The Craft of Intelligence

by Allen W. Dulles

  THE CIA AND THE FBI ARE AT LOGGERHEADS

  This is one of the favorite myths. Nothing is more newsworthy than an internecine war between government agencies, and the press likes to tell us that these two organizations—the FBI working in the domestic field and the CIA in the foreign field—are literally knifing each other. As a matter of fact, one of the most satisfactory features of my work as Director of Central Intelligence was the close relationship established with Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, particularly in the field of counterintelligence work. Each agency, of course, also furnished the other a mass of related positive intelligence material. Their respective areas and roles are clearly defined and conscientiously respected. The often-cited case of Col. Rudolph Abel is one where close cooperation between the two agencies paid off handsomely. This is only one instance of many where our information has been pooled and Soviet espionage operations have been checkmated, both at home and abroad.

  CIA—THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  And now comes the latest and most horrendous myth of them all—that CIA and its cohorts in intelligence, particularly the military intelligence services, constitute the invisible government of these Untied States. Such is the thesis which two authors developed in 1964 for the edification of friend and foe alike, in some 350 pages of scuttlebutt.3

  3 David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Random House, Inc., 1964).

  Mixing fact and fiction, accusing the intelligence services of spending some four billion dollars a year—a fantastic exaggeration—the authors pose as knight-errants of the press to kill once and for all the dragon of “secrecy” in government affairs. They purport to expose to the public and to the Kremlin and Mao the inner workings of intelligence, particularly in so-called “cold war” operations directed against Communism. In doing all this, they have also endeavored to surface to the world the names of intelligence and cold war operatives insofar as they have been able to uncover them.

  But if one reads with care and perception what these authors have to say, you will see that they are trying to prove that the government of the United States itself has, from time to time, during the last four administrations, engaged, sometimes with success and sometimes without it, in certain operations, all approved at the highest level in government, to thwart the cold war tactics of Communism. In their “disclosures,” they have offered to our antagonists the greatest propaganda bonanza since Sputnik. Fortunately, however, there are so many patent errors in what they say that neither Moscow nor Peking is likely to credit their story or believe that American correspondents could be so naïve as to publicize such secrets of government. Misunderstanding our system as the Communists do and not appreciating the limitations on government to do anything about what is printed, they could not conceive that any government in its senses would allow monstrous violations of security to appear in public print unless this government had the sinister purpose of deceiving them.

  The one thing these authors may well have demonstrated is this: under our system of government, there is precious little which can be kept secret and hence it is a myth that any “invisible government” exists.

  LITERARY MYTHS—THE SPY IN FACT AND IN FICTION

  The spy heroes of the novelists rarely exist in real life—either on our side of the Curtain or on the other. The staff intelligence officer, at least in time of peace, is hardly ever dispatched incognito or disguised into unfriendly territory on perilous or glamorous missions. Except for the Soviet illegal who is placed abroad for long periods of time, there is no reason for an intelligence service to risk the capture and interrogation of its own officers, thereby jeopardizing its agents and possibly exposing many of its operations.

  There was little resemblance between the exploits of Ian Fleming’s hero, the unique James Bond, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I read with the greatest pleasure, and the retiring and cautious behavior of the Soviet spy in the United States, Colonel Rudolf Abel. The intelligence officer, as distinct from the agent, does not usually carry weapons, concealed cameras or coded messages sewed into the lining of his pants, or, for that matter, anything that would betray him if he should be waylaid. He cannot permit himself, as do the lucky heroes of spy novels, to become entangled with luscious females who approach him in bars or step out of closets, lightly clad, in hotel rooms. Such lures might have been sent by the opposition to compromise or trap him. Sex and hardheaded intelligence operations rarely mix well.

  The Soviet “new look,” which uses socialite spies, like Ivanov in London and Skrypov, mentioned in an earlier chapter, in Australia, represents an exception to this general rule. It may well be that the Soviets, having found pay dirt in the Profumo affair with its disruptive consequences, may see some advantages in using vice rings to aid blackmailing operations in later intelligence exploitation or merely to discredit persons in government positions in the Free World. This would fit in with general purposes of bringing such governments into disrepute with their own people. Certainly, from the intelligence angle, one would not expect to find items of intelligence passed via call girls to be of high reliability.

  If there are dangers, tricks, plots, it is the agent who is personally involved in them, not the intelligence officer, whose duty it is to guide the agent safely. Even in the case of the agent and his own sources, the disciplines of intelligence today call for a talent for inconspicuousness that should rule out fancy living, affairs with questionable females and other such diversions. Alexander Foote, who worked for the Soviets in Switzerland, describes his first meeting during World War II with one of the most valuable agents of the Soviets. This was the man known by the code name Lucy, whose exploits I have already given.

