The Craft of Intelligence (17 page)

In today’s spy-conscious world, each side tries to make the opponent’s acquisition of intelligence as difficult as possible by taking “security measures” in order to protect classified information, vital installations and personnel from enemy penetration. These measures, while indispensable as basic safeguards, become in the end a challenge to the opponent’s intelligence technicians to devise even more ingenious ways of getting around the obstacles.

Clearly, if a country wishes to protect itself against the unceasing encroachments of hostile intelligence services, it must do more than keep an eye on foreign travelers crossing its borders, more than placing guards around its “sensitive” areas, more than checking on the loyalty of its employees in sensitive positions. It must also find out what the intelligence services of hostile countries are after, how they are proceeding and what kind of people they are using as agents and who they are.

Operations having this distinct aim belong to the field of counterespionage, and the information that is derived from them is called counterintelligence. Counterespionage is inherently a protective and defensive operation. Its primary purpose is to thwart espionage against one’s country, but it may also be extremely useful in uncovering hostile penetration and subversive plots against other free countries. Given the nature of Communist aims, counterespionage on our side is directly concerned with uncovering secret aggression, subversion and sabotage. Although such information is not, like positive intelligence, of primary use to the government in the formation of policy, it often alerts our government to the nature of the thrusts of its opponents and the area in which political action on our part may be required.

In 1954, the discovery of concealed arms shipments, a whole boatload of them, en route from Czechoslovakia to Guatemala first alerted us to the fact that massive Soviet support was being given to strengthen the position of a Communist regime in that country.

The function of counterespionage is assigned to various U.S. agencies, each of which has a special area of responsibility. The FBI’s province is the territory of the United States itself, where, among other duties, it guards against the hostile activities of foreign agents on our own soil. The CIA has the major responsibility for counterespionage outside the United States, thereby constituting a forward line of defense against foreign espionage. It attempts to detect the operations of hostile intelligence before the agents reach their targets. Each branch of the armed forces also has a counterintelligence arm whose purpose is mainly to protect its commands, technical establishments and personnel both at home and abroad against enemy penetration.

The effectiveness of this division of labor depends upon the coordination of the separate agencies and on the rapid dissemination of counterintelligence information from one to the other.

It was a coordinated effort that resulted in the capture of Soviet spymaster Colonel Rudolf Abel. In May, 1957, Reino Hayhanen, a close associate and co-worker of Colonel Abel in the United States, was on his way back to the Soviet Union to make his report. While in Western Europe, he decided to defect and approached U.S. intelligence, showing an American passport obtained on the basis of a false birth certificate. Hayhanen’s fantastic story of espionage included specifics as to secret caches of funds, communications among agents in his network and certain details regarding Colonel Abel. All this information was immediately transmitted to Washington and passed to the FBI for verification. Hayhanen’s story stood up in every respect. He came back willingly to the United States and became the chief witness at the trial against Abel.

As soon as Hayhanen reached our shores, primary responsibility for him was transferred to the FBI, while CIA continued to handle foreign angles.

The classical aims of counterespionage are “to locate, identify and neutralize” the opposition. “Neutralizing” can take many forms. Within the United States an apprehended spy can be prosecuted under the law; so can a foreign intelligence officer who is caught red-handed if he does not have diplomatic immunity. If he has immunity, he is generally expelled. But there are other ways of neutralizing the hostile agent, and one of the best is exposure or the threat of exposure. A spy is not of much further use once his name, face and story are in the papers.

The target of U.S. counterespionage is massive and diverse because the Soviets use not only their own intelligence apparatus against us, but also those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria, all of which are old in the ways of espionage if not of Communism. Chinese Communist espionage and counterespionage operations are largely independent of Moscow, though many of their senior personnel in earlier days were schooled by Soviet intelligence.

Although the purpose of counterespionage is defensive, its methods are essentially offensive. Its idea goal is to discover hostile intelligence plans in their earliest stages rather than after they have begun to do their damage. To do this, it tries to penetrate the inner circle of hostile services at the highest possible level where the plans are made and the agents selected and trained, and, if the job can be managed, to bring over to its side “insiders” from the other camp.

One of the most famous cases of successful high-level penetration of an intelligence service is that of Alfred Redl, who from 1901 to 1905 was chief of counterespionage in the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s military intelligence service, and later its representative in Prague. From the available evidence it would appear that from 1902 until he was caught in 1913 Redl was a secret agent of the Russians, having been trapped by them early in his intelligence career on the basis of two weaknesses—homosexuality and overwhelming venality. He also sold some of his wares at the same time to the Italians and the French. But that wasn’t all. As a leading officer of the military intelligence, Redl was a member of the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army and had access to the General Staff’s war plans, which he also gave to the Russians.

Despite the fact that Redl was apprehended just before the war, his suicide at the “invitation” of his superior officers immediately after his treachery was discovered eliminated the possibility of interrogating him and determining the extent of the damage he had done. The Austrians were more interested in hushing up the scandal. Even the Emperor was not told of it at first.

Ironically enough, Redl was caught by a counterespionage measure—postal censorship—which he himself had developed to a point of high efficiency when he had been counterespionage chief. Two letters containing large sums of banknotes and nothing else were inspected at the General Delivery Office of the Vienna Post Office. Since they had been sent from a border town in East Prussia to a most peculiar-sounding addressee, they were considered highly suspicious. For almost three months the Austrian police doggedly waited for someone to come and collect the envelopes. Finally Redl came, and the rest is history. However, it still amazes counterintelligence specialists who study the case today that the Russians, in an operation of such immense significance to them, could have resorted to such careless devices for getting money to their agent, especially since postal censorship was one of the favorite counterespionage devices of the Okhrana itself.

