The intelligence swindler, as distinct from the real agent who has gone wrong, is a man who specializes in this sort of thing without ever having been a good agent for anybody. Like any other kind of swindler, he latches onto the latest racket except that his forte is to prey entirely on intelligence services, and from long experience he knows how to find their offices and how to get in the door. Fabricators and swindlers have always existed in the intelligence world, but the recent growth and significance of technical and scientific discoveries, especially their military applications, has afforded new and tempting fields for the swindlers. The weakness they could exploit was the lack of detailed scientific knowledge on the part of the intelligence officer. Although every modern service will train and brief its field officers as thoroughly as possible in scientific matters of concern to it, it clearly cannot turn every intelligence officer into a full-fledged physicist or chemist. The result is that many a good field officer may go for a neat offer of information and continue working with an agent until the specialists at home have had time to analyze the data and unhappily inform him that he is in the toils of a swindler.
Immediately after World War II, the most popular swindle by all odds exploited the new and world-wide interest in atomic energy. We were swamped with what we began to call “uranium salesmen.” In all the capitals of Europe, they turned up with “samples” of U-235 and U-238, in tin canisters or wrapped in cotton and stuffed into pill bottles. Sometimes they offered to sell us large quantities of the precious stuff. Sometimes they claimed their samples came from the newly opened uranium mines of Czechoslovakia, where they had excellent sources who could keep us supplied with the latest research behind the Iron Curtain. There were many variations on the theme of uranium.
The chief characteristic and the chief giveaway of the swindler, as in most swindles, is the demand for cash on the line. First comes the tempting offer accompanied by the sample, then the demand for a large sum, after which the delivery of the main goods is to follow. Since no intelligence service allows its field officers to disburse more than token sums until the headquarters has reviewed a project in all detail, it is very rare that an intelligence service actually loses any money to a swindler. All it loses is time, but this is also precious, sometimes more precious than money. If the offer has any glimmer of truth to it and is not immediately recognizable as a swindle, an intelligence officer, for reasons I have already set forth many times, will try to hold on for a while in order to ascertain what he has. This can turn into a wasteful game of wits between the clever swindler and the intelligence officer, the latter refusing to let go entirely, the former fighting for all he is worth to put himself across and to parry all questions that would show him in his true light.
After uranium, there was a vogue in infrared, then came bogus information on missiles, and no doubt at this moment the swindlers are regrouping and working up reports on the Red Chinese development of a death-ray through the use of lasers. The logic here is that the Red Chinese are behind in H-bomb research and rather than go to the expense of catching up will devote their energy to lasers.
A more laborious and less easily identifiable kind of fabrication is that produced by what we call “paper mills.” They turn out reports by the yard and do not depend on hot items as the swindlers do. Often their information is plausible, well reasoned and beautifully organized. There is only one fault with it. It doesn’t come from the horse’s mouth as claimed.
In their heyday, the paper mills exploited the situation created by the existence of the Iron Curtain and thrived in the late forties and early fifties when most of the Western services had not yet satisfactorily solved the problem of piercing the Curtain. During this period, many of the intelligentsia of Eastern Europe who had fled their homelands and had little hope of earning a living as refugees discovered that the intelligence services of the West were anxious to talk to them about conditions in the areas they had recently left behind them. The less scrupulous among them easily hit upon the idea of keeping these services supplied with what they needed. For this, of course, it was important to have “sources” behind the Iron Curtain, trusted friends in important jobs who had stayed behind, also clandestine means of staying in contact with these friends—couriers, smuggled correspondence, radio networks, etc. What made it difficult to prove that the information delivered was spurious was the fact that the authors were often well versed in the structure and habits of the governments and military organizations of their homelands and could take material from newspapers published behind the Curtain and from radio broadcasts and embroider on the information or interpret it with a good deal of art. Frequently, one had quite worthwhile information. The only trouble was it cost more than it was worth and didn’t derive from the sources it claimed to derive from.
Shortly after World War II, a group of former military men who had escaped from one of the Balkan countries to the West promised us the plans of the latest postwar defenses on the Dalmatian coast, complete with harbor fortifications, missile ramps and the like. For this they wanted a good many thousands of dollars in gold. They agreed to show us a few samples of the papers before we paid up. These were supposed to be photocopies of official military drawings with the accompanying descriptive documents. They had allegedly procured the material from a trusted colleague, an officer who had remained behind and was now employed in the war ministry of an Iron Curtain country. In addition, there was a courier who knew the mountain passes, a brave man who had just come out with the plans and quickly returned home. He couldn’t stay out in the West because his absence would be noted at home, and this was dangerous. If we wished to buy into this proposition, the courier would make a trip every month and the colleague in the war ministry would supply us with what we wanted on order.
