The New Spymasters (9 page)

Or, back in 1909, consider an agent called Le Vengeur, a member of the German general staff, who sent French intelligence a copy of the Schlieffen Plan, which described how the Kaiser would invade France in the First World War. His disclosures were ignored, even when the plan was also stupidly published in the
Deutsche Revue.

It becomes evident from many cases that real-life spy stories tend to end in an anticlimax. A great coup, some terrible plot discovered, but then, when the spy comes home to tell his story, it is all for nothing. Why do the efforts of spies so often come to naught? It has to reflect a number of critical weaknesses in the business.

First, spies struggle with credibility because human intelligence delivers its product in a particularly frail vessel. To obtain secrets, spies must be treacherous. They must betray their country and tell lies to those around them. Truths from a spy come delivered in a wrapping of lies. It is hard to be sure that such habitual and accomplished liars are not being deceptive about the information they are delivering. This doubt is accentuated by the way modern spy agencies depend on foreign agents, rather than using their own officers. The agencies usually deliver what is second-hand information, technically hearsay. The game has too many layers.

Second, there is the problem of what we could call truth-shock. An important revelation is something that challenges existing belief. The better the story, the harder to convince. Dull and conventional wisdom, unsurprising warnings, these all pass safely and rapidly into reports for presidents and prime ministers. But an intelligence agency that issues a surprising warning risks ridicule and inquiries if it turns out to be wrong and so will tend to agonize over such warnings, possibly until too late.

Third, there is a problem of incentives. To use the language of economics, spying, like journalism and diplomacy, can be viewed as part of the market for information, a market that is famously imperfect. It is hard to trade efficiently in information because to describe fully the product that you are selling (for example, to say that the Russian president will visit Minsk on Monday) is already to hand over the product and devalue it. Secret intelligence is even harder to trade because it is information that often cannot be verified. A plan for a nuclear missile strike may be verifiable only after it has taken place. Imperfect markets like this lead to what economists call ‘perverse incentives' – a tendency to do suboptimal things. A rational spy may have an incentive to invent or exaggerate secrets that cannot be verified. And the rational spy agency may have a perverse incentive to reject information it cannot immediately verify, and to overvalue verifiable titbits.

These weaknesses – a lack of credibility, inbuilt inertia against shocking information and poor incentives – conspire to hinder spies from making a difference. Intelligence agencies have worked to counter these problems by, for example, developing a sceptical mindset to test the credibility of their agents. But, as both the CIA and the KGB found to their cost during periods of the Cold War, healthy scepticism can turn quickly into a sickly, paralysing paranoia that corrupts faith in faithful friends. Such a disease can devalue all the highly prized fruits of intelligence.

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What should these inbuilt weaknesses tell us about whether or not spies can ever be effective? Generalizing from specific cases is always dangerous. Even with Philby and Sorge, the fact that during certain periods their intelligence was ignored hardly allows us to sum up the overall value of their betrayal, still less of spying as a whole. But the sheer scale of the espionage that took place during the Cold War, and the volume of detail about it disclosed publicly, do provide us with a platform from which to make a number of observations.

The first is that, in spying, activity is not the same as achievement. You don't have to take Knightley's radical view that everything about spying is useless to note that much of it was.

A secret service is rarely honest to the public about itself. In the Cold War, to justify the arms race of intelligence spending, it served the interests of both sides to aggrandize the achievements of their rivals, the enemy. But, in contrast to much of what has been said in public and made its way into the literature, this was not some golden age of spying. For most of the period, huge amounts of effort were expended recruiting spies whose main value was to provide the secret services with information about each other in what became almost an internal, private war. So, while a culture of secrecy kept the public in the dark – for example, it was illegal in the United States and Britain to publish the names of undercover intelligence officers – Soviet intelligence often had a full briefing about the inside of SIS and the CIA. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviets had Kim Philby in SIS and Anthony Blunt in MI5; by the 1980s they had Aldrich Ames in CIA headquarters and Robert Hanssen in the FBI. On the other side, the West was fully briefed on Soviet intelligence. They had, among others, Oleg Penkovsky and later Oleg Gordievsky in the GRU and KGB respectively.

Really valuable intelligence might have told political leaders what their enemies or potential enemies were planning or contemplating. But in all the years of superpower confrontation, both sides had a critical lack of political agents. The KGB never did have a spy in the White House. ‘When people say that Soviet intelligence penetrated the higher echelons of Western government, I know that this is not true,' said Oleg Kalugin, the Soviet general and former head of KGB foreign counterintelligence.
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Nor did the CIA ever have a spy in the Kremlin, as William Colby, the former CIA director, admitted.
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By way of a caveat, Britain's star agent-in-place in the late Cold War, Oleg Gordievsky, did deliver valuable political intelligence when he was the KGB station chief in London while also working for SIS. He – and the intelligence he provided – played a pivotal role in making Margaret Thatcher believe and support Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign of glasnost, which ultimately brought down the communist edifice. His achievement was mainly to deliver understanding, not secrets. ‘No doubt he produced lots of facts to go with this understanding,' said one insider who observed these events close at hand, ‘but it was in changing Western perceptions of the regime that he seems to have been most influential.'

The second observation is that spying has proved successful when it was highly focused and politically directed.

The world is so complex and the future so hard to predict that spy agencies that have tried to do everything, to have spies everywhere, have rarely achieved much, even with a large budget. Stalin, whatever his faults, took the opposite approach to intelligence. He had the gift of marshalling all the resources at his disposal towards a single objective that he defined. Such determination helped the Soviets pull off the espionage coup of the twentieth century: the acquisition of the atomic bomb.

