ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOFS THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE BY ALLEN DULLES

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• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70-00058R000100260001-1
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• Document Page Count: 281
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 2, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 1, 1963
• Content Type: BOOK

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ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOFS
The Craft of
TELLIGENCE
by
Allen Dulles
NEW YORK, EV ANSTON, AND LONDON
HARPER ROW, PUBLISHERS
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This engrossing book is based on Mr. Dulles' unequaled experi-
ence as a diplomat and an intelligence officer. Mr. Dulles was with
the Central Intelligence Agency more than ten years, the last eight
as its Director. Here he sums up what he has learned from nearly a
half-century of experience in diplomacy, espionage, counterespio-
nage, and the clandestine side of foreign affairs.
In World War II his agents penetrated the German Foreign Office
and worked with the anti-Nazi underground resistance. Under his
direction the CIA developed both a dedicated corps of specialists and
a whole range of new intelligence devices, from the U-2 high-altitude
photographic plane to minute electronic listening equipment. His
knowledge of Soviet espionage techniques is unrivaled and he has
studied the history of espionage from the Biblical Joshua to the
British spy who "assisted" Benjamin Franklin.
Mr. Dulles reveals much about how intelligence is collected and
processed, how analyses of this information contribute to the forma-
tion of national policy. He discusses methods of confusing the adver-
sary, of surveillance and the usefulness of defectors from hostile
nations. He explains how the Soviet State Security Service recruits
operatives and plants "illegals" in foreign countries. He spells out
not only the techniques of modern espionage but also the philosophy
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653
FAR ER BEARER
BEAR BPARFP
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
by Allen Dulles
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spiracy. ,
Mr. Dulles denies that the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was based on
a CIA estimate that a popular Cuban uprising would ensue. He
warns that the Soviets will step up their conspiracy activities against
the West. He defends the practice of secret intelligence in a free
society and offers arguments opposing more Congressional controls
over CIA activities.
This account is enlivened with a wealth of personal anecdote. It is
a book uniquely authoritative and revealing for readers who seek -
wider understanding of intelligence operations in the cold war era.
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Stail
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2 The Craft of 1.ntelligence 653
ani_BEARER
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The Craft of Intelligence
BE
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3 The Craft of Intelligence
653
alum
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Books by Allen Dulles
GERMANY'S UNDERGROUND
THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
CAN WE BE NEUTRAL?
(with Hamilton Fish Armstrong)
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CAN AMERICA STAY NEUTRAL?
(with Hamilton Fish Armstrong)
all _EA_DL..
z AR R A-
The Craft of
INTELLIGENCE
by
Allen Dulles
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NEW YORK, EVANSTON, AND LONDON
H A R P147,11 R() W, P UB LISHERS
aw BEARER?
A " _
c AR B? F2
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4
The Craft of Intelligence
653
.1: ? ?
z EA B AR
ER B AR R
SOME OilHE MATERIAL IN THIS BOOK .ORICINALLY APPEARED IN DIFFERENT FORM
IN THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA YEARBOOK OF 1963.
Ii IF GRAFT OF IMIELLICENCE. Copyright g 1963 by Allen HT. Duiles. Printed
in the United States of .4 merica. All rights reserved. No part of this book may he
used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical anicles and reviews. For in-
formation address Harper & Row, Publishers., Incorporated, 49 East 33rd Street,
New York 16, N.Y.
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FIRST EDITION
I L-N
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NI NI ILER: 6-16507
EsER WEARER BEARER BEARER BEA
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CONTENTs
BEA
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1 A PERSONAL NOTE
2 THE HISTORICAL SETTING
3 THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE
4 THE INTELLIGENCE REQUIREMENTS OF
A FREE SOCIETY
5 THE TASK OF COLLECTION
6 COLLECTION--WHEN THE MACHINE TAKES OVER
7 PLANNING AND GUIDANCE
8 THE MAIN OPPONENT?THE COMMUNIST
INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
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9 COUNTERINTELLIGENCE
/0 VOLUNTEERS
11 CONFUSING THE ADVERSARY
12 HOW INTELLIGENCE IS PUT TO USE
/3 THE MAN ON THE JOB
14 MYTHS, MISHAPS AND MISCHIEF-MAKERS
15 THE ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE IN THE COLD WAR
16 SECURITY IN A FREE SOCIETY
17 INTELLIGENCE IN OUR FREE SOCIETY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
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5 The Craft of Intelligence 653
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A Personal Note
Sar
My interest in world affairs started early; in fact, it goes back to my
childhood days. I was brought up on the stories of my paternal
grandfather's voyage of 131 days in a sailing vessel from Boston to
Madras, India, where he was a missionary. He was almost ship-
wrecked on the way. In my youth, 1 was often in Washington with
my maternal grandparents. My grandfather, John W. Foster, had
been Secretary of State in 1892 under President Harrison. After
serving in the Civil War he had become a general and had later
been our envoy to Mexico, to Russia and to Spain. My mother had
spent much of her youth in the capitals of these countries, my
father had studied abroad. I grew up in the atmosphere of family
debates on what was going on in the world.
My earliest recollections are of the Spanish and Boer Wars. In
1901, at the age of eight, I was an avid listener as my grandfather
and his son-in-law, Robert Lansing, who was to become Secretary
of State under President Woodrow Wilson, hotly discussed the
merits of the British and Boer causes. 1 wrote out my own views?
vigorous and misspelled?which were discovered by my elders and
published as a little booklet., it became a "best seller" in the Wash-
ington area. I was for the "underdog."
After graduating from college a few months before the outbreak
of World War I in 1911, sharing the general ignorance about the
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dramatic events that lay ahead, I worked my way around the world,
teaching school in India and then China, and traveling widely in
the Far East. I returned to the United States in 1915; and a year
before our entry into the war, 1 became a member of the diplomatic
service.
During the next ten years I served in a series of fascinating posts.
First in Austria-Hungary, where in 1916-17 I saw the beginnings
of the breakup of the Hapsburg monarchy. Then in Switzerland
during the war days, I gathered intelligence on what was going on
behind the fighting front in Germany, Austria-Hungary and the
Balkans. I was, in fact, much more of an intelligence officer than a
diplomat. Assigned to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 for the
Versailles Treaty negotiations, I helped draw the frontiers of the
new Czechoslovakia and worked on the problems relating to Russia's
revolution and the peace settlement in Central Europe. When the
Conference closed, I was one of those who opened our first postwar
mission in Berlin in 1920, and after a tour of duty at Constantinople
I served four years as Chief of the Near East Division of the State
Departmen t.
By that time, 1926, although I had still not exhausted my curi-
osity about the world, I had exhausted my exchequer and turned
to the practice of the law; -a practice that was interrupted for
periods of government service as legal adviser to our delegations to
the League of Nations conferences on arms limitation, In connec-
tion with this work I met Hitler, Mussolini, Litvinov and the lead-
ers of Britain and France.
When war threatened us in 1911, President Franklin 1). Roose-
velt summoned Colonel (later Major General) William J. Donovan
to Washington to develop a comprehensive intelligence service. As
the organizer and director of the Office of Strategic Services during
World War II, Bill Donovan, I [eel, is rightly regarded as the father
of modern United States intelligence. After Pearl Harbor he asked
me to join him, and I served with him in the OSS until the wars
against Germany and Japan were over.
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During these four demanding years I worked chiefly in Switzer-
land and after the German armistice in Berlin. I believe in the case
history method of learning a profession, and here I had case after
case, and I shall make use of them to illustrate various points in
this narrative. Following the armistice with Japan, I returned to
New York and the practice of law. This, however, did not prevent
me from playing an active role in connection with the formulation
of the legislation setting up the Central Intelligence Agency in
1947.
The following year, President Truman asked me to head up a
committee of three, the other two members being William H. Jack-
son, who-had served in wartime military intelligence, and Mathias F.
Correa, who had been a special assistant to the Secretary of the
Navy, James Forrestal. We were asked to report on .the effective-
ness of the CIA as organized under the 1947 act and the relationship
of CIA activities to those of other intelligence organs of the gov-
ernment.
Our report was submitted to President Truman upon his re-
election and I returned once again to full-time practice of the law,
expecting this time to stay with it. But writing reports for the
government sometimes has unexpected consequences. You may be
asked to help put your recommendations into effect. That is what
happened to me. Our report suggested some rather drastic changes
in the organization of CIA, particularly in the intelligence estima-
tive process. General Walter Bedell Smith, who had become Director
in 1950, liked the looks of the report and asked Jackson and me to
come down and discuss it with him. I went to Washington intend-
ing to stay six weeks. I remained with CIA for eleven years, nine
years as its Director.
Since returning to private life in November of 1961, I have felt
that it was high time that someone?even though he be a deeply
--concerned advocate?should tell what properly can be told about
intelligence as a vital element of the structure of our government in
this modern age. Intelligence is probably the least understood and
the most misrepresented of the professions.
One reason for this was well expressed by President Kennedy'
when, on November 28, 1961, he came out to inaugurate the new
CIA Headquarters Building and to say good-bye to me as Director.
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6 The Craft of Intelligence 653
He then remarked: "Your successes are unheralded, your failures
are trumpeted." For obviously you cannot tell of operations that go
along well. Those that go badly generally speak for themselves.
The President then added a word of encouragement to the sev-
eral thousand men and women of CIA:
... but I am sure you realize how important is your work, how essential
it is?and in the long sweep of history how significant your efforts will
be judged. So I do want to express my appreciation to you now, and I am
confident that in the future you will continue to merit the appreciation
of our country, as you have in the past.
It is hardly reasonable to expect proper understanding and sup-
port for intelligence work in this country if it is only the insiders,
a few people within the executive and legislative branches, who
know anything whatever about the CIA. Others continue to draw
their knowledge from the so-called inside stories by writers who
have never been on the inside.
There are, of course, sound reasons for not divulging intelligence
secrets. It is well to remember that what is told to the public also
gets to the enemy. However, the discipline and techniques?what
we call the tradecraft of intelligence?are widely known in the
profession, whatever the nationality of the service may be. What
must not be disclosed, and will not be disclosed here, is where and
how and when the tradecraft has been or will be employed in par-
ticular operations unless this has already been disclosed elsewhere,
as in the case of the U-2, for example.
CIA is not an underground operation. All one needs to do is to
read the law?the National Security Act of l947?to get it general
idea of what it is set up to do. It has, of course, a secret side and
the law permits the National Security Council, which in effect
means the President, to assign to the CIA certain duties and func-
tions in the intelligence held in addition to those specifically
enumerated in the law. These functions are not disclosed. But CIA
is not the only government agency where secrecy is important. The
Departments of State and of Defense also guard with great care the
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security of much that they do.
One of my own guiding principles in intelligence work when I
was Director of Central Intelligence was to use every human means
to preserve the secrecy and security of those activities, but only
those where this was essential, and not to make a mystery of what
is a matter of common knowledge or obvious to friend and foe
alike.
Shortly after I became Director, I had a good illustration of the
futility of certain kinds of secrecy. Dr. Milton Eisenhower, brother
of the President, had an appointment to see me. The President
volunteered to drop him by at my office. They started out (I gather
without forewarning to the Secret Service), but could not find the
office until a telephone call was put through to me for precise
directions. This led me to investigate why all this futile secrecy. At
that time the CIA Headquarters bore at the gate the sign "Gov-
ernment Printing Office." However, Washington sight-seeing bus
drivers made it a practice to stop outside of our front gate. The
guide would then harangue the occupants of the bus with in-
formation to the effect that behind the barbed wire they saw was
the most secret, the most concealed place in Washington, the head-
quarters of the American spy organization, the Central Intelligence
Agency. I also found out that practically every taxicab driver in
Washington knew the location. As soon as I put up a proper sign
at the door, the glamour and mystery disappeared. We were no
longer either sinister or mysterious to visitors to the Capital; we
became just another government office. Too much secrecy can be
self-defeating just as too much talking can be dangerous.
An instance where a certain amount of publicity was helpful in
the collection of intelligence occurred during World War II when
I was sent to Switzerland for Ceneral Donovan and the OSS in
November of 1942. I had a position in the American Legation as
an assistant to the Minister. One of the leading Swiss journals pro-
duced the story that I was coming there as a secret and special en-
voy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Offhand one might have
thought that this unsought advertisement would have hampered
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ifty work. Quite the contrary was :the case. Despite my modest but
truthful denials of the story, it was generally believed. As a result,
to my network flocked a host of informants, some cranks it is true,
but also some exceedingly .valuable individuals. If I could not
separate the wheat from the chaff with only a reasonable degree of
error, then E was not qualified for my job, because the ability to
judge people is one of .the prime qualities of an intelligence officer.
? When we try ,to make a mystery out of everything relating to in-
telligence, we tend to dissipate our effort to maintain the security
of operations where secrecy is essential to success. Each situation
has to be considered according to the facts, keeping in mind the
principle of withholding from a potential enemy all useful in-
formation about secret intelligence operations or personnel en-
gaged in them. The injunction that George Washington wrote to
Colonel Elias Dayton on July 26, 1777, is still applicable to in-
telligence operations today:
The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not
be further urged. All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the
whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in
most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally de-
feated, however well planned and pmmising a -favourable issue.
On the whole, Americans are inclined to talk too much about
matters which should be classified. I feel that we hand out too many
of our secrets, particularly in the field of military "hardware" and
weaponry, and that we often fail to make the vital distinction be-
tween the type of operation that should be secret and those which,
by their very nature, are not and cannot lie kept secret. There are
times when our press is overzealous in seeking "scoops" with regard
to future diplomatic, political and military moves. We have learned
the importance of secrecy in time of war, although even then there
have been serious indisctetions at Limes. But it is well to recog-
nize that in the Cold War Our adversary takes every advantage of
what we divulge or make publicly available.
To be sure, with our form of government, and in view of the
legitimate interest of the public and the press, it is impossible to
erect a wall around the whole business of intelligence, nor do I
suggest that this be done. Neither Congress nor the executive branch
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intended this when the law of 1917 was passed:. Furthermore, cer-
tain information must be given out if public confidence in the in-
telligence mission is to be strengthened and if the profession of the
intelligence officer is to bc properly appreciated.
Most important of all, it is necessary that both those on the in-
side?the workers in intelligence- -and the public should come to
share in the conviction that intelligence operations can help
mightily to protect the nation.
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The Historical Setting
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In the fifth century R.c. the Chinese sage Sun Tin wrote that fore-
knowledge was "the reason the enlightened prince and the wise
general conquer the enemy whenever they move." In 1955, the
Herbert Hoover Commission on Intelligence Activity prefaced its
advisory report to the government with the definition that "Intelli-
gence deals with all the things which should he known in advance
of initiating a course of action." Both statements, widely separated
as they are in time, have in common the emphasis on the practical
use of advance information in its relation to action.
The desire for advance information is no doubt rooted in the
instinct for survival. The ruler asks himself: "What will happen
next? Flow will my affairs prosper? What course of action should I
take? How strong are my enemies and what are they planning
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against mer The answers to these questions are "intelligence"
when the inquiries are made not solely about the situation and
prospects of the single individual but about those of the group?
the tribe, the kingdom, the nation.
The earliest sources of intelligence, in the age of a belief in super-
natural intervention in the affairs of men, were prophets, seers,
oracles, soothsayers and astrologers. Since the gods knew what was
going to happen ahead of time, having to some extent ordained the
outcome of events, it was logical to seek out the divine intention
in the inspiration of holy men, in the riddles of oracles, in the stars
and often in dreams.
Mythology and the history of religion contain countless instances
of the revelation of the divine intention regarding mart, solicited or
unsolicited by men themselves. But not many of them have to do
with the practical all of state, with the outcome of military ven-
tures and the like. Yet there are some, and I look upon them as the
earliest recorded instances of "intelligence-gathering."
Saul, on the eve of his last battle, "was afraid, and his heart
greatly trembled" when he saw the host of the Philistines. "And
when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not,
neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets" (1 Sam. 28).
Being without "sources" and wondering what course to follow in
the battle to come, Saul, as we all know, summoned up the spirit
of Samuel through the witch of En-dor and learned from him that
he would lose the battle and would himself perish. In a subsequent
chapter of the Book of Samuel we find David directly questioning
the Lord for military advice and get ting exactly the intelligence he
needed. "Shall I pursue after this troop? Shall I overtake them? And
he [the Lord] answered him, j)lirstle, for thou shalt surely overtake
them, and without fail recover all.''
An even earlier "intelligence operation" recorded in the Bible
is of quite another sort (Num. 13). Here the Lord suggested that
man himself seek information on the spot.
When Moses was in the "wilderness" with the children of Israel,
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he was directed by the Lord to send a ruler of each of the tribes of
Israel "to spy out the land of .Canaan," which the Lord had desig-
nated as their home. Moses gave them instructions to "see the land,
-what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be
strong or weak, few or many." 'Ihey spent forty days on their mis-
sion. When they came back, they reported on the land to Moses and
Aaron: "Surely it Iloweth with milk and honey; and this is the
fruit of it"?the grapes, the pomegranates and the figs. But then ten
,of the twelve who had gone on this intelligence mission, with
Joshua and Caleb dissenting, reported that the people there were
.stronger than the men of Israel.
They were "men of a great stature," and "the cities are walled
,and very great," and "the children of Israel murmured against
Moses and against Aaron." The Lord then decreed that because of
the little faith that the people had shown in him they "should
-wander in the wilderness forty years," one year for every day that
.the spies had searched the land and brought in their timorous
findings.
In this particular intelligence mission, there is more than meets
the eye at first reading. In the first place, if one wanted a fair and
impartial view of the nature of the land of Israel and its people,
one would not send political leaders on an intelligence mission. One
would send technicians and surely not twelve, but two or three.
Furthermore, Moses and Aaron did not need information about
the land of Israel as they trusted the Lord. The real purpose of this
mission was, in fact, not to find out what sort of a land Israel was:
it was to find out what sort of people?how strong and trustworthy
?were these leaders of the various tribes of Israel. When only two
met the test in the eyes of the Lord, the rest and their peoples were
condemned to wander in the desert until a new and stronger gen-
reration arose to take over. '-
It is a part of history that intelligence even when clear should all
-too often be disregarded or sometimes not even sought. Cassandra,
the (laughter of Priam of Troy, who was beloved by Apollo, Was
accorded by him the gift of prophecy. But, as mythology tells (IS,
once she had obtained the gift, she taunted the tempter. Apollo
could not withdraw his gift but could and did add to it the quali-
fication that her prophecies should not be believed. Hence, Cas-
sandra's prediction that the rape of Helen would spell the ruin of
TkAgnd her warnin ( about the famous Trojan Horse?one of the
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The Craft of Intelligence 653
The Greeks, with their rather pessimistic view of man's relations
to the gods, seem to have run into trouble even when they had in-
formation from the gods because it was so wrapped in riddles and
contradictions that it was either ambiguous or unintelligible. The
stories about "intelligence" that run through Greek mythology
reflect a basic conviction that the ways of the gods and of fate are
not for man to know.
Herodotus tells us that when the Lacedaemonians consulted the
Delphic oracle to learn what the outcome of a military campaign
against Arcadia would be, the oracle answered that they would
dance in Tegea (a part of Arcadia) with "noisy footfall." The
Lacedaemonians interpreted this to mean that they would cele-
brate their victory there with a dance. They invaded Tegea, carry-
ing fetters with which to enslave the Tegeans. They lost the battle,
however, and were themselves enslaved and were pm to work in the
fields wearing the very fetters they had brought with them. These,
shackled about their feet and rattling as they worked, produced
the "noisy footfall" to which the oracle had referred.
Over the centuries the Delphic: oracle evolved through a number
of stages, from a "supernatural" phenomenon to an institution that
was apparently more human and more secular. In its earliest days
a virgin sitting over a cleft in the rock from which arose intoxicat-
ing fumes received in a trance the answers of the god Apollo to the
questions that had been asked, and a priest interpreted the magical
and mysterious words of the "medium." The possibility of error
and prejudice entering at this point must have been great. Later
the virgins were replaced by women over fifty because the visitors
to the oracle seem to have disturbed its smooth operation by an
undue and strongly human interest in the virgins. But that did not
necessarily affect the allegedly divine nature of the revelations
given. What did make the oracle more of a secular institution at a
later date, as we know today, was the fact that the priests apparently
had networks of informants in all the Greek lands and were thus
often better apprised of the state of things on earth than the people
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who came for consultation. Their intelligence was by no means of
divine origin, although it was roffered as such. At a still later
stage, a certain corruption seems to have set in as a result of the
possession on the part of the priests of the secrets which visitors
had confided to them. A prince or a wealthy man who either was
favored by the priests at Delphi or perhaps bribed them could have
picked up information about his rivals and enemies which the
latter had divulged when they consulted the oracle. In their most
productive period, the oracles frequently produced excellent prac-
tical advice.
But in the craft of intelligence the East was ahead of the West
in 400 B.C. Rejecting the oracles and the seers, who may well have
played an important role in still earlier epochs of Chinese history,
Sun Tat takes a more practical view.'
1 For my remarks on Sun Tzu I am _indebted to the recent excellent transla-
tion of the Alt of liar with commentaries by General Sam Griffith, Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1963.
'What is called 'foreknowledge' cannot be elicited from spirits,
nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calcu-
lations," he wrote. "It must be obtained from men who know the
enemy situation."
In a chapter of the Art of War called the "Employment of Secret
Agents," Sun Tzu gives the basics of espionage as it was practiced
in 400 a.c. by the Chinese-11110 as it is practiced today. He says
there are five kinds of agents: native, inside, doubled, expendable
and living. "Native" and "inside" agents are similar to what we
shall later call "agents in place." "Doubled," a term still used to-
day, is an enemy agent who has_ been captured, turned around and
sent back where he came from as an agent of his captors. "Ex-
pendable agents" arc a Chinese subtlety which we later touch upon
in considering deception techniques. They are agents through whom
false information is leaked to the enemy. To Sun Tzu they are
expendable because the enemy will probably kill them when he
finds out their infoimation was faulty. "Living" agents to Sun Tzu
are latter-day "penetration agents." They reach the enemy, get in-
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formation and manage to get back alive.
To Sun Tzu belongs the credit not only for this first remarkable
analysis of the ways of espionage but also for the first written recom-
mendations regarding an organized intelligence service. He points
out that the master of intelligence will employ all five kinds of
agents simultaneously and he calls this the "Divine Skein." The
analogy is to fish net consisting of many strands all joineci. to a
single cord. And this by no means exhausts Sun Tztes contribution.
He comments on counterintelligence, on psychological warfare, on
deception, on security, on fabricators, in short, on the whole craft
of intelligence. It is no wonder that Sun Tzu's book is a favorite of
Mao Tse-tung and is required reading for Chinese Communist
tacticians. In their conduct of military campaigns and of intelligence
collection, they clearly put into practice the teachings of Sun Tzu.
- Espionage of the sort recommended by Sun Tzu, which did not
depend upon spirits or gods, was, of course, practiced in the West
in ancient times also but not with the same degree of sophistication
as in the East; nor was there in the West the same sense of a craft
or code of rules so that one generation could build on the experi-
ences of another. Most recorded instances do not go far beyond what
we would now call reconnaissance. Such was the case in the second
and more successful attempt of the Israelites to reconnoiter the
situation in the Promised Land.
Joshua sent two men into Jericho to "spy secretly" and they were
received in the house of Rahab the harlot (josh. 2). This is, I be-
lieve, the first instance on record of what is now called in the intel-
ligence trade a "safe house." Rahab concealed the spies and got
them safely out of the city with their intelligence. The Israelites
conquered Jericho "and utterly destroyed it and its people except
that Rahab and her family were saved." Thus was established the
tradition that those who help the intelligence process should be
- recompensed.
According to Herodotus, the Greeks sent three spies to Persia be-
fore the great invasion of 4.80_ R.C. to see how large the forces were
that Xerxes was gathering. The three spies were caught in the act
and were about to be executed when Xerxes stayed their execution
and to the great surprise of his counselors had the spies conducted
all around his calm), showing them "all the footmen and all the
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9 The Craft of Intelligence 653
horse, letting them gaze at everything to their hearts' content."
Then he sent them home. Xerxes' idea was to frighten the Greeks
into surrendering without a fight by deliberately passing them cor-
rect information as to the size of the host he had assembled. Since,
as we know, the Greeks were not intimidated, he did not succeed in
this psychological ploy. T have an idea that Sun Tzu would have
advised the opposite. Ile would have recommended that Xerxes
bribe the spies and send them home to report that his army was far
smaller and weaker than it really was. When the Persians later in-
vaded, Sun Tzu would have expected the three men to report to
him what was going on in the Greek camp.
Just before the battle of Thermopylae, Xerxes himself sent a
"mounted spy" to see what the Greeks, who were holding the pass,
were doing and how strong they were. This was clearly nothing
but a short-range reconnaissance mission. But Xerxes' scout got very
close because when lie returned he was able to give the famous re-
port that some of the men he saw were "engaged in gymnastic
exercises, others were combing their long hair." This was a piece
of "raw intelligence," as we would call it today, that obviously
stood in need of interpretation and analysis. Accordingly, Xerxes
called in one of his advisers who knew Greek ways and who ex-
plained to him. that "These men have come to dispute the pass
with us; and it is for tins that they are now making ready. It is
their custom, when they are about to hazard their lives, to adorn
their heads with care. . . . You have now to deal with the first
kingdom in Greece, and with the bravest men." Xerxes did not put
much faith in the "estimate" and lost vast numbers of his best
troops by throwing them directly against the little band of Greeks
under Leonidas.
Altogether in the Western world in ancient times the use and the
extent of espionage seems to have depended on the personality and
strength and ambition of kings and conquerers, on their own
propensity for wiles and stratagems, their desire for power and the
need to secure their kingdoms. Athens in the days of democracy
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and Rome in the days of the republic were not climates that breed
espionage. Government was conducted openly, policy made openly,
and wars usually planned and mounted openly. Except for the size
and placement of enemy forces at key moments before the engage-
ment in battle there was little need felt for specific information,
for the foreknowledge that could affect the outcome of great ex-
ploits. For the great conquerers, the creators of upstart and usually
short-lived empires, this was not so. Then subject peoples had to
be watched for signs of revolt. Whirlwind campaigns which were
frequently great gambles were Indic likely to succeed if one had
advance knowledge of the strength and wealth of the "target" as
well as the mood and morale of its rulers and populace. The evi-
dence suggests that empire-builders like Alexander the Great,
Mithridates, the King of Pontus and Hannibal all used and relied
to a much greater extent on intelligence than their predecessors
and contemporaries. Hannibal, a _master of strategy, is known to
have collected information before_ his campaigns not only on the
military posture of his enemies, but on their economic condition,
the statements in debate of public figures and even civilian morale.
