The Craft of Intelligence (3 page)

The size and power of an internal security service is generally in direct ratio to the extent of the suspicion and fear of the ruling clique. Under a repressive and autocratic ruler secret police will blossom, a dreaded parasitical force that permeates every element of the populace and the national scene. For the best example of such an organization we must, therefore, turn to nineteenth-century Russia, where a retarded political system stood in constant fear of its own masses, its liberal leaders or the dangerous ideas and influences of its neighbors.

But this state of affairs in Russia was not an innovation of the nineteenth century. In early Russian history, the Tatars and other steppe people continually sought to ascertain the strength of the garrisons within the walled stockades (kremlins) of the Russians. As a result, the Russians became congenitally suspicious of anyone seeking admission to the walled cities, fearing that their real mission was intelligence. The tradition of attaching a
pristav
(literally, “an attached object”) to a visiting foreigner, so that he could be readily identified as such, goes back at least to the sixteenth century. There is a long ancestry for surveillance and “guided tours” in Russia. In the seventeenth century, when the Russians began sending their own people abroad to study at foreign universities, they usually sent some trusted person along to watch and report on any group of students. The custom of attaching a secret policeman to delegations attending international conferences, so much in evidence today, therefore also has hoary antecedents.

An organized political police under state management in Russia can be traced back to the establishment in 1826 by Czar Nicholas I of the Third Section of His Majesty’s Imperial Chancery. In 1878 the Third Section was abolished and its functions were given to the Okhrana, or security section, of the Ministry of the Interior.

The purpose of the Czar’s Okhrana was to “protect” the imperial family and its regime. In this capacity it kept watch on the Russian populace by means of armies of informants, and once even distinguished itself by tailing the venerable Leo Tolstoi around Russia. Tolstoi had long since become a world-renowned literary figure, but to the Okhrana he was only a retired army lieutenant and a “suspect.”

In the late nineteenth century there were so many Russian revolutionaries, radical students and
émigrés
outside Russia that the Okhrana could not hope to keep Imperial Russia secure merely by suppressing the voices of revolution at home. It had to cope with dangerous voices from abroad. It sent agents to join, penetrate and provoke the organizations of Russian students and revolutionaries in Western Europe, to incite, demoralize, steal documents and discover the channels by which illegal literature was being smuggled into Russia. When Lenin was in Prague in 1912, he unknowingly harbored an Okhrana agent in his household.

When Bolsheviks swept into power in 1917, they disbanded and to some extent “exposed” the old Okhrana as a typical oppressive instrument of the czars, claiming that the new workers, state needed no such sinister device to maintain law and order. In the same breath, however, they created their own secret police organization, the Cheka, about which we shall have more to say later. The Cheka, in scope, power, cruelty and duplicity, soon surpassed anything the czars had ever dreamed of.

One of the great intelligence services of the nineteenth century in Europe was maintained not by a government but by a private firm, the banking house of Rothschild. There was a precedent for this in the activities of a much earlier banking family, the Fuggers of Augsburg in the sixteenth century, who built up a sizable financial empire, lending money to impoverished sovereigns and states, as did the Rothschilds later. That the Fuggers made few errors in the placement of their investments was in large measure a result of the excellent private intelligence they gathered. The Rothschilds, however, once they had attained a position of some power, benefited their clients as well as themselves by their superior intelligence-gathering abilities.

In promoting their employers’ financial interests from headquarters in Frankfurt-am-Main, London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, Rothschild agents were often able to gain vital intelligence before governments did. In 1815, while Europe awaited news of the Battle of Waterloo, Nathan Rothschild in London already knew that the British had been victorious. In order to make a financial killing, he then depressed the market by selling British Government securities; those who watched his every move in the market did likewise, concluding that Waterloo had been lost by the British and their allies. At the proper moment he bought back in at the low, and when the news was finally generally known, the value of government securities naturally soared.

