The Craft of Intelligence (2 page)

Hannibal appears to have been weaker as a linguist than as a strategist. Plutarch tells us that while in Southern Italy Hannibal commanded his guides to take him to the plain of Casinum. (This was Cassino of World War II fame.) “They, mistaking his words . . . because his Italian tongue was but mean, took one thing for another and so brought him and his army . . . near the city of Casilinum.” The terrain was such that Hannibal was nearly trapped, but he took time out to dispose of those who had misled him. “Knowing then the fault his guides had made and the danger wherein they had brought him, he roundly trussed them up and hung them by the necks.” This story is often told today in intelligence schools to impress upon junior officers the need for accuracy.

Mithridates fought the power of Rome to a standstill in Asia Minor in part because he had become an outstanding intelligence officer in his own right. Unlike Hannibal, he mastered twenty-two languages and dialects and knew the local tribes and their customs far better than did the Romans.

During the Middle Ages, due as much to the fragmented political situation as to the difficulties of transportation, supply and mobilization, it was impossible to attain strategic surprise in military campaigns. It took weeks, even months, to assemble an army, and even when the force had been collected, it could move only a few miles a day. Seaborne expeditions could move somewhat more unobtrusively, but the massing of ships was difficult to conceal. For example, in 1066 King Harold of England had all the essential intelligence long before William the Conqueror landed at Hastings. He had been in Normandy himself and had seen the Norman Army in action. He knew that William was planning an attack; he estimated the planned embarkation date and landing place with great accuracy; and, judging by the size of the force he concentrated, he made a very good guess about the number of William’s troops. His defeat was not due to strategic intelligence deficiencies. He lost, rather, because his troops were battle-weary. He had just beaten the Danes in a smashing victory at Stanford Bridge. Also, they were exhausted after a long forced march.

The most serious political mistakes of Western Europe in the Middle Ages were made in relation to the East, due in large part to inadequate intelligence collection. European rulers consistently weakened Byzantium instead of supporting it as a bulwark against invasion. They failed to recognize both the dangers and the opportunities created by the Mongol drive to the west. They underestimated the Turkish threat during the period when the Ottomans were consolidating their power. Given their prejudices, they might have made the same mistakes even if they had had better intelligence support, but without it they had almost no chance of making correct decisions.

They were not very well informed about the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Slavs; they knew even less of the Moslem world, and they were almost completely ignorant of anything that went on in Central and East Asia. Emperor Frederick II (1212–50) tried to keep up contacts with Moslem rulers (and was denounced as a heretic for his pains), and Louis
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of France (1226–70) sent emissaries to the Mongols. Marco Polo’s famous book about China contained material that would have been useful for strategic intelligence, but no one looked at it in that light. Throughout most of the Middle Ages Italian merchants did obtain considerable information about the East; unfortunately, they seldom had a chance to pass it on to the people who determined Europe’s Oriental policy. The popes disliked the merchants’ willingness to trade with enemies of the faith, and kings had little contact with them.

In the fifteenth century the Italians made an important contribution to intelligence collection by establishing permanent embassies abroad. The envoys of Venice were especially adept at obtaining strategic intelligence. Most of their reports were of a very high quality, full of accurate observations and shrewd judgments. Not only did permanent embassies provide for this kind of observation, but they also provided bases from which to establish regular networks of espionage. By the sixteenth century, most European governments were following the example of the Italian city-states.

Because map making was an almost unknown art in earlier times, an important item of intelligence was information on local geography. Knowledge of a river ford might allow an army to escape encirclement; discovery of a mountain path could show the way past a strong enemy position. Local inhabitants could usually be induced to give this kind of information, and Louis IX gave a large reward to a Bedouin who showed him where to cross a branch of the Nile, thereby enabling him to stage a surprise attack upon a Moslem army. Louis’ son turned a strong defensive position in the Pyrenees by buying information about a little-used route through the mountains. Better known is the incident in the Crécy campaign when Edward III was nearly hemmed in by a large French Army. A shepherd showed him a ford across the Somme, and Edward not only escaped pursuit but also obtained such a strong defensive position that he was able to break the French Army when it finally attacked.

