The New Spymasters Read online

  This book is an inquiry into the modern secret agent and his employer, the spymaster. Our subject is what the novelist and sometime intelligence officer Graham Greene called ‘the human factor’, the business in which a real walking, talking person like al-Balawi sets about gathering ‘intelligence’, by which I mean some secret or protected information.

  In the trade, the use of a human being, a spy, to gather intelligence is known as human intelligence (HUMINT) collection. There is obviously a dark side to our subject. Spying is the art of betrayal. Almost inevitably, to gather secrets a spy must betray his country, or at least betray the trust placed in him by those who have given him access to the secrets.

  While it showed that the spy game continued, did the debacle of Khost show that the spymasters were now incompetent? The CIA’s potential secret agent had been ‘grotesquely mishandled’, said a military historian, Edward Luttwack, among other critics.5 Or was it that using human spies against al-Qaeda leaders was just too difficult?

  In these pages, I address the state of human intelligence and do so by seeking to answer three questions. First, how has spying changed in the twenty-first century? Second, when can spying still be effective? And third – the essential question posed by Khost – what kind of spying is needed and will help deal with the specific threats of today and the future?

  * * *

  Given the incredible things that can be divined in the twenty-first century by stealing a copy of someone’s electronic mail or listening to their phone, for instance, the idea of taking the word of an old-fashioned human source may seem rather questionable. Spying has been called the world’s second-oldest profession, but it can also seem to be an anachronism.

  As the Khost mission showed, spying carries tremendous risks. Spies must betray the secrets of the country or group they target. But betrayal can be addictive. Spies can, in turn, also betray those who recruit them. Since spies must survive by telling lies, it can be hard to know when they are telling the truth.

  The discovery of a spy operation can trigger diplomatic rows, sow discord and, at worst, be a pretext for war. By contrast, the use of spy satellites or the bugging of conversations – technical methods of getting intelligence – can seem a far safer way to gather information. A former CIA operative described being told by an analyst colleague, ‘Please give us a great agent. Satellite photos don’t tell us where the missile is aimed or who can fire it.’ But Admiral Stansfield Turner, a CIA director under President Jimmy Carter, declared that technical spying ‘all but eclipses traditional, human methods of collecting intelligence’.6 After the 1990 Gulf War he again summed up what became a dominant, if often unspoken, view that the US should not depend on old-style spies:

  The litany is familiar: We should throw more and more human agents against such problems, because the only way to get inside the minds of adversaries and discern intentions is with human agents. As a general proposition that simply is not true … Not only do agents have biases and human fallibilities, there is always a risk that an agent is, after all, working for someone else.7

  But despite the risks that Turner described, hardly a month goes by without a new spy being unmasked. At the time of writing, the United States was being accused by Germany of recruiting a spy inside its defence department and another in its secret services. In response, the CIA’s Berlin chief of station was expelled, with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, declaring that the Americans had ‘fundamentally different conceptions of the work of the intelligence services’.8 And yet for governments whose secret services or law enforcement agencies employ spies like these, the potential benefit of having a ‘spy in the enemy camp’ is frequently too seductive, even if the ‘enemy’ is actually a close ally.

  Spies, then, are a persistent feature of modern states. But do they make much difference, in particular against the biggest threats that nations face today?

  Good specific human intelligence is still critical. It might arguably have permitted action to thwart the attacks of 11 September 2001, in which 2,753 people died,9 or the tribal massacres in Rwanda, East Africa, in which 800,000 people died in just 100 days in 1994. But bad intelligence suggesting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction also helped lead to an invasion of that country which cost the lives of up to 500,000 people.

  * * *

  Espionage is an old and elemental human art, susceptible to endless permutations, which is why it is always hard to generalize about spying, though the motivations for betrayal – ideology, religion, money, blackmail etc. – tend to remain unchanged. As I once heard a former chief of British intelligence say, ‘There have been no new motives since the Mesopotamians.’

  This book is not a comprehensive survey. It reflects the experiences of those I have met while working primarily in the western hemisphere and dealing mainly with the security services of the United States and Britain, with some additional contacts in Germany and France and across the Middle East and South Asia. It omits huge developments in eastern Asia, South America and Africa.

  Just as the Cold War finished, I began a career as a journalist and writer. In the years that followed, working mainly abroad, and particularly reporting on national security, I have been privileged to meet spies, and the spymasters who recruit and run them, everywhere from cigar rooms in Washington, tea rooms in London, beer gardens in Germany and coffee shops in Cairo and Beirut, to military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and walled compounds in Pakistan. Some of them worked for secret services and some for other agencies in the military and law enforcement that also practise espionage.

  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’.

  * * *

  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?’10 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?

  * * *

  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.’11

  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’.12

  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.13

  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).14

  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.15

  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 late
r. 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.’16 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.