The Craft of Intelligence

by Allen W. Dulles

  One windy night during the war a parachutist was dropped into France who was supposed to make contact with the French underground. He should have landed in an open field outside the town but was blown off course and landed instead in the middle of the audience at an open-air movie. It happened to be a special showing for the SS troops stationed nearby.

  The now famous Berlin tunnel which went from West to East Berlin in order to reach and tap the Soviet communications lines in East Germany was a clever and relatively comfortable affair which had its own heating system, since Berlin winters are cold. The first time it snowed, a routine inspection aboveground showed, to the inspector’s immense dismay, that the snow just about the tunnel was melting because of the heat coming up from underneath. In no time at all a beautiful path was going to appear in the snow going from West to East Berlin which any watchful policeman couldn’t help but notice. He quickly reported what he had seen. The heat was turned off and in short order refrigeration devices were installed in the tunnel. Fortunately, it continued to snow and the path was quickly covered over. In all the complex and detailed planning that had gone into the design of this tunnel, this was something no one had anticipated. It was a near mishap in one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken. Most intelligence operations have a limited span of usefulness—a tunnel, a U-2 and the like. This is assumed when the project starts. The difficult decision is when to taper off and when to stop.

  The Soviets eventually did discover the Berlin communications tunnel and subsequently turned the East Berlin end of it into a public exhibit as proof to the East Germans of the long-advertised Soviet contention that the Allies only wanted to hold West Berlin because it was a convenient springboard for spying on the East. The Soviets set up an open-air beer-and-sausage stand near the spot so that the German burghers with their families could make a Sunday afternoon outing of their visit to the tunnel. This backfired, however, since the reaction of the visitors and the public in general was quite different from what the Soviets expected and wanted. Instead of shaking their fists at the West, the Germans got a good laugh at the Soviets because somebody had finally put something over on them and they were silly enough to boast of it. The beer-and-sausage establishment was quickly dismantled.

  There is no single field of intelligence work in which the accidental mishap is more frequent or more frustrating than in communications. One of the best illustrations of this kind of mishap can be found in a well-known literary work which couldn’t have less to do with intelligence. The reader will probably recall the incident in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles when the important message Tess slips under Angel Clare’s door slides beneath the carpet that reaches close to the sill and is never recovered by the intended recipient, with grievous consequences for all.

  Messages for agents are often put into “drops” or “caches,” as places of concealment are called. These may be anywhere above ground or below ground, in buildings or out of doors. The Bolsheviks, like Dr. Bancroft, Franklin’s secretary, used to prefer the hollow of a tree. Today there are safer and more devious contrivances by which means papers can be protected against weather and soil for long periods of time. In one case, the material was actually buried in the ground at a spot near the side of a road that had been used before successfully and was generally unfrequented day and night. On the occasion in question, the site was clear when the message was put into the ground, but when the agent came some days later to retrieve it, he found a mountain of dirt on top of it. In that short space of time between the placement and the arrival of the agent, the highway authorities had decided to widen the road and had begun to do so.

  For obvious reasons, intelligence operations will often make use of public toilets as a place to cache messages. In some countries, they are about the only places where anyone can be sure of being absolutely alone. Even in such a place, luck can run against you. In one instance, the cleaning staff decided to convert one of the booths into a makeshift closet for their brooms, mops and buckets and they put a lock on the door. This was naturally the booth in which the message was hidden, and the conversion took place in the time between the placing of the message and the arrival of the agent to retrieve it.

  In operations making use of radio communications, there can be a failure of the equipment on either the sending or receiving end. Communications making use of the mails can easily fail for at least ten good and bad reasons.

  Often trains are late and a courier doesn’t arrive in time to make contact with an agent who has been told not to wait longer than a certain time. To avoid this sort of accidental interruption of communications, most good operations have alternate or emergency plans which go into effect when the primary system fails, but here we begin to run into the problem of overload and overcomplexity, which is another quite distinct cause of mishaps. A person under some stress can commit just so much complex planning to memory, and will usually not have the plan written down because this is too dangerous. Or if he does have it written down, his notes may be so cryptic that he cannot decipher them when he needs to, even though when he wrote them down his shorthand seemed to be a clever and unmistakable reminder.

  One of the simplest and oldest of all dodges used by intelligence in making arrangements for meetings calls for adding or subtracting days and hours from the time stipulated in a phone conversation or other message, just in case the enemy intercepts such a message. The agent has been told, let us say, to add one day and subtract two hours. Tuesday at eleven really means Wednesday at nine. When the agent was first dispatched, he knew this as well as his own name. No need to write it down in any form. Three months later, however, when he gets his first message calling him to a meeting, panic suddenly seizes him. Was it plus one day and minus two hours or was it minus one day and plus two hours? Or was it perhaps plus two days and minus one hour? Or was it . . . and so on. This is, of course, a very simple instance and hardly an example of the complex arrangements often in force.

