The Craft of Intelligence

by Allen W. Dulles

  Much has been made, to be sure, of Cromwell’s intelligence chief, John Thurloe, but in the perspective of history I do not find him possessed of the same ingenuity, inventiveness and daring that distinguished Walsingham. A major key to Thurloe’s success was the very sizable funds he had at his disposal. Pepys says he spent over £70,000 a year. This figure may be exaggerated, but the records show that he paid his spies inordinate sums for their information and thus had little difficulty recruiting them. Walsingham, on the other hand, worked with the most niggardly budget under the tight-pursed Queen and is said frequently to have paid his agents out of his own pocket, and then only insignificant sums.

  Thurloe, like Walsingham, had the title of Secretary of State, but by this time his office had become known as the “Department of Intelligence,” one of the earliest official uses of the designation in English for a bureau of government. His was, of course, a time of major conspiracies bent on restoring Charles Stuart to the throne. For this reason, again as in Washington’s time, Thurloe ran both an internal security service and a foreign intelligence system. For the latter he used English consuls and diplomats abroad but supplemented their reporting with the work of secret agents. Thurloe relied even more than did Walsingham on information from postal censorship and can certainly be credited with having run a very efficient post office from the point of view of counterintelligence.

  Despite the calm, almost humdrum way in which Thurloe seems to have gone about the business of systematic intelligence collection, he was frequently involved in heavy-handed plots. One of these, which he prepared at Cromwell’s instigation, had as its purpose the assassination of Charles and the Dukes of York and Gloucester, his brothers. This was in reprisal for a Royalist plot directed against Cromwell’s life which Thurloe had uncovered. The scheme was to entice the three royal brothers from France to England on the false claim that they would be met by a body of soldiers on landing who would then set off an uprising. It all sounds rather obvious and contrived at this distance and has none of the subtlety of Walsingham’s plots in which he successfully involved Mary Queen of Scots. Whether Charles would have fallen for the trick we need not conjecture, because one of Thurloe’s closest confidants, his secretary, Morland, betrayed the plot to Charles. Pepys tells us in his diary that only five days after Charles was restored to the throne, “Mr. Morland was knighted . . . and the King did give the reason of it openly, that it was for his giving him intelligence all the time he was clerk to Secretary Thurloe.”

  Another interesting example of successful seventeenth-century intelligence is that of Sweden, which maintained its position as a great power to a very considerable degree by virtue of having the most accurate reporting system in Europe. A contemporary Russian minister admitted that “the Swedes know more about us than we do ourselves.” They played heavily on Protestant connections during the period of the religious wars and generally used men of other nationalities such as French Huguenots as both agents and reporters, much in the manner of Walsingham, thereby avoiding embarrassment and direct implication if caught. Sweden and to some extent Holland in those days illustrate how relatively small countries can make up for many power deficiencies with superior intelligence combined with technical and organizational ingenuity.

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an ever-sharpening distinction emerged between the work of internal security and the collection of foreign intelligence. In the major powers, separate organizations under separate experts were more and more entrusted with the different tasks. The reason, of course, was that the growth of internal dissidence, the threat of uprising and revolution from within, threatened the stability and power of the great autocratic and imperial systems of nineteenth-century Europe, thus causing the burgeoning of secret police organs for the protection of the emperor or ruler.

  Under Napoleon, first the infamous Joseph Fouché, a product of the turbulent conspiracies of the French Revolution, and later Colonel Savary served as Ministers of Justice and chiefs of a purely political secret police and counterespionage organization. The collection of military and foreign intelligence, however, was in the hands of the Alsatian, Karl Schulmeister, who, though nominally attached to Savary, ran a quite autonomous series of operations whose purpose was to gain intelligence about the Austrian armies and to deceive the Austrians as to the strength and intentions of the French.

  Gradually the growth of large and aggressive armed forces during the nineteenth century caused the emphasis in foreign intelligence to be placed primarily on its military aspects and the responsibility for its collection to be taken over by the army itself. In the period up to the outbreak of World War I, under the aegis of the General Staffs of most European armies a single military intelligence agency developed and became the major foreign intelligence arm of the country. It was directed by military officers rather than by civilians or cabinet ministers. Political intelligence was left largely to the diplomats.

  Prussia up to 1871 was the exception to this development, primarily because the power-hungry, though gifted Wilhelm Stieber kept the reins of both Prussian military intelligence and of the Prussian secret police in his ambitious hands. To him goes the credit for the first exercises in mass espionage, for the method of saturating a target area with so many spies that they could hardly fail to procure detailed information on every aspect of an enemy’s military and political status. These networks were also a kind of fifth column and helped soften the morale of civilian populations by inducing a fear of the coming invader. Previously, espionage had made use of a few selected and highly placed individuals. Stieber went after the farmers and the storekeepers, the waiters and the chambermaids. He used these methods in preparing for the Prussian attacks against both Austria in 1866 and France in 1870.

