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.