The Craft of Intelligence (27 page)

An unusual writer on certain aspects of intelligence work is Joseph Conrad. I would venture to suggest that Conrad’s Polish background is responsible for his native insights into the ways of conspiracy and the way of the spy. His own father was exiled and two of his uncles executed for their part in a plot against the Russians. The Poles have had long experience in conspiracy, as long as the Russians and, in great measure, thanks to Russian attempts to dominate them.

Being the kind of man he was, Conrad was not likely to tell a spy story for the sake of the adventure and the suspense. He was interested in the moral conflicts, in the baseness of men and their saving virtues. Conrad does not even exploit the inherent complexities of the spy stories he invents because it is not what primarily interests him.

The literature on intelligence which I find the most engrossing is of the Conrad type—stories that deal with the motivation of the spy, the informer, the traitor. Among these who have spied against their own country, there is the ideological spy, the conspiratorial spy, the venal spy and the entrapped spy. At different times in history one or the other of these motifs seems to dominate, and sometimes there is a combination of more than one motif. Klaus Fuchs was the typical ideological spy, Guy Burgess the conspiratorial type, the Swedish Colonel Stig Wennerstrom apparently was the venal spy, and William Vassall the typical case of entrapment—and finally there is the spy of fiction. And if at least we get pleasure in reading about him, let us keep him for such uses—even though he be a myth.

MISHAPS

In 1938, a Soviet intelligence officer working undercover in the United States sent a pair of pants to the cleaners. In one of the pockets, there was a batch of documents delivered by an agent employed in the Office of Naval Intelligence. It was not easy to press the pants with the documents in the pocket, so the pants presser removed them and in so doing brought to light one of the most flagrant cases of Soviet espionage in American experience up to that time. It was also one of the most flagrant instances of carelessness on the part of a trained intelligence officer on record. The officer, whose name was Gorin, was eventually returned to the Soviet Union, where he surely must have been shot for his sloppiness.

There have been some notorious cases of briefcases left behind in taxis or trains by people who should have known better. A sudden and inexplicable absent-mindedness can sometimes momentarily afflict a man who has been carefully trained in intelligence and security. But the gross mishap is usually not the fault of the intelligence officer. More often it results from the arbitrary or even the well-meaning behavior of outsiders who have no idea what the consequences of their acts may be, and from technical failures and from accidents.

The kind landlady of a rather busy roomer noticed that his spare pair of shoes was down at the heels. She took them to the cobbler’s one day on her own. It was a favor. The cobbler removed the old heels and discovered that in each was a hollow compartment containing some strips of paper covered with writing. Of course he informed the police.

One of my most important German sources during my days in Switzerland in World War II almost had a serious mishap because his initials were in his hat. One evening he was dining alone with me in my house in Bern. My cook detected that we were speaking German. While we were enjoying her excellent food—she was a better cook than a spy—she slipped out of the kitchen, examined the source’s hat and took down his initials. The next day, she reported to her Nazi contact the fact that a man, who from his speech was obviously German, had visited me and she gave his initials.

My source was the representative in Zurich of Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence. He frequently visited the German Legation in Bern. When he next called there, a couple of days after our dinner, two senior members of the legation, who had already seen the cook’s report, took him aside and accused him of having contact with me. He was equal to the assault. Fixing the senior of them with his eyes, he sternly remarked that he had, in fact, been dining with me, that I was one of his chief sources of intelligence about Allied affairs and that if they ever mentioned this to anyone, he would see to it that they were immediately removed from the diplomatic service. He added that his contacts with me were known only to Admiral Canaris and at the highest levels in the German government. They humbly apologized to my friend and, as far as I know, they kept their mouths shut.

Everybody learned a lesson from this—I that my cook was a spy; my German contact that he should remove his initials from his hat; and all of us that attack is the best defense and that if agent A is working with agent B, one sometimes never knows until the day of judgment who, after all, is deceiving whom. It was, of course, a close shave, and only a courageous bluff saved the day. Fortunately, in this case my contact’s bona fides was quickly established. The cook’s activities eventually landed her in a Swiss jail.

The Sorge Communist network in Japan was broken in 1942 as the result of an action which was not intended to accomplish this end at all. In fact, the person who caused the mishap knew nothing about Sorge or his ring.

