The Craft of Intelligence (8 page)

If an intelligence service cannot insert its own agent within a highly sensitive target, the alternative is to recruit somebody who is already there. You might find someone who is inside but is not quite at the right spot for access to the information you need. Or you might find someone just beginning a career which will eventually lead to his employment in the target. But the main thing is that he is a qualified and “cleared” insider. He is, as we say, “in place.”

One of my most valuable agents during World War II, of whom I shall have more to say later, was precisely of this kind. When I first established contact with him, he was already employed in the German Foreign Office in a position which gave him access to communications with German diplomatic establishments all over the world. He was exactly at the right place. No single diplomat abroad, of whatever rank, could have got his hands on so much information as did this man, who had access to the all-important Foreign Office files. Even with the most careful planning many years in advance, it would have been a stroke of fortune if we could ever have placed an agent inside this target and maneuvered him into such a position, even if he had been able to behave like the most loyal Nazi. This method of recruiting the agent “in place,” despite its immense difficulties, has the advantage of allowing the intelligence service to focus on the installation it wishes to penetrate, to examine and analyze it for its most important and most vulnerable points, and then to search for the man already employed at that point who might be likely to cooperate. It does not, as in the case of plants, begin with the man, the agent, and hope it can devise a way of inserting him into the target.

In recent years, most of the notorious instances of Soviet penetration of important targets in Western countries were engineered in this way, by the recruitment of someone already employed inside the target.

David Greenglass at Los Alamos during World War II, though only a draftsman, had access to secret details of the internal construction of the atomic bomb. Judith Coplon was employed shortly after the war in a section of the Department of Justice responsible for the registration of foreign agents in the United States. She regularly saw and copied for the Soviets FBI reports which came across her desk on investigations of espionage in the United States. Harry Houghton and John Vassall, although of low rank and engaged chiefly in administrative work, were able to procure sensitive technical documents from the British Admiralty, where they were employed in the late 1950s. Alfred Frenzel, a West German parliamentarian, had access to the NATO documents which were distributed to a West Germany Parliamentary Defense Committee on which he served in the mid-1950s. Irvin Scarbeck was only an administrative officer in our embassy in Warsaw in 1960–61. But after he had been compromised by a Polish girl and blackmailed, he managed to procure for the Polish Intelligence Service, which was operating under Soviet direction, some of our ambassador’s secret reports to the State Department on the political situation in Eastern Europe.

All these people were already employed in jobs which made them interesting to the Communists at the time they were first recruited. Some of them moved up later into jobs which made them of even greater value to the Soviets. In some instances this may have been achieved with secret Soviet guidance. Houghton and Vassall were both originally recruited while stationed at British embassies behind the Iron Curtain. When each was returned home and assigned to a position in the Admiralty, his access to important documents naturally broadened. Similarly, had Scarbeck not been caught as a result of careful counterintelligence efforts while still at his post in Warsaw, he probably could have continued for years to be of ever-increasing use to the Soviets as he was reassigned to one United States diplomatic post after another.

The Soviet Union gave widespread publicity to the case of an “insider” who worked with Western intelligence and who they admitted had access to information of great value. This was the case of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, whose conviction and execution by the Soviets are now a matter of history. His trial, along with that of the Englishman Greville Wynne, lasted just one week in early May of 1963. It is not entirely clear just why the Soviets chose to make a “show trial” of this case rather than to keep the whole affair entirely secret, which it was certainly in their power to do. The most likely reason was to discourage further espionage among their own people by showing them that in the end the culprit always gets caught. This, of course, is not true. But in staging the trial, they openly admitted that Penkovsky had caused them very considerable damage.

It is fairly plain from the evidence which the Soviets allowed to be presented in the court that a combination of Western intelligence services had succeeded a few years back in gaining the services of the Soviet colonel, who held an important position in the military and technical hierarchy of the Red Army. Penkovsky was trusted by the Soviets and allowed to travel to various international conferences in Western Europe. These afforded the occasions for establishing contact and communication with Penkovsky.

The Soviets claim that he was lured by material attractions—wine, women and song—available in the West. This is the usual method of discrediting an individual whose actions and motives may, in fact, have been far worthier than they are willing to admit. But Penkovsky was a high-level and experienced officer with many high Soviet decorations and not some youthful adventurer, not a man likely to fall for material benefits alone. There must have been much more involved than the trial and publicity indicate. The Soviet hierarchy has been deeply shaken, for Penkovsky had lost faith in the system that employed him.

