The New Spymasters (47 page)

Second, it also remains true that many of spying's limitations – the potential weakness of information provided by a serial betrayer, the risk of a source being exposed and the effects of acting on intelligence – are all less worrisome when that intelligence can be corroborated. One former intelligence officer described how in Afghanistan, for instance, the military wisely ignored reports from secret agents that a Taliban group were in this village or that village, but when that report was corroborated by signal intelligence – for instance, by locating the mobile phones of identified Taliban fighters in that village – then they were willing to commit forces to attack the group. The HUMINT could not be trusted alone, but it helped to narrow the target for surveillance and thus, in the end, to locate the enemy with reasonable certainty.

Third, political direction and a tight focus remain key to successful HUMINT. As neither Sunni extremism nor Iraq's weapons programme was a focus in the early to mid-1990s, policymakers paid the price later when they found they had no spies in place where they needed them. The US, with its aim to remain a superpower and have global influence, has a particular problem with such focus. It tries to collect intelligence from too many places and, despite its huge resources, tends to underperform. But with strong political direction and by concentrating spying resources on key threats, agencies have a chance to make the recruitments they need.

Political direction also means political accountability. In most democracies, to guard against the tendency to go rogue, secret services require political approval for their operations. In the US, most covert actions are signed off by the White House, if not the president himself. In Britain, all non-trivial actions by SIS, anything likely to have repercussions, are signed off by the foreign secretary. And the system does work, even if successive scandals appear to show these mechanisms are still far too weak.

Finally, spying remains useful and successful when used as a last resort. It is a hostile act: always invaluable during warfare, but often counterproductive and always to be used sparingly in peacetime.

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Spying on the enemy has been seen as crucial to military strategy on the battlefield since ancient times, with the resulting intelligence being used for tactics of surprise and ruse. ‘All warfare is based on deception,' wrote Sun Tzu in 400 BC. ‘There is no place where espionage is not used.'
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But in modern warfare, intelligence is even more valued, particularly as a means of replacing the grinding war of attrition – as seen in the trenches of the First World War – with victory based on the concentration of overwhelming force on the enemy's weak spots. Such an approach depends on both mobility and good information about the enemy and their plans.

Whether it is war in ancient China or against al-Qaeda, running human spies is just one way of filling in the canvas of a broad intelligence picture. But war fundamentally changes the risk calculation in espionage. In the Second World War, an agent who parachuted behind enemy lines faced a very high chance of capture or death, or both. But when good intelligence might save hundreds of lives, as, for example, in the D-day landings in Normandy, the risks to the agent were worth taking.

Because the Cold War was ‘cold', the risk of death was usually remote. The Soviet Union executed its traitors, and so the West's recruited agents always risked their lives. But the intelligence officers who handled these agents were much safer. By tacit agreement, the superpowers never tried to assassinate each other or take reprisals. These safety guarantees, however, were of little value when the West got embroiled in ‘hot' conflicts in the developing world. The war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s brought mortal danger for US field operatives, as did the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s. In each conflict, both CIA officers and agents were killed. The bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983 caused what is still the biggest CIA loss of life, with eight officers killed. In recent years, the War on Terror and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought new dangers.

Britain's SIS has always operated with great caution. No British officers have lost their lives in action since the Second World War. However, according to insiders, the lives of a series of agents working for the British have been lost while infiltrating Islamic militant groups. Given al-Qaeda's callous willingness to shed innocent blood, though, spying on them was, in principle, worth that sacrifice.

In peacetime, spying has had a very mixed record. In the fight against crime or domestic extremism, it coexists poorly with a criminal justice system that guarantees a fair and open trial, and it is hard to stop agents provoking crime. It should be used, but sparingly and only with great expertise. It may, for example, be essential as a means of tracing the hidden hand of the powerful gangsters who are the instigators and beneficiaries of serious crime.

Between peaceful nations spying is automatically dubious. The unmasking of a traitor or any attempt to recruit a spy tends to sow enmity. Where secret agencies have survived and grown in peacetime, it is because the fear of war is ever present. In particular, since the US detonated the atom bomb over Japan in 1945, the fear of nuclear conflict has made their existence, particularly in nations that possess nuclear weapons, hard to contest. Spying might often be expensive, inefficient and ineffective, but not always. Set against the prospects of nuclear war, that distinction makes all the difference. However much politicians might deride the titbits that their spies serve up, none of them could risk not having an intelligence service.

From our look at the Cold War, it is clear – with hindsight – that spying could raise the tension at times but also lower it, helping deal with paranoia about the other side's intentions. And if a scorecard existed, it would have to record that both the KGB and the CIA proved their ability to steal military secrets and to develop great systems of early warning. Military spying evened out the contest; early warning helped calm the nerves. And together they did, in their small and highly expensive way, help to keep the peace. Neither agency was ever a great success at political spying in the other's homeland. The West never noticed that the East was collapsing and the East never realized that it was failing. Up to a point, this same story of tactical brilliance and strategic myopia has continued.

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In the new world of espionage, despite initial doubts after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the secret services won a partial reprieve by shifting the case for spying into a struggle against other non-state threats. The threats were not nuclear holocaust but dirty bombs; not invasion by Warsaw Pact troops but a massacre of the innocents, whether by warring tribes or a bomb in a shopping centre. Though less of a threat to the state, the damage they could cause was real and tangible to the public, and so the need for intelligence – and for spies – was arguably unassailable. And in declaring War on Drugs and then War on Terror, US politicians were beginning conflicts that might conceivably never end.

