The Craft of Intelligence (10 page)

Our Army and Navy had, fortunately, continued to address themselves to the problems of cryptanalysis with particular emphasis on Japan, since American military thinking at that time foresaw Japan as the major potential foe of the United States in whatever war was to come next. By 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor, our cryptanalysts had broken most of the important Japanese naval and diplomatic codes and ciphers; and we were, as a result, frequently in possession of evidence of imminent Japanese action in the Pacific before it took place.

The Battle of Midway in June, 1942, the turning point of the naval war in the Pacific, was an engagement we sought because we were able to learn from decrypted messages that a major task force of the Imperial Japanese Navy was gathering off Midway. This intelligence concerning strength and disposition of enemy forces gave our Navy the advantage of surprise.

A special problem, in the years following Pearl Harbor, was how to keep secret the fact that we had broken the Japanese codes. Investigations, recriminations, the need to place the blame somewhere for the disheartening American losses threatened to throw this “Magic,” as it was called, into the lap of the public, and the Japanese. Until an adequate Navy could be put on the seas, the ability to read Japanese messages was one of the few advantages we had in the battle with Japan. There were occasional leaks but none evidently ever came to their attention.

In 1944, Thomas E. Dewey, who was then running for President against President Roosevelt, had learned, as had many persons close to the federal government, about our successes with the Japanese code and our apparent failure before Pearl Harbor to make the best use of the information in our hands. It was feared that he might refer to this in his campaign. The mere possibility sent shivers down the spines of our Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Marshall himself then wrote a personal letter to Mr. Dewey, telling him that the Japanese still did not know we had broken their codes and that we were achieving military successes as a result of our interception and decoding of their messages. Mr. Dewey never mentioned our code successes. The secret was kept.

One of the most spectacular of all coups in the field of communications intelligence was the British decipherment of the so-called Zimmermann telegram in January, 1917, when the United States was on the brink of World War I.
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The job was performed by the experts of “Room 40,” as British naval cryptanalytic headquarters were called. The message had originated with the German Foreign Secretary Zimmermann in Berlin and was addressed to the German Minister in Mexico City. It outlined the German plan for the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, 1917, stated the probability that this would bring the United States into war, and proposed that Mexico enter the war on Germany’s side and with victory regain its “lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”

Admiral Hall, the legendary Chief of British Naval Intelligence, had this message in his hands for over a month after its receipt. His problem was how to pass its decrypted contents to the Americans in a manner that would convince them of its authenticity yet would prevent the Germans from learning the British had broken their codes. Finally, the war situation caused Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to communicate the Zimmermann message formally to the American Ambassador in London. The receipt of the message in Washington caused a sensation at the White House and State Department, and created serious problems for our government—how to verify beyond a doubt the validity of the message and how to make it public without letting it seem merely an Anglo-American ploy to get the United States into the War. My uncle, Robert Lansing, who was then Secretary of State, later told me about the dramatic events of the next few days which brought America close to war.

The situation was complicated by the fact that the Germans had used American diplomatic cable facilities to transmit the message to their Ambassador in Washington, Count Bernstorff. He relayed it to his colleague in Mexico City. President Wilson had granted the Germans the privilege of utilizing our communication lines between Europe and America on the understanding that the messages would be related to peace proposals in which Wilson was interested.

The President’s chagrin was therefore all the greater when he discovered to what end the Germans had been exploiting his good offices. However, this curious arrangement turned out to be of great advantage. First of all, it meant that the State Department had in its possession a copy of the encrypted Zimmermann telegram, which it had passed to Bernstorff, unaware, of course, of its inflammatory contents. Once the encrypted text was identified, it was forwarded to our embassy in London, where one of Admiral Hall’s men redecrypted it for us in the presence of an embassy representative, thus verifying beyond a doubt its true contents. Secondly, the fact that deciphered copies of the telegram had been seen by German diplomats in both Washington and Mexico City helped significantly to solve the all-important problem that had caused Admiral Hall so much worry, namely, how to fool the Germans about the real source from which we had obtained the information. In the end the impression given the Germans was that the message had leaked as a result of some carelessness or theft in one of the German embassies or Mexican offices which had received copies of it. They continued using the same codes, thus displaying a remarkable but welcome lack of imagination. On March 1, 1917, the State Department released the contents of the telegram through the Associated Press. It hit the American public like a bombshell. In April we declared war on Germany.