  The size and power of an internal security service is generally in direct ratio to the extent of the suspicion and fear of the ruling clique. Under a repressive and autocratic ruler secret police will blossom, a dreaded parasitical force that permeates every element of the populace and the national scene. For the best example of such an organization we must, therefore, turn to nineteenth-century Russia, where a retarded political system stood in constant fear of its own masses, its liberal leaders or the dangerous ideas and influences of its neighbors.

  But this state of affairs in Russia was not an innovation of the nineteenth century. In early Russian history, the Tatars and other steppe people continually sought to ascertain the strength of the garrisons within the walled stockades (kremlins) of the Russians. As a result, the Russians became congenitally suspicious of anyone seeking admission to the walled cities, fearing that their real mission was intelligence. The tradition of attaching a pristav (literally, “an attached object”) to a visiting foreigner, so that he could be readily identified as such, goes back at least to the sixteenth century. There is a long ancestry for surveillance and “guided tours” in Russia. In the seventeenth century, when the Russians began sending their own people abroad to study at foreign universities, they usually sent some trusted person along to watch and report on any group of students. The custom of attaching a secret policeman to delegations attending international conferences, so much in evidence today, therefore also has hoary antecedents.

  An organized political police under state management in Russia can be traced back to the establishment in 1826 by Czar Nicholas I of the Third Section of His Majesty’s Imperial Chancery. In 1878 the Third Section was abolished and its functions were given to the Okhrana, or security section, of the Ministry of the Interior.

  The purpose of the Czar’s Okhrana was to “protect” the imperial family and its regime. In this capacity it kept watch on the Russian populace by means of armies of informants, and once even distinguished itself by tailing the venerable Leo Tolstoi around Russia. Tolstoi had long since become a world-renowned literary figure, but to the Okhrana he was only a retired army lieutenant and a “suspect.”

  In
the late nineteenth century there were so many Russian revolutionaries, radical students and émigrés outside Russia that the Okhrana could not hope to keep Imperial Russia secure merely by suppressing the voices of revolution at home. It had to cope with dangerous voices from abroad. It sent agents to join, penetrate and provoke the organizations of Russian students and revolutionaries in Western Europe, to incite, demoralize, steal documents and discover the channels by which illegal literature was being smuggled into Russia. When Lenin was in Prague in 1912, he unknowingly harbored an Okhrana agent in his household.

  When Bolsheviks swept into power in 1917, they disbanded and to some extent “exposed” the old Okhrana as a typical oppressive instrument of the czars, claiming that the new workers, state needed no such sinister device to maintain law and order. In the same breath, however, they created their own secret police organization, the Cheka, about which we shall have more to say later. The Cheka, in scope, power, cruelty and duplicity, soon surpassed anything the czars had ever dreamed of.

  One of the great intelligence services of the nineteenth century in Europe was maintained not by a government but by a private firm, the banking house of Rothschild. There was a precedent for this in the activities of a much earlier banking family, the Fuggers of Augsburg in the sixteenth century, who built up a sizable financial empire, lending money to impoverished sovereigns and states, as did the Rothschilds later. That the Fuggers made few errors in the placement of their investments was in large measure a result of the excellent private intelligence they gathered. The Rothschilds, however, once they had attained a position of some power, benefited their clients as well as themselves by their superior intelligence-gathering abilities.

  In promoting their employers’ financial interests from headquarters in Frankfurt-am-Main, London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, Rothschild agents were often able to gain vital intelligence before governments did. In 1815, while Europe awaited news of the Battle of Waterloo, Nathan Rothschild in London already knew that the British had been victorious. In order to make a financial killing, he then depressed the market by selling British Government securities; those who watched his every move in the market did likewise, concluding that Waterloo had been lost by the British and their allies. At the proper moment he bought back in at the low, and when the news was finally generally known, the value of government securities naturally soared.

  Sixty years later Lionel Rothschild, a descendant of Nathan, on one historic evening had Disraeli as his dinner guest. During the meal a secret message came to Lionel that a controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company, owned by the Khedive of Egypt, was for sale. The Prime Minister was intrigued with the idea, but the equivalent of about $44,000,000 was required to make the purchase. Parliament was in recess and he could not get it quickly. So Lionel bought the shares for the British Government, enabling Disraeli to pull off one of the great coups of his career. It was rumored that some of the Rothschild “scoops” were obtained by the use of carrier pigeons. There was probably little basis for the rumor, although it is true that one of the Rothschilds, immobilized in Paris when the city was surrounded by Germans in the Franco-German War of 1870, used balloons and possibly also carrier pigeons to communicate with the outside world. The world heard of the armistice ending the war through this means, rather than through conventional news channels.