Time and again Plutarch makes mention of Hannibal's possession
of "secret intelligence," of "spials he had sent into the enemies'
camp."
Hannibal appears to have been weaker as a linguist than as a
strategist. Plutarch tells us that while in Southern Italy Hannibal
commanded his guides to take him to the plain of Casimim. (This
was Cassino of World War TI fame.) "They, mistaking his words
. . . because his Italian tongue was but mean, took one thing for
another and so brought him and his army . . . near the city of
Casilinum." The terrain was such that Hannibal was nearly trapped
but he took time out to dispose of those who had misled him.
"Knowing then the fault his guides had made and the danger
wherein they had brought him, he roundly trussed them up and
hung them by the necks." This story is often told today in intelli-
gence schools to impress upon junior officers the need for accuracy.
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Mithridates fought the power of Rome to a standstill in Asia
Minor in part because he had become an outstanding intelligence
officer in his own right. Unlike Hannibal, he mastered twenty-two
languages and dialects and knew the local tribes and their customs
far better than did the Romans.
During the Middle Ages, due as much to the fragmented political
situation as to the difficulties of transportation, supply and mobiliza-
tion, it was impossible to attain strategic surprise in military cam-
paigns. It took weeks, even months, to assemble an army, and even
when the force had been collected, it could move only a few miles
a day. Seaborne expeditions could move somewhat more unobtru7
sively, but the massing of ships was difficult to conceal. For example,
in 1066 King Harold of England had all the essential intelligence
long before William the Conqueror landed at Hastings. He had
been in Normandy himself and had seen the Norman Army in ac-
tion. He knew that William was planning an attack; he estimated
the planned embarkation date and landing place with great ac-
curacy; and, judging by the site of the force he concentrated, he
made a very good guess about the number of William's troops. His
defeat was not due to strategic: intelligence deficiencies. He lost,
rather, because his troops were battle-weary. He had just beaten the
Danes in a smashing victory at Stanford Bridge. Also, they were
exhausted after a long forced march.
The most serious political mistakes of Western Europe in the
Middle Ages were made in relation to the East, due in large part to
inadequate intelligence collection. European rulers consistently
weakened Byzantium instead of supporting it as a bulwark against
invasion. They failed to recognize both the dangers and the op-
portunities created by the Mongol drive to the west. They under-
estimated the Turkish threat during the period when the Ottomans
were consolidating their power. Given their prejudices, they might
have made the same mistakes even if they had had better intelli-
gence support, but without it they had almost no chance of making
correct decisions.
They were not very well inTormed about the Byzantine Empire
and the Eastern Slays; they knew even less of the Moslem world,
and they were almost completely ignorant of anything that went
on in Central and East Asia. Emperor Frederick II (1212-50) tried
to keep up contacts with Moslem rulers (and was denounced as a
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10 The Craft of Intelligence 653 ..
heretic for his pains) and Louis IX of France (1226-70) sent emis-
saries to the Mongols. Marco Polo's famous book about China
contained material that would have been useful for strategic
intelli-
gence, but no one looked at it in that light. Throughout most of
the Middle Ages Italian merchants did obtain considerable informa-
tion about the East; unfortunately, they seldom had a chance to
pass it on to the people who determined Europe's Oriental policy.
The Popes disliked the merchants' willingness to trade with enemies
of the faith, and kings had little contact. with them.
In the fifteenth century the Italians made atm important contribu-
tion to intelligence collection by establishing permanent embassies
abroad. The envoys of Venice were especially adept at obtaining
strategic intelligence. Many of their reports were of a very high
quality, full of accurate observations and shrewd judgments. Not
only did permanent embassies provide for this kind of observation,
but they also provided bases from which to establish regular net-
works of espionage. By the sixteenth century, most European gov-
ernments were following the example of the Italian city-states,
Because map making was an almost unknown art in earlier times,
an important item of intelligence wit's information on local geog-
raphy. Knowledge of a river ford might allow an army to escape
encirclement; discovery of a mountain path could show the way past
a strong enemy position. Local inhabitants could usually be induced
to give this kind of information, and Louis IX gave a large reward
to a Bedouin who showed him where to cross a branch of the
Nile, thereby enabling him to stage a surprise attack upon a Moslem
army. Louis' son turned a strong defensive position in the Pyrenees
by buying information about a little-used route through the moun-
tains. Better known is the incident in the Crecy campaign when
Edward III was nearly hemmed in by a large French Army. A
shepherd showed him a ford across the Somme, and Edward not
only escaped pursuit but also obtained such a strong defensive posi-
tion that he was able to break the French Army when it finally
attacked.
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With the rise of nationalism and The religious struggles of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first real specialists in in-
telligence began to appear on the Western scene?ministers and
secretaries of cabinet who devoted much of their careers to organiz-
ing the collection of secret information. Because of the frequency of
internal dissension and civil strife in this era, we also see at the
same time the beginning of a distinction between foreign intelli-
gence and internal security. It was still too soon for the existence of
two separate services with distinct responsibilities?that came later?
but it was a period in which spies at home were as important as
spies abroad, all of them manipulated by the same hand.
One of the masters of both arts was Sir Francis Walsingham, who
spent most of his life as Secretary of State and chief spymaster in the
service of Queen Elizabeth. Walsingham's hand can be discovered
behind many of the major undertakings of Elizabeth's reign, pre-
paring the ground, gathering the necessary information, provoking
conspiracies and then exposing them. There is hardly a technique of
espionage which cannot be found in his practice of the craft.
Thanks to him the foolish and weakly conceived Ba.bington con-
spiracy to bring Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne grew to
such dimensions that it. finally gave Elizabeth the pretext to sign
Mary's death warrant. The most gifted graduates of Oxford and
Cambridge were enlisted by Walsingham to study in France and to
penetrate the French court and learn of its designs against England.
Christopher Marlowe appears to have been one of them and his
premature death in a tavern brawl at Deptford is thought to have
been the unfortunate result of one of Walsingham's plots.
Walsingham's greatest coup was undoubtedly the skillful round-
about operation which procured for England the naval intelligence
on which its defense against the Spanish Armada was in great
measure based. Instead of trying to strike directly against his target,
the court of Philip 11 of Spain, Walsingham avoided the obvious,
the direct reconnaissance tactic, so often doomed from the start,
and operated through other areas where he knew there were vulner-
abilities that could give him access to Spain. He dispatched a pair
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of young Englishmen to Italy who had excellent connections at the
Tuscan court.. (Throughout Walsingham's operations we find pro-
fessed religious affiliations playing a major role, Protestants masquer-
ading as Catholics and claiming to espouse the cause of England's
enemies.) One of these young Englishmen, Anthony Standen,
cultivated the Tuscan Ambassador to Spain with such success that
he arranged for the employment of his agents with the latter's mis-
sion in Spain, thus infiltrating into the Spanish ports trustworthy
observers who were not Englishmen and in no way would arouse
suspicion of being in the service of the English. Asa favor to Stan-
den, the Tuscan Ambassador even let Standen's "friends" in Spain
use his diplomatic pouch to send "personal" letters to Standen in
Italy.
Under Walsingham it became established practice for Her Maj-
esty's Secretary of State to intercept domestic and foreign corre-
spondence, to open it, read it, reseal it and send it on its way. Should
such correspondence be in code or cipher, Walsingham had in his
service an expert, a certain Thornas Phelippes, who was both cryptog-
rapher and cryptanalyst; that is, he invented secure codes for
Walsingham's use and at the same time broke the codes used in
messages which VValsingham intercepted. It was Phelippes who de-
ciphered the rather amateurish.. secret messages which went to and
from Mary Queen of Scots at the time of the Babington conspiracy.
Walsingham, in short, created the first full-fledged professional
intelligence service. He was shortly after to be rivaled by Richelieu,
but hardly by any other master of espionage until the nineteenth
century. ?
Much has been made, to be sure, of Cromwell's intelligence chief,
John Thurloe, but in the perspective of history I do not find him
possessed of the same ingenuity, inventiveness and daring that dis-
tinguished Walsingham. A major key to Thttrloe's success was the
very sizable funds he had at his disposal. Pepys says he spent over
?70,000 a year. This figure may be exaggerated but the records show
that he paid his spies inordinate sums for their information and
thus had little difficulty recruiting them. Walsingham, on the other
hand, worked with the most niggardly budget under the tight-
pursed Queen and is said frequently to have paid his agents out of
his own pocket, and then. only insignificant sums.
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Ii The Craft of Intelligence 653
Thurloe, like Walsingham, had the title of Secretary of State, but
by this time his office had become known as the "Department of
intelligence," one of the earliest official uses of the designation in
English for a bureau of government. His was, of course, a time of
major conspiracies bent on restoring Charles Stuart to the throne.
For this reason, again as in Walsingham's time, Thurloe ran both
an internal security service and a foreign intelligence system. For
the latter he used English consuls and diplomats abroad but supple-
mented their reporting with the work of secret agents. Thurloe
relied even more than did Walsingham on information from postal
censorship and can certainly be credited with having run a very
efficient post office from the point of view of counterintelligence.
Despite the calm, almost humdrum way in which Thurloe seems
to have gone about the business of systematic intelligence collec-
tion, he was frequently involved in heavy-handed plots. One of
these, which he prepared at Cromwell's instigation, had as its pur-
pose the assassination of Charles and the Dukes of York and Glouces-
ter, his brothers. This was in reprisal for a Royalist plot directed
against Cromwell's life which Thurloe had uncovered. The scheme
was to entice the three royal brothers from France to England on
the false claim that they would be met by a body of soldiers on
landing who would then set off an uprising. It all sounds rather
obvious and contrived at this distance and has none of the subtlety
of Walsingham's plots in which he successfully involved Mary,
Queen of Scots. Whether Charles would have fallen for the trick
we need not conjecture, because one of Thurloe's closest confidants,
his secretary, Morland, betrayed the plot to Charles. Pepys tells us
in his diary that only five 'days after Charles was restored to the
throne, "Mr. Morland was knighted . . . and the King did give the
reason of it openly, that it was for his giving him intelligence all
the time he was clerk to Secretary Thurloe."
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Another interesting example of successful seventeenth-century in-
telligence is that of Sweden, which maintained its position as a
great power to a very considerable degree by virtue of having the
most accurate reporting system in Europe. A contemporary Russian
minister admitted that "the Swedes know more about us than we
do ourselves." They played heavily on Protestant connections dur-
ing the period of the religious wars and generally used men of other
nationalities such as French Huguenots as both agents and reporters,
much in the manner of Walsingham, thereby avoiding embarrass-
ment and direct implication if caught. Sweden and to some extent
Holland in these days illustrate how relatively small countries can
make up for many power deficiencies with superior intelligence
combined with technical and organizational ingenuity.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an ever-
sharpening distinction emerged between the work of internal secu-
rity and the collection of foreign intelligence. In the major powers,
separate organizations under separate experts were more and more
entrusted with the different tasks. The reason, of course, was that
the growth of internal dissidence, the threat of uprising and revolu-
tions from within, threatened the stability and power of the great
autocratic and imperial systems of nineteenth-century Europe, thus
causing the burgeoning of secret police organs for the protection of
the emperor or ruler.
Under Napoleon, first the infamous Joseph Fondle, a product of
the turbulent conspiracies of the French Revolution, and later
Colonel Savary served as Ministers of justice and chiefs of a purely
political secret police and counterespionage organization. The col-
lection of military and foreign intelligence, however, was in the
hands of the Alsatian, Karl Schulmeister, who, though nominally
attached to Savary, ran a quite autonomous series of operations
whose purpose was to gain intelligence about the Austrian armies
and to deceive the Austrians as to the strength and intentions of
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the French.
Gradually the growth of large and aggressive armed forces during
the nineteenth century caused the emphasis in foreign intelligence
to be placed primarily on its military aspects and the responsibility
for its collection to be placed within the army itself. In the period
-up to the outbreak of World War I, under the aegis of the General
:Staff of most European armies a single military intelligence agency
,.developed and became the major foreign intelligence arm of the
, country. It was directed by military officers rather than by civilians
or cabinet ministers. Political intelligence was left largely to the
,diplomats.
Prussia up to 1871 was the exception to this development, pri-
marily because the power-hungry, though gifted Wilhelm Stieber
kept the reins of both Prussian military intelligence and of the
Prussian secret police in his ambitious hands. To him goes the credit
for the first exercises in mass espionage, for the method of saturating
a target area with so many spies that they could hardly fail to pro-
cure detailed information on every aspect of an enemy's military and
political status. These networks were also a kind of fifth column
....and helped soften the morale of civilian populations by inducing a
? fear of the coming invader. Previously, espionage had made use of
- 4. few selected and highly placed individuals. Stieber went after
the farmers and the storekeepers, the waiters and the chambermaids.
He used these methods in preparing for the Prussian attacks against
both Austria in 1866 and France in 1870.
The size and power of an internal security service is generally in
direct ratio to the extent of the suspicion and fear of the ruling
. clique. Under a repressive and autocratic ruler secret police will
blossom, a dreaded parasitical force that permeates every element of
the populace and the national scene. For the best example of such
an organization we must, therefore, turn to nineteenth-century
Russia, where a retarded political system stood in constant fear ,of
its own masses, its liberal leaders or the dangerous ideas and in-
-
fluences of its neighbors.
But this state of affairs in Russia was not an innovation of the
- nineteenth century. In early Russian history, the Tatars and other'
steppe people continually sought to ascertain the strength of the'
-garrisons within the walled stockades (kremlins) of the Russians.-
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seeking admission to the walled cities, fearing that their real mission
was intelligence. The tradition of attaching a pristav (literally,
"an attached object") to a visiting foreigner, so that he could be
readily identified as such, goes back at least to the sixteenth century.
There is a long ancestry for surveillance and "guided tours" in
Russia. In the seventeenth century, when the Russians began send-
ing their own people abroad to study at foreign universities, they
usually sent some trusted person along to watch and report on any
group of students. The custom of attaching a secret policeman to
delegations attending international conferences, so much in evi-
dence today, therefore also has hoary antecedents.
An organized political police under state management in Russia
can be traced back to the establishment in 1826 by Czar Nicholas I
of the Third Section of His Majesty's Imperial Chancery. In 1878
the Third Section was abolished and its functions were given to the
Okhrana, or security section, of the Ministry of the Interior.
The purpose of the Czar's Okhrana was to "protect" the Imperial
family and its regime. In this capacity it kept watch on the Russian
populace by means of armies of informants, and once even dis-
tinguished itself by tailing the venerable Leo Tolstoi around
Russia. Tolstoi had long since become a world-renowned literary
figure, but to the Okhrana he was only a retired army lieutenant
and a "suspect."
In the late nineteenth century there were so many Russian revo-
lutionaries, radical students and (.1nig)-(s outside Russia that the
Okhrana could not hope to keep imperial Russia secure merely by
suppressing the voices of revolution at home. It had to cope with
dangerous voices from abroad. It sent agents to join, penetrate and
provoke the organizations of Russian students and revolutionaries
in Western Europe, to incite, demoralize, steal documents and dis-
cover the channels by which illegal literature was being smuggled
into Russia. When Lenin was in Prague in 1912, he unknowingly
harbored an Okhrana agent in his household.
When the Bolsheviks swept into power in 1917, they disbanded
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and to some extent "exposed" the old Okhrana as a typical oppres-
sive instrument of the Czars, claiming that the new workers' state
needed no such sinister device to maintain law and order. In the
same breath, however, they created their own secret police organiza-
tion, the Cheka, about which we shall have more to say later. The
Cheka, in scope, power, cruelty and duplicity, soon surpassed any-
thing the Czars had ever dreamed of.
One of the great intelligence services of the nineteenth century in
Europe was that maintained not by ,a government, but by a private
firm, the banking house of Rothschild. There was a precedent for
this in the activities of a much earlier banking family, the Fuggers
of Augsburg in the sixteenth century, who built up a sizable fi-
nancial empire, lending money to impoverished sovereigns and
states, as did the Rothschilds later. That the Fuggers made few
errors in the placement of their investments was in large measure
a result of the excellent private intelligence they gathered. The
Rothschilds, however, once they had attained a position of some
power, benefited their clients as well as themselves by their superior
intelligence-gathering abilities.
In promoting their employers' financial interests from head-
quarters in Frankfurt-am-Main, London, Paris, Vienna and Naples,
Rothschild agents were often able to gain vital intelligence before
governments did. In 1815, while Europe awaited news of the Battle
of Waterloo, Nathan Rothschild in London already knew that the
British had been victorious. In order to make a financial killing, he
then depressed the market by selling British Government securities;
those who watched his every move in the market did likewise, con-
cluding that Waterloo had been lost by the British and their allies.
At the proper moment he bought back in at the low, and when the
news was finally generally known, the value of government securities
naturally soared.
Sixty years later Lionel Rothschild, a descendant of Nathan, on
one historic evening had Disraeli as his dinner guest. During the
meal a secret message came to Lionel that a controlling interest in
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the Suez Canal Company, owned by the Khedive of Egypt, was for
sale. The Prime Minister was intrigued with the idea, but the
equivalent of about $14,000,000 was required to make the purchase.
In the absence of Parliament, he could not get it quickly. So
Lionel bought the shares for the British Government, enabling Dis-
raeli to pull off one of the great coups of his career. It was rumored
that some of the Rothschild "scoops" were obtained by the use of
carrier pigeons. There was probably little basis for the rumor, al-
though it is true that one of the Rothschilds, immobilized in Paris
when the city was surrounded by Germans in the Franco-German
War of 1870, used balloons and possibly also carrier pigeons to com-
municate with the outside world. The world heard of the armistice
ending the war through this means, rather than through conven-
tional news channels.
The Great Powers of Europe entered World War I with intelli-
gence-services which were in no way commensurate with the might
of their armed forces or equipped to cope with the complexity of the
conflict to come. This was true of both sides?the Allies and the
Central Powers. French military intelligence had been badly shaken
up by the Dreyfus scandal and was rent by internal factions and
. conspiracies. They calculated the size of the German Army at just
half of what it was when it went into the field in 1914. The Ger-
man service, which had risen to notable efficiency .under Stieber in
1870, had fallen into a sad state of disrepair after his dismissal; it
was moreover typical of the arrogance and self-assurance of the
German General Staff of 1911 that it looked down its nose at intelli-
gence and did not think it of importance. The Russians had
achieved their great intelligence coup shortly before in the treason
of the Austrian General Staff Officer, Colonel Alfed Redl, who had
finally been caught in 1913. I shall have more to say of him in a
later chapter. Through him they had come into possession of the
Austro-Hungarian war plans, which helped them defeat the AuS-
trians in a number of the early battles of World War I. On the other
hand, the Austrians had revised some of their plans since 1913, and
the Russians, blindly putting their trust in the Redl material, fre-
quently ran into serious trouble. They also, astonishingly enough,
'Seat military communications to their troops in the field in clear
text instead of in cipher and the Germans gleefully listened in and
picked up, free of cost, valuable information about the disposition
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13 The Craft of Intelligence 653
Altogether it can be said that whatever effective espionage work
was accomplished during World War I, except in the tactical field,
was not particularly in the area or land operations. It was chiefly
in connection with naval warfare on in the remoter and peripheral
areas of conflict. British competence in breaking the German naval
codes was a lifesaving intelligence feat that kept Britain's head
above water in the darkest days of the war. Lawrence of Arabia in
the Middle East and the German, Wassmuss, in Persia. performed
real exploits in the fields of espionage, subversion and fomenting
insurrections that truly affected the course of the war in these areas.
German espionage and sabotage in the United States were among
the more successful feats of their intelligence in World War I,
thanks in part to our lack of preparedness with countermeasures.
World War I did, however, result in a number of innovations in
espionage. One was the use of radio in wartime communications,
which opened up the new possibility of gathering intelligence of
immense tactical and sometimes strategic significance by intercepting
radio signals and breaking codes and ciphers. The preservation of
neutrality in World War I by certain strategically located countries
like Sweden, Norway, Holland and Switzerland gave rise to the
espionage tactic of spying on one country via a second country,
despite the best efforts of the neutrals to prevent such use of their
soil. This is a technique which also has been employed in peace-
time, particularly in Europe. Lastly, the Far East made its first im-
portant appearance on the international espionage scene in the
shape of the Japanese intelligence service, which in the ensuing
years became a highly efficient and dangerous presence in the intel-
ligence world.
The period between the two world wars saw a proliferation of
intelligence services and a growing complexity in their internal
structure. The targets had become increasingly technical and the
world a much more complicated place. For the new dictatorships,
Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S.S.R, the intelligence service
became the major instrument abroad in probing and preparing for
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foreign expansion. At the same time the free countries, especially
England, had to take on new and enormous responsibilities in in-
telligence work in the face of the threat of these countries. The
silent warfare between the intelligence services of both sides in World
War 11 supplies many of the examples and case histories to which
I shall refer later on. On the Allied side, in opposition to the
common enemy, there was a collaboration between intelligence serv-
ices that is without parallel in history and which had a most wel-
come outcome.
During the war days when I was with OSS, I had the privilege
of working with the British service: and developed close personal
and service relationships which remained intact after the war.
In Switzerland I made contact with a group of French officers who
had maintained the tradition of the French Deuxieme Bureau and
who helped to build up the intelligence service of General de Gaulle
and the Free French. Toward the end of the war, cooperation was
established with a branch of the Italian secret service that adhered
to King Victor Emmanuel when non-Fascist Italy joined the Allied
cause. I also was working with the underground anti-Nazi group in
the German Abwehr, the professional military intelligence service
of the German Army. A group within the Abwehr secretly plotted
against Hitler. The head of the Abwehr, the very extraordinary
Admiral Canaris, was liquidated by Hitler when, following the
failure of the attempt on Hitler's life in 1944, records establishing
Canaris' cooperation with the plotters were discovered.
This wartime cooperation contributed, I believe, toward creating
among the intelligence services of the Free World a measure of
unity of purpose, and after the war a bee 'Western Germany has
made a substantial intelligence contribution. All this has helped us
to counter the massive attacks which the intelligence and security
services of the Communist Bloc countries are making against us
today.
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IIBEAR R
B ARER
BEARER BEARER
The Evolution of American Intelligence
In United States history, until after World War 11 there was little or
no official government intelligence activity except in time of combat.
With the restoration of peace, intelligence organizations which the
stress of battle had called forth were each time disbanded or sharply
reduced, and the fund of knowledge and the lessons learned from
bitter experience were lost and forgotten. In each of our crises, up
to Pearl Harbor, workers in intelligence have had to start in all
over again.
Intelligence, especially in our earlier history, was conducted on a
fairly informal basis, with only the loosest kind of organization and
there is for the historian, as well as the student of intelligence, a
dearth of coherent official records. Operations were often run out of
a general's hat or a diplomat's pocket, so to speak. This guaranteed
at the time a certain security sometimes lacking in later days when
reports are filed in septuplicate or mimeographed and distributed to
numerous officials often not directly concerned with the intelligence
process. But it makes things rather difficult for the historian. At
General Washington's headquarters Alexander Hamilton was the
only man entrusted with "developing" and reading the messages
received in secret inks and codes and no copies were made. Washing-
ton, who keenly appreciated the need for secrecy, kept his opera-
tions so secret that we may never have the full history of them.
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To be sure, two of his intelligence chiefs, Boudinot and Tall-
madge, later wrote their memoirs, but they were exceedingly dis-
creet. Even forty years after the war was over, when John Jay told.
James Fenimore Cooper the true story of a Revolutionary spy, which
the latter then used in his novel The Spy, Jay refused to divulge
the real name of the man. Much of what we know today about in-
telligence in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars was only
turned up many generations after these wars were over.
Intelligence costs money and agents. have to be paid. Since it is
the government's money which is being disbursed, even the most
informal and swashbuckling general will usually put in some kind
of chit for expenses incurred in the collection of information. Wash-
ington kept scrupulous records of money spent for the purchase of
information. He generally advanced the money out of his own
personal funds and then included the payment in the bill for all
his expenses which he sent the Continental Congress. Since he item-
ized his expenses, we can see from his financial accountings that he
spent around $17,000 on secret intelligence during the years of the
Revolutionary War, a lot of money in those days. "Walsingham, in
England, two hundred years earlier, also kept such records, and it is
from them that we have gleaned many of the details about his
intelligence activities.
But the official accountings are not the only indicators that the
pecuniary side of intelligence contributes to history. A singular
attribute of intelligence work under war conditions is the delay be-
tween the completion of an agent's work and his being paid for it.
He ma.y be installed behind the enemy lines and may not get home
until the war is over. Or the military unit that employed him may
have moved hastily from the scene in victory or retreat, leaving him
high and dry and without his reward. Thus it may happen that
not until years later, and sometimes only when the former agent or
his heirs have fallen on hard times, is a claim made against the
government to collect payment for past services rendered. Secret
intelligence being what it is, there may be no living witnesses and
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absolutely no record to support the claim. In any case, such instances
have often brought to light intelligence operations of some moment
in our own history that otherwise might have remained entirely
unknown.
In December, 1852, a certain Daniel Bryan went before a justice
of the peace in Tioga County, New York, and made a deposition
concerning his father, Alexander: Bryan, who had died in 1825.
Daniel Bryan stated that General Gates in the year 1777, just before
the Battle of Saratoga, had told his father that he wanted him
"to go into Burgoyne's Army as a spy as he wanted at that critical
?moment correct information as to the heft of the artillery of the
enemy, the strength and number of his artillery and if possible in-
formation as to the contemplated movements of the enemy." Bryan
then "went into Burgoyne's Army where he purchased a piece of
cloth for a trowsers when he went stumbling about to find a tailor
and thus he soon learned the strength of the artillery and the
number of the Army as near as he could estimate the'same and trot-
withstanding that the future movements of the Enemy were kept
secret, he learned that the next day the Enemy -intended to take
possession of Bemis heights."
The deposition goes on to tell how Alexander Bryan got away
from Burgoyne's Army and reached the American lines and General
Gates in time to deliver his information, with the result that Gates
was on Bemis Heights the next morning "ready to receive But-
goyne's Army." As we know, the latter was soundly trounced, an
action which was followed ten days later by the surrender of Bur-
goyne at Saratoga. According to the deposition, Bryan was never re-
warded. His sick child died during the night he was away and his
wife almOst died too. Gates had promised to send a physician to
Bryan's Family, but he had never got around to it. Seventy-fiVe years
later his son put the story on record, for reasons which are still not
clear as there is no record that any claim of recompense was filed.
Until accident or further research turns up additional informa-
tion, we shall not know to what extent Gates' victory at -Saratoga,
Which helped greatly to turn the ? tide of the war and was so instru-
mental in persuading the French to assist us, was helped by the
information which Bryan delivered. Sporadic finds of this-kind.can
only make us wonder who all the other unsung heroes may have
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15 The Craft of Intelligence 653
been who risked their lives to collect information for the American
cause.