Sixty years later Lionel Rothschild, a descendant of Nathan, on one historic evening had Disraeli as his dinner guest. During the meal a secret message came to Lionel that a controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company, owned by the Khedive of Egypt, was for sale. The Prime Minister was intrigued with the idea, but the equivalent of about $44,000,000 was required to make the purchase. Parliament was in recess and he could not get it quickly. So Lionel bought the shares for the British Government, enabling Disraeli to pull off one of the great coups of his career. It was rumored that some of the Rothschild “scoops” were obtained by the use of carrier pigeons. There was probably little basis for the rumor, although it is true that one of the Rothschilds, immobilized in Paris when the city was surrounded by Germans in the Franco-German War of 1870, used balloons and possibly also carrier pigeons to communicate with the outside world. The world heard of the armistice ending the war through this means, rather than through conventional news channels.

The Great Powers of Europe entered World War I with intelligence services which were in no way commensurate with the might of their armed forces or equipped to cope with the complexity of the conflict to come. This was true of both sides—the Allies and the Central Powers. French military intelligence had been badly shaken up by the Dreyfus affair and was rent by internal factions and conspiracies. They calculated the size of the German Army at just half of what it was when it went into the field in 1914. The German service, which had risen to notable efficiency under Stieber in 1870, had fallen into a sad state of disrepair after his dismissal; it was moreover typical of the arrogance and self-assurance of the German General Staff of 1914 that it looked down its nose at intelligence and did not think it of importance. The Russians had achieved their great intelligence coup shortly before in the treason of the Austrian General Staff Officer, Colonel Alfred Redl, who had finally been caught in 1913. I shall have more to say of him in a later chapter. Through him they had come into possession of the Austro-Hungarian war plans, which helped them defeat the Austrians in a number of the early battles of World War I. On the other hand, the Austrians had revised some of their plans after 1913, and the Russians, blindly putting their trust in the Redl material, frequently ran into serious trouble. They also, astonishingly enough, sent military communications to their troops in the field in clear text instead of in cipher, and the Germans gleefully listened in and picked up, free of cost, valuable information about the disposition of Russian forces.

The Austrians may have balanced out Redl’s treason to some extent as a result of the work of their agent, Altschiller, who was a close confidant of czarist Minister of War Vladimir A. Sukhomlinov and his wife. Sukhomlinov, a favorite of the imperial family who went out of his way to cultivate Rasputin, was notoriously vain, venal and incompetent and had the habit of leaving important military documents lying around his house. The Germans also had an agent close to this pair, a certain Colonel Myasoedev, who was supposed to be
Mme.
Sukhomlinov’s lover, and was hanged as a spy by the Russians in 1915.

Altogether it can be said that whatever effective espionage work was accomplished during World War I, except in the tactical field, was not particularly in the area of land operations. It was chiefly in connection with naval warfare or in the remoter and peripheral areas of conflict. British competence in breaking the German naval codes was a lifesaving intelligence feat that kept Britain’s head above water in the darkest days of the war. Lawrence of Arabia in the Middle East and the German, Wassmuss, in Persia performed real exploits in the fields of espionage, subversion and fomenting insurrections that truly affected the course of the war in those areas. German espionage and sabotage in the United States were among the more successful feats of their intelligence in World War I, thanks in part to our lack of preparedness with countermeasures.

World War I did, however, result in a number of innovations in espionage. One was the use of radio in wartime communications, which opened up the new possibility of gathering intelligence of immense tactical and sometimes strategic significance by intercepting radio signals and breaking codes and ciphers. The preservation of neutrality in World War I by certain strategically located countries like Sweden, Norway, Holland and Switzerland gave rise to the espionage tactic of spying on one country via a second country, despite the best efforts of the neutrals to prevent such use of their soil. This is a technique which also has been employed in peacetime, particularly in Europe. Lastly, the Far East made its first important appearance on the international espionage scene in the shape of the Japanese intelligence service, which in the ensuing years became a highly efficient and dangerous presence in the intelligence world.

The period between the two world wars saw a proliferation of intelligence services and a growing complexity in their internal structure. The targets had become increasingly technical and the world a much more complicated place. For the new dictatorships, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S.S.R., the intelligence service became the major instrument abroad in probing and preparing for foreign expansion. At the same time the free countries, especially England, had to take on new and enormous responsibilities in intelligence work in the face of the threat of the dictatorships. The silent warfare between the intelligence services of both sides in World War II supplies many of the examples and case histories to which I shall refer later on. On the Allied side, in opposition to the common enemy, there was collaboration between intelligence services that is without parallel in history and which had a most welcome outcome.