When one compares the cryptographic systems used today with those to which governments during World War I entrusted the passage of their most vital and sensitive secrets, the latter seem crude and amateurish, especially because of their recurring groups of symbols which tipped off the cryptanalyst that an important word or one in frequent usage must lie behind the symbols. When Admiral Hall’s cryptanalysts saw the combination “67893” in the Zimmermann telegram, they recognized it and knew that it meant “Mexico.” Under the German system it always meant that. Today such a cipher group would never stand for the same word twice.

Today not only all official government messages but also the communications of espionage agents are cast in equally secure and complex cryptographic systems. Soviet agents, for example, in reporting information back to Moscow, use highly sophisticated cipher systems. Here as elsewhere, as defensive measures improve, countermeasures to pierce the new defenses also improve.

The matters that interest an intelligence service are so numerous and diverse that some order must be established in the process of collecting information. This is logically the responsibility of the intelligence headquarters. It alone has the world picture and knows what the requirements of our government are from day to day and month to month.

Without guidance and direction, intelligence officers in different parts of the world could easily spend much of their time duplicating each other’s work or there could be serious gaps in our information. The intelligence officer at his post abroad cannot fully judge the value of his own operations because he cannot know whether the information he is procuring has already been picked up somewhere else, or is known from overt sources, or is of too low a priority to be worth the effort or the expense.

Our government determines what the intelligence objectives are and what information it needs, without regard to obstacles. It also establishes priorities among these objectives according to their relative urgency. Soviet ICBMs will take priority over their steel production. Whether or not Communist China would to go war over Laos will take priority over the political shading of a new regime in the Middle East. Only after priority has been established is the question of obstacles examined. If the information can be obtained by overt collection or in the ordinary course of diplomatic work, the intelligence service will not be asked to devote to the task its limited assets for clandestine collection. But if it is decided that secret intelligence must do the job, then it is usually because serious obstacles are known to surround the target.

In preparing its directives for the intelligence mission in a particular area, the headquarters will first of all consider the factors of political and physical geography and the presence of persons within the area who have access to the desired information. Obviously, contiguous and border areas around the great periphery of the Communist world serve as windows, though darkly shaded ones, on that world. The presence of sizable delegations from the Sino-Soviet bloc in many countries not necessarily contiguous to it offers quite another kind of opportunity for information on the bloc. Also, citizens of peripheral countries may not have the difficulties an American would have in traveling to denied areas and enjoying more freedom of movement and less close scrutiny while there. All these are factors in the problem of “access” and therefore play a role in the framing of guidance.

Hypothetically speaking, if our government wanted information on a recent industrial or technical development in Red China, where the U.S. has no diplomatic mission and no unofficial representation either, the intelligence service could assign the collection task to those free areas close to China which receive Chinese refugees from time to time, or to a free area halfway around the world from China where the latter had a diplomatic mission, or to still another free area which had commercial relations with China and whose nationals could travel there. It would not assign the task to an area where none of these conditions existed, nor would it indiscriminately flash out its requirement world-wide, setting up a scramble of intelligence officers to go after the same information by whatever means they could devise.

When Khrushchev made his secret speech denouncing Stalin to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, it was clear from various press and other references to the speech that a text must be available somewhere. The speech was too long and too detailed to have been made extemporaneously even by Khrushchev, who is noted for lengthy extemporary remarks. An intelligence “document hunt” was instituted, as the speech, never published in the U.S.S.R., was of great importance for the Free World. Eventually the text was found—but many miles from Moscow, where it had been delivered. It was necessary in this case for headquarters to alert many kinds of sources and to make sure all clues were followed up. I have always viewed this as one of the major coups of my tour of duty in intelligence. Since the text was published in full by the State Department, it also was one of the few exploits which could be disclosed as long as sources and methods of acquisition were kept secret.

Usually the means of getting the information once a task has been assigned is left to the ingenuity of the intelligence officer in the field. My source in the German Foreign Office already mentioned brought out or secretly smuggled to me in Switzerland during 1943–45, choice selections of the most secret German diplomatic and military messages, over two thousand in all. For various technical reasons, he could send only a fraction of the total available to him, and he had to pick and choose on his own initiative.

As the war in Europe was drawing to a close, the possibility of a protracted conflict with Japan still loomed ahead. I then received from headquarters a request that our source concentrate on sending me more reports from German missions in the Far East, particularly in Tokyo and Shanghai. Even though I agreed with headquarters that this window on the Far East should be opened wider, it was no easy task to carry out the instruction speedily.

