The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

  Messy but Useful

  As was the case in the twentieth century, it has been tempting for politicians to view human intelligence as the messy end of spying where, in comparison with digital techniques, the drawbacks come to the fore. But, as we have seen, snippets of bugged conversations, intercepted emails or stolen digital files can take you only so far. They are usually meaningless without context. If Putin is heard to say, ‘Let’s invade Ukraine’ or ‘Let’s kill Obama,’ does he really mean it? When an elderly Afghan warlord repeatedly calls a member of the Taliban and speaks to him with the utmost respect, does that mean he is also a Taliban supporter? Zabet Amanullah’s killing illustrates how misunderstandings from technical leads can have disastrous consequences. Human beings can provide the cultural context that allows you to judge if what someone says needs to be taken seriously, together with background knowledge about their ambitions, friends and enemies.

  Most of that background knowledge is not secret intelligence. It can be gleaned from ordinary human engagement, whether it is scholarship, journalism, diplomacy or popular entertainment. But some of the most threatening adversaries – whether heads of state or terrorist leaders – are private, remote individuals who rarely disclose their intentions and who, even if they speak in public, mostly tell lies. In these cases, only a source from within the leader’s circle – a spy – will be able to pass on and interpret his intentions.

  As Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower from the National Security Agency, disclosed, state eavesdroppers like the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ view the world by means of what they call ‘selectors’, approved targets for interception. While there may be thousands of these selectors, only a portion of them can be closely monitored: not every phone can be listened to, every conversation replayed and studied in depth. Spy agencies, however, do store great volumes of information about calls and emails and connections. According to the Guardian, ‘One NSA report from 2007 estimated that there were 850bn “call events” collected and stored in the NSA databases, and close to 150bn internet records. Each day, the document says, 1–2bn records were added.’14 But the point often missed in the controversy was that most of this was valuable only with hindsight: only after a target had been identified could the information be used to investigate his history. The most difficult intelligence problem, then, is to identify the target, before homing in on what is important among the blizzard of signals.

  So how should a ‘selector’ be chosen? This is ultimately a policy decision based on a broad understanding of threats and possible sources of valuable information. There are many sources of open information that can be used to judge who should be placed under surveillance. But, again, only a spy may be in a position to identify some of the secret people and places that are important. Unlike a mobile phone, for instance, or a camera on a drone, a spy also talks back. Running a spy is a two-way process and an agent can challenge the wisdom of the questions he is being asked or the direction of intelligence gathering. ‘If you are listening to the wrong person; if you’re focusing on the wrong target, they can tell you,’ said one former recruiter. Another intelligence officer said, ‘While policymakers will tell us where to spy, that doesn’t mean we tell them what they want to hear.’ This is above all the value of the ‘human factor’: spies are not just another ‘ear’ at the table, a stealer of secrets, but sentient beings who convey understanding.

  The Spies We Need

  So spies really can be useful if carefully deployed as a last resort against a threat that matters, and the nature of the spies we need depends on what that threat is and, in consequence, what secrets are really worth stealing. Judging the future state of the planet, and all the issues that will confront society, is a subject of its own, but there are some macro trends worth mentioning that point to the role that spying could and should play.

  The most striking trend that impacts on security is globalization: the way that powerful groups, whether political movements or commercial companies, are increasingly able to span national borders, making use of cheap and easy communications (through direct messages and phone calls between individuals or by posting propaganda on the Internet); easy travel (because of ever-decreasing restrictions on international freedom of movement and ever-decreasing prices of aircraft travel); freedom of capital movement (driven by reduced state regulations and also high-speed digital money movements); and a breakdown of cultural differences (with the increased dominance of major languages and spread of international entertainment, be it Hollywood or Egyptian soap operas). All of these factors are drivers of global networking and challenge our nation-based preconceptions and state institutions. These tendencies may be as varied as al-Qaeda propaganda, the incredible worldwide popularity of a computer game or the power of a hedge fund that operates worldwide with little regulation. Ideas, money and people always spread internationally – consider the rise of major religions. What is different about the twenty-first century is the speed with which this can happen.

  Obviously, the threats posed by transnational networks do not come from violent extremists alone, but also from other groups whose actions may have damaging consequences. An important target of intelligence should be not only Islamist extremism but also the multinational corporations, and in particular the world of plutocrats and international financiers, upon whose actions the jobs and livelihoods of millions of people depend. At the time of writing, the largest 307 US firms held $1.95 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid paying corporation tax. Their decisions on where to move that cash pile and their production centres will determine the fate of nations.15

