The New Spymasters (46 page)

One former senior SIS officer recalled how, in contrast to the huge efforts and great time once expended to try to find a single Soviet recruit, the key quality of modern espionage was its remarkable speed and efficiency.

As we have just described, the recruitment process has been aided by a fusion of technical and human methods, as well as enhanced cooperation between agencies. With the use of intrusive digital surveillance and interception, for example, an intelligence officer can rapidly access an unparalleled amount of information about a recruitment target before approaching them. Preparation for a ‘pitch' can be accelerated and there is a better chance of success.

While the debate over technical versus human methods of intelligence is not finished, it is impossible to regard, say, signals and human intelligence as either/or options. Consumers of intelligence – the military, for example – will insist that one form be corroborated by another. If a highly important agent is travelling to a dangerous place it is almost inconceivable that a major secret service would not use technical methods to track his progress and ensure that he has not been compromised, whether by bugging and tracking his mobile phone or by watching his movements from a spy satellite or drone. Conversely, when signals intelligence is relied upon without good backup from human sources – as witnessed with the assassination of Zabet Amanullah in Afghanistan – great errors can result.

Another blurring among the New Spies is the boundary between espionage and covert action. When an agent works inside a group plotting murder, the focus of effort by intelligence services has to be to defeat or disrupt those plots. There are great incentives to intervene, whether because an agency may be legally bound to prevent a known terrorist attack or because of political pressure to avoid the slightest risk of an attack succeeding. Ideally, an agent can pass information to a secret service, which can then use other means (for example, an arrest operation) to foil a plot. But it may not be so simple. An agent may be the only person able to intervene (for example, by planting a tracking device) to stop the attack.

The drawback of these successful counterterrorist operations is that so many are short-term in objective, tactical in scope and always designed to minimize risk. Secret services can intervene to disrupt a plot or scheme, but they rarely have the time or agent in place long enough to develop a broader understanding of the target. In fighting the terrorist, they have become one component in a global action-orientated secret police dedicated to catching or eliminating the ‘bad guy'. The risk is that, while successfully stopping one potential attack after another, they do little to prevent these attacks from recurring.

The Value of Spying

One official at the top of government, formerly responsible for liaison with secret agencies, put it like this: ‘If only people could know what plots have been aborted, what spying has achieved.' It was a fairly typical, and sincere, point of view espoused by insiders in the intelligence world. Given the inherent secrecy involved in good human intelligence, estimating the true value of modern spying is difficult. Because the activities of agents remain cloaked in secrecy in order to protect the identity and safety of the individuals involved, only much later will the true impact of their work be calculable. Indeed, it could be argued that if you know what really happened you cannot report it, and if you do not know you are in no position to judge.

This, however, is defeatist thinking, particularly given the great many examples of operations that have been exposed, as well as the great many insiders from the secret world able to give insight into where spying has been valuable or counterproductive. Although it has usually been impossible to name sources in this account, I can safely say that, adding their years of service together, the sources interviewed have collectively had more than a thousand years' experience of human intelligence. Let me try to sum up, then, what has emerged from interviews with them and from publicly available material, and discuss where this might lead us.

Spying's Limitations

No estimation of the value of spying makes sense without first considering its limitations. Modern spying, just like ancient spying, never offers unqualified benefits. It can easily go wrong and is not without distinct and costly trade-offs. These trade-offs are important, because without knowing in advance what will succeed or fail, the decision to use a spy must always be a risk calculation, weighing up the potential benefit of success with the potential fallout from failure. It is not enough to point to one great success and imagine this justifies everything that follows.

The first trade-off, to borrow from science, may be called the ‘observer effect', which is the term used to explain that the act of observation alters the object under observation. Roughly applied to human espionage, it means that the act of spying cannot be neutral. At some point it involves taking actions, any one of which carries the risk of discovery that may induce a hostile and counterproductive reaction. For instance, the inducements offered in spying – such as paying agents large amounts of money – may not only be seen as evidence of hostile intent if discovered, but also incentivize agents to cause events that would never otherwise have happened, in other words to act as provocateurs.

One major advantage of signals intelligence over human intelligence is that the observer effect has tended to be much weaker. A signals intelligence satellite in orbit 22,000 miles into space could hoover up signals even from friendly states with almost zero chance of anyone working out who is being listened to. This calculation is altering, however. The diplomatic fallout from Edward Snowden's revelations about whose phone calls the US was listening to, including the German chancellor's and the UN secretary general's, showed that signals intelligence is not without risk of blowback. The widespread use of strong encryption also alters the calculation, since formerly passive signals intelligence agencies may need to take active measures, such as burglary, to steal the passwords used by their targets.

Another trade-off is the ‘action effect', by which I mean that the use of intelligence tends to undermine its collection. This is because, consciously or unconsciously, an enemy will begin to notice when his secrets are turned against him. To take an extreme example, if an agent passes on details of a terrorist's murderous plot and that plot is defeated, the terrorist may then suspect the agent of betrayal, tell him no more secrets or even kill him. As the British Army demonstrated in its handling of the agent Steak Knife in the IRA, there are many clever ways to muddy the waters and misdirect suspicions about who leaked information. But it cannot always be done. And even when no one knows who the traitor is, over the long term, by an evolutionary process, those who are more security-conscious and do not leak secrets to the agent are likely to rise in importance. The result of all this is that secret services, even when they have very good agents and good information, tend to be very cautious about encouraging anyone to make use of that information.

