The New Spymasters (49 page)

Where it counts, a spy inside the enemy's camp can have tactical value and provide deeper insight. But in Iraq and Afghanistan HUMINT agencies sometimes expended too much energy trying to recruit fully paid-up and loyal agents, when it would have been better to put the effort into seeking a higher-level intelligence source who, though unwilling to cross the line and betray his cause, could provide more insight.

One intelligence official said of Afghanistan, ‘Our mission was not to understand the enemy but to defeat it.' And he was right. But, as another equally well-placed diplomat put it, perhaps the politicians had given the spymasters the wrong mission. In a war fought among the people and with no obvious ‘good guys', working out who was really the enemy was an equally important mission. The diplomat added, ‘And what if we cannot win, what if we cannot defeat an enemy, then having a real understanding of the enemy, and having contacts in the heart of their leadership, becomes all-important.'

As these conflicts showed, the more that intelligence officers were mere adjuncts to the war machine, serving up targets for air and drone strikes, for example, the more reluctant well-placed people in the enemy camp were to engage with them and help them to understand the conflict.

None of this was trivial. For a Taliban leader, any unsanctioned contact with foreigners could lead to instant execution, whether he passed over secrets or not. And on the Western side, such contacts needed political approval and risked public exposure. But having discreet contacts with an enemy is a given for spymasters. Past experience shows that covert ambassadors like SIS's Mark Allen in Libya and Michael Oatley in Northern Ireland can engage in ways that would be difficult for ordinary diplomats.

Some object to this role, deriding the notion of the spymaster as quasi-ambassador as a kind of ‘secret state department'. One CIA veteran said, ‘Look, we are an espionage agency. Do they just want to be an intelligence service? If so they can save a lot of money and subscribe to Reuters.'

But, as always, the secret service has to be the weapon of last resort. While organizing talks with an enemy is something that diplomats should be equipped to do, at certain times only the discretion and personal skills of an intelligence officer will engender sufficient trust to make an unlikely contact likely. And if such discreet contacts help to provide broader intelligence, they could make a far greater contribution to solving a conflict and protecting security than another cheap exercise in ‘stealing secrets'.

The twenty-first-century secret service is far more than a spy service. In the field it performs many roles, as I saw in practice when I reported on the war in Afghanistan in 2008. It was clear that SIS and the enormous CIA station had a multitude of functions. They were members of a ‘war cabinet', chaired by President Karzai, that directed the war; they were mentoring the local intelligence agency, the NDS, and Karzai himself; they were conducting secret missions to talk to the Taliban and other warlords; and they were also trying to help kill some Taliban and al-Qaeda members. In all, then, it was a mixed bag.

The agencies also have very different approaches. While the UK's focus has been on secret intelligence gathering, the CIA in particular has always been as much about covert action, the art of secret intervention. The itch to change the world by secret means is hard to resist for a powerful country and, though attempts to do so are often counterproductive, it is unquestionably one function of a secret agency, and one that may clash with pure-as-can-be observation.

There are many discussions about organizational structure and who does what. British and US intelligence agencies are organized very differently. For instance, SIS is almost entirely focused on secret HUMINT and does not even have a capacity for analysis. The CIA has a clandestine service, comprised of both spy runners and covert action warriors, which is only one division within a broader all-source agency. There were always calls for another reorganization. But what matters more than how a bureaucracy is structured is what role the organization performs.

Secret services, rather like nuclear missiles, need a dual-key control. Their actions need to be in strict and loyal accordance with both the orders of their country's elected leadership and their society's values. In spying, they need to be a vehicle to deliver uncomfortable truths to those in power. And, while adhering to instructions about what targets to spy on, they must have the courage to point out when the target and the enemy are poorly chosen.

The spy and spymasters we need cannot be mavericks. They must be trusted not to go rogue and embarrass either a people or its government. But they must be nonconformists, iconoclasts. They must be patriots but that patriotism should be rooted in serving their society's and humanity's wider values – agents who serve a better purpose than just supplying target data but instead strive to obtain insights about the thoughts and intentions of those abroad who are really shaping our world, whether these people be inside or outside government.

In short, what is most needed is total independence of thought, allied to accountability of action.

A Modern Betrayal

It might be asked what virtue there is in all of this. We have talked of the valuable information from spies, but does that really justify a spy's betrayal of his friends, colleagues or country – his treachery?