The one spy hero of the Revolution about whom every American.
schoolboy does know is, of course, Nathan Hale. Even Hale, how-
ever, despite his sacrifice, might have been forgotten, if his story
had not been written down in 1799 by Hannah Adams in her
History of New England. Surprising as it may now seem, twenty-two
years after his death he had been entirely forgotten and, as Hannah
Adams wrote, "It is scarcely known such a character existed." Apart
from inspiring later generations with his fortitude and loyalty,
thanks to Hannah Adams' revival of the story, Hale's misfortune
had quite another significance at the time. Since Hale had been
a volunteer, an amateur, mightily spurred on by patriotism but
sadly equipped to carry out the dangerous work of spying, his death
and the circumstances of it apparently brought home sharply to
General Washington the need for more professional, more carefully
prepared intelligence missions. After Hale's loss, Washington de-
cided to organize a secret intelligence bureau and chose as one of its
chiefs Major Benjamin Tallmadge, who had been a classmate and
friend of Nathan Hale's at Yale and therefore had an additional
motive in promoting the success of his new enterprise. His close
collaborator, Robert Townsend, was another Yale classmate.
Townsend directed the most fruitful and complex espionage chain
that existed on the Colonial side during the Revolution. At least
we know of no other quite like it. Its target was the New York area,
which was, of course, British headquarters. Its complexity lay not so
much in its collection effort as in its communications. (I recall that
General Donovan always impressed on mc the vital significance of
communications. It is useless to collect information unless you can
quickly and accurately get it to the user.)
Since the British held New York, the Hudson and the harbor area
firmly under their control, it was impossible or at least highly risky
to slip through their defenses .to Washington in New Jersey. In-
formation from Townsend's agents in New York was therefore
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passed to Washington by a highly round-about way, which for the
times, however, was swift, efficient and secure. It was carried from
New York to North Shore of Long Island, thence across Long Island
Sound by boat to the Connecticut shore, where Tallmadge picked
it up and relayed it to Washington.
The best-known spy story of the Revolution other than that of
Hale is, of course, the story of Major John Andr?nd Benedict
Arnold. These two gentlemen might never have been discovered,
in which case the damage to the patriot cause would have been
incalculable, had it not been for Townsend and Tallmadge, who
were apparently as sharp in the business of counterintelligence as
they were in the collection of military information.
During a visit Andr?aid to a British major quartered in Town-
send's house he aroused the suspicions of Townsend's sister, who
overheard his conversation and reported it to her brother. Later
when Andr?as making his way through the American line on a
pass Arnold had issued him, it was Tallmadge who ordered him held
and searched. The papers he was carrying on his person brought to
light Arnold's treason and Andres role in it.
A typical "brief" written by Washington himself for Townsend
late in 1778 mentioned among other things the following: ". . . mix
as much as possible among the officers and refugees, visit the Coffee
Houses, and all public places [in New York]." Washington then
went on to enumerate particular targets and the information he
wanted about them: "whether any works are thrown up on Harlem
River, near Harlem Town, and whether Horn's Hook is fortified.
If so, how many men are kept at each place and what number and
what sized Cannon arc in those works."
This is a model for an intelligence brief. It spells out exactly what
is wanted and even tells the agent how to go about getting the
information.
The actual collection of information against British headquarters
in New York and Philadelphia seems to have been carried out by
countless private citizens, tradesmen, booksellers, tavernkeepers and
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the like, who had daily contact- with British officers, befriended
them, listened to their conversations, sometimes masquerading as
Tories in order to gain their confidence. The fact that the opposing
sides were made up of people who spoke the same language, had the
same heritage and differed only in political opinion made spying a
different and in a sense a somewhat easier task than it is in conflicts
between parties of alien nationality, language and even physical
aspect. By the same token, the job of counterespionage is immensely
difficult under such circumstances.
One typical unsung patriot of the time was a certain Hercules
Mulligan, a New York tailor with a large British clientele. His
neighbors thought him a Tory or at least a sympathizer and
snubbed him and made life difficult for him. When General Wash-
ington came to New York after the war was over, he stopped off
one morning, rather conspicuously, at Mulligm's house and, to the
enormous surprise of Mulligan's neighbors, breakfasted with him.
After that, the neighbors understood about Mulligan. He had ob-
viously gleaned vital information from his talkative British military
customers and managed to pass it on to the General, possibly via
:Fownsend's network.
Intelligence during the Revolution was by no means limited to
military espionage in the Colonies. A fancier game of international
political spying was being played for high stakes in diplomatic
circles, chiefly in France where Benjamin Franklin headed an Ameri-
can mission whose purpose was to secure French assistance for the
Colonial cause. It was of the utmost importance for the British to
learn how Franklin's negotiations were proceeding and what help
the French were offering the Colonies. How many spies surrounded
Franklin and how many he himself had in England we shall prob-
ably never know. He was a careful man and he was sitting in a
foreign country. and he himself published little about this period of
his life. However, we do know a great deal about one man who
apparently succeeded in double-crossing Franklin. Or did he? That
is the question.
Dr. Edward Bancroft had been born in the Colonies, in Westfield,
Massachusetts, but had been educated in England. He was ap-
pointed as secretary to the American commission in Paris, wormed
his way into Franklin's confidence, and became his "faithful" as-
sistant and protege for very little pay. He successfully simulated the
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16 The Craft of Intelligence 653
part Of a loyal and devoted American. He was able to manage nicely
on his low salary from the Americans because he was being gener-
ously subsidized by the British- -"?500 down, the same amount .as
yearly salary and a life pension." Being privy, or so he thought, to
:all Franklin's secret negotiations, he was .no doubt a valuable agent
to the British.
He passed his messages to the British Embassy in Paris by de-
positing them in a bottle hidden in the hollow root of a tree in the
Tuileries Gardens. They were written in secret inks between the
lines of love letters. Whenever he had more information than could
be fitted into the bottle, or when he needed new directives from
the British, he simply paid a visit to London?with Franklin's
blessing, for he persuaded Franklin that he could pick up valuable
information for the Americans in London. The British obligingly
supplied him with what we today call "chicken feed," misleading
information prepared for the opponents' consumption. Bancroft was
thus one of the first double agents in our history.
To deflect possible suspicion of their agent, the British once even
arrested Bancroft as he was leaving England, an action intended to
impress Franklin with his bona fides and with the dangers to which
his devotion to the American cause exposed him. Everything de-
pended, of course, on the acting ability of Dr. Bancroft, which was
evidently so effective that when Franklin was later presented with
evidence of his duplicity he refused to believe it.
Perhaps the wily Franklin really knew of it but did not want
to let on that he did. In 1777, Franklin wrote to an American lady
living in France, Juliana Ritchie, who had warned him that he
was surrounded with spies:
am much oblig'd to you for your kind Attention to my Welfare in the
Information you give me. I haveilo doubt of its being well founded. But
as it is impossible to . prevent being watt:11'd by Spies, when interested
People may think proper to place them for that purpose; I have long
obscry'd one Rule which prevents any Inconvenience from such Practices.
h is simply this, to be concern'd in no Affairs that I should blush to have
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made publick; and to do nothing but what Spies may sec and welcome,
When a Man's Actions are just and honourable, the more they arc known,
the more his Reputation is increas'd and establish'd. If I was sure therefore
that my Valet de Place was a Spy," as probably he is, I think 1 should not
discharge him for that, if in other Respects 1 lik'd him.
him, B.E.
Once when the British lodged an official diplomatic protest with
the French regarding the latter's support of the American cause,
they based the protest on a secret report of Bancroft's, quoting facts
and figures he had received from Franklin and even using Ban-
croft's wording, a bit of a slip that happens from time to time in
the intelligence world. Bancroft was mortally afraid that Franklin
might smell a rat and suspect. him. He even had the British give him
a passport so that he could flee on a moment's notice if necessary.
Franklin did express the opinion on this occasion that "such precise
information must have come from a source very near him," but as
far as we know he did nothing else about it.
The British, also, had reason-to suspect Bancroft. George III does
not seem to have fully trusted him or his reports since he caught
him out investing his ill-gotten pounds in securities whose value
would be enhanced by an American victory.
Bancroft's duplicity was not clearly established until 1889, when
certain papers in British archives pertaining to the Revolutionary
period were made public. Among them, in a letter addressed to
Lord Carmarthen, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and written
in 1784, Bancroft set down in summary form his activities as a
British agent. It seems the British Government had fallen behind in
their payments to him and Bancroft was putting in a claim and
reminding his employers of his past services. He closed with the
words: "I make no Claim beyond the permanent pension of ?500
pr an. for which the Faith of Government has often been pledged;
and for which I have sacrificed near eight years of my life."
Franklin's own agents in London were apparently highly placed.
Early in 1778 Franklin knew the contents of a report General
Cornwallis submitted in London on the American situation less
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than a month after Cornwallis had delivered .it. The gist of the
report was that the conquest of America was impossible. If Frank-
lin's agents had penetrated the British Government at this -level, it
is possible that they had caught wind of the intelligence Bancroft
was feeding the British.
In the Civil War, even more than in .the Revolution, the common
heritage and language of the two parties to the conflict and the fact
that many people geographically located on one side sympathized
with the political aims of the other made the basic task of espionage
relatively simple, while making the task of counterespionage all the
more difficult. Yet the record_ seems to show that few highly compe-
tent continuous espionage operations, ones that can be compared
in significance of achievement and technical excellence with those
of the Revolution, existed on either side. No great battles were won
or lost or evaded because of superior intelligence. Intelligence oper-
ations were limited -for the Most part to more or less localized and
temporary targets. As one writer has put it, "There was probably
more espionage in one year hi any medieval Italian city than in the?
four-year War of Secession."
The reasons for this are numerous. There was no existing
intelli-
gence organization on either side at the outbreak of the war nor was
there any extensive intelligence experience among our military
personnel of that day. Before the Revolution, the colonial leaders
had been conspiring and carrying out a limited secret war against
the British for years and by the time of open conflict had a string
of active "sources" working for them in- England and moreover
possessed tested techniques for functioning in secret at home. This /
was not the case in the North or the South before the Civil War.'
Washington was an outstandingly gifted intelligence chief. He him-
self directed the entire intelligence effort of the American forces,
even to taking a hand personally in its more important operations.
There was no general with a similar gift in the whole galaxy of
Federal or Confederate generals. Lastly, the Civil War by its very
nature was not a war of surprises and secrets. Large lumbering
armies remained encamped in one place for long periods of time
and when they began to move, word of their movement spread in
advance almost automatically. Washington, with far smaller num-
bers of men, could plant false information as to his strength and
could move his troops so quickly that a planned British action
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wouldn't find them where they had been the day before, especially
when Washington through his networks knew in advance of the
British move.
At the beginning of the Civil War the city of Washington was a
sieve and the organization on the Northern side so insecure that
the size and movements of its forces were apparent to any interested
observer. It has been said that the Confederate side never again
had such good intelligence to help them as they did at the opening
Battle of Bull Run.
One of the first events which apparently brought home to Lincoln
the need for a secret intelligence service was the conspiracy of a
group of hotheads in Baltimore to assassinate him on his way to his
first inauguration in February, 1861. Allan Pinkerton, who had al-
ready achieved some fame working as a private detective for the
railroads, had been. hired by some of Lincoln's supporters to protect
him and Pinkerton successfully scotched the Baltimore plot. As a
result, Lincoln hired him to form the first Federal Secret Service,
which took on for a time the duties of guarding the President, locat-
ing Rebel spies in. the North and collecting information on the
coming insurrection in the South. Today we would find the equiva-
lent functions carried out by three q nite distinct agencies: the Secret
Service (guarding the President), the FBI (domestic counterespio-
nage) and the CIA (collecting foreign intelligence) .
As good as Pinkerton was at the job of security and counter-
espionage, he had little to recommend him for the work of intelli-
gence collection except for one excellent agent, a certain Timothy
Webster, who produced some good information entirely on his own
in Virginia. But, unfortunately, Webster was lost early in the war,
thanks to a foolish maneuver of Pinkerton's, and was subsequently
executed. Lincoln nevertheless assigned Pinkerton to work directly
with General McClellan on military intelligence and placed him
right in the General's headquarters. Pinkerton's idea of military in-
telligence was to count the noses of the opposing troops and then
to count them all over again to be sure the first figure was right.
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Since McClellan was famous for not going into battle anyway unless
he commanded overwhelming numbers, it is not likely that Pinker-
ton's nose-counting contributed significantly to the outcome of any
battle. Even with overwhelming odds in his favor, McClellan was
outmaneuvered by Lee at Antietam. When Lincoln removed him
from his command after this battle, Pinkerton resigned, leaving the
Union without a secret service.
The fact that Lincoln had hired an agent of his own on a
military intelligence mission at the time of the Battle of Bull Run
did not come to light until 1876, and then, as so often is the case,
it was revealed in the form of a claim against the government for
reimbursement. In March of 1876, the United States Supreme Court
heard a case on appeal from the U.S. Court of Claims in which a
certain Enoch Totten brought a claim against the government "to
recover compensation for services alleged to have been rendered" by
a certain William A. Lloyd, "under contract with President Lin-
coln, made in July 1861, by which he was to proceed South and as-
certain the number of troops stationed at different points in the
insurrectionary States, procure plans of forts and fortifications . . .
and report the facts to the President. . . . Lloyd proceeded . . .
within the rebel lines, and remained there during the entire period
of the war, collecting and from time to time transmitting informa-
tion to the President." At the end of the war he had been paid
his expenses but not the salary of $200 a month which Lincoln,
according to the claim, had promised him. That Lloyd survived the
entire war as an agent in the South and succeeded in transmitting
information across the lines to Lincoln was surely a notable feat, if
true, and someday we may learn how he did it. The case itself is
interesting even with only these meager facts because of the light
it casts on Lincoln's foresight at this time and the security with
which he must have handled the matter throughout the four long
years of the war. As the Supreme Court stated in its opinion: "Both
employer and agent must have understood that the lips of the
other were to be forever sealed respecting the relation of either to
the matter."
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Also, this case established the precedent that an intelligence agent
cannot recover by court action against the government for secret
service rendered. Said the Court: 'Agents . . . must look for their
compensation to the contingent fund of the department employing
them, and to such allowance from it as those who dispense the fund
may award. The secrecy which such contracts impose precludes any
action for this enforcement." This _is a warning to the agent that he
had better get his money on the barrelhead at the time of his
'operation.
After Pinkerton left the scene,_ an effort was made to create a
purely military intelligence organization known as the Bureau of
-Military Information. The responsibility for it was assigned to
Major (later General) George H. Sharpe, who appears ,to have been
'a fair-to-middling bureaucrat but is not known ever to have con-
ceived or mounted a single significant intelligence operation on his
own. What did; however', bring good information to the Union was
the work of occasional brave volunteers, most of whom generated
their own operations and communications 'Without good advice from
anybody. One of these was Lafayette Baker, who posed as an itiner-
ate photographer in the South and made a specialty of visiting Con-
federate camps in Virginia, taking pictures of the soldiers stationed
in them, at the same time gathering valuable military information.
He later rose to brigadier general and took charge of the Federal
.Secret Service, Pinkerton's old job. Where Pinkerton had excelled
at counterespionage but had little to recommend him as an es-
pionage operator, Baker excelled in the latter craft, but his failures
as a chief of secret service lost us one of our greatest Presidents. To
this day, no one knows where Baker's men were on the night of
April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was sitting in an unguarded
box watching a play in Ford's Theater, or why the assassins who
gathered at Mrs. Suratt's boarding house, whose fanatical opinions
were well known throughout Washington, were not being watched
by Baker. Nor was the capture of Booth and his accomplices the
Work of Baker, although he took credit for it.
Elizabeth van Lew, another volunteer in the South and a resident
of Richmond, stayed at her post throughout the entire war and is
acc' minted the single most valuable spy the North ever had. Grant
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18 The Craft of intelligence 653
ceived from Richmond (luring the war. In Civil NiVar espionage any
penetration" of an important headquarters, always the most dra-
matic of high-level intelligence operations, is conspicuously missing,
as are most of the more rewarding and devious undertakings of es-
pionage. The closest thing to it, however, is alleged to have been
achieved by Elizabeth van Lew when she procured a job for one of
her Negro servants as a waitress in the house of Jefferson Davis,
transmitting the intelligence this produced to .Major Sharpe in
Washington.
In 1885, the first permanent military intelligence organization
was created in the United States in peacetime. It was known as the
Military information Division and came under the Adjutant Gen-
eral's Office, In 1889, the Army attache system was founded and
with it began the posting of American military attaches to our em-
bassies and legations abroad, where they were to function as ob-
servers and intelligence officers. In 1903, with the creation of an
Army General Staff, the Military Information Division was incorpo-
rated into it as the "Second Division," thus beginning the tradition
of G-2, which has since remained the designation for intelligence in
the American Army. This early G-2, however, from lack of interest
and responsibility dwindled almost to the point of disappearance,
with the result that NATorkl War I found us again without any real
intelligence service. This time, however, our situation was different.
We were fighting abroad, the whole period during which our troops
were directly engaged lasted little over a year, and we had allies,
There was no time to develop a full-fledged intelligence arm nor
did we have to, since we could reply largely on the British and
French for strategic intelligence and even for some tactical intelli-
gence and order of battle.
But we learned rapidly?due largely to a group of officers to whom
I wish to pay tribute. There was, first of all, Colonel Ralph 1-1. Van
Deman, who is considered by many to be the moving force in estab-
lishing a U.S. military intelligence. His work is described in what
consider the best account by an American author of intelligence
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services through the ages, The Story of Secret Service, by Richard
Wilmer Rowan. I worked personally with Colonel Van Deman in
World War I when 1 was in Bern, arid I can attest to the effective
work that he and his successors, General Dennis E. Nolan and Gen-
eral Marlborough Churchill, did in building up the basis of our
military intelligence today.
By the time the war was over, the basic framework had been
established for the various military and naval intelligence branches
which continued to exist, even though in skeleton form, until the
outbreak of the Second World War?G-2, CIC (Counter Intelligence
Corps, which until 1942 was called the Corps of Intelligence Police)
and ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence). Of equal importance was
our initial experience during World War I in the field of cryp-
tography, of which I shall have more to say in a later chapter. In
this area, too, a skeleton force working during the interim years of
peace succeeded in developing the most vital instrument of intel-
ligence which we possessed when we were finally swept into war
again in 1941?the ability to break the Japanese diplomatic and
naval codes.
It was only in World War II, and particularly after the Pearl
Harbor attack, that we began to develop, side by side with our
military intelligence organizations, an agency for secret intelligence
collection and operations. As I mentioned earlier, the origin of this
agency was a summons by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Wil-
liam J. Donovan in 1941 to come down to Washington and work
on this problem.
Colonel (later Major General) Donovan was eminently qualified
for the job. A distinguished lawyer, a veteran of World War I who
had won the Medal of Honor, he had divided his busy life in peace-
time between the law, governinent service and politics. He knew the
world, having traveled widely. He understood people. He had a flair
for the unusual and for the dangerous, tempered with judgment.
In short, he had the qualities to be desired in an intelligence officer.
The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and our entry into
the war naturally stimulated the rapid growth of the OSS and its
intelligence operations.
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It had begun, overtly, as a researeh and analysis organization,
,manned- by a. hand-picked group of some of the best historians arid
other scholars available in this coun try. By June, 1942, the COI
: (Coordinator of 'Information), as Donovan's organization had been
called at first, was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and
' told "to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and
operate special services."
By this time the OSS was already deep in the task of "special serv-
ices,'' a cover designation for secret intelligence and secret operations
of all kinds and character, particularly the support of various anti-
Nazi underground groups behind the enemy lines and covert prepa-
rations for the invasion of North Africa.
During 1943, elements of :the OSS were at work on a world-wide
basis, except for Latin America, where the FBI was operating, and
.parts of the Far Eastern Command, which General MacArthur 'had
already pre-empted,
Its guerrilla and resistance branch, modeled on the wellpubli=
cized British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and working
closely with the latter in the European Theater, had already begun
to drop teams of men and women into France, Italy and Yugoslavia.
.and in the China-Burma-India Theater of war. The key idea behind
these operations was to support, train and supply already existing
resistance movements or, where there were none, to organize willing
partisans into effective guerrillas. The Jedburghs, as they were called,
- who dropped into France, and Detachment 101, the unit in Burma,
were among the most famous of these groups. Later the OSS de,
veloped special units for the creation and dissemination of black
propaganda, for counterespionage, and for certain sabotage and re,
sistance tasks that required unusual talents, such as underwater
demolitions or technical functions in support of regular intelligence
tasks.
In conjunction with all these undertakings, it had to develop its
own training schools. Toward the end of the war, as our armies
swept over Germany, it created special units for the apprehension
of war criminals and the recovery of looted art treasures as well as
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for tracking clown the movements of funds which, it was thought,
the Nazi leaders would take into hiding in order to make a come-
back at a later date. There was little that it did not attempt to do
at some time or place between 1912 and the war's end.
When the war was over, all but the secret intelligence branch and
the analysis branch of the OSS was dissolved. Even these for a time
threatened to disappear.
For a short time after Vi Day, it looked as though the U.S. would
gradually withdraw its troops from Europe and the Far East. This
would probably have included the disbanding of intelligence opera-
tions. In fact, it seemed likely at the end of 1945 that we would do
what we did after World War I?fold our tents and go back to
business-as-usual. But this time, in contrast to 1919 when we repudi-
ated the League of Nations, we became a charter member of the
United Nations and gave it our support in hopes that it would grow
up to be the keeper of world peace.
If the Communists had not overreached themselves, our govern-
ment might well have been disposed to leave the responsibility for
keeping the peace more and more to the United Nations. In fact, at
Yalta Stalin asked President Roosevelt how long we expected to keep
our troops in Europe. The President answered, not more than two
years. In view of the events that took place in rapid succession dur-
ing the postwar years, it is clear that in the period between 1945
and 1950 Premier Stalin and Mao Tse-tung decided that they would
not wait for us to retire gratefully from Europe anti Asia; they
would kick us out.
Moscow installed Communist regimes in Poland, Rumania and
Bulgaria before the ink was dry on the agreements signed at Yalta
and Potsdam. The Kremlin threatened Iran in 1946, and followed
this in rapid succession by imposing a Communist regime on Hun-
gary, activating the civil war in Greece, staging the take-over of
Czechoslovakia and instituting the Berlin blockade. Later, in 1950,
Mao joined Stalin to mastermind the attack on South Korea. Mean-
while, Mao had been consolidating his position on the mainland of
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China. These blows in different parts of the world aroused our
leaders to the need for a world-wide intelligence system. We were,
without fully realizing it, witnessing the first stages of a master plan
to shatter the societies of Europe and Asia and isolate the United
States, and eventually to take over the entire world. What we were
coming to realize, however, was the need to learn a great deal more
than we knew about the secret plans of the Kremlin to advance the
frontiers of Communism.
In his address to Congress On March 12, 1947, President Truman
declared that the security of the country was threatened by Com-
munist actions and stated that it would be our policy "to help free
peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national in-
tegrity against aggressive movements seeking to impose on them
totalitarian regimes." He added that we could not allow changes in
the status quo brought about by "coercion or by such subterfuges
as political infiltration," in violation of the United Nations Charter.
It was by then obvious that the United Nations, shackled by the
Soviet veto, could not play the role of policeman. It was also clear
that we had a long period of crisis ahead of us. Under these con-
ditions, a series of measures were taken by the government to
transform our words into action. One of the earliest was the reor-
ganization of our national defense structure, which provided for the
unification of the military services under a Secretary of Defense and
the creation of the National Security Council.
At that time President Truman, basing his action upon a blue-
print that General Donovan had submitted, recommended that a
central intelligence agency be created as a permanent agency of
government. A Republican Congress agreed and, with complete bi-
partisan approval, the CIA was established in the National Security
Act of 1947. It was an openly acknowledged arm of the executive
branch of government, although, of course, it had many duties of a
secret nature. President Truman saw to it that the new agency was
equipped to support our government's effort to meet Communist
tactics of "coercion, subterfuge, and political infiltration." Much
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of the know-how and some of the personnel of the OSS were taken
over by the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortunately many ranking
officers of the OSS had remained in the various interim intelligence
units which had functioned under the aegis of the State and War
Departments in the period 1945-47.
The CIA, however, was not patterned wholly either on the OSS
or on the structural plan Of earlier or contemporary intelligence
organizations of other countries, Its broad scheme was in a sense
unique in that it combined under one leadership the overt task of
intelligence analysis and coordination with the work of secret in-
telligence operations of the various types I shall describe. Also, the
new organization was intended to fill the gaps in our existing in-
telligence structure without displacing or unduly competing with
other existing U.S. intelligence units in the Departments of State
and Defense. At the same time, ,it was realized that the State De-
partment, largely dependent for its information on the reports
from diplomatic establishments abroad, and the armed forces, de-.
pendent mainly on its attaches and its military installations abroad,.
could neither be expected to collect intelligence on all those parts:
of the world that were becoming increasingly difficult of access nor.
to groom a standing force of trained intelligence officers. For this
reason, CIA was given the mandate to develop its own secret col-
lection arm, which was to be quite distinct from that part of the
organization that had been set up to assemble and evaluate intel-
ligence from other parts of the government.
One of the unique features of CIA was that its evaluation and
coordinating side was to treat the intelligence produced by its
clandestine arm in the same fashion that information from other
government agencies was treated. Another feature of CIA's struc-
ture, which did not come about all at once but was the result of
gradual mergers which experience showed to be practical and effi-
cient, was the incorporation of all clandestine activities under one
roof and one management. Traditionally, intelligence services have
kept espionage and counterespionage in separate compartments and
all activities belonging in the category of political or psychological,
warfare in still another compartment. CIA abandoned this kind of
compartmentalization, which so often leads to neither the right-
hand nor the left knowing what the other is doing.
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20 The Craft of Intelligence 653
The most recent development in American intelligence has been
a unification of the management of the various intelligence branches
of the armed forces. In August, 1961, the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) was established under a directive issued by the De-
partment of Defense. An outstanding Air Force officer, Lieutenant
General 'Joseph F. Carroll was named as its first Director. He has
two deputies, one from the Army and one from the Navy. Lieu-
tenant General William W. Quinn, his Army deputy, and I worked
closely together when General Quinn was the very able G-2 to
General Alexander M. Patch of the Seventh Army during the in-
vasion of Southern France and Germany. In those days, in the
summer and autumn of 1944, I used to meet secretly with Quinn at
points in liberated France near the northern Swiss border and
supply him with all the military intelligence I could gather on Nazi
troop movements and plans as Hitler's forces retreated toward the
mountain "redoubt" of Southern Germany and Austria. Rear
Admiral Samuel B. Frankel, the Navy deputy, likewise an experi-
enced intelligence officer, made a special contribution to the work
of the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) during the years
when I served it as chairman. DIA was not a merger of the intelli-
gence branches of the armed services, but primarily an attempt to
achieve maximum coordination and efficiency in the intelligence
processes of the three services.
