Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West
Calder Walton
Simon & Schuster (June 4, 2023)
688 pages
Western countries, particularly the US, face a persistent, asymmetric intelligence threat from any superpower seeking global dominance.
Historically, the west has been late to react to the aggressive clandestine tactics from rising powers that are already be launched in secret against them.
Like it or not, the past is a mess. But it can always provide helpful lessons.
Looking to the future with a rising and authoritarian China, forward thinking and imagination are required to manage global stability; critical to the western strategy to fend off the attack, will be to harness this imaginative spirit in the following areas: open-source intelligence collection, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing.
Imaginative spirit is critical since there is an inherent advantage to how intelligence agencies from the "east" (authoritarian) and "west" (democratic ideals) have operated in the past: in liberal democracies, intelligence agencies exist to protect their citizens; in authoritarian states they operation to prop up and support the regime in power.
Eastern agencies have two dark threads that run through them: ruthlessness and relativism:
Ruthlessness
the FSB (Russian security service) has only one limitation - operational effectiveness. There are no legal, ethical or moral considerations.
Relativism
This speaks to most authoritarian states, that have a built-in dysfunction as intelligence officials provide, often on pain of death, only the information that their leaders were willing to hear - truth becomes relative.
As far as intelligence and national security are concerned, the United States is already in a Cold War with China. This is the front line of the struggle for the future world order. As President Joe Biden had proclaimed: democracy and authoritarianism.
Intelligence agencies of the west have already begun preparing for this challenge, but like the experience of WWII, the long struggle against the Soviet Union, the US and Britain are - unfortunately - already behind in the game.
Three countries dominated espionage in the 20th century: the US, UK and Soviet Union.
When one reads history, the stories of the secret world of intelligence are rarely told. That is unfortunate because many significant world events have large elements related to intelligence.
It has been termed the missing dimension of statecraft and diplomacy.
While human intelligence (HUMINT), or information from a human source, is of vital importance, a vast majority of the vital information gathered is obtained via signals intelligence (SIGINT), or intercepted communications over cables, radio waves, etc..
SIGINT has shaped - in some cases warped - foreign affairs on each side of the Cold War.
The US and UK - both part of the Five Eyes Alliance along with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - have separate agencies to deal specifically SIGINT: the National Security Agency, or NSA (US) and Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ (UK), while the CIA (US) and MI6 (UK) are more well known respectively, but are focused on all-source intelligence, e.g., HUMINT, SIGNINT, OSINT, etc.
Important Notes on Terms
MI6 is also known formally as the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS. GCHQ is a direct successor to the famous wartime Bletchley Park which produced ULTRA. In Russia today, the KGB (also previously known as the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, GRU) is now known by the names of its two successors: the FSB and SVR.
Both the NSA and GCHQ focus on mass surveillance or bulk data collection.
These two agencies are fused together; they have been essentially one agency since WWII.
It is important to remember in most cases intelligence was not decisive in international relations, but occasionally it was. Espionage involves the collision of human agency and structural forces - in rare instances, it has global consequences. Intelligence gathered, whether covertly or overtly, has always been a factor in decision making in nation's capitols across the globe.
Also, some helpful perspective about the conspiratorial tendencies of the global elite:
Those who tend to see the work of a conspiracy tend to overestimate the competency.
After WWI, the newly created Soviet Union quickly sought the advantages asymmetric warfare that intelligence could bring against an inevitable conflict with the US and UK.
World War I saw the German and Austro-Hungarian empires crumble, and Central and Eastern Europe was in chaos and flux. As a consequence, the Bolsheviks sought it their destiny to create a new world order to fill this vacuum.
With nearly 3.3 million dead from the civil war the Russians faced the Entente powers of the West. In response, Lenin sought security and created the Cheka. He was proved all the more prophetic as Western troops did intervene militarily to support the White Russians (anti-communists of the Bolshevik Revolution); this support, however - like the botched British invasion at Archangel - all operations were much too few in number to affect any material outcomes in the war helping to pave the way for a Soviet victory.
However, recovering from the Revolution, Russia was weak.
But it was precisely because the Soviet state was so weak that it resorted to aggressive foreign intelligence.