Whether or not combating terrorism is really a ‘war', it still demands a proportionate response, but one in which spying remains a powerful weapon of last resort. As John MacGaffin, a thoughtful former senior CIA operations officer, wrote, ‘Clandestine collection of HUMINT must be employed only in pursuit of information that is truly essential to the most critical tasks of civilian and military national security affairs and only when that information cannot be acquired in any other way. When either of these two conditions is missing, the outcome almost always suffers.'
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The results of spying first creak and then fall apart when they are relied upon too heavily and become the sole means of supporting critical actions. The use of military and intelligence methods to round up al-Qaeda prisoners and send them to Guantanamo Bay after 9/11, for example, may have seemed to make sense at the time. But it was counterproductive in the long term. The evidence collected against these men was usually secret intelligence and so was no use in a court of law. That has made it very hard for the US to decide what to do with them, and to justify their continued, indefinite detention.

Messy but Useful

As was the case in the twentieth century, it has been tempting for politicians to view human intelligence as the messy end of spying where, in comparison with digital techniques, the drawbacks come to the fore. But, as we have seen, snippets of bugged conversations, intercepted emails or stolen digital files can take you only so far. They are usually meaningless without context. If Putin is heard to say, ‘Let's invade Ukraine' or ‘Let's kill Obama,' does he really mean it? When an elderly Afghan warlord repeatedly calls a member of the Taliban and speaks to him with the utmost respect, does that mean he is also a Taliban supporter? Zabet Amanullah's killing illustrates how misunderstandings from technical leads can have disastrous consequences. Human beings can provide the cultural context that allows you to judge if what someone says needs to be taken seriously, together with background knowledge about their ambitions, friends and enemies.

Most of that background knowledge is not secret intelligence. It can be gleaned from ordinary human engagement, whether it is scholarship, journalism, diplomacy or popular entertainment. But some of the most threatening adversaries – whether heads of state or terrorist leaders – are private, remote individuals who rarely disclose their intentions and who, even if they speak in public, mostly tell lies. In these cases, only a source from within the leader's circle – a spy – will be able to pass on and interpret his intentions.

As Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower from the National Security Agency, disclosed, state eavesdroppers like the NSA and Britain's GCHQ view the world by means of what they call ‘selectors', approved targets for interception. While there may be thousands of these selectors, only a portion of them can be closely monitored: not every phone can be listened to, every conversation replayed and studied in depth. Spy agencies, however, do store great volumes of information about calls and emails and connections. According to the
Guardian,
‘One NSA report from 2007 estimated that there were 850bn “call events” collected and stored in the NSA databases, and close to 150bn internet records. Each day, the document says, 1–2bn records were added.'
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But the point often missed in the controversy was that most of this was valuable only with hindsight: only after a target had been identified could the information be used to investigate his history. The most difficult intelligence problem, then, is to identify the target, before homing in on what is important among the blizzard of signals.

So how should a ‘selector' be chosen? This is ultimately a policy decision based on a broad understanding of threats and possible sources of valuable information. There are many sources of open information that can be used to judge who should be placed under surveillance. But, again, only a spy may be in a position to identify some of the secret people and places that are important. Unlike a mobile phone, for instance, or a camera on a drone, a spy also talks back. Running a spy is a two-way process and an agent can challenge the wisdom of the questions he is being asked or the direction of intelligence gathering. ‘If you are listening to the wrong person; if you're focusing on the wrong target, they can tell you,' said one former recruiter. Another intelligence officer said, ‘While policymakers will tell us where to spy, that doesn't mean we tell them what they want to hear.' This is above all the value of the ‘human factor': spies are not just another ‘ear' at the table, a stealer of secrets, but sentient beings who convey understanding.

The Spies We Need

So spies really can be useful if carefully deployed as a last resort against a threat that matters, and the nature of the spies we need depends on what that threat is and, in consequence, what secrets are really worth stealing. Judging the future state of the planet, and all the issues that will confront society, is a subject of its own, but there are some macro trends worth mentioning that point to the role that spying could and should play.

The most striking trend that impacts on security is globalization: the way that powerful groups, whether political movements or commercial companies, are increasingly able to span national borders, making use of cheap and easy communications (through direct messages and phone calls between individuals or by posting propaganda on the Internet); easy travel (because of ever-decreasing restrictions on international freedom of movement and ever-decreasing prices of aircraft travel); freedom of capital movement (driven by reduced state regulations and also high-speed digital money movements); and a breakdown of cultural differences (with the increased dominance of major languages and spread of international entertainment, be it Hollywood or Egyptian soap operas). All of these factors are drivers of global networking and challenge our nation-based preconceptions and state institutions. These tendencies may be as varied as al-Qaeda propaganda, the incredible worldwide popularity of a computer game or the power of a hedge fund that operates worldwide with little regulation. Ideas, money and people always spread internationally – consider the rise of major religions. What is different about the twenty-first century is the speed with which this can happen.

Obviously, the threats posed by transnational networks do not come from violent extremists alone, but also from other groups whose actions may have damaging consequences. An important target of intelligence should be not only Islamist extremism but also the multinational corporations, and in particular the world of plutocrats and international financiers, upon whose actions the jobs and livelihoods of millions of people depend. At the time of writing, the largest 307 US firms held $1.95 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid paying corporation tax. Their decisions on where to move that cash pile and their production centres will determine the fate of nations.
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