I.

Introduction

Espionage, the secret collection of information, or intelligence, that the source of such information wishes to protect from disclosure. Intelligence refers to evaluated and processed information needed to make decisions. The term can be used with reference to business, military, economic, or political decisions, but it most commonly relates to governmental foreign and defence policy. Intelligence generally has a national security connotation and therefore exists in an aura of secrecy.

Espionage, or spying, is illegal according to national laws. Spying proceeds against the attempts of counter-espionage (or counter-intelligence) agencies to protect the secrecy of the information desired.

International espionage methods and operations have few boundaries. They have been romanticized in popular fiction and the mass media, but in reality, espionage exists in a secret world of deception, fraud, and sometimes violence. Espionage involves the recruiting of agents in foreign nations; efforts to encourage the disloyalty of those possessing significant information; and audio surveillance as well as the use of a full range of modern photographic, sensing, and detection devices, and other techniques of eliciting secret information.

II.

Justification and International Sanction

In order to adopt and implement foreign policy, plan military strategy and organize armed forces, conduct diplomacy, negotiate arms control agreements, or participate in international organization activities, nations have vast information requirements. Not surprisingly, many governments maintain some kind of intelligence capability as a matter of survival in a world where dangers and uncertainties still exist. The cold war may have ended, but hostilities continue in parts of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Indeed, the collapse of old political blocs in the late 1980s has even increased international uncertainty and consequent need for information.

All nations have laws against espionage, but most sponsor spies in other lands. Because of the clandestine nature of espionage, no reliable count exists of how many intelligence officers—only a small percentage of whom are actually spies—there are in the world. A common estimate is that the United States today still employs some 200,000 intelligence personnel. The number that was generally ascribed to the Soviet intelligence establishment in the 1980s was 400,000, a figure that included border guards and internal security police.

III.

The Gathering of Intelligence

Intelligence work, including spying, proceeds in a five-step process. Initially, what the decision makers need to know is considered, and requirements are set. The second step is collecting the desired information, which requires knowing where the information is located and who can best obtain it. The information may be available in a foreign newspaper, radio broadcast, or other open source; or it may be obtained only by the most sophisticated electronic means, or by planting an agent within the decision-making system of the target area. The third step is intelligence production, in which the collected raw data are assembled, evaluated, and collated into the best possible answer to the question initially asked. The fourth step is communicating the processed information to the decision maker. To be useful, information must be presented in a timely, accurate, and understandable form. The fifth and crucial step is the use of intelligence. The decision maker may choose to ignore the information conveyed, thus possibly courting disaster; on the other hand, a judgement may be made on the basis of information that proves inaccurate. The point is that the decision maker must make the final crucial judgement about whether, or how, to use the information supplied. The intelligence process can fail at each or any of these five basic steps.

A.

Recruitment of Agents

Today, scores of developed nations have efficient intelligence organizations with systematic programmes for recruiting new agents. Agents come from three main sources: the university world, where students are sought and trained for intelligence careers; the armed services and police forces, where some degree of intelligence proficiency may already have been attained; and the underground world of espionage, which produces an assortment of people, including criminal informers, with relevant experience.

Those who do the actual spying, which may involve stealing information or performing disloyal acts of disclosure, are led to this work by various motivations. Greed or financial need is a leading incentive in many cases, but other motivations, such as ambition, political ideology, or nationalistic idealism, can figure importantly: Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a highly placed Soviet officer, provided valuable information to Western intelligence services in the belief that the West must be warned of danger. H. A. R. (“Kim”) Philby, the notorious English spy, worked for the Soviet Union on ideological grounds.

Some spies must be carefully recruited and enticed into cooperation; others volunteer. The latter must be handled with extreme caution, as it is common for double agents to be among the volunteers. Double agents are spies who pretend to be defecting, but in reality maintain their original loyalty. Counter-intelligence staffs are always sceptical of volunteers or defectors and restrict their use for positive espionage purposes. In some cases, the most valuable spy of all is the “agent-in-place”, the person who remains in a position of trust with access to highly secret information, but who has been recruited by a foreign intelligence service; such a spy is known as a “mole”.