  There are two main consequences of the increased power of globalized, non-state groups for spying. First, it creates an intelligence deficit, a requirement to monitor and understand events and people often thousands of miles away that may, through global networks, come to have a local impact. Second, it creates a more dangerous ‘action imperative’, an impetus to intervene across borders to influence those foreign events which have an increasing domestic impact. This imperative applies as much to citizens – for example, those taking action unilaterally across borders through a non-governmental group like Greenpeace – as it does to government policymakers who direct the activities of their diplomats or secret services. While durable solutions will only emerge from open collaboration across borders, when that cooperation breaks down or is non-existent, it will always be tempting to take some form of covert action. This may be secret cooperation, such as Pakistan’s acquiescence in drone strikes on militant groups within its borders, or unilateral action, such as the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Both have damaging side effects, undermining legitimate institutions in the foreign country and risking a backlash if the covert action is discovered. As they roam like buffalo across the world, tracking or even attacking the latest extremist group to threaten to bomb or hack computers in New York or London, it can be a little too easy for secret services to knock down the fences. In extremis, they may need to do so. But all this secret work is just a stop-gap solution that is no substitute for effective global cooperation.

  The threat from non-state groups should be kept in proportion. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin once asked, ‘The Pope! How many divisions has he got?’16 And it is obvious that when it comes to raw military power, the most dangerous weapons in the world are still in the hands of major countries, which must remain a major target of intelligence. While the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US are reduced, they continue to exist. And bomb technology is still slowly spreading (with programmes in Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran and Israel). With the US and Russia holding 1,800 nuclear warheads at high alert (meaning capable of being launched within fifteen minutes), good intelligence about nuclear capabilities and intentions is still more important than dealing with any other threat, certainly including terrorism.17

  The Intelligence Gap

  When intelligence is absent, spying and spies are always the last thing you need, unless the missing piece to the puzzle is s
omething very secret. Most so-called ‘intelligence errors’ come down to a failure of analysis, not a failure to collect intelligence. This was true of the rise of Sunni extremism in the 1990s (which led to al-Qaeda), as it was with the consequences of the US encouraging rebellion in Syria in the 2010s (which led to the rise of the murderous Islamic State, spanning Syria and Iraq). The errors could be blamed as much on journalists, diplomats, politicians and academics as it could on intelligence officials. The missing element was not a secret: the extremists involved were completely open in both their objectives and their violent tactics. The broader failure was in not recognizing the potential threat and taking it seriously early enough.

  Having a spy in al-Qaeda’s ranks who could have provided vital secret intelligence, such as specific details of plots like the attack of 9/11, would have made a huge difference. But, as will now be apparent, human intelligence needs to be targeted. To obtain such agents, the analysis and the appreciation of the threat have to come first.

  What makes the world more dangerous is that just when domestic events in Western countries are more driven by other events far away, we have seen a degradation in knowledge about international affairs. Globalization has been combined, fatally, with an increased reluctance in the West to explore or learn about foreign cultures and opinions. The spread of Hollywood and US television programmes has encouraged the world to understand the West and discouraged the West from understanding the world. Language learning has slowly increased (in the US, particularly since 2001), but there are still woefully few who speak foreign tongues. Newspapers and television have lived through major cutbacks and foreign-based newspaper correspondents have become a rarity. Data moves everywhere across the Internet, but it rarely carries interpretation. People travel constantly, but when they visit strange places they usually come unprepared, are shocked by what they find and may walk away with prejudice rather than understanding. Contrary to belief, travel often narrows the mind.

  Meanwhile, diplomacy has been scaled back. Ambassadors are prisoners of instant feedback and are micro-managed from their home capitals. They are sent to ‘message’ their government’s policies, not to relay back the intuitions they gather.

  There is no shortage of people who think they understand the world, but too many project their own thought processes on to others, or replace cautious analysis with wishful thinking. An example was the disastrous wave of neo-conservative ideology that held sway under President George W. Bush. A small Washington elite believed they could remake the Middle East and impose democracy, beginning with the invasion of Iraq. Such men turned diplomacy into a one-way process, trying to impose Western values and only listening to intelligence that accorded with their existing views.

  To summarize, we have created a world of global consequence without global knowledge, and spying is not a remedy for this problem. The wars of the early twenty-first century, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, were not lost or the cause dishonoured by a failure to collect particular intelligence; they were failures of a much broader nature: our inability to understand the world at large.

  But while even good spies cannot prevent strategic ignorance, strategic ignorance can prevent good espionage. This is because effective spying needs to be focused on what really matters. Viewed any way, good spying depends on the deployment of tremendous resources: not so much money as concentrated effort, the deployment of finely honed tactics and the use of great and rare talent. This is as true for those involved with the skilful handling of volunteer agents as it is for those who have been targeted for recruitment. In more traditional spy work, such as has been used against the IRA, the Soviets and the Chinese, for instance, direct recruitment was an art requiring patience and time. The nimbler twenty-first century has brought in some new techniques to speed up the process, but only at the cost of many failures and by establishing great ‘fusion teams’ to develop targets rapidly, stage recruitment attempts and then actively monitor a potential agent’s progress.