Early in 1941, the Japanese began rounding up native Communists on suspicion of espionage. One of these, a certain Ito Ritsu, who had nothing to do with espionage, pretended to cooperate with the police while under interrogation by naming a number of people as suspects who were basically harmless. One of those he named was a Mrs. Kitabayashi, who had once been Communist but had forsaken Communism while living in the United States and had become a Seventh-Day Adventist. In 1936, she had returned to Japan and sometime later had been approached by another Japanese Communist she had known in the United States, an artist by the name of Miyagi, who was a member of the Sorge ring. Miyagi had thus exposed himself to Mrs. Kitabayashi needlessly, it seems, since she, as a teacher of sewing, could not have had access to any information of interest to Sorge. Ritsu knew nothing of all this. He apparently denounced Mrs. Kitabayashi out of malice, to get her into trouble, because she had ceased being a Communist. When the police arrested Mrs. Kitabayashi, however, she gave away Miyagi. Miyagi in turn led to one of the highly placed sources of Sorge, Ozaki, and so it went until the entire ring was rounded up.

It is, of course, true that the larger a network is, with its many links and the need for communication between its various members, the greater are its chances of being discovered. Nevertheless, nothing that any of Sorge’s very numerous and very active agents ever did aroused the attention of the police at any time. The officers who talked to Mrs. Kitabayashi couldn’t have been more surprised when they were led, link after link, into one of the most effective espionage webs that ever existed. The discovery was purely the result of a mishap and one that no amount of careful planning could have avoided, except for just one precaution which the Soviets often failed to take: don’t use anyone in espionage who ever was known as a party member.

The little slips or oversights which can give away the whole show may sometimes be the fault of the intelligence service itself, not of the officer handling the agent, but of the technicians who produce for the agent the materials necessary to his mission—the false bottom of a suitcase that comes apart under the rough handling of a customs officer, a formula for secret writing that doesn’t quite work. Forged documents are perhaps the greatest pitfall. Every intelligence service collects and studies new documents from all over the world and the modifications in old ones in order to provide agents with documents that are “authentic” in every detail and up-to-date. But occasionally there is a slip that couldn’t be helped and an observant border official, who sees hundreds of passports every day, may notice that the traveler’s passport has a serial number that doesn’t quite jibe with the date of issue, or a visa signed by a consul who just happened to drop dead two weeks before the date he was supposed to have signed it. Even the least imaginative border control officer knows that such discrepancies can point to only one thing. No one but the agent of an intelligence service would have the facilities working for him that are needed to produce such a document, which is artistically and technically perfect except in one unfortunate detail.

Then there is fate, the unexpected intervention of impersonal forces, accidents, natural calamities, man-made obstacles that weren’t there the week before, or simply the perversity of inanimate things, the malfunctioning of machinery. An agent on a mission can drop dead of a heart attack, be hit by a truck or take the plane that crashes. This may end the mission or it may do more. In March 1941, Captain Ludwig von der Osten, who had just arrived in New York to take over the direction of a network of Nazi spies in the United States, was hit by a taxi while crossing Broadway at Forty-fifth Street and fatally injured. Although a quick-thinking accomplice managed to grab his briefcase and get away, a notebook found on von der Osten’s body and various papers in his hotel room pointed to the fact that he was a German masquerading as a Spaniard and undoubtedly involved in espionage. When, shortly after the accident, postal censorship at Bermuda discovered a reference to the accident in some highly suspicious correspondence that had regularly been going from the United States to Spain, the FBI was able to get on the trail of the Nazi spy ring von der Osten was to manage. In March of 1942, their work culminated in the trial and conviction of Kurt F. Ludwig and eight associates. It was Ludwig who had been with von der Osten when the taxi hit him and who had been maintaining the secret correspondence with Nazi intelligence via Spain.

One windy night during the war a parachutist was dropped into France who was supposed to make contact with the French underground. He should have landed in an open field outside the town but was blown off course and landed instead in the middle of the audience at an open-air movie. It happened to be a special showing for the SS troops stationed nearby.