A high-priority espionage target is the penetration of the various international terrorist organizations. If the leadership of such units can be infiltrated by spies, advance knowledge can be obtained of the location and identity of intended victims, the nature of the disguises being used by the hit team, and the secret sources of weapons. Such information could be used to foil terrorist operations. International drug trafficking, it has been asserted, can similarly be thwarted by effective espionage, but the problem is complex, and only limited success has been achieved.

B.

Espionage Agencies and Networks

The world's intelligence, espionage, counter-intelligence, and covert action programmes may be said to follow three distinct organizational patterns: the American, the totalitarian (exemplified by the Communist regimes), and the British (parliamentary) systems. Similarities exist among them, yet distinctions are sharp.

In the United States the Central Intelligence Agency continues to sit at the corner of an elaborate complex of some dozen separate intelligence organizations. Each has a specific role and a carefully guarded area of operations. The director of central intelligence is both head of the CIA and the president's principal intelligence adviser. In the latter job the director theoretically coordinates all the separate intelligence units, setting their requirements, budgets, and operational assignments. In reality, many of the major units in the system—such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the huge National Security Agency/Central Security Service, both part of the Department of Defense—operate in quasi-independence. The National Security Agency, which engages in code making and code breaking, the science of cryptography, is much larger in staff size and budget than the CIA. The military also maintains a major tactical intelligence capability to assist field commanders in making on-the-spot decisions. Other major units in the US intelligence system include the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration of the Department of Justice. The US model influenced the intelligence structures of those countries where the United States was dominant at the end of World War II, such as West Germany (now part of the united Federal Republic of Germany), Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

In contrast to the federated American intelligence structure, the typical totalitarian setup is highly centralized. In the Soviet Union, the power of the KGB pervaded every aspect of national life. Its director was generally a powerful member of the Politburo (the governing political committee of the USSR). The KGB had two chief directorates. The most important was the First Directorate, which was responsible for foreign intelligence gathering. The Second Directorate's principal responsibilities involved providing counter-espionage protection to the regime and recruiting foreign agents within the Soviet Union. Its targets included diplomats and journalists stationed in the USSR, foreign students, business people, tourists, and visiting delegations. Most Eastern European governments followed the KGB model in their intelligence operations. China, Cuba, and other Communist nations still do.

The third model of intelligence systems is the British, a confederation of agencies coordinated by a Cabinet subcommittee and accountable to the Cabinet and prime minister. The two principal units are the Secret Intelligence Service (often called MI6, signifying “military intelligence”) and the Security Service (popularly called MI5). These labels reflect the military origins of these services, which are now in the civilian sector. MI6 is similar to the CIA and the KGB in that it carries out espionage, counter-espionage, and covert action overseas. MI5 is charged with domestic counter-intelligence and internal security. Scotland Yard maintains a “special branch”, which operates as the overt arm of the security service; it makes arrests and offers evidence in espionage cases while MI5 agents remain in the background. A number of specialized units also operate within the British intelligence community. These include the Government Communications Centre (for code making and breaking), the Ministry of Defence intelligence sections, and various Foreign Office intelligence groups. With some national variations, the intelligence services of France, Italy, Israel, and the Commonwealth of Nations countries follow the general British pattern of organization.

IV.

History of Espionage

Intelligence was early recognized as a vital tool of statecraft—of diplomacy or war. Writing almost 2,500 years ago, the Chinese military theorist Sunzi stressed the importance of intelligence. His book The Art of War (c. 500 bc) gave detailed instructions for organizing an espionage system that would include double agents and defectors. Intelligence, however, was haphazardly organized by rulers and military chiefs until the rise of nationalism in the 18th century and the growth of standing armies and diplomacy.

A.

19th Century

Political espionage is thought to have first been used systematically by Joseph Fouché, duc d'Otrante, minister of police during the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon. Under Fouché's direction, a network of police agents and professional spies uncovered conspiracies to seize power organized by the Jacobins and by Bourbon Royalist émigrés. The Austrian statesman Prince von Metternich also established an efficient organization of political and military spies early in the 19th century. Better known than either of these organizations was the dreaded Okhrana (Department for Defence of Public Security and Order) of the Russian tsars, created in 1825 to uncover opposition to the regime.

