It was the main cause of his defection. The Soviets seem to have taken too little note of these weaknesses.

The Soviets cannot eliminate love and sex and greed from the scene. Since they use them as weapons to ensnare people, it is strange that they fail to recognize their power to disrupt carefully planned operations. A typical instance is described by Alexander Foote in telling of his Soviet military intelligence network during World War II.
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Maria Schultz, a Soviet agent of long experience, was married to one Alfred Schultz, another old-line Soviet agent who was under arrest in China for espionage. In Switzerland Maria fell in love with a radio operator who had been assigned to work with her, divorced her husband at long range and married the operator. This bit of disloyalty dismayed her old servant, Lisa Brockel, so severely that out of chagrin the latter one day called up the British consulate in Lausanne and told the officer who answered the phone enough to endanger the whole Soviet network. Fortunately for the Soviets, her English was terrible, she was hysterical and the consulate thought she was just another crank.

Time and again the Soviets and satellites make serious psychological misjudgments in the people they solicit as agents. They underestimate the power of courage and honesty. Their cynical view of loyalties other than their own kind blinds them to the dominant motives of free people. A good illustration of this failing on their part was the case of the distinguished Rumanian businessman, V. C. Georgescu. In 1953, after his escape from Communist Rumania and after he had acquired American citizenship, he was approached by a Communist intelligence agent, acting under Soviet guidance, with a cruel attempt at blackmail. The agent, posing as a Secretary in the Rumanian legation, told Georgescu in so many words that if he would agree to perform certain intelligence tasks for Rumania, his two young sons, who were still being held in Rumania, would be released and returned to their parents. Otherwise he could never expect to see his sons again. Georgescu courageously refused any discussion of the subject. He threw the man out of his office and reported the full details to the United States authorities. The Communist diplomatic agent was expelled from the United States. The whole case received wide publicity so harmful to Rumania’s relations with this country that the Rumanians finally sought to repair their damaged prestige by acceding to President Eisenhower’s personal request for the release of the boys.

Soviet intelligence is often overconfident, overcomplicated and overestimated. The real danger lies not in the mythical capabilities of the Soviet spy, though some are highly competent, but in the magnitude of the Soviet intelligence effort, the money it spends, the number of people it employs, the lengths to which it is willing to go to achieve its ends and the losses it is willing and able to sustain.

WE AMERICANS ARE TOO NAÏVE AND TOO NEW AT THE JOB

Americans are usually proud, and rightly so, of the fact that the “conspiratorial” tendencies which seem to be natural and inbred in many other peoples tend to be missing from their characters and from the surroundings in which they live. The other side of the coin is that the American public, aware of this, frequently feels that both in our diplomacy and in our intelligence undertakings we are no match for the “wily foreigner.” Foreigners likewise attribute to Americans a certain gullibility and naïveté. There are also other aspects of this same general notion. One is that the American official is a rather closed-minded do-gooder, a bit of a missionary, who butts into things he doesn’t understand and insists on doing things his way. This is the “American” we see in Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American. The Ugly American
gives us another angle of the same prejudice—lack of true understanding and appreciation of local conditions and of local peoples abroad. The number of best-sellers with this theme seems to show that it is a popular one and that we enjoy seeing our compatriots depicted as stupid people. It is little wonder then that such mischief-creating prejudices also find their way into the American and foreign criticisms of our operations abroad, including the intelligence service.

I would like to say first of all that I much prefer taking the raw material which we find in America—naïve, home-grown, even homespun—and training such a man to be a good intelligence officer, however long the process lasts, to seeking out people who are naturally devious, conspiratorial or wily, and trying to fit them into the intelligence system. The reader will have noted that when I described our norms for the potential intelligence officer in an earlier chapter, I did not include such traits among them. The recruiter does not look for slippery characters. He is much more likely to shun or reject them. The American intelligence officer is trained to work in intelligence as a profession, not as a way of life. The distinction is between his occupation and his private character.

Hand in hand with this preconception goes the attitude that American intelligence is young, hasn’t had time to grow up, and can’t possibly have produced a cadre of able officers in its brief existence who can match the work of older services, be they friendly or hostile ones. My answer to this is simple. We have seen nations such as Japan and Russia, who until the turn of this century were positively feudal, catch up with the technology of the twentieth century in one generation without going through the centuries-long evolution of Western societies. We have also seen that when a country has had its industry and technology devastated, as happened to Germany and to some extent France and Italy in World War II, it had a certain advantage when it began to reconstruct because it had lost the encumbrance of superannuated methods and equipment and there was no reason not to start with the latest and newest things.

American intelligence has been in precisely this position. During World War II it learned from the old-line services the results of centuries of experience. When the time came to found a permanent service here after the war, it was possible—indeed, imperative—to construct this organization along lines that would enable it to cope with contemporary problems and not with areas and conditions that had existed fifty years before. It is not important that American intelligence is young in years. What is important is that it is modern and not hidebound or tied to any outdated theories. I would point here above all to its ability to adapt the most modern instruments of technology to its purposes. In this it has been a daring pioneer.