During the war days when I was with OSS, I had the privilege of working with the British service and developed close personal and service relationships which remained intact after the war.

In Switzerland I made contact with a group of French officers who had maintained the tradition of the French Deuxième Bureau and who helped to build up the intelligence service of General de Gaulle and the Free French. Toward the end of the way, cooperation was established with a branch of the Italian secret service that adhered to King Victor Emmanuel when non-Fascist Italy joined the Allied cause. I also was working with the underground anti-Nazi group in the German
Abwehr
, the professional military intelligence service of the German Army. A group within the
Abwehr
secretly plotted against Hitler. The head of the
Abwehr
, the very extraordinary Admiral Canaris, was liquidated by Hitler when, following the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, records establishing Canaris’ cooperation with the plotters were discovered.

This wartime cooperation contributed, I believe, toward creating among the intelligence services of the Free World a measure of unity of purpose, and after the war a free Western Germany has made a substantial intelligence contribution. All this has helped us to counter the massive attacks which the intelligence and security services of the Communist bloc countries are making against us today.

In United States history, until after World War II, there was little official government intelligence activity except in time of combat. With the restoration of peace, intelligence organizations which the stress of battle had called forth were each time sharply reduced, and the fund of knowledge and the lessons learned from bitter experience were lost and forgotten. In each of our crises, up to Pearl Harbor, workers in intelligence have had to start in all over again.

Intelligence, especially in our earlier history, was conducted on a fairly informal basis, with only the loosest kind of organization, and there is for the historian as well as the student of intelligence a dearth of coherent official records. Operations were often run out of a general’s hat or a diplomat’s pocket, so to speak. This guaranteed at the time a certain security sometimes lacking in later days when reports are filed in septuplicate or mimeographed and distributed to numerous officials often not directly concerned with the intelligence process. But it makes things rather difficult for the historian. At General Washington’s headquarters Alexander Hamilton was one of the few entrusted with “developing” and reading the messages received in secret inks and codes, and no copies were made. Washington, who keenly appreciated the need for secrecy, kept his operations so secret that we may never have the full history of them.

To be sure, two of his intelligence officers, Boudinot and Tallmadge, later wrote their memoirs, but they were exceedingly discreet. Even forty years after the war was over, when John Jay told James Fenimore Cooper the true story of a Revolutionary spy, which the latter then used in his novel
The Spy
, Jay refused to divulge the real name of the man. Much of what we know today about intelligence in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars was only turned up many generations after these wars were over.

Intelligence costs money, and agents have to be paid. Since it is the government’s money which is being disbursed, even the most informal and swashbuckling general will usually put in some kind of chit for expenses incurred in the collection of information. Washington kept scrupulous records of money spent for the purchase of information. He generally advanced the money out of his own personal funds and then included the payment in the bill for all his expenses which he sent the Continental Congress. Since he itemized his expenses, we can see from his financial accountings that he spent around $17,000 on secret intelligence during the years of the Revolutionary War, a lot of money in those days. Walsingham, in England, two hundred years earlier, also kept such records, and it is from them that we have gleaned many of the details about his intelligence activities.

But the official accountings are not the only indicators that the pecuniary side of intelligence contributes to history. A singular attribute of intelligence work under war conditions is the delay between the completion of an agent’s work and his being paid for it. He may be installed behind the enemy lines and may not get home until the war is over. Or the military unit that employed him may have moved hastily from the scene in victory or retreat, leaving him high and dry and without his reward. Thus it may happen that not until years later, and sometimes only when the former agent or his heirs have fallen on hard times, is a claim made against the government to collect payment for past services rendered. Secret intelligence being what it is, there may be no living witnesses and absolutely no record to support the claim. In any case, such instances have often brought to light intelligence operations of some moment in our own history that otherwise might have remained entirely unknown.