  Misunderstandings or forgetting of complex arrangements can lead to a delightful comedy of errors, especially when each party to a meeting or other arrangement tries to outguess or “second-guess” the other. The agent misses the meeting because he mixed up his pluses and minuses. The other party to the meeting was at the spot at the right time. When the agent didn’t turn up, the other party imagined that the agent had mixed up his pluses and minuses and so tries to guess just how he mixed them up. He picks one of the four alternative combinations and goes to the spot again at that time. But he guessed the wrong combination. The agent in the meantime has remembered what was correct but it is too late because the correct day and hour have since rolled by. The two men fail to meet.

  Mishaps, whatever their cause and nature, can be divided into those which reveal or “blow” the existence of an undercover operation to the enemy or to local authorities (which are not always identical) and those which simply cause the operation to fail or malfunction internally, such as when communications do not reach the right people but still do not fall into unfriendly hands. In either case, a major mishap, as in most of the cases I have been citing, may close off the operation for good or stall it for a very long time until the damage can be repaired, the communications re-established, etc.

  Minor mishaps in intelligence have a nastiness all their own. One can never be quite certain whether they were damaging or not, and whether the operation should be continued or called off. Most of them have to do with losses of “cover,” with partial or temporary exposure, instances where the inconspicuousness or anonymity of the agent is not maintained and he is spotted, even if only momentarily, as a person engaged in some kind of suspicious business, very possibly espionage. I might add that it will not help the execution of his task if the impression is made rather that he is a crook, swindler or smuggler.

  Anyone who has ever traveled under another name knows that the greatest fear is not that you will forget your new identi
ty while signing your name in the hotel register. It is rather that after you have just signed the register, someone will walk into the lobby whom you haven’t seen for twenty years, come up to you, slap you on the back and say: “Jimmy Jones, you old so-and-so, where have you been all these years?”

  Any operation involving the use of a person traveling temporarily or permanently under another name always risks the one-out-of-a-thousand chance that an accidental encounter will occur with someone who knew the agent when he had another identity. Perhaps the agent can talk or joke his way out of it. The trouble is that in today’s spy-conscious world the first thing most people would think of is that espionage is the real explanation. If a great deal of work has gone into building up the new identity of the agent, such an accidental encounter might just ruin everything. The Soviet illegal is usually assigned to countries where the risk of such accidental encounter is minimal if not entirely nonexistent. Yet the following instance shows how the possibility always exists and how the Soviets, as well as the rest of us, have no way really of eliminating these risks entirely.

  In the Houghton-Lonsdale case, as I have already stated, the American pair called Kroger who had been operating the radio transmitter were identified after their arrest as long-term Soviet agents who had previously been active in the United States. The FBI accomplished this identification on the basis of fingerprints. Just as the identification was completed their New York office received a phone call from a gentleman who described himself as a retired football coach. The week before, Life Magazine had shown a series of photographs of all the persons apprehended in the Lonsdale case. Thirty-five years ago, this gentleman told the FBI, he had been coaching at a large public high school in the Bronx. At that time a scrawny little fellow had tried out for the team, and he had never forgotten him. He had just seen Kroger’s picture in Life and Kroger was that scrawny little fellow. He was absolutely certain of it. But his name wasn’t Kroger, it was so-and-so. And the coach was right.

  The Krogers had not tried to change their physical appearance at all. Kroger ran an open business in London of the kind that could have brought to him a variety of persons of all nationalities interested in collecting rare books. What was the chance that someone else, not necessarily the coach, who remembered him from that large public high school in the Bronx thirty or so years before would walk into his office one day in quest of a book and recognize him? Slight, but not impossible. The Soviets took the risk.

  Minor mishaps may expose any of a number of elements that point to espionage. They may in many cases simply show that something out of the ordinary is going on, and whether this is interpreted as espionage and is therefore damaging depends in great measure on the innocence or sophistication of the beholder, whether he is, let us say, a policeman or a landlord or just a passerby. Frequently, they occur as a result of the agent practicing some of the known dodges and subterfuges of the professional agent which are, however, observed.