Thus, in contrast to our custom in the past of letting the in-
telligence function die when the war was over, it has been allowed
to grow to meet the ever-widening and more complex responsibili-
ties of the time. The formation Of such agencies as the DIA, like
the earlier creation of CIA itself, is the result of studied effort to
give intelligence its proper stature in our national security struc-
ture. There is, of course, always the possibility that two such
powerful and well-financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become
rivals and competitors. Some of this could be healthy; too much of
it could be both expensive and dangerous. A clear definition of
functions is always a requisite and this, in broad outlines, exists,
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Furthermore, the high caliber of the officers, military and civilian,
directing the two agencies, if maintained, should guarantee effective
performance, but it is vital to protect the authority of the Director
of Central intelligence over the estimating functions of our intel-
ligence work.
DEARER E A fi E JR 111111M BEA
4=
The Intelligence Reqttirements
of a Free Society
In our time, the United States is being challenged by a hostile
group of nations that profess a philosophy of life and of government
inimical to our own. This in itself is not a new development; we
have faced such challenges before. What has changed is that now,
for the first time, we face an adversary possessing the military power
to mount a devastating attack directly upon the United States, and
in the era of nuclear missiles this can be accomplished in a matter
of minutes or hours with a minimum of prior alert.
To be sure, we possess the same power against our adversary. But
in our free society our defenses and deterrents are largely prepared
in an open fashion, while our antagonists have built up a for-
midable wall of secrecy and security. In order to bridge this gap
and help to provide for strategic warning, we have to rely more
and more upon our intelligence operations.
The Departments of State and Defense are collecting information
abroad, and their intelligence experts are analyzing it, preparing
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reports and doing a good job of it. Could they not do the whole
task?
The answer is given to this question fifteen years ago by both the
executive and legislative branches of our government was "No."
Underlying this decision was our growing appreciation of the nature
of the Communist menace, its self-imposed secrecy and the security
measures behind which it prepares its nuclear missile threat and its
subversive penetration of the Free World.
Great areas of both the Soviet Union and Communist China are
sealed off from foreign eyes. These nations tell us nothing about
their military establishments that is not carefully controlled, and yet
such knowledge is needed for our defense and for that of the Free
World. They reject, so far, the inspection and control that is es-
sential for arms and nuclear limitations. They boldly proclaim that
this secrecy is a great asset and. a basic element of policy. They claim
the right to arm in. secret so as to be able, if they desire, to attack
in secret. They curtly refused the "open sky" proposal of President
Eisenhower in 1955, which we were prepared to accept for our
country if they would for theirs. This refusal has left to intelli-
gence the task of evening the balance of knowledge and hence of
preparation by breaking through this shield of secrecy.
The Berlin Wall not only shut off the two halves of a politically
divided city from each other and limited the further escape of
East Germans to the West in any appreciable number. It also tried
to plug one of the last big gaps in the Iron Curtain?that barrier of
barbed wire, land mines, observation towers, mobile patrols and
sanitized border areas stretching southward from the Baltic. When
they put up the Berlin Wall, the Soviets finished sealing off Eastern
Europe in their fashion, and it took them sixteen years to do it.
Yet there are ways of getting under or over, around or even
through this barrier. It is just the first of a series of obstacles. Be-
hind that first wall, there are further segregated and restricted areas
and, behind these, the walls of institutional and personal secrecy
which all together protect everything the Soviet state believes could
reveal either strength or weakness to the inquisitive West.
The Iron and Bamboo Curtains divide the world in the eyes of
Western intelligence into two kinds of places?free areas and "de-
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21 The Craft of Intelligence 653
curtains. These are the military, technical, industrial and nuclear
installations that constitute the backbone of Sino-Soviet power?the
capabilities. These are also the plans of the people who guide
Soviet Russia and Communist China?their war-making intentions
and their "peaceful" political intentions.
Against these targets the overt intelligence collection work of the
State and Defense Departments, though of great value, is not
enough. The special techniques which are unique to secret intelli-
gence operations are needed to penetrate the security barriers of the
Communist Bloc.
Today's intelligence service also finds itself in the situation of
having to maintain a constant watch in every part of the world, no
matter what may at the moment be occupying the main attention
of diplomats and military men. Our vital interests are subject to
attack in almost every quarter of the globe at any time.
A few decades ago no one would have been able or willing to
predict that in. the 1960s our armed forces would be stationed in
Korea and be deeply engaged in South Vietnam, that Cuba would
have become a hostile Communist state closely allied with Moscow,
or that the Congo would have assumed grave importance in our
foreign policy. Yet these are all -facts of life today. The coming years
will undoubtedly provide equally strange developments.
Today it is impossible to predict where the next danger spot may
develop. It is the duty of intelligence to forewarn of such dangers,
so that the government can take action. No longer can the search
for information be limited to a few countries. The whole world is
the arena of our conflict. In this_age of nuclear missiles even the
Arctic and the Antarctic have become areas of strategic importance.
Distance has lost much of its old significance, while time, in stra-
tegic terms, is counted in hours or even minutes. The oceans, which
in World War II still protected this country and allowed it ample
time to prepare, are as broad as ever. But now they can be crossed
by missiles in a matter of minutes and by bombers in a few hours.
Today the United States is in the front line of attack, for it is the
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prime target of its adversaries. No longer does an attack require a
long period of mobilization with its telltale evidence. Missiles stand
ready on their launchers, and bombers are on the alert.
Therefore an intelligence service today has an additional responsi-
bility, for it cannot wait for evidences of the likelihood of hostile
acts against us until after the decision to strike has been made by
another power. Our government must be both forewarned and
forearmed. The situation becomes all the more complicated when,
as in the case of Korea and Vietnam, a provocative attack is directed
not against the U.S. but against some distant overseas area which,
if lost to the Free World, would imperil our own security. A close-
knit, coordinated intelligence service, continually on the alert, able
to report accurately and quickly on developments in almost any
part of the globe, is the best insurance we can take out against
surprise.
In addition to getting the information, there is also the question
of how it should be processed and analyzed. I feel that there are
important reasons for placing the responsibility for the prepara-
tion and coordination of our intelligence analyses with a centralized
agency of government which has no responsibility for policy or for
choosing among the weapons systems which will be developed for
our defense. Quite naturally policymakers tend to become wedded
to the policy for which they are responsible, and State and Defense
employees are no exception to this very human tendency. They are
likely to view with a jaundiced eye intelligence reports that might
tend to challenge existing policy decisions or require a change in
cherished estimates of the strength of the Soviets in any particular
military field. The most serious occupational hazard we have in the
intelligence field, the one that causes more mistakes than any
foreign deception or intrigue, is prejudice. I grant that we are all
creatures of prejudice, including CIA officials, but by entrusting
intelligence coordination to our central intelligence service, which
is excluded from policymaking and is married to no particular
military hardware, we can avoid, to the greatest possible extent, the
bending of facts obtained through intelligence to suit a particular
occupational viewpoint.
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At the time of Pearl Harbor high officials here and abroad were
convinced that the Japanese, if they struck, would strike southward
against the soft underbelly of die British, French and Dutch colonial
area. The likelihood that they would make the initial move against
their most dangerous antagonist, the United States, was discounted.
The attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines, and the mishandling
of the intelligence we then had, greatly influenced our govern-
ment's later decision on how our intelligence work should be or-
ganized. While the warnings received before the attack may not
have been clear enough to permit our leaders to pinpoint Hawaii
and the Philippines, they should at least, if adequately analyzed,
have alerted us to imminent danger in the Pacific.
If anyone has any doubt about the importance of objectives in-
telligence, I would suggest a study of other mistakes which leaders
have made because they were badly advised or misjudged the ac-
tions or reactions of other countries. When Kaiser Wilhelm II
struck at France in 1914 and was persuaded by his military leaders
that the violation of Belgian neutrality was essential to military
success, he relied too heavily on their judgment that England would
not enter the war?despite the warnings he received from the politi-
cal side. Here was a gross failure to appraise the intelligence avail-
able.
In the days prior to World War II, the British Government,
despite Churchill's warnings, failed to grasp the dimensions of the
Nazi threat, especially in aircraft.
Hitler likewise, as he launched into World War II, made a series
of miscalculations. He discounted the strength and determination of
Britain; later he opened a second front against Russia in June,
1941, with reckless disregard of the consequences. When in 1942
he was reportedly advised of the plan for an American-British land-
ing in North Africa, he refused to pay attention to the intelligence
available to him. I was told that he casually remarked, "They don't
have the ships to do it."
As for japan, successful as was the Pearl Harbor attack, later
events proved that its government made the greatest miscalculation
of all when it underestimated United States military potential.
Today a new threat, practically unknown in the days before the
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Communist revolution, has put an added strain on our intelligence
capabilities. It is the Communist attcmpt?which we began to com-
prehend after World War undermine the security of free
countries. As this is carried. on in secret, it requires secret intelli-
gence techniques to ferret it out and to build up our defenses
against it.
In the Soviet Union we are faced with an antagonist who has
raised the art of espionage to an unprecedented height, while de-
veloping the collateral techniques of subversion and deception into
a formidable political instrument of attack. No other country has
ever before attempted this on such a scale. These operations, in
support of the U.S.S.R.'s over-all policies, go on in times of so-
called thaw and under the guise of coexistence with the same vigor
as in times of acute crisis. Intelligence has a major share of the task
of neutralizing such hostile aaivities, which present a common dan-
ger to us and to our allies.
The fact that so many Soviet cases of both espionage and sub-
version have been uncovered in recent times and in several NATO
countries is not due to mere accident. It is well that the world
should know what the Soviets know already?namely, that the free
countries of the world have been developing highly sophisticated
counterintelligence organizations and have been increasingly effec-
tive over the years in uncovering Soviet espionage. Naturally, with
our NATO and other alliances, we have a direct interest in the
internal security arrangements of other countries with which secrets
may be shared. If a NATO document is filched by the Communists
from one of our allies, it is just as harmful to us as if it were stolen
from our own files. This creates an important requirement for
international cooperation in intelligence work.
Our allies, and many friendly countries which are not formal
allies, generally share our view of the Communist threat. Many of
them can make and are making real contributions to the total
strength of the Free World, including one in the intelligence field,
to help keep us forewarned. However, some of our friends do not
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have the resources to do all they might wish, and they look to the
United States for leadership in the intelligence field, as in many
others. As we uncover hostile Communist plans, they expect us to
help them in recognizing the threats to their own security. It is in
our interest to do so. One of the most gratifying features of recent
work in intelligence, and one that is quite unique in its long his-
tory, has been the growing cooperation established between the
American intelligence services and their counterparts throughout
the Free World which make common cause with us as we face a
common peril
There is a fundamental question about our intelligence work
which, I realize, worries a good many people. Is it necessary, they
ask, for the United States_with its high ideals and its traditions to
involve itself in espionage, to send U-2s over other people's terri-
tory, to break other people's coded messages?
Many people who understand that such activities may be neces-
sary in wartime still doubt that they are justified in time of peace.
Do we spy on friend and foe alike, and do we have to do it merely
because another less scrupulous and less moral type of country does
it to us? I do not consider such questions improper, frivolous or
pacifist. Indeed, it does us credit that these questions are raised.
Personally, I see little excuse for peacetime spying on our friends
or Allies. Apart from the moral issues, we have other and far more
important ways of using our limited intelligence resources. Also,
there are other ways of getting the information we need through
normal diplomatic channels. Of course, we have to take into account
the historical fact that we have had friends who became enemies?
Germany on two recent occasions, and Italy and japan. Hence, it
is always useful to have ''in the bank" a store of basic intelligence
?most of it not very secret?about all countries. I recall that in the
early days of World War II a call went out to the public for per-
sonal photographs of various areas of the world, particularly the
islands of the Pacific. We did not then have adequate knowledge
of the beaches and the flora and fauna of many places where our
forces might shortly be landing.
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But the answer to the question of the need for intelligence, par-
ticularly on the Communist Bloc, is that we are not really "at
peace" with them, and we have not been since Communism de-
clared its own war on our system of government and life. We are
faced with a closed, conspiratorial, police-dominated society. We
cannot hope to maintain our position securely if this opponent is
confident that he can surprise us by attacking the Free World at the
time and place of his own choosing and without any forewarning.
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BEARER IIIMM BEARER IIMIM BEARER BEARER
5
The Task of Collection
The collection of foreign intelligence is accomplished in a variety
of ways, not all of them either mysterious or secret. This is par-
ticularly true of overt intelligence, which is information derived
from newspapers, books, learned and technical publications, official
reports of government proceedings, radio and television. Even a
novel or a play may contain useful information about the state of
a nation.
Two sources of overt intelligence in the Soviet Union are, of
course, the newspapers /zvestio and Pravda, which translate into
News and Truth. The former is an organ of the government and the
latter of the party. There are also "little" lzvestias and Pravdas
throughout Russia. A wit once suggested that in hvestia there is no
news and in Pravda there is no truth. This is a fairly accurate
statement, but it is, nevertheless, of real interest to know what the
Soviets publish and what they ignore, and what turn they give to
embarrassing developments that they are obliged to publish.
It is, for example, illuminating to compare the published text
of Khrushchev's extemporaneous remarks in Soviet media with
what he actually said. His now-famous retort to Western diplomats
at a Polish Embassay reception in Moscow on November 18, 1956,
"We will bury you," was not quoted thus in the Soviet press re-
ports, even though it was overheard by many. The state press ap-
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parently has the right to censor. Premier Khrushchev, presumably
with his approval. Later, however, what Khrushchev then said
caught up with hint and he gave -a lengthy and somewhat mollifying
interpretation of it. Consequently, how and why a story is twisted
is at least as interesting as the actual content. Often there is one
version for domestic consumption, another for the other Com-
munist Bloc countries and still other versions for different foreign
countries. There are times when the "fairy stories" that Communist
regimes tell their own people are indicative of new vulnerabilities
and new fears.
The collection of overt foreign information by the United States
is largely the business of the State Department, with other govern-
ment departments cooperating in accordance with their own needs.
The CIA has an interest in the_"product" and shares in collection,
selection and translation. Obviously, to collect and sort out such
intelligence on a world-wide basis is a colossal task, but the work is
well organized and the burden equitably shared. The monitoring
of foreign radio broadcasts that might be of interest to us is one of
the biggest parts of the job. In the Iron Curtain countries alone,
millions of words are spewed out over the air every day; most of
the broadcasts of real interest_ originate in Moscow and Peking,
some directed to domestic audiences and others beamed abroad.
All overt information is grist for the intelligence mill. It is there
for the getting, but large numbers of trained personnel are required
to cull it in order to .find the grain of wheat in the mountains of
chaff. For example, in the fall of 1961 we were forewarned by a few
hours of the Soviet intention to resume atomic testing by means of
a vague news item transmitted by Radio Moscow for publication
in a provincial Soviet journal. A young lady at a remote listening
P? st spotted this item, analyzed it correctly and relayed it to Wash-
ington immediately. Her vigilance and perceptiveness succeeded in
singling out one significant piece of intelligence from the torrents
of deadly verbiage that have to be listened to daily.
In countries that are free, where the press is free and the publi-
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cation of political and scientific information is not hampered by
the government, the collection of overt intelligence is of particular
value and is of direct use in the preparation of our intelligence
estimates. Since we are that kind of a country ourselves, we are
subject to this kind of collection. The Soviets pick up some of their
most valuable information about us from our publications, particu-
larly from our technical and scientific journals, publiShed, trans-
.cripts of CongresSional hearings and the like. For the collection, of
this kind of literature, they often make use of the personnel of the
satellite diplomatic Missions in Washington. There is no problem
in acquiring it. The Soviets simply want to spare themselves, the
effort in order to be able to devote their time to more demanding
tasks; also, they feel that a Polish or Czech collection agent is likely
to be less conspicuous than a Russian.
Information is also collected in the ordinary course of conduct-
ing official relations with a foreign power. This is not overt in the
sense that it is available to anyone who reads the papers or listens
to the radio. Indeed, the success of diplomatic negotiations calls for
a certain measure of secrecy. But information derived from diplo-
matic exchanges is made available to the intelligence service for
the preparation of estimates. Such information may, contain facts-,
slants and hints that are significant, especially when coupled with
intelligence from other sources. If the Foreign Minister of X hesi-
tates to accept a United States offer on Monday, it may be that he
is seeing the Soviets on -Fuesday and hoping for a better offer there.
Later, from an entirely different quarter, we may get a glimpse into
the Soviet offer. Together these two items will probably have much
more. meaning than either would have had alone.
The effort of overt collection is broad and massive, it tries to
miss nothing that is readily available and might be of use. Yet there
may be some subjects on which the government urgently needs
information that arc not covered by such material. Or this material
may lack sufficient detail, may be inconclusive or may not be coin- ?
pletely trustworthy. Naturally, this is more often the case in d
closed society. We cannot depend on the Soviets making public,
either intentionally or inadvertently, what our government most
wants to know; only what they wish us to believe. When they do
give .out official information, it cannot always be. trusted. Published
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intelligence from inside informants may show that the plan Failed
in certain respects and that the ruble statistics given were not a true
index of values, Photographs may be doctored, or even faked, as
was the famous Soviet publicity picture of the junk heap first
designated as the downed U-2. The rocket in the Red Army Day
parade, witnessed and photographed by Western newsmen and
military attaches, may be a dud, an assemblage of odd rocket parts
that do not really constitute a working missile. As easy as it is to
collect overt intelligence, it is equally easy to plant deception within
it. For all these reasons clandestine intelligence collection (espio-
nage) must remain an essential and basic i.c.tivity of intelligence.
Clandestine intelligence collection is chiefly a matter of circum-
venting obstacles in order to reach an objective. Our side chooses
the objective. The opponent has set up the obstacles. Usually he
knows which objectives are most important to us, and he surrounds
these with appropriately difficulLobstacles. For example, when the
Soviets started testing their missiles, they chose launching sites in
their most remote and unapproachable wastelands. The more closed
and rigid the control a government has over its people, the more
obstacles it throws up. In our time this means that U.S. intelligence
must delve for the intentions and capabilities of a nation pledged
to secrecy and organized for deception, whose key military instal-
lations may be buried a thousand miles off the beaten track.
Clandestine collection uses people: "agents," "sources," "in-
formants." It may also use machines, for there are machines today
that can do things human beings cannot do and can "see" things
they cannot see. Since the opponent would try to stop this effort if
he could locate and reach it, it is carried out in secret; thus we
speak of it as clandestine collection. The traditional word for it is
espionage.
The essence of espionage is access. Someone, or some device, has
to get close enough to a thing, a place or a person to observe or
discover the desired facts without arousing the attention of those
who protect them. The information must then be delivered to the
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people who want it. It must move quickly or it may get "stale."
And it must not get lost or be intercepted en route.
At its simplest, espionage is nothing more than a kind of well-
concealed reconnaissance. This suffices when a brief look at the
target is all that is needed. The agent makes his way to an objective,
observes it, then comes back and reports what he saw. The target
is usually fairly large and easily discernible?such things as troop
dispositions, fortifications or airfields. Perhaps the agent also can
make his way into a closed installation and have a look around, or
even make off with documents. In any case, the length of his stay is
limited. Continuous reportage is difficult to maintain when the
agent's presence in the area is secret and illegal.
Behind the Iron Curtain today, this method of spying is hardly
adequate?not because the obstacles are so formidable that they
cannot be breached, but because the kind of man who is equipped
by his training to breach them is not likely to have the technical
knowledge that will enable him to make a useful report on the
complex targets that exist nowadays. If you don't know anything
about nuclear reactors, there is little you can discover about one,
even when you are standing right next to it. And even for the rare
person who might be technically competent, just getting' close to
such a target is hardly enough to fulfill today's intelligence require-
ments. What is needed is a thorough examination of the actual
workings of the reactor. For this reason it is unrealistic to think
that U.S. or other Western tourists in the Soviet Union can be of
much use in intelligence collection. But for propaganda reasons, the
Soviets continue to arrest tourists now and then in order to give
the world the impression that U.S. espionage is a vast effort ex-
ploiting even the innocent traveler.
Of far more long-term value than reconnaissance is "penetration"
by an agent, meaning that he somehow is able to get inside the
target and stay there. One of the ways of going about this is for
the agent to insinuate himself into the offices or the elite circles of
another power by means of subterfuge. He is then in a position to
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.elicit the desired information from persons who come to trust him
and who arc entirely unaware of his true role. In popular parlance,
this operation is called a "plant," and it is one of the most ancient
devices of espionage. The case of Ben Franklin's secretary, Edward
Bancroft, which 1 related in an earlier chapter, is a classical ex-
ample of the planted agent.
? A penetration of this kind is predicated upon a show of, outer
loyalties, which are often not put to the test. Nor are they easily'
tested., especially when opponents share a common "language and
background. But today, when the lines that separate one nation and,
one ideology from another are so sharply drawn, the dissembling.
Of loyalties is more difficult to maintain over a. long period. Of. time,
and under close scrutiny. It can be managed though. One of the
most notorious Soviet espionage operations before and during,
World War 11 was the network in the Far East, directed by Richard.
Sorge, a German who was working in Tokyo as a correspondent of,
the Frankfurter Zeitung. Sorge made it his business to cultivate his
fellow countrymen at the German Embassy in Tokyo, and eventu-
ally succeeded in having himself. assigned to the embassy's Press
Section. This not only gave him excellent cover for secret work
with his Japanese agents, but also provided him directly with inside.
information about the Nazis' conduct. of the war and their relations.
with Japan.
? To achieve this, Sorge had to play the part of the good Nazi,
which he apparently did convincingly even though he detested the
Nazis. The Gestapo chief in the embassy, as well as the ambassador ,
and the service attaches, were all his "friends." Had the Gestapo in
Berlin ever investigated Sorge's past, as it eventually did after Sorge
was apprehended by the Japanese in. 1911, it would .have discovered ,
that Sorge had been a Communist agent and agitator in Germany
during the early 1920s and had spent years in Moscow.
? Shortly thereafter, the West was subjected to similar treatment at
the hands of Soviet espionage. Names such as Bruno Pontecorvo
and Klaus Fuchs come to mind as agents who were unmasked after'
the war. In some such cases records of previous Communist affili-
ations lay in the files of Western security and intelligence services
even while the agents held responsible positions in the West, but
they were not found until it was too late. Because physicists like
Fuchs and Pontecorvo moved .from job tojob among_ the Allied
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countries?one year in Great Britain, another in Canada and an-
other in the United States?and because the scientific laboratories of
the Allies were working under great pressures, investigations of
personnel with credentials from Allied countries were not always
conducted as thoroughly as in the case of U.S. citizens. And when
available records were consulted, the data found in them?particu-
larly if of Nazi origin?seem often to have been discounted at a
time when Russia was our ally and I rider our enemy, and when the
war effort required the technical services of gifted scientists of many
nationalities.
The consequences of these omissions and oversights during the
turbulent war years are regrettable, and the lesson will not easily
be forgotten. We cannot afford any more Fuchses or Pon.tecorvos.
Today investigation of persons seeking employment in sensitive
areas of the U.S. Government and related technical installations is
justifiably thorough and painstaking.
Consequently, an agent who performs as a plant in our time must
have more in his favor than acting ability. With our modern
methods of security checking, he is in danger of failure if there is
any record of his ever having been something other than what he
represents himself to be. The only way to disguise a man today so
that he will be acceptable in hostile circles for any length of time
is to make him over entirely. This involves years of training and a
thorough concealing and burying of the past under layers of fic-
titious personal history which have to be "backstopped."
If you were really born in Finland but are supposed to have been
born in Mtmich, Germany, then you must have documents showing
your connection to that city. You have to be able to act like some-
one who was born and lived there. Arrangements have to be made
in Munich to confirm your Origin in case an investigation is ever
undertaken. Perhaps Munich or a similar city was chosen. because
it was bombed and certain records were destroyed. A man so made
over is known as an "illegal," and I shall have more to say about
him later. Obviously, an intelligence service will go to all this
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trouble only when it is intent upon creating deep-set and long-
range assets.
If an intelligence service cannot insert its own agent within a
highly sensitive target, the alternative is to recruit somebody who
is already there. You might hnd someone who is inside but is not
quite at the right spot for access to the information you need. Or
you might find someone just beginning a career which will even-
tually lead to his employment in the target. But the main thing is
that he is a qualified and "cleared" insider. He is, as we say, "in
place."
One of my most valuable agents during World War 11, of whom
I shall have more to say later, was precisely of this kind. When I
first established contact with him, he was already employed in the
German Foreign Office in a position which gave him access to com-
munications with German diplomatic establishments all over the
world. He was exactly at the right place. No single diplomat abroad,
of whatever rank, could have gotten his hands on so much informa-
tion as did this man, who had access to the all-important Foreign
Office files. Even with the most careful planning many years in
advance, it would have been a stroke of fortune if we could ever
have placed an agent inside this target and maneuvered him into
such a position, even if he had been able to behave like the most
loyal Nazi. This method of recruiting the agent "in place," despite
its immense difficulties, has the advantage of allowing the intelli-
gence service to focus on the installation it wishes to penetrate, to
examine and analyze it for its most important and most vulnerable
points, and then to search for the man already employed at that
point who might be likely to cooperate. It does not, as in the case
of plants, begin with the man, the agent, and hope it can devise a
way of inserting him into the target.
in recent years, most of the notorious instances of Soviet pene-
tration of important targets in Western countries were engineered in
this way, by the recruitment of someone already employed inside the
target.
David Greenglass at Los Alamos during World War II, though
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only a draftsman, had access to secret details of the internal con-
struction of the atomic bomb. Judith Coplon was employed shortly
after the war in a section of the Department of Justice responsible
for the registration of foreign agents in the United States. She
regularly saw and copied for the Soviets FBI reports which came
across her desk on investigations of espionage in the United States,
Harry Houghton and john Vassall, although of low rank and en-
gaged chiefly in administrative work, were able to procure sensitive
technical documents from the British Admiralty, where they were
employed in the late 1950s. Alfred Frenzel, a West German parlia-
mentarian, had access to the NATO documents which were dis-
tributed to a West Germany Parliamentary Defense Committee on
which he served in the mid-I950s._ Irvin Scarbeck was only an ad-
ministrative officer in our embassy in Warsaw in 1960-61. But after
he had been compromised by a Polish girl and blackmailed, he
managed to procure for the Polish Intelligence Service, which was
operating under Soviet direction, some of our Ambassador's secret
reports to the State Department on the political situation in Eastrn Europe.