SECRET INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS ARE NOT IN THE AMERICAN TRADITION; IF ENGAGED IN, THEY SHOULD NEVER BE ACKNOWLEDGED

This is only in part a myth, and one that is on the wane. However, it is still true today that there are some Americans who are suspicious of any “secret” agency of government. Certainly that agency must assume the burden of proof that its claim to secrecy is reasonable and in the national interest.

Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of the dangers we face in the Cold War and that they cannot all be met by the usual tools of open diplomacy. And even those who regret the necessity for it are reconciling themselves to the fact that national security requires us to resort to secret intelligence operations. Interestingly enough, I have found little hesitation on the part of Congress to support and to finance our intelligence work with all its secrecy. In the very law setting up the CIA, Congress has enjoined the Agency to “protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure,” but has provided none of the tools to accomplish this, outside of the CIA itself.

Naturally, when our intelligence operations go wrong and blow up in the press, there is bound to be criticism, and sometimes unjustified criticism. Intelligence operations are risky enterprises, and success can rarely be guaranteed. Since generally only the unsuccessful ones become advertised, the public gains the impression that the batting average of intelligence is much lower than is really the case.

The ability of the CIA to recruit year after year a select and very able group of our young college graduates shows that the hesitation of Americans about intelligence in general has not gone very deep in the younger generation. I have found that our young recruits have a growing appreciation of intelligence work as a career where they can make a real contribution to our national security. In my ten years with the Agency I recall only one case out of many hundreds where a man who had joined the Agency felt some scruples about the activities he was asked to carry on. In this case, he was given the option of either an honorable resignation or a transfer to some other branch of the work.

There was one sensational secret operation, now in the public domain, which did worry some people in this country as being “unlawful,” namely the flights of the U-2 airplane. People know a good bit about espionage as it has been carried on from time immemorial. The illegal smuggling of agents with false papers, false identities and false pretenses across the frontiers of other countries is a tactic which the Soviets have employed against us so often that we are used to it. But to send an agent over another country, out of sight and sound, more than ten miles above its soil, with a camera seemed to shock because it was so novel. Yet such are the vagaries of international law that we can do nothing when Soviet ships approach within three miles of our shores and take all the pictures they like, and we could do the same to them if we liked.

If a spy intrudes on your territory, you catch him if you can and punish him according to your laws. That applies without regard to the means of conveyance he has taken to reach his destination—railroad, automobile, balloon or aircraft or, as my forebears used to say, by shanks’ mare. Espionage is not tainted with any “legality.” If the territory, territorial waters or air space of another country is violated, it is an illegal act. But it is, of course, a bit difficult for a country to deny any complicity when the mode of conveyance is an aircraft of new and highly sophisticated design and performance.

As I said at the outset, some of our fellow citizens don’t want anything to do with espionage of any kind. Some prefer the old-fashioned kind, popularized in the spy thrillers. Some would concede that, if you are going to do it at all, it is best to use the system that will produce the best results and is most likely to secure the information we need.

The decision to proceed with the U-2 program was based on considerations deemed in 1955 to be vital to our national security. We required the information necessary to guide our various military programs and particularly our missile program. This we could not do if we had no knowledge of the Soviet missile program. Without a better basis than we then had for gauging the nature and extent of the threat to us from surprise nuclear missile attack, our very survival might be threatened. Self-preservation is an inherent right of sovereignty. Obviously, this is not a principle to be invoked frivolously.

In retrospect, I believe that most thoughtful Americans would have expected this country to act as it did in the situation we faced in the fifties, when the missile race was on in earnest and the U-2 flights were helping to keep us informed of Soviet progress.

And while I am discussing myths and misconceptions, I might tilt at another myth connected with the U-2, namely, that Khrushchev was shocked and surprised at it all. As a matter of fact, he had known for years about the flights, though his information in the early period was not accurate in all respects. Diplomatic notes were exchanged and published well before May 1, 1960, the date of the U-2 failure, when Khrushchev’s tracking techniques had become more accurate. Still, since he had been unable to do anything about the U-2, he did not wish to advertise the fact of his impotence to his own people, and he stopped sending protests.

His rage at the Paris Conference was feigned for a purpose. At the time he saw no prospect of success at the conference on the subject of Berlin. He was then in deep trouble with the Chinese Communists. Following his visit to President Eisenhower in the fall of 1959, he had been unable to placate Mao during his stop at Peking en route back from the United States. Furthermore, he was apprehensive that the Soviet people would react too favorably to President Eisenhower’s planned trip to the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1960. Influenced by all these considerations, he decided to use the U-2 as a good excuse for torpedoing both the trip and the conference.