My source was in Berlin and I was in Switzerland. He was able to travel out only rarely, I might not see him for weeks, and the matter was too urgent to let go until our next meeting. Normally we never communicated with each other across the Swiss-German border because it was too dangerous, but we did have an emergency arrangement based on a fictitious girl friend of the source who was supposedly living in Switzerland. Since postcards seem more innocent to the censor than sealed letters, the “girl friend” sent to the source’s home address in Berlin a beautiful postal card of the Jungfrau. “She” wrote on it that a friend of hers in Zurich had a shop which formerly sold Japanese toys but had run out of them and couldn’t import them because of wartime restrictions; in view of the close relations between Germany and Japan, couldn’t he help her out by suggesting where in Germany she could buy Japanese toys for her shop? My source got the point immediately since he knew all messages from the Swiss “girl friend” were from me. The next batch of cables to the German Foreign Office which he sent me were largely from German officials in the Far East and told the plight of the Japanese Navy and Air Force.

Sometimes for diplomatic or other reasons an intelligence headquarters gives out negative guidance, i.e., instructions what not to do. An enterprising intelligence officer may run into some splendid opportunities and learn to his disappointment after corresponding with his headquarters that there are good reasons for passing them up. He may or may not be told what these good reasons are.

General Marshall, in the letter to Governor Dewey mentioned earlier, emphasized the sensitivity of operations involving enemy codes and ciphers by telling him of an uncoordinated attempt by American intelligence to get a German code in Portugal. The operation misfired and so alerted the Germans that they changed a code we were already reading, and this valuable source was lost.

I had no knowledge of this incident at the time when I received a radio message from headquarters at my wartime post in Switzerland not to get
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foreign codes without prior instructions. Shortly after this, in late 1944, one of my most trusted German agents told me that he could get me detailed information about certain Nazi codes and ciphers. This put me in quite a quandary. Though I had confidence in him, I did not wish him to deduce that we were breaking the German codes. If I showed no interest, this would have been an indication that such was the case. No intelligence officer would otherwise reject such an offer. I told my friend I wanted a bit of time to think over how best this could be worked out. The next day I told him that as all my traffic to Washington had to go by radio—Switzerland was then surrounded by Nazi and Fascist forces—it would be too insecure for me to communicate what he might give me. I said I preferred to wait till France was liberated—the Normandy invasion had already taken place—so I could send out his code information by diplomatic pouch. He readily accepted this somewhat specious answer.

The best planning and the best guidance cannot, of course, foresee everything. No intelligence service and no intelligence officer rules out the possibility of the random and unexpected and often inexplicable windfall. Sometimes a man who has something on his mind feels safer talking to a Western intelligence officer ten thousand miles from home and so waits for the opportunity of a trip abroad to seek one out. A Soviet scientist or technician visiting Southeast Asia, for example, might talk in a more relaxed manner than if he were behind the Curtain or even if he were visiting in New York. The Kremlin’s instruction to a Soviet official in Egypt, if it came to our attention, might throw some light on Soviet policy toward Berlin.

In 1958 an Arab student from Iraq who had been taking some advanced studies in Arizona received a letter from Baghdad which caused him to leave immediately for home. As he departed, he hinted to an American friend of his that the reason for his sudden leave-taking was that important political events were impending in his home country. A few weeks later came the Iraq
coup d’état
which astounded the Western world and left some intelligence officers with red faces. This bit of information about the student’s hasty departure, and the reason for it, thanks to some good work of field collection in Arizona did in fact reach headquarters in Washington quite promptly. Unfortunately, there it was viewed at the desk level, and quite naturally, as only one straw in a wind which seemed to be blowing in a different direction.

This story also illustrates how important it is for the field officer, without any directives or headquarters administration, to send in bits and pieces of intelligence. If, for example, in the Iraq case, headquarters had received three or four messages that persons at “outs” with the Iraq government were converging toward Baghdad, a quiet alert should have been sounded.

Some years ago, when the Moscow meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist part were often held in great secrecy, they could sometimes be predicted by noting the movements of the many committee members serving in diplomatic or other posts or traveling abroad. If they quietly converged on Moscow, as they did just before the ouster of Khrushchev, something was likely to be about to happen. Here the travel pattern of Soviet officials was a type of information which field officers were alerted to follow.

Headquarters guidance is necessary but it is no substitute for such field initiative as was taken in Arizona.