With the rise of nationalism and the religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first real specialists in intelligence began to appear on the Western scene—ministers and secretaries of cabinet who devoted much of their careers to organizing the collection of secret information. Because of the frequency of internal dissension and civil strife in this era, we also see at the same time the beginning of a distinction between foreign intelligence and internal security. It was still too soon for the existence of two separate services with distinct responsibilities—that came later—but it was a period in which spies at home were as important as spies abroad, all of them manipulated by the same hand.

One of the masters of both arts was Sir Francis Walsingham, who spent most of his life as Secretary of State and chief spymaster in the service of Queen Elizabeth. Walsingham’s hand can be discovered behind many of the major undertakings of Elizabeth’s reign, preparing the ground, gathering the necessary information, provoking conspiracies and then exposing them. There is hardly a technique of espionage which cannot be found in his practice of the craft. Thanks to him the foolish and weakly conceived Babington conspiracy to bring Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne grew to such dimensions that it finally gave Elizabeth the pretext to sign Mary’s death warrant. The most gifted graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were enlisted by Walsingham to study in France and to penetrate the French court and learn of its designs against England. Christopher Marlowe appears to have been one of them, and his premature death in a tavern brawl at Deptford is thought to have been the unfortunate result of one of Walsingham’s plots.

Walsingham’s greatest coup was undoubtedly the skillful roundabout operation which procured for England the naval intelligence on which its defense against the Spanish Armada was in great measure based. Instead of trying to strike directly against his target, the court of Philip II of Spain, Walsingham avoided the obvious, the direct reconnaissance tactic, so often doomed from the start, and operated through other areas where he knew there were vulnerabilities that could give him access to Spain. He dispatched a pair of young Englishmen to Italy who had excellent connections at the Tuscan court. (Throughout Walsingham’s operations we find professed religious affiliations playing a major role, Protestants masquerading as Catholics and claiming to espouse the cause of England’s enemies.) One of these young Englishmen, Anthony Standen, cultivated the Tuscan Ambassador to Spain with such success that he arranged for the employment of his agents with the latter’s mission in Spain, thus infiltrating into the Spanish ports trustworthy observers who were not Englishmen and in no way would arouse suspicion of being in the service of the English. As a favor the Tuscan Ambassador even let Standen’s “friends” in Spain use his diplomatic pouch to send “personal” letters to Standen in Italy.

Under Walsingham it became established practice for Her Majesty’s Secretary of State to intercept domestic and foreign correspondence, to open it, read it, reseal it and send it on its way. Should such correspondence be in code or cipher, Walsingham had in his service an expert, a certain Thomas Phelippes, who was both cryptographer and cryptanalyst; that is, he invented secure codes for Walsingham’s use and at the same time broke the codes used in messages which Walsingham intercepted. It was Phelippes who deciphered the rather amateurish secret messages which went to and from Mary Queen of Scots at the time of the Babington conspiracy.

Walsingham, in short, created the first full-fledged professional intelligence service. He was shortly after to be rivaled by Richelieu, but hardly by any other master of espionage until the nineteenth century.

Much has been made, to be sure, of Cromwell’s intelligence chief, John Thurloe, but in the perspective of history I do not find him possessed of the same ingenuity, inventiveness and daring that distinguished Walsingham. A major key to Thurloe’s success was the very sizable funds he had at his disposal. Pepys says he spent over £70,000 a year. This figure may be exaggerated, but the records show that he paid his spies inordinate sums for their information and thus had little difficulty recruiting them. Walsingham, on the other hand, worked with the most niggardly budget under the tight-pursed Queen and is said frequently to have paid his agents out of his own pocket, and then only insignificant sums.