All these people were already employed in jobs which made them
interesting to the Communists at the time they were first recruited-.
Some of them moved up later into jobs which made them of even
greater value to the Soviets. In some instances this may have been
achieved with secret Soviet guidance. Houghton and Vassall were
both originally recruited while stationed at British embassies be-
hind the Iron Curtain. When each was returned home and assigned
to a position in the Admiralty, his access to important documents
naturally broadened. Similarly, had Scarbeck not been caught as .a
result of careful counterintelligence efforts while still at his post in
Warsaw, he probably could have continued for years to be of ever-
increasing use to the Soviets as he was reassigned to one United
States diplomatic post after another.
The Soviet Union has recently given great publicity to the case
of an "insider" who worked with Western intelligence and who
they admitted had access to information of great value. This was
the case of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, whose conviction and. execti
tion by the Soviets was recently announced. His trial, along with
.
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early May of 1963. It is not entirely clear just why the Soviets
chose to make a "show trial" of this case rather than to keep the
whole affair entirely secret, which it was certainly in their power
to do.
It is fairly plain from the evidence which the Soviets allowed to
be presented in the court that a combination of Western intelli-
gence services had succeeded a few years back in gaining the services
of the Soviet Colonel, who held an important position in the mili-
tary and technical hierarchy of the Red Army. He was trusted
sufficiently by the Soviets to be allowed to travel to various inter-
national conferences in Western Europe and these afforded the oc-
casions for establishing contact and communication with Penkovsky.
I would surmise that the failure of these communications somewhere
along the line is what brought the case to grief.
The Soviets claim that he was lured by material attractions?
wine, women and song?available in the West. This is the usual
method of discrediting an individual whose actions and motives
may, in fact, have been far worthier than they are willing to admit.
But Penkovsky was a high-level and experienced officer with many
high Soviet decorations and not some youthful adventurer, not a
man likely to fall for material benefits alone. There must have been
much more involved than the trial and publicity indicate. The
Soviet hierarchy has been deeply shaken for Penkovsky had lost
faith in the system that employed him.
Whatever his motives, the case is typical of the current pattern
of espionage. Penkovsky had natural access to important informa-
tion. All his advantages were built in. No reconnaissance, no
traveler, no plant could have duplicated his achievement. He was
already there. He had to be discovered, contact had to be estab-
lished with him, he had to be convinced that he could make a
valuable contribution to a cause in which he believed.
The overt and clandestine methods of collection I have been dis-
cussing are obviously quite inadequate alone to meet all our in-
telligence needs today. They can be and are supplemented by
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other methods, particularly by taking advantage of the great ad-
vances 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.
Colletion--Whert the NI ach inc. Takes Over
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 per-
sonnel 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, how-
ever, is recover quickly and accurately from the enormous store-
house 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.
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But this is an ordinary feat compared to what technology can do
today in collecting the information itself. Here 1 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 intelli-
gence 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 de-
vice 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 owir
experiments with nuclear weapons and missiles hastened the refine-
ment 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 de-
termine the presence of radioactivity in the atmosphere. Since radio- -
active particles arc 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 countermeasines, also of a highly technological nature. It is
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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 con ii termeas
The protracted negotiations at Geneva between East and West on
the subject or disarmament and the nuclear test ban involve pre-
cisely 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 experi-
ments 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. 'Fo discover the existence of such installations one must
get close to them or directly over them at very high altitudes, armed
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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 docu-
ments 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 . . . an types of vital informa-
tion. 'These results were considered in formulating our military programs.
),Vc 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 consti-
tuted 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.
Eloquent testimony to the value of scientific intelligence collec-
tion, which has proved its worth a hundred times over, has been
given by Winston Churchill in his history of World War 111.1. He
1 The Second World War, Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1918-53.
describes British use of radar in. the Battle of Britain in September,
1940, and also tells of bending, amplifying and falsifying the direc-
tion signals sent by Berlin to guide the attacking German aircraft.
Churchill calls it all the "wizard war" and he concludes that "Un-
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less 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."
Science as a vital arm of intelligence is here to stay. We are in a
critical competitive race with the scientific development of the Com-
munist 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 informa-
tion 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 con-
(c'ealment 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 in-
strument 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.
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. Micro-
phones 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 staff
whose responsibility is to see that the proper foreigners are put in
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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 Ger-
man 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) in-
tended 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 surveil-
lance.
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 in-
stance 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 them-
selves he 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
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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 question, 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 recog-
nize the overriding importance of intelligence, including what we
now call "communications intelligence." When the fate of a na-
tion 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 intel-
ligence 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 tech-
nical 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 sys-
tems of communication and to protect these systems and the per-
sonnel needed to run them. At the same time, it will do everything
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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 reason 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 U.')
gather about another.
There is a vast difference between 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 lor a whole word or evert 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 upin a message that,
is what- they mean. When the Japanese Government sent the famons
"East Winds" message to their diplomats in the United States in
December, 1941, they indicated through the simplest prearranged.
code words that an attack in the Pacific was forthcoming.
In a cipher, a symbol or a group of symbols stands for a single
letter in a word. Thus, "b" or "2" Or "94" 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 VVorld 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 lan-
guages, like Navajo and Grow, which have no written forms and
had never been studied by foreign scholars. Two members of the
same tribe at either end of a field telephone could transmit mes-
sages which no listener except another Navajo could possibly under-
stand. Needless to say, neither the Germans nor the Japanese had
any Navajos. -
In Modern terminology, the word "crypt," meaning "something
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29 The Craft of Intelligence 653
hidden," conveniently gets around the distinction between codes and
ciphers since it refers to all methods of transforming "plain text"
or "clear text" into symbols. The over-all term for the whole field
today is "cryptology," Untler. this broad heading we have two
distinct areas. Cryptography has to do with making, devising, in-
venting or protecting codes and ciphers for the use or one's own
government. Cryptanalysis, on the other hand, has to do with break-
ing codes and ciphers or "decrypting" them, with translating some-
one else's intercepted messages into proper language. To put one's
own messages into a code or cipher is to "encrypt" them. However,
when we. translate our own messages back into plain language, we
are "deciphering."
A cryptogram or cryptograph would be any message in code or
cipher. "Communications intelligence" is information which has
been gained through successful cryptanalysis of other people's traffic.
And now having confused the reader completely, we can get to the
gist of the matter.
The diplomatic service, the armed services and the intelligence
service of every country use secret codes and ciphers for classified
and urgent long-distance communications. Transmission may be
via commercial cable or radio or over special circuits set up by gov-
ernments. Anyone can listen in to radio traffic. Also, governments,
at least in times of crisis, can usually get copies of the encrypted
messages that foreign diplomats stationed on their territory send
home via commercial cable facilities. 'The problem is to break the
codes and ciphers, to "decrypt" them.
Certain codes and ciphers can be broken by mathematical analysis
of intercepted traffic, i.e., cryptanalysis, or more dramatically and
simply by obtaining copies of codes or code books or information on
cipher machines being used by an opponent, or by a combination
of these methods.
In the earlier days of our diplomatic service up to World War 1,
the matter of codes was sometimes treated more or less cavalierly,
often with unfortunate results. 1 remember a story told mc as a
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warning lesson when I was a young foreign service officer. In the
quiet days of 1 )13, we had as our Minister in Rumania an
estimable politician who had served his party well in the Midwest.
His reward was to be sent as Minister to Bucharest. He was new to
the game and codes and ciphers meant little to him. At that time
our basic system was based on a book code, which 1 will call the
Pink Code, although that was not the color we then chose [(Jr its
name. I spent thousands of worried hours over this book, which I
have not seen for over forty years, but to this day I can still re-
member that we had six or seven words for "period.'' One was
"PIVIR" and another was "N INU I)." The other live or six I do
not recall. The theory then was?and it was a na? one?that if we
had six or seven words it would confuse the enemy as to where we
began and ended our sentences.
In any event, our -Ministex to Rumania started off from Wash-
ington with the Pink Code in a great, sealed envelope and it
safely reached Bucharest. It was supposed to be lodged in the lega-
tion's one safe. However, handling combinations was not the new
Minister's forte and he soon Found it more convenient to put the
code under his mattress, where it rested happily for some months.
One day it disappeared?the. whole code book and the Minister's
only code book. It is believed that it found its way to Petrograd.
The new Minister was in a great quandary, which, as a politician,
he solved with considerable_ ingenuity. The coded cable traffic to
Bucharest in those days was relatively light and mostly concerned
the question of immigrants to the United States from Rumania and
Bessarabia. So when the new Minister had collected a half-dozen
coded messages, he would get on the train to Vienna, where he
would quickly visit our Ambassador, in the course of conversation
the visitor from Bucharest would casually remark that just as he
Was leaving he had received some messages winch Ire had not had
time to decode and could he borrow the Ambassador's Pink Code.
(In those good old days, we sent the same code books to almost all of
our diplomatic missions.) The Minister to Bucharest would then
decipher his messages, prepare and code appropriate replies, take
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the train back to Butharest and, at staged intervals, send off the
coded replies. For a time everything went smoothly. The secret of
the loss of the code book was protected until August, 1914, brought
a ffood of messages from Wash ington as the dramatic events leading
UI) to World War I unrolled, The Minister's predicament was
tragic?trips to Vienna no longer sufficed. He admitted his &relic-
-tion and returned to American politics.
- The uncontrollable accidents and disasters of war sometimes ex-
pose to one opponent cryptographic materials used by the other. A
headquarters or an outpost may be overrun. and in the heat of _re-
treat code books left behind. Many notable instances of this kind
in World War I gave the British a lifesaving insight into the mili-
tary and diplomatic intentions of the Germans. Early in the war
the Russians sank the German cruiser Magdeburg and rescued from
the arms of a drowned sailor the German naval code book, which
was promptly turned over to their British allies. British salyage
operations on sunken German submarines turned up similar find-
ings. In 1917 two German dirigibles, returning from a raid over
England, ran into a storm and were downed over France. Among
the materials retrieved from them were coded maps and code books
used by German Il-boats in the Atlantic.
Military operations based on breaking of codes will often tip off
the enemy, however. Once the Germans noticed that their sub-
marines were being spotted and cornered with unusual and startling
frequency, it was not hard for them to guess that communications
with their underwater deo were being read. As a result, all codes
were immediately changed. There is always the problem, then, of
how to act on information derived in this manner. One can risk
terminating the usefulness of the source in order to obtain an im-
mediate military or diplomatic gain, or one can hold back and con-
tinue to tc.ctimulate an ever-broadening knowledge of the enemy's
movements and actions in order eventually to inflict the greatest
possible damage.
Actually, in either case, the attempt is usually made to protect
the real source and keep it viable, by giving the enemy fake indica-
tions that some other kind of source was responsible for the in-
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30 The Craft of Intelligence 653
the enemy is not undertaken if it would alert the enemy to the fact
that its origin was solely due to information obtained by reading his
messages.
During World War I the first serious American cryptanalytic
undertaking was launched under the aegis of the War Department,
Officially known as Section 8 of Military Intelligence, it liked to
call itself the "Black Chamber," the name used for centuries by the
secret Organs of postal censorship of the major European nations.
Working from scratch, a group of brilliant amateurs under the
direction of Herbert Yardley, a former telegraph operator, had by
1918 become a first-rate professional outfit. One of its outstanding
achievements after World War 1 was the breaking of the Japanese
diplomatic codes. During negotiations at the Washington Disarma-
ment Conference in 1921, the United States wanted very much to
get Japanese agreement to a 10:6 naval ratio. The Japanese came
to the conference with the stated intention of holding to a 10:7
ratio. In diplomacy, as in any kind of bargaining, you are at a tre-
mendous advantage if you know your opponent is prepared to
retreat to secondary positions if necessary. Decipherment of the
Japanese diplomatic traffic between Washington and Tokyo by the
Black Chamber revealed to our government that the Japanese were
actually ready to back Clown to the desired ratio if we forced the
issue. So We were able to force it without risking a breakup of the
conference over the issue.
The "Black Chamber" remained intact, serving chiefly the State
Department until 1929, when Secretary Stimson refused to let the
department avail itself further of its services. McGeorge Bundy,
Stimson's biographer, provides this explanation:
Stimson adopted as his guide in foreign policy a principle he always
tried to follow in personal relations?the principle that the way to make
men trustworthy is to trust them. In this spirit he made one decision for
which he was later severely criticized: he closed down the so-called Black
Chamber. . . . This act he never regretted. . . . Stimson, as Secretary of
State, was dealing aS a gentleman with the gentlemen sent as ambassadors
and ministers from friendly nations.2
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2 Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Aciive Sconce in Peace and War,
Harper & Bros., 1948.
Our Army and Navy had, fortunately, begun to address them-
selves to the problems of cryptanalysis in the late 1920s, with par-
ticular emphasis on japan, since American military thinking at that
time foresaw japan as the major potential foe of the United States
in whatever war was to come next. By 1941, the year of Pearl Har-
bor, Navy cryptographers had broken most of the important Japa-
nese naval and diplomatic codes and ciphers; and we were, as a
result, frequently in possession of evidence of imminent Japanese
action in the Pacific before it took place.
The Battle of Midway in June, 1942, the turning point of the
naval war in the Pacific, was an-engagement we sought because we
were able to learn from decrypted messages that a major task force
of the Imperial Japanese Navy was gathering off Midway. This in-
telligence concerning strength and disposition of enemy forces gave
our Navy the advantage of surprise.
A special problem, in the years following Pearl Harbor, was how
to keep secret the fact that we had broken the Japanese codes. In-
vestigations, recriminations, the need to place the blame somewhere
for the disheartening American losses threatened to throw this
"Magic," as it was called, into the lap of the public, and the Japa-
nese. Until an adequate Navy could be put on the seas, the ability to
read Japanese messages was one of the few advantages we had in
the battle with Japan. There were occasional leaks but none evi-
dently ever came to their attention.
In 1944, Thomas E. Dewey, who was then running for President
against President Roosevelt, had learned, as had many persons close
to the Federal government, about our successes with the Japanese
code and our apparent failure before Pearl Harbor to make the
best use of the information in our hands. It was feared that he
might refer to this in his campaign. The mere possibility sent shivers
down the spines of our Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Marshall him-
self appealed personally to mr. Dewey in a letter to keep patriotic
considerations above partisan politics. Mr. Dewey never mentioned
our code successes.
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One of the most spectacular of all coups in the field of corn,
munications intelligence was the British decipherment of the so-
called Zimmermann telegram in January, 1917, when the United
States was on the brink of World War I. The job was performed by
the experts of "Room 40," as British naval cryptanalytic head-
quarters were called. The message had originated with the German
Foreign Secretary Ziannermann in Berlin and was addressed to the
German Minister in Mexico City. It outlined the German plan for
the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on February '1,
1917, stated the probability that this would bring the United States
into war, and proposed that Mexico enter the war on Germany's side
and with victory regain its "lost territory in Texas, New Mexico,
and Arizona:"
Admiral Hall, the legendary Chief of British Naval Intelligence,
had this message in his hands for over a month after its receipt. His
problem was how to pass its deciphered contents to the Americans
in a manner that would convince them of its authenticity yet would
prevent the Germans from learning the British had broken their
codes. Finally, the war situation caused Lord Balfour, the British
Foreign Secretary, to communicate the Zimmermann message for-
mally to the American Ambassador in London. The receipt of the
message in Washington caused a sensation at the White House and
State Department, and created serious problems for our govern-
ment?how to verify beyond a doubt the validity of the message and
how to make it public without letting it seem merely an Anglo-
American ploy to get the United States into the war. Robert
Lansing, who was then Secretary of State and an uncle of mine,
later told me about the dramatic events of the next few days which
brought America much closer to war.
The situation was complicated by the fact that the Germans had
used American diplomatic cable facilities to transmit the message
to their Ambassador in Washington, Count Bernstorff. }-Ie relayed
it to his colleague in Mexico City. President Wilson had granted
the Germans the privilege of utilizing our communication lines. be-
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tween Europe and America on the understanding that the messages
would be related to peace proposals in which Wilson had been
interested.
The President's chagrin was therefore all the greater when he
discovered to what end the Germans had been exploiting his good
offices. However, this curious arrangement turned out to be of great
advantage. First of all, it meant that the State Department had in its
possession. a copy of the encrypted Zimmermann. telegram, which it.
had passed to Bernstorlf, unaware, of course, of its inflammatory
contents. Once the encrypted text was identified, it was forwarded
to our embassy in London, where one of Admiral Hall's men re,
decrypted it for us in the presence of an embassy representative, thus
verifying beyond a doubt its true contents. Secondly, the fact that
deciphered copies of the telegram had been seen by German diplo,
mats in both Washington and Mexico City helped significantly to
solve the all-important problem that had caused Admiral Hall so
much worry, namely, how to fool the Germans about the real source
from which we had obtained the information. In the end the im-
pression given the Germans was that the message had leaked as a
result of some carelessness or theft in one of the German embassies
Or Mexican offices which had received copies of it. They continued
using the same codes, thus displaying a remarkable but welcome
lack of imagination. On March 1, 1917, the State Department re-
leased the contents of the telegram to the Associated Press. It hit the
American public like a bombshell. In April we declared war on
Germany.
When one compares the cryptographic systems used today with
those to which governments during World War I entrusted the pas,
sage of their most vital and sensitive secrets, the latter seem crude
and amateurish, especially because of their recurring groups of
symbols which tipped off the cryptanalyst that an important word
or one in frequent usage must lie behind the symbols. When Ad-
miral Hall's cryptanalysts saw the combination "67893" in the
Zimmermann telegram, they recognized it and knew that it meant
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Information he is procuring has already been picked up somewhere
else, or is known from overt sources, or is of too low a priority to
be worth the effort or the expense.
Our government determines what the intelligence objectives are
and what information it needs, without regard to obstacles. It also
establishes priorities among these objectives according to their rel-
ative urgency. Soviet ICBMs will take priority over their steel
production. Whether or not the Soviet Union would go to war over
Laos will take priority over the political shading of a new regime in
the Middle East. Only after priority has been established is the
question of obstacles examined. If the information can be obtained
by overt collection or in the ordinary course of diplomatic work, the
intelligence service will not be asked to devote to the task its limited
assets for clandestine collection. But if it is decided that secret in-
telligence must do the job, then it is usually because serious obstacles
are known to surround the target.
In preparing, its directives for the intelligence mission in a,partie-
ular area, the headquarters Will first of all consider the factors of
political and physical geography and the presence of persons within
the area who have access to the desired information. Obviously,
contiguous and border areas around the great periphery of the
Communist world serve as windows, though darkly shaded ones
on that world, The presence of sizable delegations from the Sino-
Soviet Bloc in many countries not. necessarily contiguous to it offers
quite another kind of opportunity for information on the Bloc.
.Also, citizens of peripheral countries may not have the difficulties
.,an American would have in traveling to denied areas and enjoying
,more freedom of movement and less close scrutiny while there. All
these are factors in the problem of "access" and therefore play a
role in the framing of guidance.
Hypothetically speaking, if our government wanted information
On a recent industrial or technical development in Red China,
where the U.S. has no diplomatic mission and no unofficial repre-
sentation either, the intelligence service could assign the collection
task to those free areas close to China which receive Chinese refugees
from time to time, or to a free area halfway round the world from
.China where the latter had a diplomatic mission, or to still another
free area which had commercial relations with China and whose
nationals coukl travel there. It would not assign the task to an are2
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"Mexico." Under the German system it always meant that. Today
such a cipher group would never stand for the same word twice.
Today not only all official government messages but also the
communications of espionage agents are cast in equally secure and
complex cryptographic systems. Colonel Abel, for example, in re-
porting information back to Moscow, used a highly sophisticated
cipher system. Here as elsewhere, as defensive measures improve,
countermeasures to pierce the new defenses also improve. And, of
course, if an opposing intelligence service succeeds by clandestine
means in procuring the actual cipher pads or the special "keys" on
which the cipher systems are based, then there is a good possibility
that the ciphers can be broken.
7
Planning and C nidance
The matters that interest, an intelligence service are so numerous
and diverse that some order must be established in the process of
collecting information. This is logically the responsibility of the in-
telligence headquarters. It alone has the world picture and knows
what the requirements of our government are from day to day
and month to month.
Without guidance and direction, intelligence officers in different
parts of the world could easily spend much of their time duplicating
each other's work or there could be serious gaps in our information.
The intelligence officer at his post abroad cannot fully judge the
Yahte of his own operations because he cannot know whether the
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where none of these conditions existed, nor would it indiscrimi-
nately flash out its requirement world-wide, setting up a scramble of
intelligence officers to go after the same information by whatever
means they could devise.
When Khrushchev made his secret speech denouncing Stalin to
the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, it was clear from various
press and other references to the speech that a text must be avail-
able somewhere. The speech was too long and too detailed to have
been made extemporaneously even by Khrushchev, who is noted for
lengthy extemporary remarks. An intelligence "document hunt"
was instituted and eventually the text of the speech was found?
but many miles from Moscow, where it had been delivered. It was
necessary in. this case for headquarters to alert many kinds of sources
and to make sure all clues were followed up.
Usually the means of getting the information once a task has been
assigned is left to the ingenuity of the intelligence officer in the
field. My source in the German Foreign Office already mentioned
brought out or secretly smuggled to me in Switzerland during 1944-
45, choice selections of the most secret German diplomatic and
military messages. For various technical reasons, he could only send
a fraction of the total available to him, and he had to pick and
choose on his own initiative anti under my guidance.
As the war in Europe was drawing to a close, the possibility of a
protracted conflict with japan still loomed ahead. I then received
from headquarters a request that our source concentrate on sending
me more reports from German missions in the Far East, particularly
in Tokyo and Shanghai. Even though I agreed with headquarters
that this window on the Far Fast should be opened wider, it was no
easy task to carry out the instruction speedily.
My source was in Berlin and I was in Switzerland. He was able to
travel out only rarely, I might not see him for weeks, and the
matter was too urgent to let go until our next meeting. Normally we
never communicated with him across the Swiss-German border
because it was too dangerous, but we did have an emergency ar-
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rangement based on a fictitious girl friend of the source who was
supposedly living in Switzerland. Since postcards seem more inno-
cent to the censor than sealed letters, the "girl friend" sent to the
source's home address in Berlin a beautiful postal card of the
Jungfrau. "She" wrote On it that a friend of hers in Zurich had a
shop which formerly sold Japanese toys but had run out of them
and couldn't import them because of wartime restrictions; in view
of the close relations between Germany and Japan, couldn't he help
her out by suggesting where in Germany she could buy Japanese
toys for her shop? My source got the point immediately since he
knew all messages from the Swiss "girl friend" were from me. The
next batch of cables to the German Foreign Ofiice which he sent me
were largely from German officials in the Far East and told the
plight of the Japanese Navy and Air Force.
Sometimes for diplomatic or other reasons an intelligence head-
quarters gives out negative guidance, i.e., instructions what not to
do. An enterprising intelligence officer may run into some splendid
opportunities and learn to his disappointment after corresponding
with his headquarters that there are good reasons for passing them
up. He may or may not be told what these good reasons are.
General Marshall, in the letter to Governor Dewey mentioned
earlier, emphasized the sensitivity of operations involving enemy
codes and ciphers by telling him of an uncoordinated attempt by
American intelligence to get a German code in Portugal. The
operation misfired and so alerted the Germans that they changed
a code we were already reading, and this valuable source was lost.
I had no knowledge of this incident at the time when I received
an instruction at my wartime post in Switzerland not to try to get
any foreign codes without prior instructions. Shortly after this,
in late 1944, one of my most trusted German agents told me that
he could get me detailed information about certain Nazi codes and
ciphers. This put me in quite a quandary. Though I had confidence
in him, T did not wish him to deduce that we were breaking the
Gernaan codes. If I showed no interest, this would have been an
indication that such was the case. No intelligence officer would
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otherwise reject such an offer. I told my .friend I wanted a bit of
time to think over how best this could be worked out. The next
day I told him that as all my traffic to Washington had to go by
radio?Switzerland was then surrounded by Nazi and Fascist forces?
it would be too insecure for me to communicate what he might give
Tile. I said I preferred to wait till France was liberated?the Nor-
mandy invasion had already taken place?so I could send out his
code information by diplomatic pouch. He readily accepted this
somewhat specious answer.
The best planning and the best guidance cannot, of course, fore-
see everything. No intelligence service and no intelligence officer
rules out the possibility of the random and unexpected and often
inexplicable windfall. Sometimes a man who has something on his
mind feels safer talking to a Western intelligence officer ten thou-
and miles from home and so waits for the opportunity of a trip
abroad to seek one out. A Soviet scientist or technician visiting
Southeast Asia, for example, might talk in a more relaxed manner
than if he were behind the Curtain or even if he were visiting in
New York. The Kremlin's instruction to a Soviet official in Egypt,
if it came to our attention, might throw some light on Soviet policy
toward Berlin.
In 1958 an Arab student from Iraq who had been taking some
advanced studies in Arizona received a letter from Baghdad which
caused him to leave immediately for home. As he departed he
hinted to an. American friend of his that important political events
were impending in his home country. A few weeks later came the
Iraq coup dYtat which astounded the Western world and left some
Intelligence officers with red faces. This bit of information about the
student's hasty departure, and the reason for it, thanks to some good
work of field collection in Arizona did in fact reach headquarters in
Washington quite promptly. Unfortunately, there it was viewed, at
the desk level, and quite naturally, as only one straw in a wind
which seemed to be blowing in a different direction.
This story also illustrates how important it is for the field officer,
without any directives or headquarters administration, to send- in
bits Rnd pieces of intelligence. If, for example, in the Iraq case,
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headquarters had received three or four messages that persons at
"outs" with the lraq Government were converging toward Baghdad,
a quiet alert should have been .sounded.
Some years ago when the Moscow meetings of the Central Com-
mittee of the Communist party were often held in great secrecy, they
could sometimes be predicted by noting the movements of the many
committee members serving in diplomatic or other posts or traveling
abroad. If they quietly converged on Moscow, something was likely
to be about to happen. Here the travel pattern of Soviet officials was
a type of information which field officers were alerted to follow.
Headquarters guidance is necessary but it is no substitute for such
field initiative as was taken in Arizona.
pm FS E.ARER 101=M BEARER BEARER I=M BEARER ...
8
The Main Opponent--
The Communist Intellige ce Service
Most totalitarian countries have, in the course of time, developed
not just one but two intelligence services with quite distinct func-
tions, even though the work of these services may occasionally over-
lap. One of these organizations is a military intelligence service run
by the general staff of the armed forces and responsible for collect-
ing military and technical information abroad. In the U.S.S.R. this
military organization is called the GRU (Intelligence Directorate).
