All overt information is grist for the intelligence mill. It is there for the getting, but large numbers of trained personnel are required to cull it in order to find the grain of wheat in the mountains of chaff. For example, in the fall of 1961 we were forewarned by a few hours of the Soviet intention to resume atomic testing by means of a vague news item transmitted by Radio Moscow for publication in a provincial Soviet journal. A young lady at a remote listening post spotted this item, analyzed it correctly and relayed it to Washington immediately. Her vigilance and perceptiveness succeeded in singling out one significant piece of intelligence from the torrents of deadly verbiage that have to be listened to daily.
In countries that are free, where the press is free and the publication of political and scientific information is not hampered by the government, the collection of overt intelligence is of particular value and is of direct use in the preparation of our intelligence estimates. Since we are that kind of country ourselves, we are subject to that kind of collection. The Soviets pick up some of their most valuable information about us from our publications, particularly from our technical and scientific journals, published transcripts of Congressional hearings and the like. For the collection of this kind of literature, they often make use of the personnel of the satellite diplomatic missions in Washington. There is no problem in acquiring it. The Soviets simply want to spare themselves the tasks; also, they feel that a Polish or Czech collection agent is likely to be less conspicuous than a Russian.
Information is also collected in the ordinary course of conducting official relations with a foreign power. This is not overt in the sense that it is available to anyone who reads the papers or listens to the radio. Indeed, the success of diplomatic negotiations calls for a certain measure of secrecy. But information derived from diplomatic exchanges is made available to the intelligence service for the preparation of estimates. Such information may contain facts, slants and hints that are significant, especially when coupled with intelligence from other sources. If the Foreign Minister of X hesitates to accept a United States offer on Monday, it may be that he is seeing the Soviets on Tuesday and hoping for a better offer there. Later, from an entirely different quarter, we may get a glimpse into the Soviet offer. Together these two items will probably have much more meaning than either would have had alone.
The effort of overt collection is broad and massive. It tries to miss nothing that is readily available and might be of use. Yet there may be some subjects on which the government urgently needs information that are not covered by such material. Or this material may lack sufficient detail, may be inconclusive or may not be completely trustworthy. Naturally, this is more often the case in a closed society. We cannot depend on the Soviets making public, either intentionally or inadvertently, what our government most wants to know; only what they wish us to believe. When they do give out official information, it cannot always be trusted. Published statistics may credit a five-year plan with great success; economic intelligence from inside informants may show that the plan failed in certain respects and that the ruble statistics given were not a true index of values. Photographs may be doctored, or even faked, as was the famous Soviet publicity picture of the junk heap first designated as the downed U-2. The rocket in the Red Army Day parade, witnessed and photographed by Western newsmen and military attachés, may be a dud, an assemblage of odd rocket parts that do not really constitute a working missile. Easy as it is to collect overt intelligence, it is equally easy to plant deception within it. For all these reasons clandestine intelligence collection (espionage) must remain an essential and basic activity of intelligence.
Clandestine intelligence collection is chiefly a matter of circumventing obstacles in order to reach an objective. Our side chooses the objective. The opponent has set up the obstacles. Usually he knows which objectives are most important to us, and he surrounds these with appropriately difficult obstacles. For example, when the Soviets started testing their missiles, they chose launching sites in their most remote and unapproachable wastelands. The more closed and rigid the control a government has over its people, the more obstacles it throws up. In our time this means that U.S. intelligence must delve for the intentions and capabilities of a nation pledged to secrecy and organized for deception, whose key military installations may be buried a thousand miles off the beaten track.
Clandestine collection uses people: “agents,” “sources,” “informants.” It may also use machines, for there are machines today that can do things human beings cannot do and can “see” things they cannot see. Since the opponent would try to stop this effort if he could locate and reach it, it is carried out in secret; thus we speak of it as clandestine collection. The traditional word for it is “espionage.”
The essence of espionage is access. Someone, or some device, has to get close enough to a thing, a place or a person to observe or discover the desired facts without arousing the attention of those who protect them. The information must then be delivered to the people who want it. It must move quickly or it may get “stale.” And it must not get lost or be intercepted en route.
At its simplest, espionage is nothing more than a kind of well-concealed reconnaissance. This suffices when a brief look at the target is all that is needed. The agent makes his way to an objective, observes it, then comes back and reports what he saw. The target is usually fairly large and easily discernible—such things as troop dispositions, fortifications or airfields. Perhaps the agent can also make his way into a closed installation and have a look around, or even make off with documents. In any case, the length of his stay is limited. Continuous reportage is difficult to maintain when the agent’s presence in the area is secret and illegal.
