The Craft of Intelligence Read online

  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.

  5

  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 whethe
r 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.”

  1The Second World War (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1948–53).

  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.

  I am, of course, not speaking here of ordinary mail, although postal censorship has itself often played a significant role in intelligence work. However, except in the detection of secret writing, there is little technology involved in postal censorship. Modern communications intelligence, on the other hand, is a highly technical field, one that has engaged the best mathematical minds in an unceasing war of wits that can easily be likened to the battle for scientific information which I described a little earlier.

  Every government takes infinite pains to invent unbreakable systems of communication and to protect these systems and the personnel needed to run them. At the same time, it will do everything in its power to gain access or insight into the communications of other governments whose policies or actions may be of real concern to it. The reasons for this state of affairs on both sides is obvious. The contents of official government messages, political or military, on “sensitive” subjects constitute, especially in times of crisis, the best and “hottest” intelligence that one government can hope to gather about another.

  There is a vast difference betw
een the amateur and professional terminology in this field. If I stick to the amateur terms, I shall probably offend the professionals, and if I use the professional terms, I shall probably bore and confuse the amateur. My choice is an unhappy one and I will be brief. In a code, some word, symbol or group of symbols is substituted for a whole word or even for a group of words or a complete thought. Thus, “XLMDP” or “79648,” depending upon whether a letter or number code is used, could stand for “war” and every time they turn up in a message that is what they mean. When the Japanese Government set up the famous “East Winds” code for their diplomats in the United States in December, 1941, they were prepared to indicate through the simplest prearranged code words that an attack in the Pacific was forthcoming.

  In a cipher, a symbol, such as a letter or number, stands for a single letter in a word. Thus, “b” or “2” can mean “e” or some other letter. In simple ciphers the same symbol always stands for the same letter. In the complex ciphers used today, the same symbol can stand for a different letter each time it turns up. Sometimes a message is first put into code, and then the code is put into cipher.

  The United States military forces were able to resort to rather unusual “ready-made” codes during World War I, and in a few instances during World War II, in communications between units in the field. These resources were our native American Indian languages, chiefly the Navajo language, which has no written forms and had never been closely studied by foreign scholars. Two members of the same tribe at either end of a field telephone could transmit messages which no listener except another Navajo could possibly understand. Needless to say, neither the Germans nor the Japanese had any Navajos.