With more than 200 Americans working as Soviet agents during and after the Second World War, and a series of agents involved at various levels within the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear bombs, the first Soviet bomb tested in 1949 ‘was a copy of the American original tested … more than four years earlier', Christopher Andrew records.
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One of those blamed for this leak of technology was a German scientist and émigré to Britain, Klaus Fuchs, who confessed to an MI5 interrogator that he had given the Russians ‘all the information in his possession about British and American research in connection with the atomic bomb'.
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As with much spy literature, discussion on atomic espionage is often shallow, ignoring the strides taken independently by the Soviets' own weapons programme. Some research suggests the stolen intelligence was used mainly to compare results. But, even so, this would have been critical. Spying was crucial to this strategic shift.

Hans Bethe, a fellow nuclear physicist, suggested that, by his spying, Fuchs was ‘the only physicist I know who truly changed history'.
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He should also have added the creators of the nuclear bomb, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The third observation is that human intelligence has the most effect when it is corroborated or, even better, verifiable. These are technical terms of spy-speak. Corroboration means obtaining the same information independently from other sources. Without such a backup, you are left with ‘single source intelligence'. Verifiable intelligence means information that can be checked. So, for example, a secret agent's report that a bomb had been planted in a Rome hotel could be corroborated by another agent's report or by another source of intelligence, such as a bugged telephone. It could be verified if the agent gave other specific information that allowed the actual bomb to be found.

Corroboration and verification are double-checks on intelligence. And while, as mentioned, a requirement for double-checks will skew what spies provide (at the expense of uncheckable but useful truths), this double-checking has generally proved the only practical way to make human intelligence useful. Few spies have been so brilliant, or so convincing, that their intelligence was ever trusted without being backed up in this way.

Philby's story is again instructive. In trying to show why Philby's intelligence was valuable – despite Moscow's doubts – some biographers cite the case of the warnings he provided after the Second World War about a programme by the CIA and SIS to insert agents into Eastern Europe and Albania in particular. In a mission known as Operation Valuable, between 1949 and 1954, the West made successive attempts to overthrow a newly established Albanian communist leader, Enver Hoxha, and to restore the esteemed King Zog. But, as a result of tip-offs, most of the Western agents were captured as they landed on the coast or parachuted in and were executed.

Philby's role is often cited uncritically here, partly because he boasted about it. Philby became infamous, as one newspaper writer puts it, as the traitor who ‘sent agents to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain'.
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Philby himself wrote that the ‘agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on murder, sabotage and assassination … To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.' Yuri Modin, Philby's NKVD contact in London, also claimed that Philby ‘gave us vital information about the number of men involved, the day and the time of the landing, the weapons they were bringing and their precise programme of action'.
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But, as most historians concede, Operation Valuable was anyway penetrated from top to bottom by Soviet spies. And whatever value Philby may have delivered had credibility because it was corroborated by those other spies, and indeed by the capture of the agents when they landed. He could be trusted on Albania because he was not a solitary source. On his own, even this master spy counted for little.

There is research that questions whether Philby even provided details of the agents' landings – the central claim made by all who have built up his importance. This challenge comes from Albert Lulushi, an Albanian-American author, based on a study of declassified CIA files. Nicholas Pano, a history professor, in a review of Lulushi's work, concludes that he puts Philby in perspective:

It demonstrates that although he was knowledgeable of the plans against Albania, he did not have access to the operational plans in Albania. Although he was a factor in the failure of this adventure in Albania, the main factors were the rivalry and divisions among the Albanian émigré groups, the leaks of operational details from these groups, the bureaucratic approach that the CIA and British planners of these operations often took, and the rivalry among different intelligence agencies with interests in Albania at the time.
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At the time of writing, this evidence is too fresh to be conclusive. But what it underlines is the need for caution in accepting any claim about the immense value of a particular spy, as well as the huge interest that almost everyone has in exaggerating his importance.

On the other side of Cold War spying, there was a clear example of intelligence that made a difference. While US political intelligence in Moscow was often thin, the CIA successfully stole many Russian technical secrets. This had impact because the stolen designs and science could be tested and replicated.

Adolf Tolkachev, a senior Russian aeronautical scientist who spied for the CIA between 1977 and 1985, gained access to (and was also involved in the design of) radars for the Soviet fighter programme and so helped the US defeat them. According to James Pavitt, the former CIA deputy director for operations, Tolkachev's spying saved the US billions and ‘ensured us air superiority at a critical juncture of the Cold War'.
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Dmitri Polyakov, a major general in Soviet military intelligence, was another great catch. He spied for nearly twenty years from 1961 and was described by Sandy Grimes, a CIA counterintelligence officer who helped catch Aldrich Ames, as ‘our crown jewel' and possibly ‘the best source that any intelligence service has ever had'. He passed on specifics of Soviet missiles and other weapons.
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(Unfortunately, the CIA had failed to protect their agents with proper compartmentalization. The need-to-know principle was ignored and too many people knew their identity. Both were betrayed by Soviet agents – Tolkachev by Ames and Polyakov by Hanssen – and executed at the Lubyanka.)

Pavitt emphasizes the money saved by technical intelligence, but another reason such intelligence was valuable was that it could be tested. The stolen secrets triggered a research programme, not only to learn methods to counteract the Soviet weapons but also to verify that the intelligence was accurate. The cost of verification was one reason why clandestine actions to steal the actual weapons were regarded as even more important. SIS officers pulled these off in Afghanistan and the CIA in Egypt.
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