Behind the Iron Curtain today, this method of spying is hardly adequate—not because the obstacles are so formidable that they cannot be breached, but because the kind of man who is equipped by his training to breach them is not likely to have the technical knowledge that will enable him to make a useful report on the complex targets that exist nowadays. If you don’t know anything about nuclear reactors, there is little you can discover about one, even when you are standing right next to it. And even for the rare person who might be technically competent, just getting close to such a target is hardly enough to fulfill today’s intelligence requirements. What is needed is a thorough examination of the actual workings of the reactor. For this reason it is unrealistic to think that U.S. or other Western tourists in the Soviet Union can be of much use in intelligence collection. But for propaganda reasons, the Soviets continue to arrest tourists now and then in order to give the world the impression that U.S. espionage is a vast effort exploiting even the innocent traveler.
Of far more long-term value than reconnaissance is “penetration” by an agent, meaning that he somehow is able to get inside the target and stay there. One of the ways of going about this is for the agent to insinuate himself into the offices or the elite circles of another power by means of subterfuge. He is then in a position to elicit the desired information from persons who come to trust him and who are entirely unaware of his true role. In popular parlance, this operation is called a “plant,” and it is one of the most ancient devices of espionage. The case of Ben Franklin’s secretary, Edward Bancroft, which I related in an earlier chapter, is a classical example of the planted agent.
A penetration of this kind is predicated upon a show of outer loyalties, which are often not put to the test. Nor are they easily tested, especially when opponents share a common language and background. But today, when the lines that separate one nation and one ideology from another are so sharply drawn, the dissembling of loyalties is more difficult to maintain over a long period of time and under close scrutiny. It can be managed, though. One of the most notorious Soviet espionage operations before and during World War II was the network in the Far East, directed by Richard Sorge, a German who was working in Tokyo as a correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Sorge
made it his business to cultivate his fellow countrymen at the German embassy in Tokyo, and eventually succeeded in having himself assigned to the embassy’s Press Section. This not only gave him excellent cover for secret work with his Japanese agents, but also provided him directly with inside information about the Nazis’ conduct of the war and their relations with Japan.
To achieve this, Sorge had to play the part of the good Nazi, which he apparently did convincingly even though he detested the Nazis. The Gestapo chief in the embassy, as well as the ambassador, and the service attachés were all his “friends.” Had the Gestapo in Berlin ever investigated Sorge’s past, as it eventually did after Sorge was apprehended by the Japanese in 1941, it would have discovered that Sorge had been a Communist agent and agitator in Germany during the early 1920s and had spent years in Moscow.
Shortly thereafter, the West was subjected to similar treatment at the hands of Soviet espionage. Names such as Bruno Pontecorvo and Klaus Fuchs come to mind as agents who were unmasked after the war. In some such cases, records of previous Communist affiliations lay in the files of Western security and intelligence services even while the agents held responsible positions in the West, but they were not found until it was too late. Because physicists like Fuchs and Pontecorvo moved from job to job among the Allied countries—one year in Great Britain, another in Canada and another in the United States—and because the scientific laboratories of the Allies were working under great pressures, personnel with credentials from one Allied country were sometimes accepted for employment in another under the impression that they had already been sufficiently checked out. And when available records were consulted, the data found in them—particularly if of Nazi origin—seem often to have been discounted at a time when Russia was our ally and Hitler our enemy, and when the war effort required the technical services of gifted scientists of many nationalities.
The consequences of these omissions and oversights during the turbulent war years are regrettable, and the lesson will not easily be forgotten. We cannot afford any more Fuchses or Pontecorvos. Today investigation of persons seeking employment in sensitive areas of the U.S. Government and related technical installations is justifiably thorough and painstaking.
Consequently, an agent who performs as a plant in our time must have more in his favor than acting ability. With our modern methods of security checking, he is in danger of failure if there is any record of his ever having been something other than what he represents himself to be. The only way to disguise a man today so that he will be acceptable in hostile circles for any length of time is to make him over entirely. This involves years of training and a thorough concealing and burying of the past under layers of fictitious personal history which have to be “backstopped.”
If you were really born in Finland but are supposed to have been born in Munich, Germany, then you must have documents showing your connection to that city. You have to be able to act like someone who was born and lived there. Arrangements have to be made in Munich to confirm your origin in case an investigation is ever undertaken. Perhaps Munich or a similar city was chosen because it was bombed and certain records were destroyed. A man so made over is known as an “illegal,” and I shall have more to say about him later. Obviously, an intelligence service will go to all this trouble only when it is intent upon creating deep-set and long-range assets.
If an intelligence service cannot insert its own agent within a highly sensitive target, the alternative is to recruit somebody who is already there. You might find someone who is inside but is not quite at the right spot for access to the information you need. Or you might find someone just beginning a career which will eventually lead to his employment in the target. But the main thing is that he is a qualified and “cleared” insider. He is, as we say, “in place.”