Domestically, the Cheka were ruthless in their quest to solidify power of the new Soviet state and devised ingenious methods of torturing victims during the Red Terror; the Soviets adopted techniques from the tsarist secret police the Okhrana.
Internationally, the strategy focused around deep cover illegals who continue to be seen by Russia as their foreign intelligence elite and the crown jewel in their intelligence apparatus to this day. Complicated codes, hollow coins, hidden deposits, lack of official cover, and dead drops are all part of this mystique.
As the Soviets ramped up the secret war against the West, US and UK intelligence services were largely asleep.
After WWI, the US did not even have a
dedicated foreign intelligence agency.
Since the US emerged from WWI (and post-Bolshevik Revolution) as the only creditor on the planet with a Wilsonian - near-messianic - sense of democratic destiny, it was put on a collision course with the Soviet Union. Both ideologies - east and west - were universalist, which were the central issue in any mutually agreed governance model of a future world order.
Divergent worldviews and Soviet distrust led to an explosion of espionage from the east, unbeknownst to the Americans and British.
Perhaps the most effective spying technique is the ability to break the enemy's code. Sometimes codebreaking occurs through the work of brilliant minds like at Bletchley Park with ULTRA, but it is also accomplished in more pedestrian ways: foreign code books can be stolen, or clerks recruited.
Boring and mundane methods are more typical of intelligence gathering - the exact opposite of Bond or Bourne.
Obtaining information about a code or cipher through a human foreign agent is known as human-derived SIGINT - said another way, when a spy discloses the secrets that make codebreaking possible.
In order to fool American's into believing in the communist utopia, Soviets utilized elaborate disinformation campaigns that depicted Soviet industrialization as a staggering success. The West fell prey to it, as they are largely falling prey to Chinese disinformation in much the same manner today.
The 1929 stock market crash was a watershed moment and framed as "the failure of capitalism". The Soviets were now more able to turn Americans against their country to spy for the east. Turning them was the careful work of a talented group of cosmopolitan Soviet intelligence officers later known in the Kremlin as the Great Illegals.
During this period ideology was more important as many westerners, like the Cambridge Five, who felt Soviet Communism offered a better system of government, and even civilization.
The acronym MICE is always helpful to describe and simplify what would motivate someone to become a traitor to their country and spy for a foreign power. CIA officers essentially have to convince someone to eat bugs, so they need to tap into deep motivations buried inside a person's private personal space.
M - money
I - ideology
C - having been compromised*
E - ego
*(pseudo-blackmail, the CIA officially states that is does not do blackmail)
Of these four, ideology is, by far, the most potent and destructively deadly.
US and UK intelligence evolved rapidly during WWII - it was the fulcrum of the partnership.
As Britain fought the early period of WWII alone, some of their wartime intelligence was actually directed at the US in the form of airing British-friendly radio programs and stealing polling data to shape propaganda. These were intended to smear any isolationist US politicians and groups such as America First.
At the time, US intelligence was asleep and a mess.
One of the main problems was its maze of competing branches and bureaucracies. Fragmentation of the organizational architecture directly contributed to America's day of infamy - Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the greatest disaster in US naval history.
American code breakers did, in fact, deliver strategic warning to Roosevelt that war with Japan is coming, but the decrypts did not reveal when or where. This was because the Japanese government never provided its own overseas diplomatic missions forewarning of the Pearl Harbor attack, leaving nothing in communications for US code breakers to detect.
It is generally concluded by much of the US intelligence community (IC) that the attack on Pearl Harbor was the result of a failure of analysis - a failure to distinguish signals from noise.
However, it can also be argued that even if there had been sufficient resources, it is doubtful whether any relevant decrypts would have found their way through Washington's labyrinth of competing bureaucracies to decision makers. This line of thinking puts Pearl Harbor a failure of both collection and analysis.
Britain fared far better, but was still well behind the Soviets intelligence capabilities.
Their code breakers (GC & CS) were based at Bletchley Park, a manor house north of London equidistant from Cambridge and Oxford; it was also known as Station X.
