The New Spymasters (3 page)

In this sense, I have grown up with a new generation of spies, watching as they redefined their enemies and raison d'être, and changed their character too. I was fortunate that this occurred at a time of greater openness, when someone such as myself – with only modest connections – was able to find a window into this world.

While sharing the experiences and insights of the spies and spymasters I have met, I have also tried to maintain the critical distance that is lacking from most official publications or books written by retired spies, who, even if they do not say so, must submit their accounts for approval by the secret services.

In addition, I have included experiences of the spied-upon: the violent militants or radical activists who come up with new strategies on a daily basis to escape attention. At a conference in Oxford, a former chief (known as ‘C') of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service introduced me in a wary tone to the panel as ‘someone who has actually met al-Qaeda'.

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Spying is an old habit. There are spies mentioned in the Bible and in the records of ancient China and Egypt. There were spies in ancient Mesopotamia and even documents marked ‘Top Secret'. From the twentieth century, spies have featured so often in books and films that it is easy to think we know the subject backwards. But much of what is said is confused, wrong or based around myths.

One of the reasons spying can seem rather dated is that so many of the popular conceptions about it derive from the role played by spies in the confrontation between the former Soviet Union and the West. The spy game was central to the Cold War: the KGB and its allies on one side, the CIA and its partners on the other. While the military stood poised for action but remained largely motionless, the spy wars were real.

For those like me who grew up in this time of confrontation, who can forget the spy stories in the news, in literature and in the movies? As children we played spy: we put on false moustaches, tailed our enemies across the playground, learned to write in code and passed messages in invisible ink. The problem was that in the excitement over espionage's trappings – its intrigue, dangers and gadgets – underlying questions about its success or failure were rarely posed.

The first part of this book takes us back to the Cold War and the origins of the modern secret service. I want to explain not only the nuts and bolts of spying, but also why the assumptions that many people make about spying, based on our understanding of this period, are often dubious. When operations like Khost are criticized by old-timers, it is worth knowing, for instance, that there never really was a past golden age of espionage.

History can give us direct and positive lessons for the present. For example, while the fight against terrorism would come to dominate intelligence work, this was not a new concern for secret services. The real story of Britain's secret espionage fight against the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for example, is only just emerging. And it provides a template for how spying against terrorists can work, even if modern terrorists are different in important ways.

With the second part of the book we enter the uncharted period after the Cold War, when the spymasters confronted ill-defined or unfamiliar adversaries and had to find new targets for their spies. Initially, there was even some suggestion that spymasters and spies were no longer relevant. Sir Colin McColl, the chief of SIS at the end of the Cold War, recalled being treated by ‘intelligent, knowledgeable people' like a long-forgotten uncle and asked, ‘Are you still here?'
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Years later, following new wars and colossal attacks by terrorists, few doubted the need for intelligence. But the debate continued as to whether, with improvements in technology, human spies were still valuable. In a little-noticed discussion, some argued that spies were useful to spy on governments but useless against modern targets such as radical Islamists and their suicide bombers. Some highly experienced spymasters argued that human intelligence was a ‘dying art' and would play at best a secondary, if not negligible, role compared to technical methods.

I had to establish if this was true before I could consider what kind of spies we really need. Could a spy get close to such ruthless, chaotic enemies, and do so without stirring up the proverbial hornet's nest and thereby making those enemies more dangerous?

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The road to the failure of human intelligence collection in Khost started with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As the Soviet Union disbanded two years later, debate began about whether the end of superpower rivalry would lead to a ‘peace dividend', a scaling back of defence and intelligence spending. According to the
New York Times
in an editorial on 9 March 1990, there was ‘a fabulous fortune to be amassed' by such budget cuts. Within a decade, it predicted, up to $150 billion a year could be saved. Others argued that intelligence services should be cut back too. Bills were introduced in the US Congress to emasculate and even abolish the CIA. Congressman Dave McCurdy told the House of Representatives in 1992, ‘With the demise of the Soviet Union, that threat has been substantially reduced … the governmental organizations which have been primarily focused on the Soviet Union must … be re-evaluated. This process has begun for the Armed Forces, and it must be undertaken for our intelligence agencies as well.'
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William Pfaff, an influential opinion writer, said what others were thinking. In an article entitled ‘We Need Intelligence, Not Spies', he asked, ‘What are spies for? They recruit one another to betray their respective services, but what positive things do they accomplish?' Pointing to numerous CIA operations that had damaged the US government's reputation, he went on, ‘the CIA, as it has existed for the last 47 years, is at the end of its useful life'.
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While the idea that the ancient craft of spying could be allowed to wither away completely was but a brief delusion, the secret services still required years of lobbying to maintain their status – and their budgets. And even though they managed to survive, it was often at the expense of the human intelligence side of their work.

One reason to doubt the need for secret activities such as spying was a new sense of transparency and openness. Even if nuclear-armed Russia remained a threat, the end of the Iron Curtain meant so much less information was hidden. Closed lands were opened. People had more freedom to speak. It was much harder to explain why you needed spies to collect information. In the now ex-communist countries, secrets were spilling out. Even the former KGB, whose communist masters had been deposed, opened its archives for a short while to the press and public (often for cash). Former agents were being unmasked.

Spy agencies in the West also had their perestroika and ‘came out' – but not because of any change of heart. The spies showed their faces because they were looking for new roles. They needed public support to protect their budgets and, above all, they needed something or someone to replace the old ‘Main Enemy', as the Soviet Union was known in the CIA. Spymasters argued that they should use their skills to fight major gangsters (or ‘organized crime'), the drugs trade and even illegal immigration.