Whatever his motives, the case is typical of the current pattern of espionage. Penkovsky had natural access to important information. All his advantages were built in. No reconnaissance, no traveler, no plant could have duplicated his achievement. He was already there. He had to be discovered, contact had to be established with him, he had to be convinced that he could make a valuable contribution to a cause in which he believed.

A similar case, which also ended tragically for the agent, was that of the Bulgarian diplomat Asen Georgieff, who was tried and executed in Sofia for espionage in December, 1963. During his trial, there was a great deal of propaganda given out by the Bulgarians concerning Georgieff’s alleged weakness for the material benefits of the West. Little was said about the fact that Georgieff had long been a Communist intellectual of unusually high caliber, a doctor of laws, an internationally recognized Hegel scholar, a man whose mental prowess placed him head and shoulders above his colleagues and had earned for him one of the top-ranking positions in his country’s delegation to the Untied Nations. He was not, as were most of his colleagues, chosen for this position because of party accomplishments.

Unlike Penkovsky, whose contributions were in the field of military and technical intelligence, Georgieff, according to indications which came out during his trial, was of interest to Western intelligence because of his access to political information. East and West guard their major military and technical secrets with about equal fervor, if not always equal success. On the other hand, much of “political intelligence” is no secret at all in the West, but is regarded as highly sensitive information in the Soviet-satellite areas. The U.S. Congress debates openly, and the results of the deliberations of the cabinet and even of the National Security Council sooner or later tend to reach the public. The equivalent deliberations of the Kremlin and of the politburos of the satellites are matters of deepest secrecy, thus necessitating an intelligence effort to uncover them.

The overt and clandestine methods of collection I have been discussing are obviously quite inadequate alone to meet all our intelligence needs today. They can be and are supplemented by other methods, particularly by taking advantage of the great advances in science and technology and through the fact that much intelligence comes to us from “volunteers,” about whom I shall have much to say later.

Collection—Enter the Machine

The intelligence service needs a man who speaks Swahili and French, has a degree in chemical engineering, is unmarried and over thirty-five but under five feet eight. You push a button and in less than forty seconds a machine—like those commonly used in personnel work—tells whether such a man is available, and if so, everything else there is on record about him. Similar machines are used in sorting and assembling the data of intelligence itself.

This means that among the ranks of the analysts and evaluators in intelligence work today there are also persons trained in data processing and in the handling of computers and other complex “thinking” machines.

We are under no illusions that these machines improve the nature of the information. This will always depend on the reliability of the source and the skill of the analyst. What machines can do, however, is recover quickly and accurately from the enormous storehouse of accumulated information such past data as are necessary for evaluating current information. What, before the advent of the machine, might have taken the analyst weeks of search and study among the files, the machines can now accomplish in a matter of minutes.

But this is an ordinary feat compared to what technology can do today in collecting the information itself. Here I am speaking not of computers and business machines, but of special devices which have been developed to observe and record events, to replace in a sense the human hand and eye or to take over in areas which human capabilities cannot reach.

The technical nature of many contemporary targets of intelligence has itself suggested or prompted the creation of the devices which can observe them. If a target emits a telltale sound, then a sensitive acoustical device comes to mind for monitoring and observing it. If the target causes shock waves in the earth, then seismographic apparatus will detect it.

Moreover, the need to observe and measure the effects of our own experiments with nuclear weapons and missiles hastened the refinement of equipment which, with some modifications, can also be useful for watching other people’s experiments. Radar and accurate long-range photography are basic tools of technical collection. Another is the collection and analysis of air samples in order to determine the presence of radioactivity in the atmosphere. Since radioactive particles are carried by winds over national borders, it is unnecessary to penetrate the opponent’s territory by air or land in order to collect such samples.

In 1948 our government instituted round-the-clock monitoring of the atmosphere by aircraft for detecting experimentation with atomic weapons. The first evidence of a Soviet atomic explosion on the Asiatic mainland was detected by this means in September of 1949, to the surprise of the world and of many scientists who until then had believed, on the basis of available evidence, that the Soviets would not “have the bomb” for years to come. Refinements in instrumentation then began to reveal to us not only the fact that atomic explosions had taken place but also the power and type of the device or weapon detonated.

