The Craft of Intelligence (28 page)

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 identity 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.

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.