In a democracy, secret services should take orders from elected politicians, not lobby for new or different orders. But internal documents from Britain's domestic security service (MI5) give a glimpse of how such agencies manoeuvred in secret in the 1990s to preserve their role. In one example, MI5 directors worried that if a ceasefire by the IRA in Northern Ireland held and counterterror work by the Service, as they called themselves, declined they would be faced with the following choices:

1. Do nothing and accept significant reduction in size of the Service; or

2. Move towards acquisition of new work. E.g. in Organized Crime, by one of two routes:

– Big Bang (immediate and overt bid for an expanded role)

– Incremental, undisclosed approach.
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MI5 chose the last option: secret campaigning. Most of its staff were not even told, let alone Parliament or the public. Speaking notes by Stephen Lander, then the director general, concluded, ‘Service's strategy will become visible in part through pushing at the edges – but
it will fail if complete intentions are revealed
prematurely – therefore essential that SMG [Senior Management Group] does not disclose this agenda to any other staff at this stage' (my emphasis).
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Although the arguments made by the secret services were self-serving, they did have some merit. With the Berlin Wall gone, the world had become more chaotic. While the chance of a Red Army invasion was now zero and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust was at least reduced, the likelihood of smaller-scale atrocities or conflicts had increased. For all its high stakes, the Cold War had temporarily suspended many serious national and regional conflicts. Among other things, global superpower confrontation in the Third World had in effect suspended the process of decolonization. Subsidies from superpowers had sustained dictators in nations whose borders bisected tribal divisions and where elite, unrepresentative social classes frequently held sway. Without the subsidies, the struggle for power in those countries could resume. The world, the intelligence agencies argued, had thus suddenly become more dangerous.

Writing in 1996, a former military intelligence officer, Michael Smith, summed up the spy community's view:

The demise of the Warsaw Pact, which many saw as signalling the end for the spy, and indeed the spy writer, has only increased the need for intelligence as fragile new democracies threaten to plunge back into totalitarianism, weapons-grade nuclear materials are traded on the black market, and Third World countries that were previously kept in check by their superpower mentors turn into dangerous mavericks.
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These arguments, together with a combination of bloody events and liberal thinking, would end up preserving the secret services. Events started even before the Soviet Union had been dissolved, with the invasion of oil-rich Kuwait in 1990 by a former Western ally, Iraq. There followed the tragic bloodletting in Somalia in 1991, the massacres of the Bosnian War – beginning in 1992 – and ethnic genocide in tiny Rwanda in the summer of 1994.

The advent of this ‘new instability' gave Western political leaders a reason to love their secret services once more. The same liberals who had viewed the military and secret services as tools for repression, Cold War sabre-rattling and neo-imperialism now asked them to help stop human rights abuses and massacres.

This new interventionist viewpoint was championed by US president Bill Clinton, who took office in 1993, and later by British prime minister Tony Blair, when he came to power four years later. Clinton was a slow convert. He had run for office on a ‘peace dividend' manifesto, promising to focus as president not on foreign events but on domestic growth. ‘It's the economy, stupid' became his campaign slogan. When in office, however, he responded to a growing popular sense that, without the danger of a Soviet reaction, the US had a freer hand and even a responsibility to intervene, particularly after tragic events like the genocide in Rwanda. For Blair, this duty to respond to foreign evils became an article of faith. ‘We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries,' he said in a pivotal 1999 speech in Chicago, ‘if we want still to be secure.'
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This pre-emptive ‘Blair doctrine' needed to be built around good intelligence. Intervening early, without waiting to be attacked, required precise and accurate forewarning.

So, with all the new threats and pressure for global intervention, the secret services had secured for themselves a breathing space. But while politicians had come to realize that they still wanted and needed intelligence, they were in disarray about how to collect it, and were wary of using real spies.

In the 1990s, the introduction of electronic mail and mobile telephones for consumers offered two new forms of communication that were enticingly easy to steal and bug. Such technical methods of spying were particularly attractive in this new period of post-Cold War friendly international relations. From bitter prior experience, politicians knew that recruiting secret agents even among declared enemies always risked causing a scandal, but it was much worse in peacetime. The discovery of a spy or an attempt to recruit one was never seen as a friendly act. It could jeopardize the peace. Interception of communications, by contrast, was seen as risk-free: as long as no one found out, you could spy as easily on your friends as on your enemies. That is why signals intelligence, as such interception was called, always carried the highest kind of security classification, way above Top Secret.

Time and again, US politicians who controlled the purse strings debated the right mix between human and technical means of collecting secrets, particularly after the latest, greatest ‘intelligence error'. It was never really an either-or question; it was always about calibrating the balance between the two approaches. But in a cautious era, advocates of human intelligence methods often seemed to lose the argument. In 1994, Brent Scowcroft, a former US national security adviser, argued the contrary position. He suggested that post-Cold War, ‘we need a new kind of intelligence, a different kind of intelligence that is less directed at technical collection, where we are good', and he suggested a move ‘back to human intelligence, where we don't do as well'.
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But those who disagreed ultimately carried more weight because technical methods offered swifter results with less risk. Budgets for spying were cut back and – perhaps more decisively – risky or potentially embarrassing operations were not authorized.

Then came the attacks of 11 September 2001. There had been plenty of warnings about terrorist plots to strike within the United States, but this was on a bigger scale than most imagined possible. Amid the recriminations that followed, there was much debate about whether the secret services had lost their way. There were promises of reversing spending cutbacks and reviving spycraft. But there were also some sharper questions.