Thurloe, like Walsingham, had the title of Secretary of State, but by this time his office had become known as the “Department of Intelligence,” one of the earliest official uses of the designation in English for a bureau of government. His was, of course, a time of major conspiracies bent on restoring Charles Stuart to the throne. For this reason, again as in Washington’s time, Thurloe ran both an internal security service and a foreign intelligence system. For the latter he used English consuls and diplomats abroad but supplemented their reporting with the work of secret agents. Thurloe relied even more than did Walsingham on information from postal censorship and can certainly be credited with having run a very efficient post office from the point of view of counterintelligence.

Despite the calm, almost humdrum way in which Thurloe seems to have gone about the business of systematic intelligence collection, he was frequently involved in heavy-handed plots. One of these, which he prepared at Cromwell’s instigation, had as its purpose the assassination of Charles and the Dukes of York and Gloucester, his brothers. This was in reprisal for a Royalist plot directed against Cromwell’s life which Thurloe had uncovered. The scheme was to entice the three royal brothers from France to England on the false claim that they would be met by a body of soldiers on landing who would then set off an uprising. It all sounds rather obvious and contrived at this distance and has none of the subtlety of Walsingham’s plots in which he successfully involved Mary Queen of Scots. Whether Charles would have fallen for the trick we need not conjecture, because one of Thurloe’s closest confidants, his secretary, Morland, betrayed the plot to Charles. Pepys tells us in his diary that only five days after Charles was restored to the throne, “Mr. Morland was knighted . . . and the King did give the reason of it openly, that it was for his giving him intelligence all the time he was clerk to Secretary Thurloe.”

Another interesting example of successful seventeenth-century intelligence is that of Sweden, which maintained its position as a great power to a very considerable degree by virtue of having the most accurate reporting system in Europe. A contemporary Russian minister admitted that “the Swedes know more about us than we do ourselves.” They played heavily on Protestant connections during the period of the religious wars and generally used men of other nationalities such as French Huguenots as both agents and reporters, much in the manner of Walsingham, thereby avoiding embarrassment and direct implication if caught. Sweden and to some extent Holland in those days illustrate how relatively small countries can make up for many power deficiencies with superior intelligence combined with technical and organizational ingenuity.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an ever-sharpening distinction emerged between the work of internal security and the collection of foreign intelligence. In the major powers, separate organizations under separate experts were more and more entrusted with the different tasks. The reason, of course, was that the growth of internal dissidence, the threat of uprising and revolution from within, threatened the stability and power of the great autocratic and imperial systems of nineteenth-century Europe, thus causing the burgeoning of secret police organs for the protection of the emperor or ruler.

Under Napoleon, first the infamous Joseph Fouché, a product of the turbulent conspiracies of the French Revolution, and later Colonel Savary served as Ministers of Justice and chiefs of a purely political secret police and counterespionage organization. The collection of military and foreign intelligence, however, was in the hands of the Alsatian, Karl Schulmeister, who, though nominally attached to Savary, ran a quite autonomous series of operations whose purpose was to gain intelligence about the Austrian armies and to deceive the Austrians as to the strength and intentions of the French.

Gradually the growth of large and aggressive armed forces during the nineteenth century caused the emphasis in foreign intelligence to be placed primarily on its military aspects and the responsibility for its collection to be taken over by the army itself. In the period up to the outbreak of World War I, under the aegis of the General Staffs of most European armies a single military intelligence agency developed and became the major foreign intelligence arm of the country. It was directed by military officers rather than by civilians or cabinet ministers. Political intelligence was left largely to the diplomats.

Prussia up to 1871 was the exception to this development, primarily because the power-hungry, though gifted Wilhelm Stieber kept the reins of both Prussian military intelligence and of the Prussian secret police in his ambitious hands. To him goes the credit for the first exercises in mass espionage, for the method of saturating a target area with so many spies that they could hardly fail to procure detailed information on every aspect of an enemy’s military and political status. These networks were also a kind of fifth column and helped soften the morale of civilian populations by inducing a fear of the coming invader. Previously, espionage had made use of a few selected and highly placed individuals. Stieber went after the farmers and the storekeepers, the waiters and the chambermaids. He used these methods in preparing for the Prussian attacks against both Austria in 1866 and France in 1870.