The New Spymasters (45 page)

There was a wider and more devastating consequence to his recruitment, particularly as the CIA operation had wrongly been reported to be offering a polio vaccination (it was in fact hepatitis B). In 2012, tens of thousands of children along the north-west frontier of Pakistan were due to be vaccinated against polio (Pakistan was one of only three countries in the world where the disease was still endemic
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), but the Taliban banned the campaign and families refused to let their children take part. The governor of Khyber Province blamed the CIA's ‘fake vaccine' programme. In February 2012, a group of 200 American non-governmental organizations wrote to the CIA, accusing the agency of ‘undermining the international humanitarian community's efforts to eradicate polio' and saying reports of the CIA's actions might have contributed ‘to an uptick in targeted violence against humanitarian workers'.
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On 16 October 2012, a volunteer in the vaccination programme was shot dead in Quetta – one among dozens of polio workers who were to be killed or injured in the following two years. In unconnected incidents on 13 December 2013, two policemen responsible for guarding polio workers were murdered, together with a polio vaccinator, in north-west Pakistan.
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Spying is never costless or risk-free.

PART FOUR

Where Next?

Chapter 12

The Good Spy

‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles'

– Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
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On 13 May 2013, a glum-looking American diplomat was sitting on a wooden chair in the carpeted office of a Russian ministry in Moscow. Behind him was a desk on which an array of objects was laid out. All of them had been found in his rucksack and were, it was claimed, the tools of a modern spy.

Ryan Christopher Fogle had been wearing a blond wig at the time of his arrest and he carried a spare black one. Among other items were three pairs of sunglasses, a Moscow atlas, a compass, a knife and a Bic lighter, envelopes with €500 notes amounting to $100,000, as well as what the Russians described as ‘special technical equipment'. This included a metal shield for credit cards which prevented their data being read automatically.
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He also carried a letter that he wanted to deliver to a Russian FSB officer:

Dear friend,

This is a down-payment from someone who is very impressed with your professionalism and who would greatly appreciate your cooperation in the future. Your security means a lot to us. This is why we chose this way of contacting you. We will make sure our correspondence remains safe and secret.

We are ready to offer you $100,000 to discuss your experience, expertise and cooperation. The reward may be much greater if you are willing to answer specific questions. In addition to that, we can offer up to $1million a year for long-term cooperation, with extra bonuses if we receive some helpful information.

To get back to us, please go to an internet cafe, or a coffee shop that has Wi-Fi, and open a new Gmail account which you will use exclusively to contact us. As you register, do not provide any personal info that can help identify you or your new account. Don't provide any real contacts, e.g. your phone number or other email addresses.

If Gmail ask you for personal info, start the registration process again and avoid providing such data. Once you register this new account, use it to send a message to [email protected]. In exactly one week, check this mailbox for a response from us.

(If you use a network or any other device (e.g. a tablet) to open the account at a coffee shop, please don't use a personal device with personal data on it. If possible, buy a new device (paying in cash) which you will use to contact us. We will reimburse you for this purchase.)

Thank you for reading this letter. We look forward to working with you in the nearest future.
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Accounts on Google's Gmail? Was this the new face of spying? Fogle, who was accredited as a third secretary at the US Embassy, was branded persona non grata and ejected from Russia.

The country's foreign ministry made a statement: ‘At a time when the presidents of our countries have reaffirmed their readiness to broaden our bilateral relations, including special service [cooperation] in the battle with international terrorism, such provocative actions in the spirit of the “Cold War” do not facilitate a strengthening of mutual trust.'
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Of course those words were tongue-in-cheek. Russia was just as busy trying to spy on its rivals.

*   *   *

In this account of modern spying, I have tried to detail useful examples that provide raw material to help answer three particular questions. How has spying changed? When is it valuable? Who are the spies we need? As evidenced throughout, within spying there is much that remains constant – such as spying in Russia – and much that has evolved, often in quite subtle ways. In the light of these experiences, then, how should we answer these questions?

How Spying Has Changed

The Fogle case emphasized once more that the old games were still being played, albeit with less vigour. While we have focused on what is different about modern espionage, some themes endured. Foremost among them were the basics of human psychology and the efforts of major states to spy on each other. As Milton Bearden said, ‘About the only difference in the handling of the ambush of Fogle by the Russian security service was that the photographic record of his arrest was in sharp, digital colour, rather than grainy black and white. It was a textbook takedown.'
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The motive to spy on another state comes from concern about that state's intentions. However much relations between the US and Russia relaxed following the Cold War, neither side's guard was entirely lowered. The same was true of relations between Russia and Great Britain, particularly after Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, became Russian president in 2000. Things were not helped by the poisoning in London in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB officer who, according to family and friends, was an agent for Britain's SIS. The British blamed Russian operatives for killing him with a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium.