GRU officers working out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa operated
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is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence
anti counterintelligence organization. It is an instrument for sub-
version, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the
,affairs of other countries. It is an aggressive arm of Soviet ambitions
in the Cold War. If the Soviets .send astronauts to the moon,
expect that a KGB officer will accompany them.
No sooner had the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia than they
:established their own secret police. The Cheka was set up under
Feliks Dzerzhinski - in December, 1917, as a security ?force with
executive powers. The name stood for "Extraordinary Commission
:against Counter-Revolution ,and Sabotage." The Cheka was a mili-
tant, terroristic police force that ruthlessly liquidated civilians on
:the basis of denunciations and suspicion of bourgeois origins. ft
hollowed the Red armies in their conflicts with the White Russian
forces, and operated as a kind of counterespionage organization in
areas where sovietization had not yet been accomplished. In 1921
if established a foreign arm, because by that time White Russian
:oldiers and civilian opponents of die Bolsheviks who could manage
to do so had fled to Western Europe and the Middle and Far East
and were seeking to strike back against the Bolsheviks from abroad:
Almost at once this foreign- arm- of Soviet security had a much
bigger job than ever confronted the Czar's Okhrana.?It had not only
to penetrate and neutralize the Russian exile organizations that
were conspiring against the Soviets, but also to watch, and wherever
possible to influence, the Western powers hostile to the Bolsheviks.
It thus became a political intelligence service with a militant mis-
sion. In order to achieve its aims, it engaged in violence and bru-
tality, in kidnaping and murder, both at home and abroad. This
actiVity was directed not only against the "enemies of the state," but
against fellow Bolsheviks who were considered untrustworthy or
burdensome. In Paris in 1926 General Petlura, the exiled leader of
the Ukrainian nationalists, was murdered; some say it was by the
security service, others claim it was personal vengeance. In 1930,
again in Paris, the service kidnaped General Kutepov, the leader of
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the atomic spy networks in Canada during World War H. The other
service, which more typically represents an exclusive development
of a totalitarian state, is the "security" service. Generally such a
service has its origin in a secret police force devoted to internal
affairs such as the repression of dissidents and the protection of the
regime. Gradually this organization expands outward, thrusting into
neighboring areas for "protective" reasons, and finally spreads out
over the globe as a full-fledged foreign intelligence service and much
more.
Since this security service is primarily the creation of the clique or
party in power, it will always be more trusted by political leaders
than is the military intelligence service, and it will usually seek to
dominate and control the military service, if not to absorb it. In
Nazi Germany the "Reich Security Office," under Himmler, during
1944 completely took over its military counterpart, the Abzuchr.
In 1947, the security and military services in Soviet Russia were
combined, with the former dominant, but the merger lasted only
a year. In 1958, however, Khrushchey placed one of his most trusted
security chiefs, General Ivan Serov, in charge of the GRU, ap-
parently in order to keep an eye on it. It was Scrov, one of the
most brutal men in Soviet intelligence history, whom Khrushchev
called upon to direct the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution
and the Soviet "recon.quest" of Hungary in November of 1956.
There are, incidentally, indications that things may not be going
too well for Serov, that he may have been caught tip in a new and
dramatic house cleaning that may go even beyond the intelligence
services.
Whether or not the security service of it totalitarian state succeeds
in gaining control of the military service, it inevitably becomes the
more powerful organization. Furthermore, its mandate, both inter-
nal and external, far exceeds that of the intelligence services of
free societies. Today the Soviet State Security Service (KGB) is the
eyes and ears of the Soviet state abroad as well as at home. It is a
multipurpose, clandestine arm of power that can in the last analysis
carry out almost any act that the Soviet leadership assigns to it. It
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successor, General Miller. For over a decade Leon Trotski, who had
gone into exile in 1929, was the prime assassinator target of Stalin.
On August 21, 1940, the old revolutionist died in Mexico City after
being slashed with an Alpine climber's ice ax by an agent of Soviet
security. The list of its own officers and agents abroad whom it
murdered during this same period, many of whom had tried to
break away or were simply not trusted by Stalin, is far longer.
Lest anyone think that violent acts against exiles who opposed
or broke with the Bolsheviks in the early days were merely manifes-
tations of the rough-and-tumble era of early Soviet history or of
Stalin's personal vengefulness, it should be pointed out that in the
subsequent era of so-called "socialist legality," which was pro-
claimed by Khrushchev in 1956, a later generation of exiled leaders
was wiped out. The only difference between the earlier and later
crops of political murders lay in the subtlety and efficacy of the
murder weapons. The mysterious deaths in Munich, in 1957 and
4959, of Lev Rebet and Stephen Bandera, leaders of the Ukrainian
emigres, were managed with a cyanide spray that killed almost in-
stantaneously. This method was so effective that in Rebet's case it
was long thought that he had died of a heart attack. The truth
became known only when the KGB agent Bogdan Stashinski gave
himself up to the German police in 1961 and acknowledged that he
had perpetrated both the killings.
For the first murder, Stashinski reports he was given a fine
banquet by his superiors in the KGB; for the second he received
from them the Order of the Red Banner.
Since the earliest days of the Soviets, secret assassination has been
an official state function assigned to the apparatus of the security
service. A special "Executive Action" section within the latter has
the responsibility for planning such assassinations, choosing and
training the assassin, and seeing to it that the job is carried out in
such a way that the Soviet Government cannot be traced as the per-
petrator. That this section is still today a most important component
of Soviet intelligence is borne out by the fact that its recently
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appointed chief is General Korovin. While serving as counselor
of the Soviet Embassy in London from 1953 until early 1961 he
was in charge of two key Soviet spies in Britain, George Blake and
William John Vassall. After the apprehension of the latter, the
ground got too hot for the General and he was recalled and re-
assigned to the "Murder Inc." branch of the KGB.
EVOLUTION OF SOVIET SECURITY SERVICES
In 1922 the Cheka became the GPU (State Political Adtninistra-
tion), which in 1934 became part of the NKVD (People's Com-
missariat for Internal Affairs). This consolidation finally brought
together under one ministry all security and intelligence bodies?
secret, overt, domestic and foreign. As the foreign arm of Soviet
security was expanding into a world-wide espionage and political
action organization, the domestic arm grew into a monster. It is
said that under Stalin one out of ..every five Soviet citizens was re-
porting to it. In addition, it exercised control over the entire border
Militia, had an internal militia of its own, ran all the prisons and
labor and concentration camps, and had become the watchdog over
the government and over the Communist party itself. Its most
frightening power as an internal secret police lay in its authority
to arrest, condemn and liquidate at the behest of the dictator, his
henchmen or even on its own cognizance, without any recourse to
legal judgment or control by any Other organ of government.
During the war years and afterward the colossus of the NKVD was
split up, reconsolidated, split up again, reconsolidated again and
finally split up once more into two separate organizations. The
MGB, now KGB, was made responsible for external espionage and
high-level internal security; the other organization retained all
policing functions not directly concerned with state security at the
higher levels and was called the NEVI) (Ministry of Internal Affairs).
Obviously, any clandestine arm _that can so permeate and control
public life, even in the upper echelons of power, must be kept under
the absolute control of the dictator. Thus it must occasionally be
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this new ministry would do he did not clarify, although he did
promise that no more trials would be held in which Soviet citizens
were condemned in secret.
Yet internal control systems still exist, even though in new forms.
For example, under the terms of it decree published on November
28, 1962, an elaborate control system has been established which, to
quote the New Yr?-It Times (November 29, 1962), "would make every
worker in every job a watchman over the implementation of party
and government directives." In commenting on the decree Pravda
made reference to earlier poor controls over "faking, pilfering,
bribing and bureaucracy," and asserted that the new system would
be a "sharp Weapon" against them, as well as against "red tape and
misuse of authority" and "squanderers of the national wealth." The
new watchdog agency is called the Committee ol Party and State
Control.
With so many informers operating against such broad categories
of crimes and misdemeanors, it should be possible to put almost
anyone in jail at any time. And indeed the press has been full of
reports recently that courts in the Soviet Union have been handing
down death or long prison sentences for many offenses that in the
United States would be only minor crimes or misdemeanors.
On February 5, 1963, we learned for example that the director and
manager of the Sverdlovsk railway station restaurant had been con-
demned to death by the court in Sverdlovsk for inventing and using
a machine for h?ying meat and pies which required two or three
grains less fat than regulations called for. The two men pocketed
the difference and swindled the government out of tour hundred
rubles monthly. There is something alarmingly out of joint in a
country that today will levy the :death penalty for such crimes and
calls for the collaboration of the ordinary citizen with the secret
police in order to discover them. Aleksandr N. Shelepin, who was
designated by the Central Committee of the Communist party of the
Soviet Union to be the head of this new control agency, once served
as head of the KGB, having succeeded General Ivan Serov in 1958.
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purged and weakened to keep it from swallowing up everything,
the dictator included. The history of Soviet state security, under its
various names, exhibits many cycles of growing strength and sub-
sequent purge, of consolidation and of splintering, of rashes of po-
litical murders carried out by it and sometimes against it.
After any period during which a leader -had exploited it to keep
himself in power, it had to be cut down to size, both because it
-knew too much and because it might become too strong for his own
safety. After the demise of a dictator, the same had to be done for
the safety of his successor.
Stalin used the CPU to enforce .collectivization and liquidate the
kulaks during the early thirties, and the NKVD during the mid-
thirties to wipe out all the people he did not trust or like in the
party, the army and the government. Then in 1937 he purged the
instrument of liquidation itself. Its chiefs and leading officers knew
too much about his crimes, and their power was second only to his.
By 1953, after the death of Stalin, the security service was again
,strong enough to become a dominant force in the struggle for power,
and the so-called "collective leadership" felt they would not be safe
until they had liquidated its leader, Lavrenti Beria, and cleaned out
his henchmen.
In Khrushchev's now [MOUS address to the Twentieth Congress of
the Communist party in 1956, in which he exposed the crimes of
Stalin, the main emphasis was on those crimes Stalin had committed
through the NKVD. This speech not only served to -open Khru-
shchev's attack on Stalinism and the Stalinists still in the regime, but
was also intended to justify new purges of existing state security
organs, which he had to bring under his control in order to
strengthen his own position aS dictator. Anxious to give both the
Soviet public and the outside world the impression that the new
- era of "socialist legality" was (bwning, Khrushchev subsequently
took various steps to wipe out the image of the security service as a
repressive executive body. One of these was the announcement on
September 3, 1962, that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was
now to be called the Ministry of Public Law and Order. just what
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But all these shake-ups, purges and organizational changes seem to
have had remarkably little effect on the aims, methods and capabili-
ties of that part of the Soviet security service which interests us
most?its foreign arm. "Fhroughout its forty-five years this world-
wide clandestine apparatus has :iccumulated an enormous fund of
knowledge and experience; its techniques have been amply tested
for their suitability in furthering Soviet aims in various parts of the
world, and its exhaustive files of intelligence information have been
kept intact through all the political power struggles. It has in its
ranks intelligence officers (those who survived the purges) of twenty
to thirty years experience. It lets on its rosters disciplined, experi-
enced agents and informants spread throughout the world, many
of whom have been active since the 1930s. And it has a tradition
that goes all the way back to Czarist days.
On December 20, 1962, an article appeared in Pravda written
by the present Chief of Soviet State Security (KGB), E. Semichastny,
which opened with the words, "Forty-live years ago today, at the
initiative of Vladimir flitch Lenin . . and went on to describe
the founding of the first Soviet security body, the Cheka, in 1917,
and to summarize the ups and downs of forty-five years of Soviet
police and intelligence hisuny. While the purpose of the article
was no doubt to improve the public image of this justly feared and
hated institution, its importance to the foreign observer lay in the
tacit admission that despite changes of name and of leadership the
Soviets really view this organization as having a definite and un-
broken continuity since the day of its founding.
In their attempts to evade detection and capture by the Okhrana,
the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries developed the cottspiratorial techniques that later
stood the Soviets in such good stead. 'Me complicated and devious
tricks of concealing and passing messages, of falsifying documents, of
using harmless intermediaries between suspect parties so as not to
expose one to the other or allow both to be seen together?these
were all survival techniques developed after bitter encounters and
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many losses at the hands of the Czar's police. When the Soviets later
founded their own intelligence service, these were the tricks they
taught their agents to evade the police of other countries. Even the
very words which the Bolsheviks used in the illegal days before 1917
as it kind of private slang among terrorists?such as dubok (little oak
tree) for a dead-letter drop-- -bee in time the terms in ?nicht' use
within the Soviet intelligence service.
It is a matter (il sonw surmise it the present moment whether the
internal power struggles which are again apparently rife within the
hierarchy of the Soviet [Inion will affect the position and powers or
the KGB as the most privileged body in the Soviet state. I do not
mean solely that its top people may be Fel-nov(2d, or even executed,
as Were the COrtner Chiefs, Ye/Jim', Yagoda and Beria, in their day,
but rather that its entire ranks might be purged and its standing
vis-:)-vis other elements ot the state sharply reduced. The chief
contender for power is time Army, which time and again in Soviet
history has been downgraded by the dictator in favor of the state
security organization, since the fatter was his personal instrument
and he could use it to keep an e:\c on the army.
THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES OF THE EUROPEAN SATELLITES
ANI) RED CHINA
Soviet State Security founded, organized, trained and today stilt
supervises the intelligence and security services of the European
satellites of Soviet Russia. They are in a sense little "K n'' and
sometimes like to call themselves that within their owtt ranks. 'I hey
are entirely the creatures of the Soviets and mirror in their structure
and their techniques the results of the long-range experience of
their Soviet big brothers. Their main objectives arc dictated by
the Soviets, although they are allowed certain limited initiatives in
matters relating to their own "internal- security. The Poles and
Czechs, lot example, will rim operations whose intent is to locate
Western espionage directed against their national areas. If in the
course of such operations they lair? up an especially good agent
who offers, let us say, a prime opportunity for penetration of a
lAfestern government, the Soviets will very likely take over the agent
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and run him themselves and the satellite intelligence service must
grin and bear it,
This was the case with Harry Houghton, who was 'first recruited
by the Polish intelligence service when he was stationed at the
British Embassy in I/VarsaW. When lie was transferred back to Lon-
don and put to work in the Admiralty, the Soviets saw opportunities
which were far too important for the Poles to handle. They took
over the case and the Polish intelligence service never heard about
Houghton again until his name appeared in the papers after his
arrest.
From the beginning the Soviets maintained an efficient strangle-
hold over these services by appointing to the top jobs in them peo-
ple who had been old-line Soviet agents and had been trained in
Moscow, many of them in pre-World. ?Var II days. The hard core
of the present Polish intelligence service, for example, is made up
of Polish Communists who had fled to Russia in 1939 and who re-
turned to Poland in 19,14 witli Polish military units accompanying
the Red Army. They had spent most of the war years in Moscow
being trained by the KGB for their future jobs in a projected but as
yet nonexistent Polish intelligence service. Younger personnel are
carefully screened by the Soviets before being accepted for employ-
ment in any of the satellite services.
Even today the Soviets manage and direct the satellite services,
not at long range but in person. They do this through a so-called
advisory system. A Soviet "adviser" is installed in almost every
department and section of the satellite intelligence services, be it
in Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest or any other satellite capital. This
adviser is supposed to be shown all significant material concerning
the work being done, and must give consent to all important opera-
tional undertakings. He is to all intents and purposes a supervisor,
and his word is final.
As a sidelight on Soviet relations to its satellites, it is interesting to
note that the Soviets do not rely wholly on these advisers to control
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the satellite intelligence services. This is not became the latter are
incompetent, but because the satellite services are evidently not
trusted by their Soviet masters. In order to prevent these services
from getting away with anything, the Soviets go to the trouble of
secretly recruiting intelligence officers of the satellite services who
can supply them with information on plans, personnel, conflicts in
the local management, disaffection and the like, which might not
have come to the attention of the adviser.
While the Soviets cannot really trust their satellites, they will use
them to draw chestnuts out of the fire for them where it is advan-
tageous to do so. The Soviets were quick to recognize, for example,
that the very great numbers of persons of Polish, Czech and Hun-
garian extraction living in Western Europe and in Canada and the
United States theoretically represented a potential pool of agents
to which the respective satellite services might find access with much
greater ease than the Soviets could, on the basis of common ethnic
background, family and other sentimental ties to the old country,
etc. Thus, we find that the attempts to recruit people of Central
European and Balkan extraction both here and abroad for Com-
munist espionage have largely been carried out by personnel of the
satellite intelligence services. That the latter have been rebuffed
in most cases is a tribute to the loyalties of the first- or second-
generation citizens of the U.S. and the other NATO countries.
Red China, not being a satrapy of the Soviet Union as are the
smaller nations of Eastern Europe, has its own independent intelli-
gence and security system which is in no way subservient to the
KGB. In intelligence as in technical and scientific fields, the Soviets
for a long period had advisers stationed in China, but these were
really advisers and not the kind of supervisors I described above.
They have long since departed and it is unlikely today, in view of
the Sino-Soviet rift, that there is more than the most nominal col-
laboration and coordination between the Red Chinese and the
Soviet intelligence services. Indeed, we can safely assume that each
of these countries is using its intelligence service to keep its eye on
the other.
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,We have not yet begun to consider Red Chinese espionage as a
serious menace to our own security in the U.S., though in the years
to come it may well become a formidable instrument of espionage
and subversion in the West, as it already has throughout Asia and
the Pacific. The Chinese are, of course, at the sante disadvantage in
;operating against us as we are in attempting to operate against
them. Physical and cultural differences make it almost impossible to
camouflage the true ethnic status and national origin of intelligence
officers or agents on either side.
The Ukrainian, Colon_Molody, was able with sufficient training
and with the proper documents to pass himself off in England as a
Canadian of Anglo-Saxon origin named Gordon Lonsdale. For a
Chinese, this would, of course, be impossible. In areas where there
are large numbers of resident Chinese, as in Hawaii, Malaya, etc.,
the Chinese can take advantage of ethnic ties. The first real inroads
into Occidental areas are now being made by the Chinese in South
America, where the more fanatical element of the local Communist
contingents welcomes them, as Castro now seems to be doing in
Cuba. Should the Chinese succeed in such areas in recruiting.
Westerners of Hispanic origin as long-term agents, it will begin to,
be possible for them to infiltrate the U.S. and, European countries
with such agents, who would be no more recognizable as Chinese,
agents than Lonsdale was as a Soviet agent.
THE SOVIET INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
From my own experience I have the impression that the Soviet in-
telligence officer represents the species homo Sovieticus in its un-
alloyed and most successful form. This strikes mc as much the most
important thing about hum, more important than his characteristics
as a practitioner of the in telligence craft itself. It is as if the Soviet
intelligence officer were a kind of final and extreme product of the
Soviet system, an example or the Soviet mentality pitched to the nth
degree.
He is blindly and unquestioningly dedicated to the cause, at least
at the outset. He has been fully indoctrinated in the political and
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philosophical beliefs of Communism and in the basic motivation
which proceeds from these beliefs, which is that the ends alone count
and any means which achieve them are justified. Since the ingrained
Soviet approach to the problems of life and politics is conspiratorial,
it is no surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in
intelligence work. When such a_ man does finally sec the light, as
has happened, his disillusionment is overwhelming.
The Soviet intelligence officer is throughout his career subject to a
rigid discipline and, as one intelligence officer put it who had ex-
perienced this discipline himself, he "has graduated from an iron
school." On the one hand, he belongs to an elite; he has privilege
and power of a very special kind. He may be functioning as the
embassy chauffeur, but he may have a higher secret rank than the
ambassador and more power where the power really counts. On the
other hand, neither rank nor seniority nor past achievement will
protect him if he makes a mistake. When a Soviet intelligence officer
is caught out or his agents are caught through an oversight on his
part, he can expect demotion, dismissal, even prison. In Stalin's day
he would have been shot.
I can think of no better illustration of file merciless attitude of
the Soviet intelligence officer himself than the story told of one of
Stalin's intelligence chiefs, General V. S. Abakumov. During the
war, Abakumov's sister was picked -up somewhere in Russia on a
minor black-marketing charge?"speculation," as the Soviets call it.
In view of her close connection to this powerful officer in the secret
hierarchy, the police officials sent a message to Abakumov asking
how he would like the case handled. They fully expected he would
request the charges be dropped. Instead, he is reliably reported to
have written on the rnemorand.um sent him: "Why do you ask me?
Don't you know your duty? Speculation during wartime is treason.
Shoot her." An interesting sidelight on Abakumov is that he, like his
boss, Bcria, ran what one writer has described as "a string of private
brothels,"
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Abakumov met the fate of many Soviet intelligence officers after
the death of Stalin and the liquidation or Beria. At that time he
was in charge of the internal section of Soviet security which kept
the files on members of the government and of the party..Abakumov
was secretly executed and his entire section was decimated under the
Malenkov regime. They knew too much. Despite certain relaxations
in the public life of Khrushchev's Russia today, the "terror" still
holds sway within Soviet intelligence itself because this arm of
Soviet power, second to none in peicetime, cannot relax, cannot be
allowed any weakness.
In Soviet Russia, where the foreign intelligence service and the
internal secret police at the higher levels are only separate arms of
the KGB, most officers rotate between the two different types of
duty. They customarily are assigned early in their careers to some
provincial secret police office, usually in an area of their country in
which they are not native. Here their duties primarily call for the
running of informants among the local populace. Besides carrying
out a Function which the Soviet state deems necessary for its own
internal security, men working at such posts also receive a basic on-
the-job training in the fundamentals of espionage and counter-
espionage and at a level where occasional errors are not especially
damaging.
Less gifted officers may remain at such posts for the greater part
of their careers. The better men will eventually be assigned to in-
telligence headquarters. When they have sufficient experience and
are thought to have been adequately tested for trustworthiness from
the Communist point of view, they may finally be sent to a foreign
Post.
Peter Deriabin, who came over to us in Vienna in 1954, relates in
his book, The Secret World, that he began his KGB career with
an assignment to the section responsible for guarding the lives of
the Soviet bigwigs.' He spent five years in this section and finally
Par Deriabin and Frank Gamey, The Scowl Wu).Id, Doubleday, 1959.
succeeded in getting himself assigned to a branch of the Foreign
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intelligence Department responsible for operations in Austria. This,
:as would be the case in most intelligence services, gradually opened
the way for his own transfer to a foreign post, logically enough, in
Vienna. But he had served in the KGB over six years before he was
entrusted with a foreign assignment.
The Soviets prefer to send men abroad who have had counter-
Intelligence experience within Soviet Russia and for a noteworthy
reason. Having sat for years in posts where their primary responsi-
bility was apprehending opponents of the regime, penetrating, dis-
sident circles and tracking an occasional miscreant suspected. of
'cooperating with the "imperialists," they are well 'aware of the
workings of the secret police mentality. When the tables are turned
'-and they find themselves in foreign countries running their own
'spy networks, they are likely to anticipate and often to outwit local
-police organs for whom they now represent the potential victim.
After returning froni a tour of duty abroad in which they did not
especially distinguish themselves, they may be assigned again to
provincial police duties. The Soviets thus have a built-in solution
for disposing of superannuated or ineffective intelligence officers.
If, On the other hand, they did well abroad, they may begin to go
up the administrative ladder in the foreign intelligence department,
which is the most preferred and privileged branch of the service.
The Soviet citizen docs not usually apply for a job in the intern-
gence service. He is spotted and chosen. Bright upcoming young
men in various positions, be it in foreign affairs, economics or the
sciences, are proposed by their superiors in the party for work in
intelligence. To pass muster they must either be party members
themselves, candidates for party membership or members of the
youth organization, Komsomol, which is a kind of junior Com-
munist party. They must come from an impeccable political back-
ground according to Communist standards, which means that thete
can be no "bourgeois taint" or any record of deviation or dissent in
their immediate family or forebears.
An ambitious young man who is able to make his career in one.
of the branches of Soviet intelligence is fortunate by Soviet stand-
ards. His selection for this duty opens to him the doors of the "New.?
-bass," the elite, the nobility of the new Soviet state. Soviet
intelli-
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gence officers are ranked, as are the military, and have the same
titles, although they only use these titles within the service at home,
Rudolf Abel, who so successfully acted the part of a second-rate
photographer in Brooklyn, was a colonel in Soviet intelligence. The
heads of large departments usually rank as majors or lieutenant
generals. But service with Khrushchev's security and intelligence
often surpasses the prestige of service with the military. Soviet in-
telligence officers receive material. rewards much above those given
the similar ranks of government bureaucracy in other departments,
They have opportunities for travel open to few Soviet citizens.
Further, a career of this kind may open the road to high political
office and important rank in the Communist party.
This is the breed of men who handled such cases as Chambers and
Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Burgess and MacLean, George Blake,
Houghton and Vassall. They have had some brilliant successes,
What are their weaknesses and shortcomings?
The Soviet Security Service suffers from the same fundamental
weakness as does Soviet bureaucracy and Communist society gen-
erally?indifference to the individual and his feelings, resulting in
frequent lack of recognition, improper assignments, frustrated ambi-
tion, unfair punishment, all of which breed, in a Soviet Russian as
in any man, loss of initiative, passivity, disgruntlement and dissi-
dence. Service in the Soviet bureaucracy does not exactly foster
independent thought and the qualities of leadership. The average
Soviet official, in the intelligence service as elsewhere, is not inclined
to assume responsibility or risk his career. There is an ingrained
tendency to perform tasks "by the book," to conform, to try to pass
the bureaucratic buck if things go wrong.
Most important of all, every time the Soviets send an intelligence
officer abroad they risk his expottre to the very systems he is dedi-
cated to destroy. If for any reason he has become disillusioned or
dissatisfied, his contact with the Western world often works as the
catalyst which starts the process of disaffection. A steady and grow-
ing number of Soviet intelligence officers have been coming over
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to our side, proving that Soviet intelligence is by no means as mono-
lithic and invulnerable as it wishes the world to believe.
SOME SOVIET TECHNIQUES?LEGALS AND ILLEGALS
I have already referred to "illegals" in an earlier chapter as a kind
of "made-over" man. In Soviet practice not only agents but the staff
intelligence officer himself may go abroad as an illegal. In the 1920s,
when the Soviets ran their intelligence operations out of their diplo-
matic establishments abroad, these operations, which at that time
were by no means particularly sophisticated, frequently fell afoul
of the local police with the result that the espionage center was
traced down to the local Soviet Embassy, forcing the recall of the
intelligence personnel stationed there and often harming Soviet re-
lations with important countries, such as France and England, with
whom the Soviets for economic and other reasons wished to stay on
outwardly good terms. It was at this time, in an attempt to keep
espionage and diplomacy ostensibly separate, with advantages for
both, that the Soviets hit upon- the idea of developing a duplicate
espionage apparatus in each country. Within the embassy there
would still be intelligence officers but they would restrict themselves,
except in emergencies, to "clean" operations, of which I have more
to say below. This unit the Soviets call the "legal residentura."