  I arrived first and awaited with some curiosity the arrival of this agent who had his lines so deep into the innermost secrets of Hitler. A quiet, nondescript little man suddenly slipped into a chair at our table and sat down. It was “Lucy” himself. Anyone less like the spy of fiction it would be hard to imagine. Consequently he was exactly what was wanted for an agent in real life. Undistinguished looking, of medium height, aged about fifty, with his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.4

  4 Op. cit., p. 137.

  Most spy romances and thrillers are written for audiences who wish to be entertained rather than educated in the business of intelligence. For the professional practitioner there is much that is exciting and engrossing in the techniques of espionage, but those untutored in the craft of intelligence would probably not find it so. And that part of actual espionage which is crucial—the successful recruitment of an important agent, the acquisition of critical information—for security reasons only finds its way into popular literature when it is seared with age.

  A useful analogy is to the art of angling. In fact, I have found that good fishermen tend to make good intelligence officers. The fisherman’s preparation for the catch, his consideration of the weather, the light, the currents, the depth of the water, the right bait or fly to use, the time of day to fish, the spot he chooses and the patience he shows are all a part of the art and essential to success. The moment the fish is hooked is the moment of real excitement, which even the nonfisherman can appreciate. He would not be intrigued by all the preparations, although the fisherman is, because they are vital to his craft and without them the fish is not likely to be lured and landed.

  I have always been intrigued by the fact that one of the greatest author-spies in history, Daniel Defoe, never wrote a word about espionage in his major novels. In the eyes of many, Defoe is accounted one of the professionals in the early history of British intelligence. He was not only a successful operative in his own right but later became the first chief of an organized British intelligence system, a fact which was not publicly known until many years after his death. His most famous literary works, of course, are
Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year. Try if you will to find even the slightest reference to spies or espionage in any of these books. No doubt Defoe carefully avoided writing about any actual espionage plots known to him because of political considerations and an ingrained sense of secrecy. But a man with his fertile mind could easily have invented what could have passed as a good spy story and projected it into another time and another setting. I cannot dispel the conviction altogether that he never did this because, having the inside view, he felt that for security reasons he could not give a true and full story of espionage as it was really practiced in his day, and as a novelist Defoe was above inventing something at variance with the craft.

  An unusual writer on certain aspects of intelligence work is Joseph Conrad. I would venture to suggest that Conrad’s Polish background is responsible for his native insights into the ways of conspiracy and the way of the spy. His own father was exiled and two of his uncles executed for their part in a plot against the Russians. The Poles have had long experience in conspiracy, as long as the Russians and, in great measure, thanks to Russian attempts to dominate them.

  Being the kind of man he was, Conrad was not likely to tell a spy story for the sake of the adventure and the suspense. He was interested in the moral conflicts, in the baseness of men and their saving virtues. Conrad does not even exploit the inherent complexities of the spy stories he invents because it is not what primarily interests him.

  The literature on intelligence which I find the most engrossing is of the Conrad type—stories that deal with the motivation of the spy, the informer, the traitor. Among these who have spied against their own country, there is the ideological spy, the conspiratorial spy, the venal spy and the entrapped spy. At different times in history one or the other of these motifs seems to dominate, and sometimes there is a combination of more than one motif. Klaus Fuchs was the typical ideological spy, Guy Burgess the conspiratorial type, the Swedish Colonel Stig Wennerstrom apparently was the venal spy, and William Vassall the typical case of entrapment—and finally there is the spy of fiction. And if at least we get pleasure in reading about him, let us keep him for such uses—even though he be a myth.

  MISHAPS

  In 1938, a Soviet intelligence officer working undercover in the United States sent a pair of pants to the cleaners. In one of the pockets, there was a batch of documents delivered by an agent employed in the Office of Naval Intelligence. It was not easy to press the pants with the documents in the pocket, so the pants presser removed them and in so doing brought to light one of the most flagrant cases of Soviet espionage in American experience up to that time. It was also one of the most flagrant instances of carelessness on the part of a trained intelligence officer on record. The officer, whose name was Gorin, was eventually returned to the Soviet Union, where he surely must have been shot for his sloppiness.

  There have been some notorious cases of briefcases left behind in taxis or trains by people who should have known better. A sudden and inexplicable absent-mindedness can sometimes momentarily afflict a man who has been carefully trained in intelligence and security. But the gross mishap is usually not the fault of the intelligence officer. More often it results from the arbitrary or even the well-meaning behavior of outsiders who have no idea what the consequences of their acts may be, and from technical failures and from accidents.

  The kind landlady of a rather busy roomer noticed that his spare pair of shoes was down at the heels. She took them to the cobbler’s one day on her own. It was a favor. The cobbler removed the old heels and discovered that in each was a hollow compartment containing some strips of paper covered with writing. Of course he informed the police.

  One of my most important German sources during my days in Switzerland in World War II almost had a serious mishap because his initials were in his hat. One evening he was dining alone with me in my house in Bern. My cook detected that we were speaking German. While we were enjoying her excellent food—she was a better cook than a spy—she slipped out of the kitchen, examined the source’s hat and took down his initials. The next day, she reported to her Nazi contact the fact that a man, who from his speech was obviously German, had visited me and she gave his initials.