  Imagine spying as a very powerful telescope observing an object on a far-off planet from Earth. There are great skills involved in moving the telescope to point at the chosen target and in making that telescope show us a clear, bright and enlarged picture, but none of those efforts is worthwhile unless the telescope is pointed at the right object. So, which way should that telescope be pointed?

  Intelligence agencies do often try to spread their resources, the CIA especially. They monitor more than one thing at once, but with limited success. We’ve seen how the attempt to direct human espionage at terrorism – to find that elusive ‘man on the rock’ inside al-Qaeda in particular – has been fraught with challenges, and there is no indication that such a spy has been found so far. But spying tactics have adapted and al-Qaeda members have grown disillusioned. Time is the spymaster’s best friend. Spy agencies are finding ways to get agents in among the militants.

  As I write, al-Qaeda is fragmented, but new powerful terrorist groups such as Islamic State are looming equally dangerous. After the next great intelligence shock, after the Next Attack, the spy we wish we had had – the next-generation ‘man on the rock’, sitting next to some other as yet unidentified enemy – will be absent not because of the latest tactical blunders by the spymasters, but more likely because of our much wider myopia about where trouble is brewing in our world.

  Secrets and Understanding

  The intelligence gap that exists about our rapidly changing world needs to be filled in many ways. More important than acquiring certain secret information will be a greater effort to widen our engagement with other lands and cultures. Before trying to spy, we should reach first for almost every other person who is prepared, as the military say, to ‘step outside of the wire’, to leave the comfort of their surroundings and enter unfamiliar territory. Such explorers might be academics, journalists, backpackers, missionaries, diplomats, mobile phone salesmen, climbers or soldiers. We need them to understand foreign cultures intimately and to explain them to us.

  But secret services can play an important role too, in areas where their special skills might be useful and when there is a really important secret that cannot be teased out by open means. A diplomat or journalist might be able to talk to an ordinary whistle-blower, but if the individual’s job was so sensitive that his life would be in danger by talking or if his greatest value would come from remaining in his job while secretly informing, then sometimes only an intelligence agency has the capability to handle such a source.

  At times direct, open engagement with a certain person or group is impossible. On occasion you need to wear a disguise, to lie and cheat to come close to someone. You may need to employ every trick in the book to get an insider’s account of what is happening. The secret servant should be deployed to tackle the really tough nut. He should be the gifted talker who sneaks in where few dare and fewer are capable, then charms the feared foe into opening his soul and revealing his disposition. That may involve ‘recruitment’; it may require some loose cash; it will most likely involve a few lies, a bit of pressure. But not always.

  If spying is the only way to get a secret, what secrets are really worth stealing? While they are always much sought after and exciting for senior politicians and others with clearance to read them, they tend to be overrated. ‘From infancy on, we are all spies,’ John Updike once wrote, ‘the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.’18 He was not far wrong.

  From a military standpoint, an obsession with secrets can be counterproductive. As John Robb, a former Special Forces operator and technology entrepreneur, noted, much of current and future low-intensity conflict – terrorist attacks or rebellions short of all-out war – will increasingly be characterized by ‘open source warfare’ where (borrowing from the software industry) almost all plans, orders and lessons learned are debated publicly. Overly secretive organizations, like most modern militaries, tend to hoard information and thus alter their plans far too slowly. On the other hand,
open-source fighters can be incredibly flexible, are devolved and tend to evolve rapidly. Spies are not required to discover their plans.19

  Those modern secrets that are important often lie in unexpected places. As recent counterintelligence research for the US Office of the Director for National Intelligence argued, the nation’s most valuable secrets lay primarily not in governments but in the hands of private corporations, whether software codes or medical formulas, for example. Stealing the dull secrets of another country’s state bureaucracy may simply be a waste of effort.

  Insights into the motivating forces and intentions of powerful and influential people and groups, whether inside or outside government, are what is needed. Politicians and senior business leaders, after all, lie endlessly about their intentions. A spy may not be required to figure that out, but sometimes he may be, particularly if that leader is especially secretive as well as powerful or dangerous.

  Spies may sometimes supply insights that are merely tactical (as opposed to strategic), meaning that they are only valuable in the context of a short-term battle. For example, a spy can tell his handler where the Russian president is planning to send his armoured columns, or reveal the location of a terrorist training camp or a specific bomb plot in a Western city or a Czech oligarch’s plan to bet billions of dollars against the pound sterling. Such information may be helpful, may save lives on one side of a conflict (and also – don’t forget – cost lives on the other side) or, when it is a matter of economic secrets, may protect the livelihoods of millions.

  But far too often the tactical side is overrated. Under intense round-the-clock scrutiny by the media, twenty-first-century political leaders have become infected with a control-room mentality where, seduced by powerful communications and the ability to project precision power at great distance – for example, with missiles, drones or Special Forces – they can overestimate their ability to influence events in faraway places. Rather like looking through a drinking straw at one part of a big landscape, the US president in his situation room may follow the events in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, but that is only at the expense of ignoring everything else happening on a larger scale.