  The Great Powers of Europe entered World War I with intelligence services which were in no way commensurate with the might of their armed forces or equipped to cope with the complexity of the conflict to come. This was true of both sides—the Allies and the Central Powers. French military intelligence had been badly shaken up by the Dreyfus affair and was rent by internal factions and conspiracies. They calculated the size of the German Army at just half of what it was when it went into the field in 1914. The German service, which had risen to notable efficiency under Stieber in 1870, had fallen into a sad state of disrepair after his dismissal; it was moreover typical of the arrogance and self-assurance of the German General Staff of 1914 that it looked down its nose at intelligence and did not think it of importance. The Russians had achieved their great intelligence coup shortly before in the treason of the Austrian General Staff Officer, Colonel Alfred Redl, who had finally been caught in 1913. I shall have more to say of him in a later chapter. Through him they had come into possession of the Austro-Hungarian war plans, which helped them defeat the Austrians in a number of the early battles of World War I. On the other hand, the Austrians had revised some of their plans after 1913, and the Russians, blindly putting their trust in the Redl material, frequently ran into serious trouble. They also, astonishingly enough, sent military communications to their troops in the field in clear text instead of in cipher, and the Germans gleefully listened in and picked up, free of cost, valuable information about the disposition of Russian forces.

  The Austrians may have balanced out Redl’s treason to some extent as a result of the work of their agent, Altschiller, who was a close confidant of czarist Minister of War Vladimir A. Sukhomlinov and his wife. Sukhomlinov, a favorite of the imperial family who went out of his way to cultivate Rasputin, was notoriously vain, venal and incompetent and had the habit of leaving important military documents lying around his house. The Germans also had an agent close to this pair, a certain Colonel Myasoedev, who was supposed to be Mme. Sukhomlinov’s lover, and was hanged as a spy by the Russians in 1915.

  Altogether it can be said that whatever effective espionage work was accomplished during World War I, except in the tactical field, was not particularly in the area of land operations. It was chiefly in connection with naval warfare or in the remoter and peripheral areas of conflict. British competence in breaking the German naval codes was a lifesaving intelligence feat that kept Britain’s head above water in the darkest days of the war. Lawrence of Arabia in the Middle East and the German, Wassmuss, in Persia performed real exploits in the fields of espionage, subversion and fomenting insurrections that truly affected the course of the war in those areas. German espionage and sabotage in the United States were among the more successful feats of their intelligence in World War I, thanks in part to our lack of preparedness with countermeasures.

  World War I did, however, result in a number of innovations in espionage. One was the use of radio in wartime communications, which opened up the new possibility of gathering intelligence of immense tactical and sometimes strategic significance by intercepting radio signals and breaking codes and ciphers. The preservation of neutrality in World War I by certain strategically located countries like Sweden, Norway, Holland and Switzerland gave rise to the espionage tactic of spying on one country via a second country, despite the best efforts of the neutrals to prevent such use of their soil. This is a technique which also has been employed in peacetime, particularly in Europe. Lastly, the Far East made its first important appearance on the international espionage scene in the shape of the Japanese intelligence service, which in the ensuing years became a highly efficient and dangerous presence in the intelligence world.

  The period between the two world wars saw a proliferation of intelligence services and a growing complexity in their internal structure. The targets had become increasingly technical and the world a much more complicated place. For the new dictatorships, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S.S.R., the intelligence service became the major instrument abroad in probing and preparing for foreign expansion. At the same time the free countries, especially England, had to take on new and enormous responsibilities in intelligence work in the face of the threat of the dictatorships. The silent warfare between the intelligence services of both sides in World War II supplies many of the examples and case histories to which I shall refer later on. On the Allied side, in opposition to the common enemy, there was collaboration between intelligence services that is without parallel in history and which had a most welcome outcome.

  During the war days when I was with OSS, I had the privilege of working with the British
service and developed close personal and service relationships which remained intact after the war.

  In Switzerland I made contact with a group of French officers who had maintained the tradition of the French Deuxième Bureau and who helped to build up the intelligence service of General de Gaulle and the Free French. Toward the end of the way, cooperation was established with a branch of the Italian secret service that adhered to King Victor Emmanuel when non-Fascist Italy joined the Allied cause. I also was working with the underground anti-Nazi group in the German Abwehr, the professional military intelligence service of the German Army. A group within the Abwehr secretly plotted against Hitler. The head of the Abwehr, the very extraordinary Admiral Canaris, was liquidated by Hitler when, following the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, records establishing Canaris’ cooperation with the plotters were discovered.

  This wartime cooperation contributed, I believe, toward creating among the intelligence services of the Free World a measure of unity of purpose, and after the war a free Western Germany has made a substantial intelligence contribution. All this has helped us to counter the massive attacks which the intelligence and security services of the Communist bloc countries are making against us today.

  2

  The Evolution of American Intelligence

  In United States history, until after World War II, there was little official government intelligence activity except in time of combat. With the restoration of peace, intelligence organizations which the stress of battle had called forth were each time sharply reduced, and the fund of knowledge and the lessons learned from bitter experience were lost and forgotten. In each of our crises, up to Pearl Harbor, workers in intelligence have had to start in all over again.