The now famous Berlin tunnel which went from West to East Berlin in order to reach and tap the Soviet communications lines in East Germany was a clever and relatively comfortable affair which had its own heating system, since Berlin winters are cold. The first time it snowed, a routine inspection aboveground showed, to the inspector’s immense dismay, that the snow just about the tunnel was melting because of the heat coming up from underneath. In no time at all a beautiful path was going to appear in the snow going from West to East Berlin which any watchful policeman couldn’t help but notice. He quickly reported what he had seen. The heat was turned off and in short order refrigeration devices were installed in the tunnel. Fortunately, it continued to snow and the path was quickly covered over. In all the complex and detailed planning that had gone into the design of this tunnel, this was something no one had anticipated. It was a near mishap in one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken. Most intelligence operations have a limited span of usefulness—a tunnel, a U-2 and the like. This is assumed when the project starts. The difficult decision is when to taper off and when to stop.

The Soviets eventually did discover the Berlin communications tunnel and subsequently turned the East Berlin end of it into a public exhibit as proof to the East Germans of the long-advertised Soviet contention that the Allies only wanted to hold West Berlin because it was a convenient springboard for spying on the East. The Soviets set up an open-air beer-and-sausage stand near the spot so that the German burghers with their families could make a Sunday afternoon outing of their visit to the tunnel. This backfired, however, since the reaction of the visitors and the public in general was quite different from what the Soviets expected and wanted. Instead of shaking their fists at the West, the Germans got a good laugh at the Soviets because somebody had finally put something over on them and they were silly enough to boast of it. The beer-and-sausage establishment was quickly dismantled.

There is no single field of intelligence work in which the accidental mishap is more frequent or more frustrating than in communications. One of the best illustrations of this kind of mishap can be found in a well-known literary work which couldn’t have less to do with intelligence. The reader will probably recall the incident in Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
when the important message Tess slips under Angel Clare’s door slides beneath the carpet that reaches close to the sill and is never recovered by the intended recipient, with grievous consequences for all.

Messages for agents are often put into “drops” or “caches,” as places of concealment are called. These may be anywhere above ground or below ground, in buildings or out of doors. The Bolsheviks, like Dr. Bancroft, Franklin’s secretary, used to prefer the hollow of a tree. Today there are safer and more devious contrivances by which means papers can be protected against weather and soil for long periods of time. In one case, the material was actually buried in the ground at a spot near the side of a road that had been used before successfully and was generally unfrequented day and night. On the occasion in question, the site was clear when the message was put into the ground, but when the agent came some days later to retrieve it, he found a mountain of dirt on top of it. In that short space of time between the placement and the arrival of the agent, the highway authorities had decided to widen the road and had begun to do so.

For obvious reasons, intelligence operations will often make use of public toilets as a place to cache messages. In some countries, they are about the only places where anyone can be sure of being absolutely alone. Even in such a place, luck can run against you. In one instance, the cleaning staff decided to convert one of the booths into a makeshift closet for their brooms, mops and buckets and they put a lock on the door. This was naturally the booth in which the message was hidden, and the conversion took place in the time between the placing of the message and the arrival of the agent to retrieve it.

In operations making use of radio communications, there can be a failure of the equipment on either the sending or receiving end. Communications making use of the mails can easily fail for at least ten good and bad reasons.

Often trains are late and a courier doesn’t arrive in time to make contact with an agent who has been told not to wait longer than a certain time. To avoid this sort of accidental interruption of communications, most good operations have alternate or emergency plans which go into effect when the primary system fails, but here we begin to run into the problem of overload and overcomplexity, which is another quite distinct cause of mishaps. A person under some stress can commit just so much complex planning to memory, and will usually not have the plan written down because this is too dangerous. Or if he does have it written down, his notes may be so cryptic that he cannot decipher them when he needs to, even though when he wrote them down his shorthand seemed to be a clever and unmistakable reminder.

One of the simplest and oldest of all dodges used by intelligence in making arrangements for meetings calls for adding or subtracting days and hours from the time stipulated in a phone conversation or other message, just in case the enemy intercepts such a message. The agent has been told, let us say, to add one day and subtract two hours. Tuesday at eleven really means Wednesday at nine. When the agent was first dispatched, he knew this as well as his own name. No need to write it down in any form. Three months later, however, when he gets his first message calling him to a meeting, panic suddenly seizes him. Was it plus one day and minus two hours or was it minus one day and plus two hours? Or was it perhaps plus two days and minus one hour? Or was it . . . and so on. This is, of course, a very simple instance and hardly an example of the complex arrangements often in force.