Yet, despite the accusations, neither Great Britain and the US nor Russia wanted the confrontation to intensify beyond control. When an inquest was opened into Litvinenko's killing, the British government won a court order to keep evidence of Russia's involvement in the crime, as well as of Britain's relationship with Litvinenko, secret. Only when Russia invaded and seized the Crimean region of Ukraine in 2014 did Britain announce an official inquiry into Litvinenko's death, to examine in particular if Russia was responsible. But crucial parts of the evidence were likely to be heard behind closed doors.
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Russia, then, remained a threat, capable and prepared to challenge US global power. It still tried to run secret agents in the West and the West still tried to run secret agents in Russia. But neither the clash of interests nor the threat reached anything like Cold War proportions, so the effort expended to spy on each other never came close to what it had been. Wild as it was, Russia was now mixed up, in its own quixotic way, with the global capitalist economy. The wealth of the elite was tied up in bank accounts across the world. It had no interest in outright confrontation. On the flipside, the West wanted Russia's support to confront non-state issues like terrorism and organized crime. When the Boston Marathon was attacked by two immigrants from the Russian north Caucasus, killing three and injuring 170, the US needed Russia's help to learn about the men's background.
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This was just a month before Fogle's arrest. So while Russia remained an expansionary and corrupt power, pragmatic politics put a limit on hostilities. Cooperation was more important. The same was true of policy towards communist-ruled China, where despite aggressive Chinese espionage, particularly in cyberspace, and growing domestic repression, the West chose to avoid confrontation.

Beyond the continuation of state-on-state spying, another immutable was the steady expansion of the spy bureaucracy, as a chart of MI5's staffing levels illustrates. The total numbers may strike some as surprisingly small, revealing the relative modesty of Britain's secret establishment. But apart from a blip in the early 1990s, when staff numbers fell, they also show the agency's inexorable rise.

In the US, the intelligence bureaucracy had become a monster. By 2013, as a leak of the ‘black budget' revealed, the CIA had a total annual budget to spend of $14.7 billion – more than the GDP of Iceland or seventy smaller countries. It employed 21,459 out of 83,500 civilians in the US intelligence community. Of its budget, $6.28 billion was allocated to three human intelligence categories: human intelligence enabling ($2.53 billion), human intelligence operations ($2.34 billion) and human intelligence technical tools ($1.41 billion). More broadly, technical intelligence still clearly absorbed the lion's share of intelligence spending, with the three main technical collection agencies taking up half of the whole intelligence budget between them.
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The total ‘black budget' was $52.6 billion, about the equivalent of the GDP of a small country such as Bulgaria.
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As their budgets indicate, the modern intelligence agencies are firmly entrenched. But though they have made their case for a permanent role, this is not to say that they remain as they once were. So, for example, recruitment has changed: their staff are no longer the exclusive preserve of the privileged white male. And attitudes and policies have altered. Whether in the CIA, the SVR (the former KGB) or SIS, the former high priests of the Cold War have had to adapt.

In Britain, an Establishment elite had always run the intelligence services, said former SIS officer Alastair Crooke, but that elite had changed: ‘The “one of us” is not what it used to be. It's a different group who have come up through Oxford and Cambridge that are now the sort of Cabinet members and the political elite … But the entry price is [as before] that you don't criticize certain things.'

In the US, too, the agencies employed new types of people, but they clung to their influence. ‘They became like any other middle-aged bureaucracy, they defend themselves ferociously,' said one former senior CIA executive.

Spies and spymasters had to become a different breed because the world was changing. The biggest change in espionage since 1989 was the refocusing of efforts in order to target non-state groups and, in particular, terrorist gangs. In my assessment of this new target, I described the view that human intelligence might be a dying art and that the ‘flock of birds' – the diffuse, highly adaptive and networked form of terrorist group that al-Qaeda and its offshoots became after 9/11 – would not be as susceptible to penetration by human agents as the monolithic and hierarchical targets of old, like the Soviet secret service.

In fact, while there is no evidence that any major secret service has been able to recruit within the highest level of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, the goal of getting a ‘man on the rock' was partly achieved: many agents have been run inside al-Qaeda, for example, sent for training among the militant groups in Pakistan or Yemen, and then been able to return with information about specific plots in development or leaders' location.

Recruiting spies in terror groups did not turn out to be the hardest problem. As in the Cold War, volunteers came forward and many deliberate recruitment operations, often exploiting the opportunities afforded by the arrest of a terror suspect or an interrogation at border control, have proved successful. The bigger challenge has been how to run these agents: not only how to stay in touch with them and control their activities, but also having to decide whether to shut down an operation to avoid the risk of a terrorist attack succeeding or to continue to allow an agent to function and get deeper inside.

As interviews with intelligence officers actively involved in such recruitments indicate, the solution has been to take a precautionary approach: to close down terror plots when there was any danger they might otherwise go ahead. This has altered the typical lifespan of an agent: rather than, say, a mole inside the Chinese Communist Party who might have remained in place for years, the modern agent might complete an assignment within a few months, but in doing so find himself unable to get alongside the very senior level of an organization.

Through concentrated effort, then, some of the challenges of recruiting such agents have been met. When the hierarchy of terrorist groups began to flatten and fragment, using the old, long-term, painstaking approaches against them became pointless. Instead, intelligence services began to mirror the terrorist groups by becoming faster, nimbler in their attitude to recruitment.