There are those who suggest that spying is a fundamentally immoral profession. The novelist John le Carré believes that the British made great spies because duplicity was built into their country's class culture. In a newspaper interview, he argued that the work of intelligence officers was to ‘fine-tune the aptitude for duplicity into an art form'. And in Britain there were always appropriate recruits. ‘We have never lacked in this country for people with larcenous instincts and charming manners.'
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Markus Wolf, the former director of East German foreign intelligence, went further, saying, ‘Every director of an intelligence service, including those in the West, would be in the wrong position if he said, “I have to be scrupulous about it – is that in line with my ethical conduct?” Intelligence methods are not moral things.'
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But le Carré's depiction of ruthless tactics in the service of some greater good, however dubious that objective might sometimes be, is not identical to Wolf's suggestion that in essence anything is acceptable in espionage; that somehow there is a moral equivalence to each side of a spy war, as if the need for rough tactics in war makes everyone equally bad. It does not. Wolf may have been a master tactician, but he was also the heartless servant of a bankrupt, oppressive regime.

As Oleg Gordievsky put it when justifying his treachery, ‘The betrayal question is pointless because it [the Soviet Union] was a criminal state. The most criminal element of the criminal state was the KGB. It was a gang of bandits. To betray bandits … was very good for the soul.'
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The invocation of a higher cause is what helps spies live with themselves after they have betrayed their friends (even if it is, perhaps, some other motive, such as money, that has really lured them into betrayal). But where the real contradiction arises is not between moral purpose and sordid tactic (war is messy), but between this higher purpose and the much narrower interest of the modern state's secret service.

To justify what they do among their own people, intelligence services are fiercely patriotic, but at the same time they constantly ask foreigners to betray their flag. In his pitch, the spymaster asks a potential agent to think about betraying his group or country or co-religionists ‘to save lives' or ‘for peace'. The recruiter may honestly believe that. But the intelligence agency's appeal to universal values is disingenuous. When the situation is reversed, when an insider from the secret services or military blows the whistle (someone like Bradley Manning, the soldier who went to Wikileaks, or the NSA contractor Edward Snowden) for what they regard as equally high principles, they are treated not as heroes but as loathsome traitors.

Those among the very exclusive club of intelligence officers who have successfully recruited an important spy testify to feeling first-hand another, more personal contradiction with the state's purposes. Betrayal, as they have recounted, is not a trivial thing. It is not provoked from a brief, chance conversation but must usually be cultivated, which demands prolonged access to the potential secret agent. Those involved in recruitment often talk of its subtlety: the need to establish a real friendship, the creation of real emotional bonds. They were often fiercely loyal to their agents, even long after they had been passed across to another ‘handler'. It was like a marriage, or, according to a retired officer, ‘like giving away a child'. After all, said one legendary CIA recruiter, you needed thick skin: ‘You have to be able to deal with ambiguity – with people's lives.' And give away their children they did: the friendship was a device, an emotional twist used in the service of a cause, a country they believed in.

Not every spy requires a good cause. Plenty will betray secrets for money, even to the dark side. Plenty also were just consumed by the love of the game. But in order to attract people who will betray their secrets to you, the cause must be important. And in a world of globalized threats and common interests that transcend borders, and where the actions of intelligence services are under ever-greater scrutiny, the contradiction between the greater good, espoused by secret services, and the narrow interests of the nation-state may come to look increasingly untenable.

What great cause, for instance, could motivate and justify spying between states that are moral equivalents: for example, for one ethnic group against another, or for France against Germany? Or take economic espionage: when multinational corporations, for instance, abandon all loyalties to individual states (and are quite willing to transfer jobs, cash hoards and tax liabilities from their nation), what would be the moral basis for a nation-state to assist them to win contracts? In contrast, when a transnational company is polluting the seas across the globe, then betraying its secrets seems perfectly justified.

When the threats to security faced by free citizens across the world are broadly similar – whether it is the spread of religiously motivated violence or the struggle against dictatorship, concentration of economic power and unregulated capital flows – then serving one state or another may begin to look petty. In those circumstances, a nation's ability to secure friends in other countries – whether spies or simply allies – may depend on how obviously its foreign policy matches its clear obligations as a global citizen.

When the CIA was exposed for its extraordinary renditions, secret jails and harsh torture of mainly Arab prisoners, for instance, what right-thinking Arab would really want to betray their secrets to such an organization? As Sir Richard Dearlove, the former British spy chief, indicated in a speech in July 2006, one of the reasons that intelligence organizations attracted willing agents from other countries, was ‘because the West unequivocally, at the end of the Cold War, did occupy the moral high ground'. And, he went on to say, ‘We are not on it at the moment.'
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Spying and secret service activity should continue to be nationally controlled. No international or non-government spy agency could be relied upon to protect vital secrets and keep alive the most sensitive agents. This is what the best intelligence agencies, through a century of experience, excel at. Nevertheless, intelligence agencies can rarely operate unilaterally as they confront global threats. In future, they will be expected to work constantly with other services and help serve wider interests. Their success, and their ability to recruit the spies we need to protect us all from the next big threat, will depend on the values by which they live, and the extent to which those values are shared not just by their government masters but also by all right-thinking people.

Notes

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Introduction: The Exploding Spy