  My source was the representative in Zurich of Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence. He frequently visited the German Legation in Bern. When he next called there, a couple of days after our dinner, two senior members of the legation, who had already seen the cook’s report, took him aside and accused him of having contact with me. He was equal to the assault. Fixing the senior of them with his eyes, he sternly remarked that he had, in fact, been dining with me, that I was one of his chief sources of intelligence about Allied affairs and that if they ever mentioned this to anyone, he would see to it that they were immediately removed from the diplomatic service. He added that his contacts with me were known only to Admiral Canaris and at the highest levels in the German government. They humbly apologized to my friend and, as far as I know, they kept their mouths shut.

  Everybody learned a lesson from this—I that my cook was a spy; my German contact that he should remove his initials from his hat; and all of us that attack is the best defense and that if agent A is working with agent B, one sometimes never knows until the day of judgment who, after all, is deceiving whom. It was, of course, a close shave, and only a courageous bluff saved the day. Fortunately, in this case my contact’s bona fides was quickly established. The cook’s activities eventually landed her in a Swiss jail.

  The Sorge Communist network in Japan was broken in 1942 as the result of an action which was not intended to accomplish this end at all. In fact, the person who caused the mishap knew nothing about Sorge or his ring.

  Early in 1941, the Japanese began rounding up native Communists on suspicion of espionage. One of these, a certain Ito Ritsu, who had nothing to do with espionage, pretended to cooperate with the police while under interrogation by naming a number of people as suspects who were basically harmless. One of those he named was a Mrs. Kitabayashi, who had once been Communist but had forsaken Communism while living in the United States and had become a Seventh-Day Adventist. In 1936, she had returned to Japan and sometime later had been approached by another Japanese Communist she had known in the United States, an artist by the name of Miyagi, who was a member of the Sorge ring. Miyagi had thus exposed himself to Mrs. Kitabayashi needlessly, it seems, since she, as a teacher of sewing, could not have had access to any information of interest to Sorge. Ritsu knew nothing of all this. He apparently denounced Mrs. Kitabayashi out of malice, to get her into trouble, because she had ceased being a Communist. When the police arrested Mrs. Kitabayashi, however, she gave away Miyagi. Miyagi in turn led to one of the highly placed sources of Sorge, Ozaki, and so it went until the entire ring was rounded up.

  It is, of course, true that the larger a network is, with its many links and the need for communication between its various members, the greater are its chances of being discovered. Nevertheless, nothing that any of Sorge’s very numerous and very active agents ever did aroused the attention of the police at any time. The officers who talked to Mrs. Kitabayashi couldn’t have been more surprised when they were led, link after link, into one of the most effective espionage webs that ever existed. The discovery was purely the result of a mishap and one that no amount of careful planning could have avoided, except for just one precaution which the Soviets often failed to take: don’t use anyone in espionage who ever was known as a party member.

  The little slips or oversights which can give away the whole show may sometimes be the fault of the intelligence service itself, not of the officer handling the agent, but of the technicians who produce for the agent the materials necessary to his mission—the false bottom of a suitcase that comes apart under the rough handling of a customs officer, a formula for secret writing that doesn’t quite work. Forged documents are perhaps the greatest pitfall. Every
intelligence service collects and studies new documents from all over the world and the modifications in old ones in order to provide agents with documents that are “authentic” in every detail and up-to-date. But occasionally there is a slip that couldn’t be helped and an observant border official, who sees hundreds of passports every day, may notice that the traveler’s passport has a serial number that doesn’t quite jibe with the date of issue, or a visa signed by a consul who just happened to drop dead two weeks before the date he was supposed to have signed it. Even the least imaginative border control officer knows that such discrepancies can point to only one thing. No one but the agent of an intelligence service would have the facilities working for him that are needed to produce such a document, which is artistically and technically perfect except in one unfortunate detail.

  Then there is fate, the unexpected intervention of impersonal forces, accidents, natural calamities, man-made obstacles that weren’t there the week before, or simply the perversity of inanimate things, the malfunctioning of machinery. An agent on a mission can drop dead of a heart attack, be hit by a truck or take the plane that crashes. This may end the mission or it may do more. In March 1941, Captain Ludwig von der Osten, who had just arrived in New York to take over the direction of a network of Nazi spies in the United States, was hit by a taxi while crossing Broadway at Forty-fifth Street and fatally injured. Although a quick-thinking accomplice managed to grab his briefcase and get away, a notebook found on von der Osten’s body and various papers in his hotel room pointed to the fact that he was a German masquerading as a Spaniard and undoubtedly involved in espionage. When, shortly after the accident, postal censorship at Bermuda discovered a reference to the accident in some highly suspicious correspondence that had regularly been going from the United States to Spain, the FBI was able to get on the trail of the Nazi spy ring von der Osten was to manage. In March of 1942, their work culminated in the trial and conviction of Kurt F. Ludwig and eight associates. It was Ludwig who had been with von der Osten when the taxi hit him and who had been maintaining the secret correspondence with Nazi intelligence via Spain.