In December, 1852, a certain Daniel Bryan went before a justice of the peace in Tioga County, New York, and made a deposition concerning his father, Alexander Bryan, who had died in 1825. Daniel Bryan stated that General Gates in the year 1777, just before the Battle of Saratoga, had told his father that he wished him “to go into Burgoyne’s Army as a spy as he wanted at that critical moment correct information as to the heft of the artillery of the enemy, the strength and number of his artillery and if possible information as to the contemplated movements of the enemy.” Bryan then “went into Burgoyne’s Army where he purchased a piece of cloth for a trowsers when he went stumbling about to find a tailor and thus he soon learned the strength of the artillery and the number of the Army as near as he could estimate the same and notwithstanding that the future movements of the Enemy were kept a secret, he learned that the next day the Enemy intended to take possession of Bemis heights.”

The deposition goes on to tell how Alexander Bryan got away from Burgoyne’s Army and reached the American lines and General Gates in time to deliver his information, with the result that Gates was on Bemis Heights the next morning “ready to receive Burgoyne’s Army.” As we know, the latter was soundly trounced, an action which was followed ten days later by the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga. According to the deposition, Bryan was never rewarded. His sick child died during the night he was away and his wife almost died too. Gates had promised to send a physician to Bryan’s family, but he had never got around to it. Seventy-five years later his son put the story on record, for reasons which are still not clear, as there is no record that any claim of recompense was filed.
1

Until accident or further research turns up additional information, we shall not know to what extent Gates’ victorious strategy, which helped greatly to turn the tide of the war and was so instrumental in persuading the French to assist us, was based on the information which Bryan delivered. Sporadic finds of this kind can only make us wonder who all the other unsung heroes may have been who risked their lives to collect information for the American cause.

The one spy hero of the Revolution about whom every American schoolboy does know is, of course, Nathan Hale. Even Hale, however, despite his sacrifice, suffered comparative oblivion for decades after his death and did not become a popular figure in American history until the mid-nineteenth century. In 1799, twenty-two years after his death, an early American historian, Hannah Adams, wrote, “It is scarcely known such a character existed.” In his own time, Hale’s misfortune had quite a special significance for the conduct of Colonial operations. Since Hale had been a volunteer, an amateur, mightily spurred on by patriotism but sadly equipped to carry out the dangerous work of spying, his death and the circumstances of it apparently brought home sharply to General Washington the need for more professional, more carefully prepared intelligence missions. After Hale’s loss, Washington decided to organize a secret intelligence bureau and chose as one of its chiefs Major Benjamin Tallmadge, who had been a classmate and friend of Nathan Hale at Yale and therefore had an additional motive in promoting the success of his new enterprise. His close collaborator was a certain Robert Townsend.

Townsend directed one of the most fruitful and complex espionage chains that existed on the Colonial side during the Revolution. At least we know of no other quite like it. Its target was the New York area, which was, of course, British headquarters. Its complexity lay not so much in its collection effort as in its communications. (I recall that General Donovan always impressed on me the vital significance of communications. It is useless to collect information unless you can quickly and accurately get it to the user.)

Since the British held New York, the Hudson and the harbor area firmly under their control, it was impossible or at least highly risky to slip through their defenses to Washington in Westchester. Information from Townsend’s agents in New York was therefore passed to Washington by a highly roundabout way, which for the times, however, was swift, efficient and secure. It was carried from New York to the North Shore of Long Island, thence across Long Island Sound by boat to the Connecticut shore, where Tallmadge picked it up and relayed it to General Washington.

The best-known spy story of the Revolution other than that of Hale is the story of Major John André and Benedict Arnold. These two gentlemen might never have been discovered, in which case the damage to the patriot cause would have been incalculable, had it not been for Townsend and Tallmadge, who were apparently as sharp in the business of counterintelligence as they were in the collection of military information.

One account claims that during a visit André paid to a British major quartered in Townsend’s house he aroused the suspicions of Townsend’s sister, who overheard his conversation and reported it to her brother. Later, when André was caught making his way through the American line on a pass Arnold had issued him, a series of blunders which Tallmadge was powerless to prevent were instrumental in giving Arnold warning that he had been discovered, thus triggering his hasty and successful escape.

A typical “brief” written by Washington himself for Townsend late in 1778 mentioned among other things the following: “. . . mix as much as possible among the officers and refugees, visit the Coffee Houses, and all public places [in New York.]” Washington then went on to enumerate particular targets and the information he wanted about them: “whether any works are thrown up on Harlem River, near Harlem Town, and whether Horn’s Hook is fortified. If so, how many men are kept at each place and what number and what sized Cannon are in those works.”