The plans were beautiful. So were the documents. There was only one little flaw we noticed at the very first reading. Midway through one of the documents there was a statement that the new fortifications were being built by “slave” labor. Only an anti-Communist would use that term. There is, after all, no admitted slavery under Communism. Our military friends in their fervor had given themselves away. It was obvious that they themselves had drawn up the beautiful plans and documents in somebody’s cellar in Munich. There was no brave courier and no friend in the war ministry, as they later admitted.
These paper mill products were usually cleverly conceived, well constructed and nicely attuned to the desires of the prospective purchasers and therefore almost impossible to reject on first glance. There was almost always a trained draftsman in the crowd, and the paper mill rarely failed to come up with elaborate and many-colored charts and tables drawn on a large scale showing networks of sources, subsources, letter drops, courier lines, safe houses and all the accouterments of professional espionage. As the result of a common drive on the part of the United States and other intelligence services, these mills have now for the most part been eliminated.
Cranks and crackpots run a close second after the fabricators as mischief-makers and time-wasters for the intelligence service. The reader would be amazed to know how many psychopaths and people with grudges and pet foibles and phobias manage to make connections with intelligence services all over the world and to tie them in knots, if only for relatively short periods of time. Again the intelligence service is vulnerable because of its standing need for information and because of the unpredictability of the quarter from which it might come.
Paranoia is by far the biggest cause of trouble. Since espionage is now in the atmosphere, it is no wonder that people with paranoid tendencies who have been disappointed in love or in business or who just don’t like their neighbors will denounce their friends and foes and competitors, or even the local garbage man, as Soviet spies. During World War I, many German governesses employed by families on Long Island were denounced at one time or another and mostly for the same reason. They were seen raising and lowering their window shades at night, secretly
signaling to German submarines which had surfaced offshore. Just what kind of significant information they could pass on to a submarine by lowering their shades once or twice was usually unclear, but then it is typical of paranoid delusions that there is a “bad man” close by, although it is never quite certain what he wants. Trained intelligence officers can frequently spot the crank by just this trait. There is usually very little positive substance to the crank’s claim. The waiter at the “Esplanade” is spying for an Iron Curtain country. He was seen surreptitiously making notes in a corner after he had just taken overly long to serve two people who are employed in a government office. (He was probably adding up their bill.) It may later turn out that he had once accidentally spilled soup on the source, who was convinced he had done it on purpose.
Cranks and crackpots sometimes manage to wander from one intelligence service to another, and they can cause serious trouble if they are not spotted early in the game because they may have learned enough from the one experience to bring some substance to the next. A young and rather attractive girl once turned up in Switzerland with a story of her adventures behind the Iron Curtain and in West Germany and of her work in intelligence for both the Russians and one of the Allied services. Her story was long and took months to unravel. It was clear that she had been where she said she had been because she could name and describe the places and people and knew the languages of all the places. Most damning was her claim that certain Allied intelligence officers, including some Americans stationed in Germany, were working for the Soviets.
Our investigations eventually revealed that the girl had turned up as a refugee in Germany with information about the Soviets and the Poles, who had apparently employed her at one time in a purely clerical capacity. While the process of interrogation and checking was going on, she had come into contact with numerous Allied intelligence officers and had gotten to know their names. She apparently hoped for employment, but was finally turned down, since it was clear that she was a little wrong in the head. She next wandered into Switzerland, where she came to our attention. Her story by then had expanded and now included the men she had met in Germany, not in their true roles, but as actors in a great tale of espionage and duplicity. When she got through with us and went on to the next country, it is quite likely that the story got even bigger and that we who had just spoken with her also figured now as agents of the Soviets or worse. One of our people had the theory that the Russians had sent her to the West because, without any training at all, she was a perfect sabotage weapon. She could be guaranteed to waste the time of every intelligence service in Europe and prevent them from getting on with their more serious tasks.
14
The Role of Intelligence in the Cold War
Shortly before the Bolshevik revolution of October-November, 1917, a nationwide election was held in Russia for delegates to a Constituent Assembly, which was to choose the leaders of a new Russia.
This was the last, possibly the only, free vote the people of Russia ever had. Even under the chaotic conditions which prevailed in the fall of 1917 in war-torn Russia, about thirty-six million votes were cast for 707 Assembly seats. In this vote, the Bolsheviks received only about a quarter of the total and 175 seats. Unable either to control or intimidate the Assembly, Lenin dissolved it by brute force and the use of goon squads.
Here is Lenin’s gloating judgment:
Everything has turned out for the best. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly means the complete and open repudiation of the democratic idea in favor of the dictatorship concept.
This will be a valuable lesson.
And so it proved to be. The pattern was set for the techniques used in the destruction of freedom in other countries. Lenin here showed that a minority backed by illegal force could trample on a majority which relied on democratic methods.