It is, of course, not necessary to recruit the chief, as in the Redl case. His secretary, had he had one, might have done almost as well. Actually, the size of a major intelligence organization today makes it impossible for the chief to be concerned with all the operational details an opposing service would wish to know. Not only that, but today the headquarters of an intelligence organization are as “impenetrable” as the best minds assigned to the task can make them. As a consequence, counterespionage usually aims at more accessible and vulnerable targets directly concerned with field operations. These targets will often be the offices and units which intelligence services maintain in foreign countries. As is well known, they are frequently found in embassies, consulates and trade delegations, which may afford the intelligence officer the protection of diplomatic immunity as well as a certain amount of “cover.”

How does the counterespionage agent “penetrate” his target? By what means can he gain access to the personnel of another intelligence service? One of the ways is to come supplied with beguiling information and offer it and his services to the opposition. Since some of the most crucial intelligence in recent history has been delivered by people who just turned up out of a clear sky, no intelligence service can afford to reject out of hand an offer of information. Of course, behind the Iron Curtain and in most diplomatic establishments of the Soviet bloc outside the Curtain, the general distrust and suspicion of strangers is such that an uninvited visitor, no matter what he is offering, may not go beyond the receptionist. In the end, however, his ability to get a foot in the door depends on the apparent quality of the information he is offering. Every intelligence service has the problem of distinguishing, when such unsolicited offers come along, between a bona fide volunteer and a penetration agent who has been sent in by the other side. This is no easy matter.

If counterespionage succeeds in “planting” its penetration agent with the opposing service, it is hoped that the agent, once he is hired by the opposition, will be given increasingly sensitive assignments. All of them are reported duly by the agent to the intelligence service running the “penetration.”

The Soviets used this method against Allied intelligence offices in West Germany and Austria during the 1950s. Refugees from the East were so numerous at that time that it was necessary to employ the better-educated ones to help in the screening and interrogation of their fellow refugees. The Soviets determined to take advantage of this situation and cleverly inserted agents in the refugee channel, providing them with information about conditions behind the Curtain which could not fail to make them seem of great interest to Western intelligence. Their task for the Soviets was to find out about our methods of handling refugees, to get acquainted with our personnel and also to keep tabs on those among the refugees who might be susceptible to recruitment as future Soviet agents.

This same penetration tactic can be used to quite a different end, namely, provocation, which has an ancient and dishonorable tradition. The expression
agent provocateur
points to French origins and was a device used in France during times of political unrest, but it is the Russians again who made a fine art of provocation. It was the main technique of the czarist Okhrana in smoking out revolutionaries and dissenters. An agent joined a subversive group and not only spied and reported on it to the police, but incited it to take some kind of action which would provide the pretext for arresting any or all of its members. Since the agent reported to the police exactly when and where the action was going to take place, the police had no problems.

Actually, such operations could become immensely subtle, complicated and dramatic. The more infamous of the czarist
agents provocateurs
have all the earmarks of characters out of Dostoevski. In order to incite a revolutionary group to the action that would bring the police down on it, the
provocateur
himself had to play the role of revolutionary leader and terrorist. If the police wished to round up large numbers of persons on serious charges, then the revolutionary group had to do something extreme, something more serious than merely holding clandestine meetings. As a result, we encounter some astounding situations in the Russia of the early 1900s.

The most notorious of all czarist
provocateurs
, the agent Azeff, appears to have originated the idea of murdering the Czar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Sergius, and the Minister of the Interior, Plehwe. The murders then gave the Okhrana the opportunity of arresting the terrorists.

One of Lenin’s closest associates from 1912 until the Revolution, Roman Malinovsky, was, in fact, a czarist police agent and
provocateur
, suspected by Lenin’s entourage but always defended by Lenin. Malinvosky helped reveal the whereabouts of secret printing presses, secret meetings and conspiracies to the police, but his main achievement was far more dramatic. He got himself elected, with police assistance and with Lenin’s innocent blessing, as representative of the Bolshevik faction to the Russian parliament, the Duma. There he distinguished himself as an orator for the Bolsheviks. The police often had to ask him to restrain the revolutionary ardor of his speeches. Indeed, in the cases of both Azeff and Malinovsky, as with many “doubles,” there is some question as to where their allegiance really lay. Since they played their “cover” roles so well, they seem at times to have been carried away by them and to have believed in them at least temporarily.

Nowadays when you read in the paper that an individual has been expelled from one of the Soviet bloc countries, it is frequently either a completely arbitrary charge, often in reprisal for our having caught and expelled a Soviet bloc intelligence officer in the Untied States, or else it is the result of a provocation.

The routine goes like this. One day a foreigner behind the Iron Curtain is called upon at home or encountered in a restaurant, on the street or even in his office by a member of the “underground” or by someone who feigns dissatisfaction with the regime and offers important information. The “target” may accept the information and continue to meet the informant. If so, sooner or later during one of these meetings, the local security police “arrest” the informant for giving information to a foreign power. The target may find his name in the paper, and, if he is an official, his embassy will receive a request from the local Foreign Office that he leave the country within twenty-four hours. The informant was, of course, a provocation agent planted by the police.

Even though these incidents are generally faked, much of the world audience whom the Soviets try to impress will not recognize them for what they are. Whenever the Soviets can accuse the West of spying, of abusing their diplomatic privileges, of meddling in the affairs of the “peace-loving socialist republics,” they will do so; and concrete instances of Westerners “caught in the act” provide the best ammunition for their propaganda.