One of my most valuable agents during World War II, of whom I shall have more to say later, was precisely of this kind. When I first established contact with him, he was already employed in the German Foreign Office in a position which gave him access to communications with German diplomatic establishments all over the world. He was exactly at the right place. No single diplomat abroad, of whatever rank, could have got his hands on so much information as did this man, who had access to the all-important Foreign Office files. Even with the most careful planning many years in advance, it would have been a stroke of fortune if we could ever have placed an agent inside this target and maneuvered him into such a position, even if he had been able to behave like the most loyal Nazi. This method of recruiting the agent “in place,” despite its immense difficulties, has the advantage of allowing the intelligence service to focus on the installation it wishes to penetrate, to examine and analyze it for its most important and most vulnerable points, and then to search for the man already employed at that point who might be likely to cooperate. It does not, as in the case of plants, begin with the man, the agent, and hope it can devise a way of inserting him into the target.
In recent years, most of the notorious instances of Soviet penetration of important targets in Western countries were engineered in this way, by the recruitment of someone already employed inside the target.
David Greenglass at Los Alamos during World War II, though only a draftsman, had access to secret details of the internal construction of the atomic bomb. Judith Coplon was employed shortly after the war in a section of the Department of Justice responsible for the registration of foreign agents in the United States. She regularly saw and copied for the Soviets FBI reports which came across her desk on investigations of espionage in the United States. Harry Houghton and John Vassall, although of low rank and engaged chiefly in administrative work, were able to procure sensitive technical documents from the British Admiralty, where they were employed in the late 1950s. Alfred Frenzel, a West German parliamentarian, had access to the NATO documents which were distributed to a West Germany Parliamentary Defense Committee on which he served in the mid-1950s. Irvin Scarbeck was only an administrative officer in our embassy in Warsaw in 1960–61. But after he had been compromised by a Polish girl and blackmailed, he managed to procure for the Polish Intelligence Service, which was operating under Soviet direction, some of our ambassador’s secret reports to the State Department on the political situation in Eastern Europe.
All these people were already employed in jobs which made them interesting to the Communists at the time they were first recruited. Some of them moved up later into jobs which made them of even greater value to the Soviets. In some instances this may have been achieved with secret Soviet guidance. Houghton and Vassall were both originally recruited while stationed at British embassies behind the Iron Curtain. When each was returned home and assigned to a position in the Admiralty, his access to important documents naturally broadened. Similarly, had Scarbeck not been caught as a result of careful counterintelligence efforts while still at his post in Warsaw, he probably could have continued for years to be of ever-increasing use to the Soviets as he was reassigned to one United States diplomatic post after another.
The Soviet Union gave widespread publicity to the case of an “insider” who worked with Western intelligence and who they admitted had access to information of great value. This was the case of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, whose conviction and execution by the Soviets are now a matter of history. His trial, along with that of the Englishman Greville Wynne, lasted just one week in early May of 1963. It is not entirely clear just why the Soviets chose to make a “show trial” of this case rather than to keep the whole affair entirely secret, which it was certainly in their power to do. The most likely reason was to discourage further espionage among their own people by showing them that in the end the culprit always gets caught. This, of course, is not true. But in staging the trial, they openly admitted that Penkovsky had caused them very considerable damage.
It is fairly plain from the evidence which the Soviets allowed to be presented in the court that a combination of Western intelli
gence services had succeeded a few years back in gaining the services of the Soviet colonel, who held an important position in the military and technical hierarchy of the Red Army. Penkovsky was trusted by the Soviets and allowed to travel to various international conferences in Western Europe. These afforded the occasions for establishing contact and communication with Penkovsky.
The Soviets claim that he was lured by material attractions—wine, women and song—available in the West. This is the usual method of discrediting an individual whose actions and motives may, in fact, have been far worthier than they are willing to admit. But Penkovsky was a high-level and experienced officer with many high Soviet decorations and not some youthful adventurer, not a man likely to fall for material benefits alone. There must have been much more involved than the trial and publicity indicate. The Soviet hierarchy has been deeply shaken, for Penkovsky had lost faith in the system that employed him.
Whatever his motives, the case is typical of the current pattern of espionage. Penkovsky had natural access to important information. All his advantages were built in. No reconnaissance, no traveler, no plant could have duplicated his achievement. He was already there. He had to be discovered, contact had to be established with him, he had to be convinced that he could make a valuable contribution to a cause in which he believed.
A similar case, which also ended tragically for the agent, was that of the Bulgarian diplomat Asen Georgieff, who was tried and executed in Sofia for espionage in December, 1963. During his trial, there was a great deal of propaganda given out by the Bulgarians concerning Georgieff’s alleged weakness for the material benefits of the West. Little was said about the fact that Georgieff had long been a Communist intellectual of unusually high caliber, a doctor of laws, an internationally recognized Hegel scholar, a man whose mental prowess placed him head and shoulders above his colleagues and had earned for him one of the top-ranking positions in his country’s delegation to the Untied Nations. He was not, as were most of his colleagues, chosen for this position because of party accomplishments.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 8