It was some thirty years later before Communism felt it was strong enough to try these tactics outside of the area Russia had controlled in 1914, but as the war ended in 1945, Communism was on the march again. By then the Communists were consolidating their frontiers on the Elbe River deep in Western Europe, and had their forces of occupation and their subversive apparatus at work installing Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. Shortly thereafter, they took over Czechoslovakia and had also begun their advance to the China Sea in the Far East.
A major part of the strategy of the Communists in the Cold War today is the secret penetration of free states. The means they use, the target countries they select and the soft areas in these targets are concealed as long as possible. They exploit secret weaknesses and vulnerabilities of opportunity and, in particular, endeavor to penetrate the military and security forces of the country under clandestine attack.
I include this issue—the most serious one we as a nation and the Free World face today—in a book on intelligence because intelligence has an important role to play here. The subversion campaigns of Communism generally start out using secret techniques and a secret apparatus. It is against them that our intelligence assets must be marshaled in good time and used as I shall indicate. Among the tasks assigned to intelligence, this is one that ranks in importance alongside those I have described: collecting information, counterintelligence, coordinating intelligence and producing the national estimates.
Of course, the whole range of Communist tactics in the Cold War is broader than the type of covert action and political subversion such as we have seen in Czechoslovakia and Cuba. It also includes: limited wars and wars by proxy, as in Korea and North Vietnam; guerilla wars, as in South Vietnam; civil wars, as in China; the use and abuse of their zones of “temporary” military occupation, as in the East European satellites and North Korea.
The Communists have not always succeeded, and this is due in no small measure to the employment of intelligence assets, not only of our own but also those of our friends and allies, including those of friendly governments under Communist attack. Their stooges took over power in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954, and they were driven out. They tried to disrupt the Philippines and Malaya by guerrilla tactics, and they were defeated. They lavished arms deliveries on Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Indonesia, hoping these states would join the Communist bloc, and so far they have had only a very modest return on these particular investments.
On the whole, however, they can look with satisfaction on what they have accomplished by subversion in the two decades since the Allied victory over Hitler and the Japanese war lords was assured in 1944. For it is wise to remember that the Communist program was well under way by the time of our peace talks with them at Yalta and Potsdam. Then they were thinking not of peace but of how they could use the common victory, and their zones of military occupation, for further Communist conquest.
In the last fifteen years, their progress has been considerably slowed down but by no means stopped. Beginning in 1947, they ran into a series of roadblocks: the United States stood firm in Greece, at Berlin and in Korea, and later on a broad front that reached to the Chinese offshore islands and Vietnam; helped by the Marshall Plan and other aid, Europe and Japan staged spectacular economic recoveries; Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung were more and more divided on the tactics to pursue, although they remained in agreement on the basic objective of burying the Free World.
The Soviet policy of covert aggression rather than “hot” nuclear war had undergone considerable rethinking in the Kremlin following Stalin’s demise and the revolution in Hungary. This policy was vigorously restated by Khrushchev under the general heading of “wars of liberation,” in his speech of January 6, 1961. Here is how he outlined Communist power and Soviet tactics.
Our epoch is the epoch of the triumph of Marxism-Leninism.
Today . . . socialism is working for history, for the basic content of the contemporary historical process constitutes the establishment and consolidation of socialism on an international scale.
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The time is not far away when Marxism-Leninism will possess the minds of the majority of the world’s population. What has been going on in the world in the 43 years since the triumph of the October Revolution completely confirms the scientific accuracy and vitality of the Leninist theory of the world socialist revolution.
The colonial system of imperialism verges on complete disintegration, and imperialism is in a state of decline and crisis.
Later on in his speech, Khrushchev cited Cuba as the typical example of an uprising against United States imperialism. He then added:
Can such wars flare up in the future? They can. Can there be such uprisings? There can. But these are wars which are national uprisings. In other words, can conditions be created where a people will lose their patience and rise in arms? They can. What is the attitude of the Marxists toward such uprisings? A most positive one. These uprisings must not be identified with wars among states, with local wars, since in these uprisings the people are fighting for implementation of their right for self-determination, for independent social and national development. These are uprisings against rotten reactionary regimes, against the colonizers. The Communists fully support such just wars and march in the front rank with the peoples waging liberation struggles.
Now Communist parties are functioning in nearly 50 countries of these continents [Asia, Africa and Latin America]. This had broadened the sphere of influence of the Communist movement, given it a truly world-wide character.
Khrushchev concluded:
Comrades, we live at a splendid time: Communism has become the invincible force of our century.
This then is the charter of the Communists for world domination by world-wide subversion.
This country has been slow to arouse itself to the dangers we face from these tactics of Communism, which Khrushchev so clearly describes. Since Lenin’s day this had always been a part of the Communist program. With Khrushchev, it became its major weapon in the foreign field.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 28