This is a model for an intelligence brief. It spells out exactly what is wanted and even tells the agent how to go about getting the information.

The actual collection of information against British headquarters in New York and Philadelphia seems to have been carried out by countless private citizens, tradesmen, booksellers, tavernkeepers and the like, who had daily contact with British officers, befriended them, listened to their conversations, masquerading as Tories in order to gain their confidence, The fact that the opposing sides were made up of people who spoke the same language, had the same heritage and differed only in political opinion made spying a different and in a sense a somewhat easier task than it is in conflicts between parties of alien nationality, language and even physical aspect. By the same token, the job of counterespionage is immensely difficult under such circumstances.

One typical unsung patriot of the time was a certain Hercules Mulligan, a New York tailor with a large British clientele. His neighbors thought him a Tory or at least a sympathizer and snubbed him and made life difficult for him. On General Washington’s first morning in New York after the war was over, he stopped off rather conspicuously at Mulligan’s house and, to the enormous surprise of Mulligan’s neighbors, breakfasted with him. After that, the neighbors understood about Mulligan. He had obviously gleaned vital information from his talkative British military customers and managed to pass it on to the General, possibly via Townsend’s network.

Intelligence during the Revolution was by no means limited to military espionage in the Colonies. A fancier game of international political spying was being played for high stakes in diplomatic circles, chiefly in France, where Benjamin Franklin headed an American mission whose purpose was to secure French assistance for the Colonial cause. It was of the utmost importance for the British to learn how Franklin’s negotiations were proceeding and what help the French were offering the Colonies. How many spies surrounded Franklin and how many he himself had in England we shall probably never know. He was a careful man and he was sitting in a foreign country and he himself published little about this period of his life. However, we do know a great deal about one man who apparently succeeded in double-crossing Franklin. Or did he? That is the question.

Dr. Edward Bancroft had been born in the Colonies in Westfield, Massachusetts, but had been educated in England. He was appointed as secretary to the American commission in Paris, wormed his way into Franklin’s confidence and become his “faithful” assistant and protégé for very little pay. He successfully simulated the part of a loyal and devoted American. He was able to manage nicely on his low salary from the Americans because he was being generously subsidized by the British—“£500 down, the same amount as yearly salary and a life pension.” Being privy, or so he thought, to all Franklin’s secret negotiations, he was no doubt a valuable agent to the British.

He passed his messages to the British Embassy in Paris by depositing them in a bottle hidden in the hollow root of a tree in the Tuileries Gardens. They were written in secret inks between the lines of love letters. Whenever he had more information than could be fitted into the bottle, or when he needed new directives from the British, he simply paid a visit to London—with Franklin’s blessing, for he persuaded Franklin that he could pick up valuable information for the Americans in London. The British obligingly supplied him with what we today call “chicken feed,” misleading information prepared for the opponents’ consumption. Bancroft was thus one of the first double agents in our history.

To deflect possible suspicion of their agent, the British once even arrested Bancroft as he was leaving England, an action intended to impress Franklin with his bona fides and with the dangers to which his devotion to the American cause exposed him. Everything depended, of course, on the acting ability of Dr. Bancroft, which was evidently so effective that when Franklin was later presented with evidence of his duplicity he refused to believe it.

Perhaps the wily Franklin really knew of it but did not want to let on that he did. In 1777, Franklin wrote to an American lady living in France, Juliana Ritchie, who had warned him that he was surrounded with spies:

I am much oblig’d to you for your kind Attention to my Welfare in the Information you give me. I have no doubt of its being well founded. But as it is impossible to . . . prevent being watch’d by Spies, when interested People may think proper to place them for that purpose; I have long observ’d one rule which prevents an Inconvenience from such Practices. It is simply this, to be concern’d in no Affairs that I should blush to have made publick; and to do nothing but what Spies may see and welcome. When a Man’s Actions are just and honourable, the more they are known, the more his Reputation is increas’d and establish’d. If I was sure therefore that my Valet de Place was a Spy, as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other Respects I lik’d him.