  Once, somewhat unwisely perhaps, three men were sent to see a certain important personage who was occupying a suite of rooms on one of the upper floors of a hotel in a large European city. Each of them was a specialist and was needed for the opening gambit in this operation. They were not residing in the hotel or even in the country in question and were entirely unknown there. Many months later, after it had been established by other means of contact that this gentleman was willing to work with us, we sent one of the three original officers to see him. After some debate, it was decided less risky to send our officer to the hotel than to try to have the personage go out and meet us somewhere in the city, where few secure facilities were available to us. The officer had after all only been in the hotel once before, many months ago, and no one had the slightest means of knowing his business. Our man gave the number of the desired floor to the elevator operator. He was the only passenger. He looked over the operator, an old man and nondescript, and was sure he had never seen him before. But he was anxious to remember his face for the future because he would purposely avoid this particular chap and his elevator on his next few visits. Shortly before the elevator reached its destination, the old man turned around and looked at our man. “Oh, how are you?” he said. “I see you didn’t bring your other two friends along today.” Harmless? Probably, but you can never tell. The main point is that the officer was not so inconspicuous as he had thought. Elevator operators, like waiters and hotel people generally, remember faces. In certain countries, employees of this sort, bartenders, doormen, are police informants. Had he also guessed whom our man might be visiting? Had he guessed the nationality of our man, who spoke the local language well, but not perfectly? From his clothes, his manners? It is the very inconclusiveness of these minor mishaps which distinguishes them. The efficient intelligence service will take no chances after even the most minor mishap but will change its arrangements for contact and communications. It will even change the personnel on the job if it is the latter who are attracting attention.

  MISCHIEF-MAKERS

  One of the greatest sources of mischief for Western intelligence and diplomacy are the Soviet forgeries which I have already mentioned. Next in line I would rank the scurrilous propaganda which the Soviets manufacture, pretending to expose the personnel and methods of our intelligence services. To the perceptive Westerner these are generally funny, but their outlandishness is not likely to be perceived by the audience for whom they are intended. In their attempts to discredit American intelligence, the Soviets have produced for consumption behind the Iron Curtain and in neutral areas no end of books, pamphlets, press articles and radio programs branding our intelligence service as vicious. reactionary and warmongering, and its officers, including its Director, as gangsters and war criminals.

  Such material is usually on the level of the lowest kind of war propaganda and revels in trumped-up stories and doctored pictures of atrocities. They have claimed that we torture people and have shown pictures of the instruments we use. More of such material has appeared in East Germany than elsewhere because the territory of East Germany has been most vulnerable to Western intelligence, and the Soviets rightly fear it and are anxious to frighten the East Germans away from any entanglements with the nefarious West.

  One such work, published (in German) in East Berlin in 1959, is called Allen’s Gangsters in Action. On its purple and yellow cover, it shows a partially unclad damsel who is wired with microphones and tape recorders and a miniature transmitter and antenna, all of which one would not see if she were fully clothed. Its general accuracy is attested to by the fact that it gives the address of CIA as “24 E-Street, Washington/N.Y.” As anyone could have found out by consulting the Washington phone book, the older number was 2430 E, and, as we all know, the State of New York has not yet gobbled up the city of Washington.

  A favorite tactic of such books is to accuse us of “brainwashing.” As we know, the Soviets and the Red Chinese engage extensively in the brainwashing of prisoners of war in order to use the luckless victim for propaganda purposes. However, in accusing us of brainwashing, the Soviets are trying to explain to their own citizens how it was possible for a former Soviet or satellite national to speak up in the West against the Soviet system. They cannot admit that he was disillusioned and that he is acting freely and without prompting. They must insist that he was captured, even kidnapped, perhaps, and brainwashed, and has become the tool of the “imperialists” against his own will.

  At times, however, though rarely, there is a touch of humor in the Soviet propaganda blasts. Some years ago, in a year-end summary of events and personalities which appeared in Izvestia, the well-known Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg devoted a few terse lines to me. He said in effect that if that spy Allen Dulles should ever pass through the “Pearly Gates” into Heaven, he would be found mining the clouds, shooting the stars and slaughtering the angels. I have found this a very useful introduction for public addresses where I attempted to outline the duties of the Director of Central
Intelligence. Today Ilya Ehrenburg’s writing generally seems to be more appreciated in the West than in Moscow.

  Quite another kind of mischief-makers are the intelligence fabricators and swindlers. Among these there is the agent whose real sources “dry up” and who is therefore threatened with being put out of business. He knows what kind of information the intelligence service wants and he has its confidence. If he has no other means of livelihood and is not basically honest, it is understandable that he might come upon the idea of keeping the sources “alive” and functioning after they are really “dead” by writing their reports himself and fabricating their contents. Sooner or later the intelligence service will catch on, probably on the basis of internal evidence—errors in fact, discrepancies, an obvious paucity of hard data, a certain amount of embroidery that wasn’t there before, even errors in style. Or the hoax might be exposed quite another way. The agent has to see his sources from time to time. When he does, he not only delivers to the intelligence service the information he collects, but writes a report on his meeting with the source, describing the circumstances of the meeting, the general welfare and state of mind of the source and many other matters which an intelligence service keeps track of. “Look here,” says the intelligence officer to the agent. “You say you saw X on the twenty-fifth. That’s very interesting, because we happen to know that he was out of the country all that week.” This is not a pleasant moment for the intelligence officer if he is talking to a man who once did good work for him.