During the mid-19th century the secret police of Prussia was reorganized and invested with the duty of safeguarding the external as well as the internal security of the country. The Prussian espionage system played an important part in preparations to unify the German states in the German Empire. It also covered France with a network of about 30,000 agents whose work contributed to the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Not until the latter part of the 19th century, however, were permanent intelligence bureaux created by modern states.

B.

Early 20th Century

Systematic espionage aided the Japanese in defeating the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. In preparing for World War I the Germans again flooded France with a host of agents, some of whom were disguised as trade representatives, teachers, agricultural labourers, or domestics. The most famous of these agents was Mata Hari, who posed as an Indian dancer in Paris. German agents also engaged in attempts to sabotage American national defence both before and after the US entry into World War I.

Most nations, however, entered World War I with inadequate espionage staffs, and the war was frequently fought on the basis of poor intelligence. The lessons of that war, along with rapid advances in technology, especially in communications and aviation, spurred a major growth in intelligence agencies. This was further stimulated by the advent of Fascist governments in Europe and a military dictatorship in Japan, all of which had expansionist foreign policies, and the creation of counter-espionage agencies such as the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. These developments led other, democratic countries to establish counter-espionage systems as well.

C.

World War II

World War II was the great stimulus to intelligence services worldwide. Modern military and communications technology put a premium on accurate and quick information, as well as on efforts to protect the security of sensitive information. Some of the great battles of World War II were actually intelligence and counter-intelligence battles. Only in recent years have some of the exploits, and failures, in this secret war been disclosed. Notable is Operation Double Cross, in which the British captured practically all the German spies in Great Britain during the war and turned them into double agents who sent false information back to Germany. Also, the British and their allies were able to break the German secret code, providing access to many of the enemy's secret transmissions.

The surprise attack by Japan on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a great intelligence success for the Japanese and an intelligence failure for the Americans. That failure stimulated the post-war growth of a massive intelligence apparatus in the United States. Before World War II the United States had virtually no intelligence system; after the war the CIA became world famous for its pervasive international surveillance, joining the MI6, the KGB, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage of France, Israel's foreign intelligence agency Mossad, China's Social Affairs Department, and numerous other intelligence agencies in a massive network of espionage and counter-espionage efforts.

D.

Modern Era

In the mid-1970s, as a result of disillusionment with the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the policies of détente, many Americans began to question the role of the CIA. Mass-media disclosures of intelligence agency abuses and failures were followed by investigations by presidential commissions and congressional committees, which resulted in new guidelines for secret operations and a new structure for executive and legislative supervision. Controversy over the CIA's role and control remains, however. One result is an ever-increasing amount of public information about intelligence services around the world. In Britain, MI5 remained unrecognized by statute until 1989, and MI6 until 1994.

E.

Espionage in Politics and Industry

Intelligence and espionage are terms most commonly associated with national foreign policies, yet secret information is needed to make decisions in politics, commerce, and industry. Political parties have always been interested in the strategic plans of their opponents or in any information that might discredit them.

Most large corporate enterprises today have divisions for strategic planning that require intelligence reports. Competitive enterprises are undeniably interested in the plans of their competitors; despite laws against such practices, industrial espionage is difficult to detect and control and is known to be an active tool for gaining such foreknowledge. Many of the tools of government intelligence work are used, including electronic surveillance and aerial photographic reconnaissance, and attempts are even made to recruit defectors.

F.

Implications of Modern Technology

All forms and techniques of intelligence are now aided by an accelerating technology of communications and a variety of computing and measuring devices. Miniaturized cameras and microfilm have made it easier for people engaged in all forms of espionage to photograph secret documents and conceal the films. Artificial satellites also have an espionage function—that of aerial photography for such purposes as detecting secret military installations. Information held or programmes running on computers are vulnerable to penetration by hackers, whether acting independently or for other bodies. The vanguard of these developments is highly secret, but it is known that telephones can be tapped without wires, rooms can be bugged (planted with electronic listening and recording devices) without entry, and photographs can be made in the dark. Of course this same technology is used in countermeasures, and the competition escalates between those seeking secret information and those trying to protect it.

In foreign embassies in sensitive areas, confidential discussions routinely take place in plastic bubbles encasing secure rooms, to protect the confidentiality of information. Intelligence agencies have long been known to be staffed with expert lip readers. Privacy of communications remains under constant assault by technological developments that offer threats to, but perhaps also promises for, human progress.