Outside the embassy and buried away under the guise of some harm-
less occupation, perhaps in a bookstore or a photography shop, was
quite another center devoted to the "dirty" operations. This was
headquarters of the "illegal" residentura, composed mainly of offi-
cers who over a period of years had carefully been turned into
personages whom it would be almost impossible to identify as
Soviet nationals, much less as intelligence personnel. The illegal,
unless apprehended with the agent or betrayed by him, can dis-
appear into the woodwork if something goes wrong. There will be
no trail leading to a Soviet diplomatic installation to embarrass
or discredit it. A principle governing this double setup was that
neither center would have anything at all to do with each other
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except in emergencies. Each had its own separate communications
with Moscow and only took its orders from there. The legal resi-
dentura used diplomatic channels of communication. The illegals
had their own radio operators, a most dangerous and difficult ar-
rangement. Most of the great Soviet wartime intelligence nets, as
we shall see, came to grief because of their secret radio communica-
tions.
A man chosen for illegal work in any of its aspects will be sent to
live abroad for as many years_as it takes him to perfect his knowl-
edge of the language and way of life of another country. He may
even acquire citizenship in the adopted country. But during this
whole period he has absolutely no intelligence mission. He does
nothing that would arouse suspicion. When he has become suffi-
ciently acclimatized, he returns to the Soviet Union, where he is
trained and documented for his intelligence mission, and eventually
dispatched to the target country, which may be the same one he has
learned to live in or a different one. It matters little, for the main
thing is that he is unrecognizable as a Soviet or Eastern European.
He is a German or a Scandinavian or a South American. His papers
show it, and so do his speech -and his Manners.
Sometimes, to provide their illegals With documents, the Soviets
'make use of the papers of a family which has been wiped out. For
example, after the liberation of the Baltic states in World War 1,
_many Americans of Lithuanian extraction returned to their native
habitat with their children. Two decades later, when the Baltic states
were overrun by the Soviets, many of these people were caught in
the liquidation of anti-CommUnists which followed. Their papers,
includingThe birth certificates of their American-born children,. fell
into the hands of the Soviet police. Later the KGB found these
extremely useful for documenting their agents with bona fide
American passports.
In most Western countries lax procedures in the issuance of
duplicate birth certificates, records of marriage, death, etc., make it
relatively easy for hostile intelligence services, to procure valid doett
Ments for "papering" their agents: This situation has been fre-
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quently used by the Soviets and any measures taken to correct it
would be of distinct service. to VVestern security.
Because they have almost perfect camouflage and are consequently
immensely difficult to locate, "illegals" constitute the gravest secu,
rity hazards to countries against which they are working. There is
every evidence that the Soviets have been turning out such "illegals"
at an accelerated rate since the end of World War II. Generally,
they are used in a supervisory capacity, for directing espionage net-
works, rather than for penetration jobs that increase the danger of
discovery.
However, despite the lengths to which the Soviets go to create
illegals, a number of them_ of major stature have been uncovered
and apprehended by Western intelligence in recent years. In 1957
the FBI caught Colonel Rudolf Abel, alias Emil R. Goldfus. He was
tried and sentenced but was exchanged in 1962, after serving five
years in prison, for the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers. In
early 1961 the British caught Colon Molody, alias Gordon Lonsdale,
in London and with him four other Soviet agents in what became
known as the Naval Secrets Case. Lonsdale was sentenced to twenty-
five years in prison and is now serving his term. Lonsdale's Canadian
identity had been built up over many years, but. the Soviets used
him not in Canada, where he would have been exposed to accidental
encounters with people from his "home town," but in England,
where, as a Canadian, he would be quite acceptable and would be
unlikely to become the subject of much curiosity about the details of
his background.
When an intelligence service goes to all the trouble to retool and
remake a man so that he can succeed in losing himself in the crowd
in another country, it naturally does so in the expectation that the
man will stay put and remain active and useful for a long period of
time. There is no rotation here of the sort that is common among
officials of most diplomatic and intelligence services. Also, for ob-
vious reasons, if the "illegal" has a family, the family does not ac-
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company him. 'The wives and children cannot also be "made over."
He goes alone and even his communications to his wife and children
must necessarily be limited and must pass through secret channels.
The only glimpse of Colonel Abel as a human being, indeed the.
only glimpse of the man as anything but a tight-lipped automaton,
was afforded by some letters found in his possession which were
written by his wife and daughter. Abel had been at his post nine
years when he was caught. There is no reason to believe that he
would not have continued in it for many years if one of his fellow
workers, also an illegal, had not turned himself over to the U.S.A.
There are times, of course, when the "cover" of the embassy or
trade mission lends advantages to the "legal" center not available to
the illegal. Under the guise of "business" or "social" relations an
officer in an embassy may be able to make certain connections in
circles to which he has access which would be denied to the illegal.
If the Soviets, for example, are anxious to find an agent in a
Western country who can report to them on a sensitive industry,
the Soviet Trade Mission will advertise that it is interested in pur-
chasing certain nonstrategic items manufactured by that industry or
one closely allied to it. Manufacturers or middlemen will be at-
tracted by the ad and will visit the Soviet Mission to talk over
possible business. They will be requested to fill out forms that call
for personal and business data, references, financial statements, etc.
All this material is reviewed by the intelligence officer stationed at
the mission. If any candidates seem promising because of their
innocence, their political or perhaps apolitical attitudes, their need
for money or susceptibility to blackmail, the Soviets can cultivate
them further by pretending that the business deal is slowly brewing.
The hand of espionage has not yet been shown. Nothing ostensibly
has yet been done against the law.
Similarly, if Soviet intelligence officers stationed at an embassy and
belonging to the "legal" residentura meet interesting or influential
persons from the local environment in the course of the dinners,
parties or other social events (which the Soviets now give in order
to create a certain sophisticated and "friendly" impression in con-
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Oast to their behavior in earlier decades), they may very likely de-
velop these "friendships" and even risk a recruitment at a later
date. However, some of their recent attempts of this sort, particu-
larly through their UN personnel, have been so crude and bare,
faced as to make one wonder whether the Soviets 111'e not using the
UN for the schooling of their intelligence officers. It is also apparent
from some recent cases that the Soviets have not been able to
establish "illegals" in certain countries and therefore are forced to
f all back upon their "legal" personnel even for risky operations,
THE USE OF THE PARTY
The Communist party outside the Soviet Union has been used
only intermittently by the Soviet Government for actual espionage.
'Every time some element of the Communist party is caught in acts
of espionage, this discredits the party as an "idealistic" and in,
.digenous political organization and exposes it for what it really is-
-the instrument of a hostile foreign power, the stooge of Moscow.
Whenever such exposures have taken place, as happened frequently
in Europe in the 1920s, it has been observed that, for a time, there.
is a sharp decline in the intelligence work performed by local Com-
munist parties. Furthermore, the value of using Communist parties?
Furthermore, the value of using personnel not fully trained in in-.
telligence work is questionable, since these amateur collaborators,
can expose not only themselves but also the operations of the intelli-
gence service proper.
Chiefly in countries where the party is tolerated but where resi-
dent agents are difficult to procure, the Soviet intelligence services.
have had recourse to the party. This was the case in the United.
States during World War II. One of the reasons for the eventual
collapse of Soviet networks that reached deeply into our govern-
ment at that time was the fact that the personnel were not ideally
suited for espionage. Many of these people had only strong ideolo-
gical leanings toward Communism to recommend them for such
Work and in time were repelled by the discipline of espionage., Some,
like -Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, to whom the work.
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40 The Craft of Intelligence 653
became unpalatable, finally- balked and volunteered their stories to
the FBI. This problem came to a head for the Soviets just after the
end of World AiVar II as a result of the revelations of Igor Gouzenko,
the defected code clerk of- the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. At that
time the KGB issued a secret order to its officers abroad not to in-
volve members of Communist parties further in intelligence work.
The Communist party apparatus and Communist front organiza-
tions may, however, be useful for "spotting'' potential agents for
espionage. The evidence given in the Canadian trials by Gouzenko
acquainted the public for the first time with the elaborate tech-
niques employed by the Communist party under various guises.
'Reading groups'' and "study groups" for persons quite innocently
interested in Russia were formed witInn Canadian defense indus-
tries, entirely for the purpose of spotting and cultivating people
who could eventually be exploited for the information they pos-
sessed. The target in this case was the atomic bomb,
ENTRAPMENT
The Soviets often work on the principle that to get a man to do
what you want, you try to catch or entrap him in something he
would not like to have exposed to the public, to his wife, to his
employers or to his government, as the case may be. If the potential
victim has clone nothing compromising, then he or she must be en-
ticed into a situation set up by the KGB operatives which will be
compromising. Two of the recent cases I have mentioned, that of
Irvin Scarbeck in Poland and 'John Vassal] in the Soviet UniQn, are
examples of entrapment for intelligence purposes.
Within the Soviet Union itself, or in a Bloc country, where the
Soviets can set the stage, provide the facilities, a safe house, hotel
or nightclub and furnish the cast of male or female provocateurs,
tactics of entrapment are commonly used.
.The sordid story of Vassall, the British Admiralty employee who
spied for the Soviets for six years both. in the Soviet Union and in
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London, is a typical one. In my own experience, I have run across
a score of cases where the scenarios are almost identical with this
one. The KGB operatives assigned to the task, after studying
Vassall's case history from all angles and analyzing his weaknesses,
set up the plan to frame him, exploiting the fact that he was a
homosexual. The usual procedure here is to invite the victim to
what appears to be a social affair; there the particular temptation to
which the victim is likely to succumb is proffered him and his
behavior is recorded on tape or on film. He is then confronted with
the evidence and told that unless he works for the Soviets the evi-
dence will be brought to the attention of his employers. Vassall
succumbed to this.
If the target individual is strong-willed enough to tell the whole
story to his superior officer immediately, then the Soviet attempts at
recruitment can be thwarted with relatively little danger to the in-
dividual concerned?even if he is residing in the Soviet Union. Some-
times his superior officer, particularly if the approach has been
made in a free country, will want to play the man back against
the Soviet apparatus in order to ferret out all the individuals and
the tactics involved. Sometimes if the man approached does not seem
qualified to play such a role, he is merely told to break off from hfi
tormentors after telling them that he has disclosed everything.
The fact that the Soviets have no comeback when this is dont
is shown by an instance which came to light in the course of tht
official investigations intothe Vassall case. The same Soviet agent
employed in the British Embassy as a factotum Who had originalll
drawn Vassall into a homosexual trap later attempted to recruit
through blackmail a maintenance engineer of the British Embassy
in Moscow who had committed some black market offenses. The
KGB expected that this victim, too, would rather cooperate with
them than be exposed. The engineer, however, reported the re-
cruitment attempt to his superiors, was promptly sent home from
Moscow and the Soviet agent who had caused all the trouble finallw
lost his job with the British Embassy. At that, time it was, of course,
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not known that he had also been responsible for the ploy which
jed up to the recruitment of Vassa11.2
it is possible that someone who has been or may he approached will see
these lines; and this may help him to recognize the proced.ures. It 'can be hoped
that he will take the path of full and frank disclosure advised here. If so, the
ease with which the Soviet and sometimes the satellite operatives are able to
effect recruitment will -not be quite he same in the future.
Interestingly enough, we have found that some of the KGB
operatives become so disgusted when forced to play the roles as-
signed to them in these recruitments that they 'become more willing
'Candidates to break it all and leave the service of the Soviet itself for
.a better life.
' While homosexuality has played a prominent role in the most
,notorious recent cases, such as Vassall's, adultery or promiscuity is
the more usual lever. Here, .however, the Soviet and satellite intelli-
gence services have learned over the years that blackmail based on
the threatened exposure of .illicit sexual acts is a powerful instru-
ment when applied to men of certain nationalities, not so when
applied to others. It depends on the mores, on the moral standards
of the country of origin. The citizens of those countries where a
certain value is placed on marital fidelity and where social dis-
approval of infidelity is strong are naturally the most likely victims.
I will refrain here from naming those countries which fall into
the one category or the other in the opinion of the Soviets, since
I would like to avoid opening an international debate on such a
touchy subject. I cannot refrain, however, from passing along a story
which was related to me some years ago at a time when the officials
of a certain European satellite of the Soviets were still a little na?
about the attitudes in sexual matters of some of their Western
neighbors. The secret police of the country in question had suc-
ceeded in taking some very compromising pictures of a certain
diplomat which they hoped to use in order to force this gentleman
to collaborate with their intelligence service. They invited him to
their office under some pretext and showed him the pictures in their
possession. They implied that the diplomat's wife as well as his
superiors might be rather unhappy about him if they were shown
the photographs.. Contrary to their hopes and expectations, the!
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diplomat didn't even wince at the implication but continued en-
thusiastically to study the photographs. Finally he said: "These are
wonderful shots. I wonder if you fellows would be kind enough to
make me some copies. I'd like two of these, and two of those. . . ."
Either he was quite sophisticated or else he knew well how to handle
blackmail.
An entirely different sort of pressure is that which the Soviets, as
well as the satellites, bring to bear on refugees and expatriates who
have close relatives behind the Iron Curtain. A refugee in the West
may one day receive a visit from a stranger who will make the
proposition clear to him: "Cooperate with us or your mother,
brother, wife or children will suffer." However, since the refugee
might just be courageous enough to complain to the local authori-
ties, which could lead in turn to the apprehension of the agent who
brought the message, the operation is more often run in less crude
fashion. The refugee receives, instead of a visit, a letter from one of
his close relatives at home which indicates in a veiled way that the
local authorities are making inquiries about the refugee and that
some unpleasantness may be in store for his relatives. This letter
may be a forgery which the intelligence service has produced, es-
pecially if it is known that the refugee is not in Frequent corre-
spondence with any of Ins relatives. On the other hand, it may be
authentic and the actual result of a visit which the police have
paid to the relative. The refugee begins to worry and eventually
writes a letter home asking how things are going. The relative,
again under police direction or dictation, answers that things are
going hard for them now but could be helped if the refugee would
just do one or two little favors, one of these being to drop in at the
embassy of his country for a chat. The intelligence service obviously
gauges the likelihood of a successful recruitment by the tone of the
letters the refugee writes back to his relatives and is not likely to
risk the embarrassment of his exposing their tactics to authorities
in the country of his adoption unless they see that he is falling for
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the game. Sometimes this technique is used to induce persons who
have fled from Iron Curtain countries to return "home."
THE CHANGING PATTERN OF SOVIET OPERATIONS
The success of Soviet intelligence in the past and the depth of
its penetration against its main targets are nowhere better evi-
denced than in its operations (hiring World War II which have been.
uncovered. We must assume, however, that there were many such
operations that have not come to light. Those that have are suffi-
cient proof of an ability to establish and maintain clandestine con-
tact with high-level sources Under adverse conditions and to guide
them in such a way that vital Soviet intelligence needs were ful-
filled.
The key to many of these operations was the pro-Communist
inclinations of the people drawn into the networks and the im-
portant positions they occupied within their own governments or
in its sensitive installations. Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy, is of
course, a prime example of a case where the Soviets had an optimum
intelligence advantage. Fuchs was employed in key British and
American research installations and was a convinced Communist.
Today, as we shall see, at least in the countries of its major op-
ponents, the Soviets can no longer rely on finding such ideological
collaborators in key positions. Hence they are forced more and more
to turn to the other tactics, chiefly entrapment or promises of sizable
financial or other reward.
Soviet operations in World War II can be divided into two cate,
gories: those against its enemies and those against its "allies." In
both areas Soviet intelligence had to fulfill Stalin's order "to get
the documents," to reach directly into the places where decisions
were made and literally to Ferret out the facts and figures. In a
country like Germany, even before the latter invaded Russia, and
in japan, with whom the Soviets were at peace until close to the
war's end, it was the main aim of Soviet intelligence to find out
what military preparations were being made which affected the
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defense of the U.S.S.R.
In Japan, the major Soviet network run by the German, Richard
.Sorge, consisted almost entirely of Japanese officials and news-
papermen close to the Cabinet, most of whom had been sympathiz-
ers with the Communist cause since their student days. The main
:achievement of the Sorge ring was to give Stalin by mid-1941 defi-
nite evidence that the Japanese then had no military intentions
tgainst the Soviet and were going to concentrate their forces against
Southeast Asia and the Pacific?the Pearl Harbor tactic. This in-
formation was worth many divisions to Stalin and he acknowledged
his debt to Sorge but did nothing to save him once he was "blown."
Stalin was able to leave his Eastern flanks only lightly fortified,
confident that he would not have to fight on two fronts. The Sorge
ring was rounded up shortly after this intelligence was received in
Moscow, but it had done its job.
Against the Nazis and particularly the nerve centers of the Ger-
man Army, Air Force and diplomatic service in Berlin, the Soviets
ran a spy ring called the Schulze-Boysen?Harnack group. It was
comparable to Sorge's ring in its makeup and mission. However,
this group was by no means as professional in security techniques
as Sorge's and was doomed to be found out sooner or later because
- of the carelessness of its members. It consisted of some thirty to
...forty anti-Nazi and pro-Communist sources scattered throughout
Nazi ministries, the Armed Forces and the aristocracy.
Schulze-Boysen was an intelligence officer in the Air Ministry in
Berlin. Harnack, whose wife, Mildred Fish, was an American (she
and all of the ringleaders-- were executed), was an official in the
Economics Ministry. The widely ramified contacts of these two
men served the Soviets well. Of the hundreds of reports they passed
in the period 1939-42, those of the greatest significance to the
Soviets contained detailed information on the disposition of the
German Air Force, German aircraft production, movements of
ground troops and decisions of the:. German High Command?for,
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42 The Craft of Intelligence -653
example, the decision to encircle Leningrad and cut it off rather
than attempt to occupy it.
The Gestapo unit that finally apprehended this group and other
Soviet networks in Western Europe called them the Rote Kapelle, or
Red Orchestra. After they were put out of operation by late 1942,
the Soviets developed a fantastic source located in Switzerland, a
certain Rudolf Rossler (code name, "Lucy"). By means which have
still not be ascertained to this day, R6ssler in Switzerland was able
to get intelligence from the German High Command in Berlin on
a continuous basis, often less than twenty-four hours after its daily
decisions concerning the Eastern front were made. Rossler was that
unusual combination, a pro-Communist Catholic. Alexander Foote,
who operated one of the secret Soviet radio bases that transmitted
Lucy's information to Moscow, said of him:
Lucy , . held in his hands the threads winch led back to the three
main commands in Germany, and also could, and did, provide informa.
tion front other German offices Nnyone who has fought a battle from
the general staff angle will know what it means to be able to place the
Hags of the enemy on the map and plan the disposition of one's own troops
accordingly. . . . Lucy often put Moscow in tins position, and the effect
on the strategy of the Red Army and the ultimate defeat of the Wehrmacht
was incalculable.a
3 Alexander Foote, Handbook for spies, IA)11d011, 1949, p. 75.
The Sorge, Rote Kapelle and "Lucy" operations are the three best
known of many Soviet penetrations in the war days. Altogether, the
information which their intelligence work was able to collect
through clandestine operations in World War II useful to the
defense of the Soviet was about as good as any nation could hope
to get.
In Allied countries the Soviet aim was essentially twofold. Stalin
did not trust either Roosevelt or Churchill, and early in the game
realized the coming clash of interests in the postwar world. Hence
one aim of Soviet intelligence was to penetrate those offices of the
American British governments concerned with the "peace"
settlements. The other target was scientific and, in particular,
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nuclear. The Soviets knew that a great joint effort was being made
in atomic research and they wanted the benefits of it, hence Fuchs,
Alan Nunn May, the Rosenbergs, Greenglass, Gold and a list of
further names as case after case of Soviet atomic espionage broke in
the postwar years.
In the field of political intelligence, the cases and the agents have
perhaps remained less fixed in the public memory, with the ex-
ceptions of the Hiss and Burgess-MacLean cases. The fact is, how-
ever, that in pursuit of its aim to learn what the United States
Government was planning for Germany, Central Europe and japan
after the war, the Soviets had over forty high-level agents in various
departments and agencies in Washington during World War II. At
least this number was uncovered; we do not know how many re-
mained undetected. Almost all df them, like the atomic spies, were
persons of pro-Communist inclination at the time. Many have since
recanted.
The Burgess-MacLean case, which broke in 1951 with the sudden
flight of the two British officials to Soviet Russia, has perhaps been
given too much the coloration of a defection. Also, its lurid angles
have beclouded the real issues. This was no ordinary defection. The
two men fled presumably because they had been warned just in time
that British security was hot CM their trail. These two men, in
positions of trust in the British Foreign Office, had been working
for Soviet intelligence for some years, it is now believed; how long
no one knows exactly. Burgess apparently was a Communist sym-
pathizer while a student at Cambridge in the 1930s. The value of
Burgess to the Soviets was increased when he served in a diplomatic
position in the United States in-the early 1950s shortly before seek-
ing refuge in the U.S.S.R.
In the postwar period, if we Can judge from the cases that have
been coming to light in the last ten years, Soviet intelligence in its
pursuit of agents in sensitive positions in the U.S.A. and Britain
began to run out of Communists and Communist sympathizers of
the Fuchs-Rosenberg-Burgess-Maul.ean variety. There are a num-
ber of reasons for this. The hostile and aggressive intentions of
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,Soviet Russia could no longer -be masked by outwardly .friendly
.diplomatic relations. The spectacle of the United States, Britain 9r
France soft-pedaling a case Of Soviet espionage because existing
_policy called for maintaining diplomacy on an even keel with the
Soviets, a situation which prevailed from time to time in the late
Antics and during the war, was unthinkable after about 1947. In-
stead, security precautions of a kind unprecedented in Western
history began to be taken in our country and elsewhere to safe-
guard government offices, military establishments and sensitive scien-
tific and industrial installations against penetration by employees
who might be agents or potential Soviet agents. Secondly, the dis-
illusionment with the once supposedly idealistic aims of Com-
munism began to reach the intellectuals in the postwar period so
that the late forties and fifties saw no groups of well-educated pro-
Communists coming from the campuses of our universities and
colleges as had been the case from the depression days up to World
War II.
The Soviets turned to other kinds of helpers, people who had
other reasons to collaborate with them, willingly or unwillingly.
Perhaps the most typical trend in the early postwar period, which
illustrates the rapid adaptability of Soviet intelligence to new con-
ditions, as well as the basic cold-blooded pragmatism of Communist
tactics, was the massive recruitment by the Soviets of former SS
and war criminals in both East and West Germany for intelligence
work. The Soviets saw two strong factors they could exploit in deal-
ing with such people. They were first of all, by agreement of all the
Allies, in the "automatic arrest" category. Under military gov-
ernment we had imprisoned many of them. The Soviets shot some
of them. But what better way to force the recruitment of an agent
than to stay his execution or excuse him from long imprisonment if
he will consent to commit espionage in return for the favor? This
was the line the Soviets took in East Germany. In West Germany,
the de-Nazificzttion procedures made it very difficult for former
members of the SS, Gestapo and similar Nazi organizations to get
decent jobs. Many of these men who had shortly before been riding
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43 The Craft of Intelligence 653
high under the emblems of Nazi power were ostracized, unem-
ployed and in dire straits. Their attitude toward the American and
British occupation authorities was, to say the least, negative. They
were ripe For the Soviet invitation to treason. They hardly felt it
to be treason, since in their opinion there was with Germany under
foreign military rule no real authority to which they felt any
direct loyalty.
A case of this kind was that of Heinz Felfe, a senior officer of the
West German intelligence service, who was caught by his own col-
leagues and superiors in November, 1961, after having betrayed
what he knew of their work to the Soviets ever since he had joined
the service over ten years before.. in 1945 Felfe had been a rather
junior member of the foreign arm of the Nazi security and intelli-
gence service. He hailed from a part of Germany which came under
Soviet occupation after the war was over. He had been captured
and interned in Holland by the Allies and after his release tried to
settle in West Germany. He went through the de-Nazification proc-
ess but had great difficulties finding a job to his liking. Eventually,
armed with questionable credentials and letters of recommendation
he had talked some innocent people into giving him, he applied
for a police job, the only kind of work he knew. In the rather con-
fused atmosphere of the Allied-sponsored German civil service, he
got a job in a minor office of the counterintelligence section. Later
it turned out he had been helped to the job by certain German
officials who themselves were under Soviet pressure.
During this period, Felfe himself became a Soviet agent, having
fallen into Soviet clutches while on a secret trip to his home area
of East Germany. The man who led the Soviets to him was a friend,
also a former SS man, who had made his bargain with the Soviets at
an even earlier date. Felfe, in turn, recommended others of similar
ilk. The price of all this was cheap for the Soviets?past sins were
forgiven and a little money and protection were offered for the
future. But a sword hung over the heads of these people and they
knew it would fall if they betrayed the Soviets. The Soviets picked
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up all the old SS men they could find. Most of them were guaran-
teed to be ambitious and utterly unprincipled. A few would be
clever enough to work their way np the ladder of the West German.
civil service. FeIle was one of these and the Soviet investment paid
off handsomely.
But such displaced rootless vagrants of postwar Europe are only
one type of agent that Soviet intelligence is looking for. Among
those who still have home and country the Soviets will search out the
misfits and the disgruntled, people in trouble, people with griev-
ances and frustrated ambitions, with unhappy domestic lives?
neurotics, homosexuals and alcoholics. Such people sometimes need
only a slight nudge, a slight inducement to fall into the practice of
treason. Sometimes entrapment is necessary, sometimes not.
The Soviets are, of course, well aware of the fact that persons
with moral and psychological weaknesses do not make the best
agents. They only use them where there is nothing better available.
They would prefer the ideologically motivated person and still
keep on the lookout for them. In the underdeveloped countries, in
countries where the lack of up-to-date security practices does not
prevent Communists and Communist sympathizers from getting gov-
ernment jobs or from taking an active part in politics, there is no
doubt that the kind of agent who performed so well for the Soviets
before 1945 in the West is now serving them in the same fashion.
Two recent cases, far apart in geography, point up, I think, the
present quandary of Soviet intelligence. In Iceland recently two
Soviet diplomats were expelled because they tried to pressure a
young Icelandic trucker into committing espionage for the Soviet
Union. They wanted him to get information for them on the
NATO Air Base at Keflavik. What makes the case interesting and
symptomatic of the changed times is the fact that the victim, a
certain Ragnar Gunnarsson, a man of thirty-two, was a card-
carrying Communist and still is .at least he still was in February,
1963.