ULTRA, the project code named for breaking German communications during the war, gave the Allies an edge in two theatres: the Royal Navy fighting over the Atlantic and the moonlike desolation of North Africa.
Counter-espionage disinformation campaigns also played a critical role in fooling the German high command of the exact location of the D-Day invasions the Allies could now listen in to verify the Germans had been deceived.
The Germans followed a central theme common to all authoritarian regimes in which the Abwehr (German intelligence) failed to predict Soviet resistance on the eastern front. As with the Kremlin, sycophancy in Hitler's court meant any intelligence provided to him was loyal information only.
Six months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt finally created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in June 1942. This was the precursor to the CIA, and, or the first time, America had a dedicated foreign intelligence collection (espionage) and sabotage service.
The OOS - or commonly known as "Oh So Social" enjoyed unlimited funding for agents, weapons, planes, cars, and endless parties.
The service attracted adventurers, mostly the children of American dynasties and movie stars. It was one continuous cocktail party.
However, the war quickly taught the Allies the darker arts of intelligence. Realities better engrained in the cultures of the east.
The legacy of fighting side-by-side in WWII solidified the US-UK intelligence partnership, and SIGINT was where the two governments developed relations the closer that any previous nations in history.
In May 1943, they formalized the SIGINT relationship in a top secret agreement known as BRUSA, later known as UKUSA. This worked to establish a mothership of worldwide signals network from the leftover pieces of the British empire and the new American-led global order.
This has since increased with the Five Eyes Alliance to include Australia (now renamed again to AUKUS) as part of the strategy to contain a growing and belligerent China.
According to the Soviets, the Cold War was an inevitable conflict with the world's imperialist, capitalist powers in the West.
Intelligence was critical to Stalin's (and all subsequent Soviet leaders') long-term strategies against the West. Initially, he wanted to discover whether the Allies were secretly negotiating a separate peace deal with the Axis power, mainly Germany.
However, in the long-run, he wanted his intelligence services to focus on stealing scientific and technological secrets on an industrial scale to keep up with the West.
His disinformation campaigns were effective; the utopian promises of the communist ideology drove most westerners to become traitors to their countries.
Before long, Soviet-run agents had penetrated the highest levels of the US government; they had direct access to two of the most senior positions in the US government: the Secretary of the Treasury (the Fed) and the Secretary of State.
Unfortunately, some of the most important agents like Harry Dexter (code-named CASHIER) White in the Treasury department and architect to the Bretton Woods Agreement (establishment of the UN, IMF, and World Bank) or Larry Duggan (code-named 19) in the State Department died before they could be prosecuted.
Through their intelligence, there was little that Stalin did not know about US and British postwar plans for the UN.
Despite the ambiguity over their complicity, contemporary US and British SIGINT intercepts now establish their actions and guilt beyond doubt.
However, while the Kremlin knew much of the post-war plans of the West, the US and UK had no significant intelligence whatsoever about Stalin's plans.
Initially after the war, US and British intelligence agencies were focused on hunting down Nazis and bringing them to justice - not on the coming conflict with the Soviet Union.
The two blocs were heading in opposite directions. Western and Soviet divergent world views even produced basic misunderstandings on the connotations of diplomatic terminology.
Democratic West:
Peaceful coexistence = mutual coexistence
Authoritarian East:
Peaceful coexistence = continuation of class warfare
Soviet espionage had an intense dark side which incentivized many officers' ruthlessness. NKVD (KGB) and GRU officials were grimly efficient, humorless, and hard. Since many had to survive homicidal political purges, obtaining promotions most of the time meant climbing over piles of corpses from the liquidation of colleagues.
Since Moscow was a sheer fortress, this was one of the only windows for the Americans to gain information by recruiting disaffected Soviet agents.
The Truman Doctrine emerged from his dawning realization that world affairs were ugly and required spies. In 1947, he committed US $400 million to help save Greece and Türkiye from becoming communist beachheads. This decision - in turn - paved way for the much larger Marshall Plan (US $13.7 billion) in Europe.
With this, Truman overhauled US intelligence by passing the National Security Act which gave birth to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in July 1947.
***
continued in Part II
Comments