The third major trade-off could be called the ‘rogue effect', which is the tendency of secret operators to go off the rails, the risk being that spying's intrinsic secrecy divorces those involved from the norms of society. They lack the usual means of self-regulation in public life, notably judgement and scrutiny by the public.

In order to protect their tactics and the identity of their sources, spymasters remain cloistered in a kind of private club, in an isolated environment that can, without care, lead to rogue behaviour. Basic assumptions within this club can lie unchallenged, as can the veracity of their agents' reports. Apparently, if their activities are kept secret, usually ordinary and decent people will do irrational and indecent things. Or as one British intelligence officer put it crudely, ‘Intelligence agencies whose operations are pursued without strict outside scrutiny invariably f*** up in the end.'

An example of this rogue behaviour was exhibited by the leadership of the CIA after the 9/11 attacks. They might have had their sign-off from the president and indeed reflected the vindictive public mood, but in countenancing systematic torture and a chain of secret detention places, they strayed far from the broader values of their society, or even the law. They had failed what should be called the ‘flap test': that is, would a secret action be judged publicly acceptable if it were no longer secret? A less dramatic, but equally clear, example of aberrant behaviour was the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in London's Metropolitan Police, which, over the course of four decades, believed it acceptable – in the name of quelling protests by environmental activists, for example – for their agents to sleep with their surveillance targets and even father children (some of whom, it is alleged, they abandoned).

This was a genuine rogue unit. An investigation by the
Guardian
found that of nine undercover policemen identified, ‘eight are believed to have slept with the people they were spying on'.
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But, when ten women sued the Metropolitan Police, claiming they had been deceived, a judge came to the conclusion that so-called sexspionage was not unusual. Mr Justice Tugendhat, a High Court judge, said examples came to mind from the realms of fiction.

James Bond is the most famous fictional example of a member of the intelligence services who used relationships with women to obtain information, or access to persons or property. Since he was writing a light entertainment, Ian Fleming did not dwell on the extent to which his hero used deception, still less upon the psychological harm he might have done to the women concerned. But fictional accounts (and there are others) lend credence to the view that the intelligence and police services have for many years deployed both men and women officers to form personal relationships of an intimate sexual nature (whether or not they were physical relationships) in order to obtain information or access.
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How far should a spy go? It was an open question. But certainly not that far to deal with such a small threat. The SDS had been formed largely of uniformed policemen with training as neither detectives nor undercover agents, in stark contrast to Scotland Yard's professional undercover unit, for a long time designated SO10. ‘It isn't normal to sleep with a target. If you have to, it means you are not in control,' said one former operative.

The Misuse of Spies

Pure spying, then, has many weaknesses, tending to undermine its value. But the biggest drawback of all comes not from intelligence collection itself but rather from the temptation to intervene and misuse that intelligence too readily. Modern society has developed great techniques to pry into the lives of others – the challenge is how we make use of these.

Society has faced these dilemmas before, but they were of a different character. In the Cold War, the issue was civil liberties. A substantial amount of spying was done by East and West against their own citizens, with the object of preventing subversion. But this information collected secretly was also used by the state to take pre-emptive action. So, for example, the careers of East Germans discovered to have contacts with the West were secretly hindered. And in the West, those with suspected communist sympathies were secretly blacklisted from taking up certain jobs and radical organizations were secretly subverted if they were seen as communist fronts. In essence, this spying was objectionable because it was an affront to natural justice and an open society in which someone's faults or blessings could be debated openly and fairly.

In the twenty-first century, the threat to civil liberties continues, even if it has altered. Intelligence collection is – contrary to some reports – far more tightly focused on those who are suspected of posing a violent threat to society and rarely directed against domestic ‘subversives'. But when violent threats are identified, political leaders continue to look for a convenient and secret response. If a group of Britons in Pakistan are heard discussing bombing a shopping mall in New York, it might be tempting to think a convenient explosive dropped from a drone would deal with the problem. Or if, as in Britain, assassination is ruled out but the only evidence of the plot is secret intelligence, then it might be tempting to lock the plotters in jail using secret court procedures. As before, this poses a threat to natural justice. Supposing the intelligence is wrong? Is this action fair and proportionate?

But taking preventive action in this way also enlarges the role of secret services, moving intelligence into the uncomfortable and rarely accurate world of prediction. How often do people plan to commit a crime that may never come off or that they may, in the end, decide not to commit? We have found very powerful ways to reach into people's thoughts. The dilemma for society is when it is right to intervene and punish those intentions.

Judging When Spies Are Effective

While, as we have discussed, spying today has its limits and can be abused, one reason it persists is that mechanisms have been put in place to compensate for those weaknesses. A tendency to go rogue, for example, is prevented by strict political accountability.

Four observations on the effectiveness of spying were outlined earlier, drawn from experience in the Cold War: that activity is not the same as achievement; that human intelligence offers the most when it is corroborated or, better still, verified; that spying proves itself valuable when it is highly focused and politically directed; and that spying has to be a weapon of last resort. These principles apply equally to modern spying.

First, as before, the mere existence of a spy in the enemy camp is not sufficient to be of value. Modern technology and techniques can make spying more efficient than it has been before. Some spy missions are really successful and make a genuine difference in changing government policy or averting some crisis or crime, as, say, when the UK's agent in Yemen prevented an attack on an airline in 2012. But these successes are rare, even if, given the scale of potential security threats, it seems worthwhile to persist.