Such developments, as was to be expected, eventually inspired the opponent, who learned that his experiments were being monitored, to take countermeasures, also of a highly technological nature. It is now possible to “shield” atomic explosions both underground and in the outer atmosphere so that their characteristics cannot be easily identified as to size and type. The next round, of course, is for the enterprising technicians on the collection side to devise means of penetrating the countermeasures.

The protracted negotiations with the Soviets in recent years on the subject of disarmament and the nuclear test ban involve precisely these problems and have brought out into the open the amazingly complex research, hitherto secret, which we and the Soviets also are devoting to the problems both of shielding experiments with nuclear devices and of detecting them even when they are shielded.

Modern technology thus tries to monitor and observe certain scientific and military experiments of other nations by concentrating on the “side effects” of their experiments. Space research presents quite another kind of opportunity for monitoring. Space vehicles while in flight report back data on their performance as well as on conditions in outer space or in the neighborhood of heavenly bodies by means of electronic signals, or telemetry. These signals are of course meant for the bases and stations of the country that sent the vehicle aloft. Since, as in the case of ordinary radio messages, there is nothing to stop anyone with the right equipment from “listening in,” it is obvious that nations competing in space experimentation are going to intercept each other’s telemetry in an attempt to find out what the other fellow’s experiments are all about and how well they have succeeded. The trick is to read the signals right.

Many important military and technical targets are, however, static and do not betray their location or the nature of their activity in ways which can be detected, tracked, monitored or intercepted. Factories, shipyards, arsenals, missile bases under construction do not give off telltale evidence of their existence which can be traced from afar. To discover the existence of such installations one must get close to them or directly over them at very high altitudes, armed with long-range cameras. This was, of course, the purpose of the U-2, which could collect information with more speed, accuracy and dependability than could any agent on the ground. In a sense, its feats could be equaled only by the acquisition of technical documents directly from Soviet offices and laboratories. The U-2 marked a new high, in more ways than one, in the scientific collection of intelligence. Thomas S. Gates, Jr., Secretary of Defense of the United States at the time of the U-2 incident, May 1, 1960, testified to this before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 2, 1960:

From these flights we got information on airfields, aircraft, missiles, missile testing and training, special weapons storage, submarine production, atomic production and aircraft deployment . . . all types of vital information. These results were considered in formulating our military programs. We obviously were the prime customer, and ours is the major interest.

In more recent days, it was the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance flights which gave the “hard” evidence of the positioning in Cuba of Soviet medium-range missiles in late October of 1962. If they had not been discovered while work on the bases was still in progress and before they could be camouflaged, these bases might have constituted a secret and deadly threat to our security and that of this hemisphere. Here, too, was an interesting case in which classical collection methods wedded to scientific methods brought extremely valuable results. Various agents and refugees from Cuba reported that something in the nature of missile bases was being constructed and pinpointed the area of construction; this led to the gathering of proof by aerial reconnaissance.

The question whether the piloted U-2 can be superseded by pilotless satellites orbiting the globe at much higher altitudes came up in May, 1964, when Premier Khrushchev declared that the United States could avoid international tension by desisting from further flights of the U-2 over Cuba. The space satellites, said Khrushchev, can do the same job, and he offered to show our President photographs of American military bases taken by Soviet “sky spies.” I doubt whether we would agree wholly with Khrushchev that space vehicles should supersede the manned plane for all reconnaissance purposes. But his admissions of the use to which his satellites have been put is an interesting one.

Eloquent testimony to the value of scientific intelligence collection, which has proved its worth a hundred times over, has been given by Winston Churchill in his history of World War II.
1
He describes British use of radar in the Battle of Britain in September, 1940, and also tells of bending, amplifying and falsifying the direction signals sent by Berlin to guide the attacking German aircraft. Churchill calls it all the “wizard war” and he concludes that “Unless British science had proved superior to German and unless its strange, sinister resources had been effectively brought to bear in the struggle for survival, we might well have been defeated, and being defeated, destroyed.”

Science as a vital arm of intelligence is here to stay. We are in a critical competitive race with the scientific development of the Communist bloc, particularly that of the Soviet Union, and we must see to it that we
remain
in a position of leadership. Some day this may be as vital to us as radar was to Britain in 1940.

AUDIO SURVEILLANCE

A technical aid to espionage of another kind is the concealed microphone and transmitter which keeps up a flow of live information from inside a target to a nearby listening post; this is known to the public as “telephone tapping” or “bugging” or “miking.” “Audio surveillance,” as it is called in intelligence work, requires excellent miniaturized electronic equipment, clever methods of concealment and a human agent to penetrate the premises and do the concealing.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in early June of 1960 displayed before the United Nations in New York the Great Seal of the United States which had been hanging in the office of the American Ambassador in Moscow. In it the Soviets had concealed a tiny instrument which, when activated, transmitted to a Soviet listening post everything that was said in the Ambassador’s office. Actually, the installation of this device was no great feat for the Soviets since every foreign embassy in Moscow has to call on the services of local electricians, telephone men, plumbers, charwomen and the like. The Soviets have no difficulties in seeing to it that their own citizens cooperate with their intelligence service, or they may send intelligence officers, disguised as technicians, to do the job.

In early May, 1964, our State Department publicly disclosed that as a result of a thorough demolishing of the internal walls, ceilings and floors of “sensitive” rooms in our embassy in Moscow, forty concealed microphones were brought to light. Previous intensive electronic testing for such hidden devices had not located any of these microphones.

In Soviet Russia and in the major cities of the satellite countries certain hotel rooms are designated for foreign travelers because they have been previously bugged on a permanent basis. Microphones do not have to be installed in a rush when an “interesting” foreigner arrives on the scene. The microphones are already there, and it is only the foreigner who has to be installed. All the hotels are state-owned and have permanent police agents on their staffs whose responsibility is to see that the proper foreigners are put in the “right” rooms.

When Chancellor Adenauer paid his famous visit to Moscow in September, 1955, to discuss the resumption of diplomatic relations between Russia and West Germany, he traveled in an official German train. When he arrived in Moscow, the Soviets learned to their chagrin that the wily Chancellor (who then had no embassy of his own to reside in, for such limited security as this might afford) intended to live in his train during his stay in Moscow and did not mean to accept Soviet “hospitality” in the form of a suite at one of the VIP hotels for foreigners in Moscow. It is reported that before leaving Germany the Chancellor’s train had been equipped by German technicians with the latest devices against audio surveillance.

Outside its own country an intelligence service must consider the possible repercussions and embarrassments that may result from the discovery that an official installation has been illegally entered and its equipment tampered with. As in all espionage operations, the trick is to find the man who can do the job and who has the talent and the motive, whether patriotic or pecuniary. There was one instance when the Soviets managed to place microphones in the flowerpots that decorated the offices of a Western embassy in a neutral country. The janitor of the building, who had a weakness for alcohol, was glad to comply for a little pocket money. He never knew who the people were who borrowed the pots from him every now and then or what they did with them.

There is hardly a technological device of this kind against which countermeasures cannot be taken. Not only can the devices themselves be detected and neutralized, but sometimes they can be turned against those who install them. Once they have been detected, it is often profitable to leave them in place in order to feed the other side with false or misleading information.

In their own diplomatic installations abroad, the Soviets and their satellites stand in such fear of audio surveillance operations being mounted against them that they will usually refuse to permit local service people to install telephones or even ordinary electrical wiring in buildings they occupy. Instead, they will send out their own technicians and electricians as diplomats on temporary duty and will have them do the installing. In one instance where they evidently suspected that one of their embassies had been “wired for sound” by outsiders, they even sent a team of day laborers to the capital in questions, all of them provided with diplomatic passports for the trip. To the great amusement of the local authorities, these “diplomats” were observed during the next few weeks in overalls and bearing shovels, digging a trench four or five feet deep in the ground around the embassy building, searching for buried wires leading out of the building. (They didn’t find any.)

CODES AND CIPHERS

“Gentlemen,” said Secretary of State Stimson in 1929, “do not read each other’s mail,” and so saying, he shut down the only American cryptanalytic (code-breaking) effort functioning at that time. Later, during World War II, when he was serving as Secretary of War under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he came to recognize the overriding importance of intelligence, including what we now call “communications intelligence.” When the fate of a nation and the lives of its soldiers are at stake, gentlemen do read each other’s mail—if they can get their hands on it.