Yet it was this Communist who refused to submit to Soviet pres-
sure and who informed the Icelandic police of the whole plot and
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even cooperated with them in trapping the Soviets in the act.
The Soviets had cultivated Gunnarsson for a long time. When he
was only twenty-two, he had been invited to the Soviet Union for
a three-week tour with eight other Icelandic youths and had been
shown the sights at Soviet expense. Later the Soviets tried to cash
in on the investment, but they picked the wrong man or, what is
more likely, they had yet to learn that times have changed. It is
possible now for a Communist not to feel obliged to spy for the
Soviet Union and even to take _steps to frustrate their espionage
Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in
1945 and revealed what Soviet espionage was doing in the United
States after they had been involved in it themselves for years. By
then they were entirely disillusioned and broke with Communism
entirely. Gunnarsson refused to commit espionage in the first place,
but remained a Communist.
What apparently makes such a state of mind as Gunnarsson's
possible today is the fact that the Soviet Union is no longer the
holy matrix of Communism (in the eyes of its adherents), but only
a sponsor of it, and one of several sponsors at that. And this seems
to have set back the Soviet intelligence service in their search for
-agents. The ground has been taken away from under the ideological
appeal to commit espionage in all but the backward countries.
The case which was exposed in Australia in February, 1963, points
more sharply than any other to the failure of the vaunted Soviet
service to keep up with a changing world and to manage its busi-
ness successfully among strangers and in a country where good
security practices prevail. The Soviets had suffered an enormous
setback in Australia in 1951 when the KGB resident, Vladimir
Petrov, defected. One reason he defected was because he saw even
at that time that the tasks the KGB had assigned him in Australia
were hopeless, that the KGB in .Moscow could not understand that
Australia in 1951 was not, let us say, like Germany in the late 1920s.
And he knew dint he himself would be blamed for Moscow's failure.
to adjust to a new situation.
His defection and his disclosures of Soviet espionage in Australia,
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44 The Craft of -Intelligence 653
caused a break in diplomatic relations between the Soviet -Onion
and Australia which were only- resumed again in 1959. By this time
there was an attempted "new look" to Soviet espionage tactics
noticeable in many places. The very man who was sent to head up
the reopened Soviet Embassy in Canberra, Ivan Skripov, was a high
KGB official under diplomatic cover, evidence that the espionage
task had first priority in Soviet eyes. After all, there was lost time
to be made up for. But Skripov was not the sinister, silent type of
the old school. He was a gay blade, a party-giver, a backslapper. His
gay participation in Australian official life was supposed to mislead
everyone as to his true mission. This was the "new look."
These cheap theatricals, typical as they are of the new face Soviet
diplomacy has put on, are however not significant for what really
concerns us. What is more important is that Skripov picked up as
an agent, in the attempt to build up a new undercover intelligence
apparatus in Australia, an Australian woman who was really an
agent of the Australian Security Service. This was the kind of
COUP that the Soviets themselves have tried to practice so often, yet
it has rarely been practiced successfully against them, largely be-
cause in the past they (lid not have to rely on strangers and out-
siders and when they did, their own investigative capabilities could
usually determine how reliable the agent was, i.e., they tailed him
around and checked him out. Here, in a strange land with a strong
and watchful security service, however, the Soviets could neither
pick up local Communist sympathizers for their work nor could
they muster enough "leg-men" and informers to keep track of their
main agents. Thus they had CO rely on the show of "goodwill" and
apparent dedication of their "volunteer." Their ability to judge
behavior was hampered because they were dealing with a species of
people foreign to diem.
The blow to the Soviets in Australia was well deserved. What
Skripov was trying to do through his agent was to set up an illegal-
residentura for die KGB which would have obviated further use
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of the Soviet Embassy for important espionage operations. Thus a,
high-speed radio transmitter and other materials for clandestine
work were passed via the agent to a further party in Adelaide who
was later to function illegally. In apprehending Skripov through
their double agent, the Australians put both the legal and illegal-
apparatus of the KGB in Australia out of business for a long time
to come. Whether the Soviets will try a third time to create an ,
espionage apparatus in Australia remains to be seen.
Without wishing to appear overly optimistic, I would hazard the
guess that the KGB will for the moment retreat, mete out the ap-
propriate punishments to the officers at fault in this latest fiasco and
wait a time before tryin.g again. Then they will probably come up
with some entirely new scheme for penetrating the Australian de-
fenses. They will certainly "case the joint" more carefully in the
future. What they may realize, though they may never give up, is
that in a country which is aware and knowledgeable of Soviet aims
and tactics and is willing to make a serious effort to guard itself
by maintaining a highly trained, competent security and counter-
intelligence force, and where, moreover, indigenous Communism is
weak and is kept that way, success for the Soviet spy is difficult.
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1301. F, A
Rep
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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 installa-
tions 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 in-
genious ways of getting around the obstacles.
Clearly, if a country wishes to protect itself against the unceas-
ing 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 counter-
espionage 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 un-
covering hostile penetration and subversive plots -against other free
countries. Given. the nature of Communist aims, counterespionage
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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 forma-
tion 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 boat-
load 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,
arnong other duties, it guards against the hostile activities of
foreign agents on our own soil. The CIA has the major responsi-
bility for counterespionage outside the United States, thereby con-
stituting 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. who 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 co-
ordination 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. in-
telligence, 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
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Abel. All this information was immediately transmitted to Wash-
ington and passed to the FBI for verification. Hayhan.en's story
stood up in every respect. He came back willingly to the United
States and became the thief 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 arc "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 humanity. If he has im-
munity, he is generally expelled. But there are other ways of neu-
tralizing the hostile agent, and one of the best is exposure or the
threat of exposure. A spy is not of mach further use once his name,
face and story are in the papers.
The target of U.S. counterespionage is massive and diverse be-
cause the Soviets use not only their own intelligence apparatus
against us, but also those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ru-
mania and Bulgaria, all of which are old in the ways of espionage
if not of Communism. Chinese Communist espionage and counter-
espionage 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 meth-
ods are essentially offensive. Its ideal 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 circles 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 Red!, who from 1901 to
1905 was chief of counterespionage in the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire's military intelligence service, and later its representative in
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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 over-
whelming venality. He also sold some of his wares at the KIMC 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 Gen-
eral 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 meas-
ure?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 suspi-
cious. 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 opera-
tion 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 de-
vices of the Okhrana itself.
It is, of course, not necessary to recruit the chief, as in the Red!!
case. His secretary, had he had one, might have done almost as
well. Actually, the site of a major intelligence organization today
makes it unlikely that the chief would personally be concerned with
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all the operational details an opposing service would wish to know.
Not only that, but today the headquarters of an intelligence or-
ganization 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 in-
telligence service? One of the ways is to come supplied with be-
guiling 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 diplo-
matic 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 re-
ceptionist. 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 assign-
ments. 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
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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 Cur-
tain 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 tradi
tion. 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 line 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, com-
plicated 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,
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47 The Craft of Intelligence 653
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 provoca-
teur, suspected by Lenin's entourage but always defended by Lenin,
Malinovsky helped reveal the whereabouts of secret printing presses,
secret meetings and conspiracies to the police, but his main achieve-
ment 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 sonic 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 hav-
ing caught and expelled a Soviet Bloc intelligence officer in the
United 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 in-
formant 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.
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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.
The double agent is the _most characteristic tool of counterespio-
nage operations, and he comes in many guises. In an area like West
Germany with its concentration of technical and military instal-
lations, both those of the West Germans and of the NATO forces,
there is a flood of agents from the Soviet Bloc spying on airfields,
supply depots, factories, United States Army posts, etc. Many are
caught. Many give themselves up because they have found a girl
and want to stay with her or simply because they find life in the
West more attractive. Such men become double agents when they
can be persuaded to keep up the pretense of working for the Soviet
Bloc under Western "control." The ones who are caught often
agree to this arrangement because it is preferable to sitting in jail
for a couple of years.
The aim is to build up the agent, allowing him to report back to
the Bloc harmless information, which is first screened. It is hoped
that the Soviets will then give him new briefs and directives, which
show us what the opponent wants to know and how he is going
about getting it. Sometimes it is possible, through such an agent, to
lure a courier or another agent or even an intelligence officer into
the West. When this happens, one has the choice of simply watch-
ing the movements of the visitor, hoping he will lead to other
agents concealed in the West, or of arresting him, in which case
the operation is naturally over, but has succeeded in neutralizing
another person working for the opposition.
A more valuable double is the resident of a Western country who,
when approached by an opposition intelligence service to under-
take a mission for them, quietly reports this to his own authorities.
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The advantages are obvious. If the Soviets, for example, try to recruit
a Westerner, they must have something serious in mind. Secondly,
the voluntary act of the person approached, in reporting this event,
points to his trustworthiness. Tbe target of Soviet recruitment will
usually be told by his own intelligence authorities to "accept" the
Soviet offer and to feign cooperation, meanwhile reporting back on
all the activities the Soviets assign him. He is also provided With
information which his principals desire to have "fed" to the Soviets.
This game can then be played until the Soviets begin to suspect
their "agent" or until the agent can no longer stand the strain.
The case of the late Boris Morros, the Hollywood director, was
of this kind. Through Morros, who cooperated with the FBI for
many years, the Soviets ran a network of extremely important agents
in the United States, most of them in political and intellectual
circles. lhis operation led to the apprehension of the Sobles, of
Dr. Robert Soblen and numerous others.
"Surveillance" is the professional word for shadowing Or tailing.
Like every act of counterespionage, it must be executed with maxi-
mum care lest its target become aware of it. A criminal who feels
or knows he is being followed has limited possibilities open to him.
The best he can hope for is to chide surveillance long enough to
find a good hiding place. But an intelligence agent, once he has
been alarmed by surveillance, will take steps to leave the country,
and he will have plenty of assistance in doing so.
The purpose of surveillance in counterespionage is twofold. If
a person is only suspected of being an enemy agent, close observa-
tion of ins actions over a period of time may lead to further facts
that confirm the suspicion and supply details about the agent's
mission and how he is carrying it out. Secondly, an agent is rarely
entirely on his own. Eventually he will get in touch, by one means
or another, with his helpers, his sources and perhaps the people
from whom he is taking orders. Surveillance at its best will un-
cover the network to which he belongs and the channels through'
Which he reports.
Surveillance was largely responsible for the British success in
rounding up five Soviet agents in the Lonsdale ring in January,,
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1961. Harry Houghton, an Admiralty employee, was suspected of
passing classified information to an unidentified foreign power.
Scotland Yard tailed Houghton to a London street, where he met
another man so briefly that it was impossible to tell for certain
whether anything had passed between. them or whether they had
even spoken.
However, the fact that both parties acted furtively and seemed
extremely wary of surveillance convinced the British that they were
on the right track. The Yard split its trained men into two teams to
follow the suspects separately. This eventually led them, after many
days of tireless and well-concealed surveillance, to a harmless-
looking American couple who operated a secondhand book store,
Their role, if any, could not be immediately ascertained.
On a later occasion Houghton came up to London again, this
time with his girl friend, who worked in the same naval establish-
ment. Again under surveillance, the two of them, walking down the
street carrying a market bag, were approached from the rear by the
same man whom Houghton had met previously. just as this fellow
was about to relieve Houghton and the girl of the market bag,
which was clearly a prearranged method for passing the "goods,"
all three were arrested. The unknown man was Gordon Lonsdale,
the Soviet "illegal" with Canadian papers who was running the
show.
A few hours later, the harmless-looking American booksellers met
the same fate. They were being sought by the FBI for their part in
a Soviet net in the United States and had disappeared when things
had become too hot for them. In London they had been operating
a secret transmitter to relay Lonsdale's information to Moscow.
Counterintelligence, like most branches of intelligence work,
has many technical resources, and one among them has been re-
sponsible in the past for uncovering more defensive intelligence net-
works than any other single measure. This is the interception and
locating of illegal radio transmitters, known as "direction-finding,"
DiFing for short. It employs sensitive electronic measuring de-
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vices which when mounted on mobile receivers, in a car or truck,
can track down the location of a radio signal by indicating whether
the signal is getting stronger or weaker as the mobile receiver weaves
around a city listening to what has already been identified as an
illegal transmitter.
Every legal radio transmitter, commercial or amateur, in most
countries today is licensed and registered. In this country the call
-signal and the exact location of the transmitter are on record with
the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC monitors the
air waves at all times as a law enforcement procedure. This leads to
the uncovering of enthusiastic "ham" radio operators who haven't
bothered to get a license. It also leads to the discovery of illegal
agent transmitters. The latter are usually identifiable because their
messages are enciphered and they do not use any call signal on
record.
Monitoring of a suspicious Signal may also reveal that the opera-
tor has some kind of fixed schedule for going on the air and this
almost unfailingly points to the fact that he is transmitting to a
foreign headquarters by prearrangment. At this point the D/Fing
process begins. The main difficulty of tracking is that the illegal
operator usually stays on the air, for obvious reasons, only for very
short periods. As the mobile D/F experts try to trace his signal
across a large city on air waves crowded with other signals, he sud-
denly finishes, goes off the air, and there is nothing the D/Fers can
do until he comes on again some days or weeks later. If the Soviets
are behind the operation, the transmission schedule, while fixed,
may follow a pattern that is not easy to spot. Also, the transmitting
frequency may change from time to time. The only solution is -for
the D /F headquarters to listen for the suspicious signal all the time
and to keep after it. But here, too, the' technicians have invented
new improvements to foil and outwit each other. The latest is a
high-speed method of transmission. The operator does not sit at
his telegraph key sending as fast as he can. He prerecords his mes-
sage on tape, then plays the tape over the air at breakneck speed,
too fast for any ear to disentangle. His receiving station at home
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,records the transmission And can replay it at a tempo Which is an-
telligible. If the illegal operator is on the air for only twenty or
thirty seconds, the D/Fers are not going to get very far in their at-
tempt to pinpoint the physical location of the transmitter.
During World War II, before the invention of these high-speed
techniques, the efficiency of D/Fing on both sides was responsible
for some very dramatic counterintelligence work. In the famous
pperation Northpole British intelligence headquarters in London
was in touch with the Dutch underground by radio. The Dutch
center radioed intelligence on German military matters to London
and also made arrangements by wireless with London to have
further personnel and equipment air-dropped into Holland. From
1942 to 1944 the British, complying with the requests and arrange-
ments proposed by the various Dutch underground radio trans-
mitters, dropped large amounts of weapons and supplies into Hol-
land at prearranged drop areas. Many of the bombers which de,
. livered ..the men and the goods were shot down shortly after the
drops, but at least their valuable cargo had reached the people who
needed it. So it was at first thought in England. Actually, in late
1941 and early 1942 counterintelligence units of .the German
Abwchr stationed in Holland succeeded by D/Fing in locating a
series of illegal radio transmitters of the Dutch underground and in
capturing some of the operators. The Germans gradually substituted
their own operators by blandly informing London that the old
operator was not in good shape and the "underground" had sup-
plied some new ones. This was counterintelligence at its wiliest.
Playing the part of the Dutch underground on the air, the Nazis
sucked into their maw many of the valiant volunteers and much of
the equipment which was intended for their own destruction, thus
effectively neutralizing the whole underground effort. It also ac,
counted for the bombers being shot down after and not before they
had delivered the goods each time. Nazi control of Northpole was
finally ended when two of the captured agents succeeded in escap-
ing and in reaching England.
German D /Fing, which was at all times excellent, must also in
.great measure be given the credit for the initial breakthrough which
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49 The Craft of Intelligence 653
caused the downfall of the greatest of all Soviet networks in Europe
during World War II, the so-called "Role Kape11c." By mid-1941,
radio interception stations of German counterintelligence had re-
corded and examined a sufficient number of enciphered messages
emanating from what were obviously illegal transmitters in Western
Europe to realize that an extensive Soviet network was pumping
information out of the German-occupied territories. The German
DiFing was dogged, unremitting and systematic. The Soviets, it is
true, made the job easier for the Germans by requiring their opera-
tors to transmit for very long periods of time, since the intelligence
to be reported was vital and extensive.
Just how significant the DiFing technique has been for counter-
intelligence is clear when one realizes that in this case the Germans
had not the slightest clue as to the identity or whereabouts of any
of the many Soviet agents who were gathering information of such
interest to Moscow that five or more transmitters were keeping the
air waves hot with it. Nor could the Germans make the slightest
progress in breaking the ciphers used in these messages. The only
possible way in which they could hope to close in on this unseen
and unknowable spy system was by physically locating the radio
transmitters into which the information was being fed. It was also
a case of pinpointing a location not merely within a city but within
an area of many thousands of square miles.
In a period of a little less than a year, from the fall of 1941 until
the summer of 1942, Abwehr direction-finding units managed to lo-
cate three of the most important Soviet illegal radio stations and to
apprehend the personnal of all three (since they were usually taken
by surprise while transmitting). Two of the stations were in Belgium
and one in France. Once the operators began to talk, and many of
them gave out the most vital information about their networks
with little persuasion on the part of the Germans, the latter were, of
course, able to get on the track of the agents and informants whose
information had kept the radios so busy. With the assistance of one
of the operators arrested in Belgium, the Germans tracked down
the Schulze-Boysen?Harnack group in Berlin which had pene-
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trated the Luftwaffe and many key ministries of the Nazi regime. As
in the Northpole case, the Germans kept some of the Soviet radios
active for a time and succeeded in fooling. Moscow long enough to
smoke out further collaborators with Moscow's unwitting assistance.
Over fifty persons were executed by the Nazis for their com-
plicity in this spy ring. As a result of these losses and because it was,
by then too dangerous, if not impossible, to establish new illegal
radio transmitters in Germany or Gertnan-occupied territory, the
Soviets concentrated from 1942 onward on making Switzerland their
communications base. Since the Soviets had no diplomatic repre-
sentation in Switzerland, it was again necessary to resort to illegal
transmitters. Many of them were eventually located and closed down-
as a result of Swiss DiFing.
This account by no means exhausts the whole gamut of human
and technical measures which counterintelligence has at its dis-
posal. Much of its basic work is accomplished in the unglamorous.
area of_ its, tiles, which constitute the backbone of any counter-.
intelligence effort. One of the greatest advances in the administra-
tion of counterintelligence work has been the partial mechanization
of file systems, which facilitates the quick and accurate recovery of.
world-wide counterintelligence information.
While most of the daily work of counterintelligence is laborious
and humdrum, its complex and subtle operations are very much
like a gigantic chess game that uses the whole world for its boat-ch..
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50 The Craft of Intelligence
653
BE
IltzaiA1111- MAL -
10
Volu te rs
The piercing of secrets behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains is
made easier for the West because of the volunteers who come our
way.
We don't always have to go to the target. Often it comes to us
through people who arc well acquainted with it. While this is not
a one-way street, the West has gained far more in recent years from
volunteers than its opponents have. A reason for this change, in
addition to Hitler's demise, is the growing discontent with the sys-
tem inside the Soviet Union, The satellite nations and Communist
China, and some relaxation of the controls of Stalin's days. People
know more, and they want more and they travel more.
These volunteers are either _refugees and defectors who cross over
the frontiers to us or they are people who remain "in place" in or-
der to serve us from within the Communist societies.
Information from refugees is often piecemeal and scattered, but
for years it has added to OM basic hind of knowledge, particularly
about the Soviet satellites in Europe. The Hungarian Revolution in
1956 sent over a quarter of a million refugees fleeing westward.
They brought us up to date on every aspect of technical, scientific
and military achievement in Hungary and gave its an excellent fore-
cast of likely capabilities for years to come. Among the hundreds of
thousands of refugees who have come over from East Germany,
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other satellites and Communist China since the end of World War
many have performed a similar service.
The term "defector" is often used in the jargon of international
relations and intelligence to describe the officials or highly knowl-
edgeable citizens, generally from the Communist Bloc, who leave
their country and come to the West. It is, however, a term that is
resented, and properly so, by persons who repudiate a society which
they leave in order to join a better one.
I do not claim that all so-called defectors have come to the West
lor ideological reasons. Some come because they have tailed in their
jobs; some because they fear a shake-up in the regime may mean a
demotion or worse; some are lured by the physical attractions of the
West, human or material. But there is a large band who have come
over to us from Communist officialdom for highly ideological rea-
ons. They have been revolted by life in the Communist world and
??earn for something better. Hence, for these cases I use the term
"defector" sparingly and then with apology. I prefer to call them
'volunteers."
If the man who comes over to us belonged to the Soviet hierarchy,
lie may well know the strengths and weaknesses of the regime, its
lactions, its inefficiencies and its corruption. If a specialist, he would
know its achievements in his chosen field. Volunteers may be
oldiers, diplomats, scientists, engineers, ballet dancers, athletes and,
-tot infrequently, intelligence officers. Behind the Iron Curtain there
are many dissatisfied persons unknown to us who seriously consider
tight. Some of them hesitate to take the final step, not because they
have qualms about forsaking an unsatisfying way of life, but be-
ause they are afraid of the unknowns that await them.
The answer to this is to make it clear that they are welcome and
will be safe and happy with us. Every time a newly arrived political
efugee goes on the air over the Voice of America and says he is
glad to be here and is being treated well, other officials behind the
Iron Curtain who were thinking of doing the same thing will take
:wart and go back to figuring out just how they can get themselves
Appointed as trade representatives in. Oslo or Paris. Short-term visi-
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tors to the West from the Soviet Bloc would probably volunteer in
far greater numbers were it not for the Soviet practice of often
keeping wives and children behind as hostages.
Oleg Lenchevsky, the Soviet scientist who sought asylum in
Britain in May of 1961 while he was studying there on a UNESCO
fellowship, tried in. vain to get Khrushchev to permit his wife and
two daughters, whom he had left behind in Moscow, to leave the
country and join him. His personal appeal, in the form of a letter
to Khrushchev, was published in many Western newspapers. Khru-
shchev, of course, did not relent. He couldn't because he well knew
that if he ever let Lenchevsky's family out of Russia, it would only
set off a wave of defectors with families, all in hopes of the same
treatment.
One of Lenchevsky's reasons for defecting was unusual, but
symptomatic enough. He claimed that after years of suppressing his
religious feelings he had suddenly felt the need of church and had
been relieved to be able to attend services in Britain. He did not
mention this in his letter to Khrushchev, but what he (lid mention
was his discovery while in England of the contents of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of
the United Nations in 1948. Although all the signatories to this
declaration, the Soviets included, agreed to its publication in every
civilized country of the world, it had never seen the light of day in
Soviet Russia. "Surely," Lencheysky wrote Khrushchev,
now, thirteen years later, when the liberty, fraternity, equality and hap-
piness of all people have been proclaimed as our ideals in the new program
of the Communist party, it is high time to put into practice these elemen-
tary principles of interhtiman relations that arc contained in the Universal .
Declaration of Human Rights.
A frequent cause for unrest among scientists, artists and writers
behind the iron Curtain is quite naturally the lack of freedom of
inquiry in their fields, the imposition of political theses on their
work which even goes so far as to reject ideas that tend to conflict
with Marxist views of the world. In some fields an honest Soviet
scientist stands in about the same relation to the state as Galileo did
to- the Inquisition 350. years ago (recant or be punished). The
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51 The Craft of Intelligence 653
Lysenko controversy was one of the most publicized affairs in which
laboratory science and Marxist ideology clashed head on, and Marx-
ism, of course, won. The theories of biologists who opposed Lysenko
and genetic findings which emphasized the importance of heredity
were rejected by a state which rules that man can be transformed
by his environment. The outstanding Soviet chemist, Dr. Mikhail
Klochko, a Stalin Prize winner, who defected in Canada in 1961,
wrote:
The Soviet Encyclopedia had appeared with an article on physical
chemistry written by scientists senior to me, which was both biased and
ludicrous. At a meeting I pointed this out. Many persons told me later
that although they agreed with me, they thought I should not get into
trouble with these powerful men. But this event merely reinforced the
conviction :I now had that I must leave the Soviet Union if ever I was to
achieve my full potentialities as a scientist).
I This Week Magazine, December 31, 1961.
I believe that, given a free opportunity to leave, the number of
people who today would move West from behind the Iron Curtain
would be, without exaggeration, astronomical. The total from the
end of World War II until the end of 1961, the year the Berlin
Wall went up, was over ten million, and most of them had not been
given the opportunity to leave; they took it. The best available
figures, which include war-displaced persons who did not wish to
return to their homelands behind the Curtain after the war was
over, as well as refugees and defectors, are by area of origin, as
follows:
?
East Germany
3,600,000
Baltic states
200,000
European satellites
1,283,000
Communist China
3,000,000
Asian satellites
2,000,000
Soviet Russia -
290,000
Total
10,373,000
The Communists will go to great lengths to prevent the defection.
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of any person whom they regard as "valuable" to them or of pos-
sible use to us. Western scientists at international conferences at-
tended by Soviet and satellite delegations have frequently tried to
start friendly conversations with one or another of the members of
such delegations decked out as chemists or meteorologists, only to
stumble upon the one man who does not know the first word
about the subject in which the delegation was supposed to be expert.
He is the KGB security man Who has been sent along solely for the
sake of keeping an eye on the bona fide scientists in the delegation,
to see that they don't talk out of turn and, above all, that they don't
make a break for freedom.
The Chinese Communists carefully limit the amount of fuel in
the tanks of their military planes before the latter go on training
missions or maneuvers so that a pilot who might take it into his
head while aloft to steer for Formosa and freedom cannot reach
his goal. Even so, a few years ago one of their pilots happened to
make it. The first night after he landed he was put up at a farm
out in the country. The next morning he was. asked how he had
slept during his first night of freedom. He hadn't slept well, he
said, because of the noise. "Noise?'' he was asked. "Out here in
the country? What noise?" It turned out that the clucking of the
chickens had kept him awake He wasn't used to it. Barnyard noises
apparently are on the wane on the mainland.
On the other hand, the fate of some who have gone from our
side over to the Soviets would not serve as a particularly good ad-
vertisement for further defections in that direction. Some of them
recently have talked to Western visitors and have admitted, without
prompting, that their lot is an unhappy one and that they have no
future. The scientific defectors, like the atomic physicist Pontecorvo,
who continue to be useful to the Soviet in their technological
efforts, seem to fare better than the others, and sometimes even re-
ceive high honors, as Pontecorvo recently did when he received the
Lenin Prize. The Burgesses and MacLeans, the Martins and Mitch-
ells, have had their day of publicity anti now eke out a dull living,
some as "propaganda advisers."
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Often "defectors" from the Communist side are not exactly what
they seem. Some, for example, have been working as agents "in
place" behind the Curtain for long periods of time before defecting
and only come out because they or we feel that the dangers of.re-
maining inside have become too great.
People who volunteer "in place" have many ways of. doing. so,
even though the isolation, the physical barriers and. the internal con-
trols of the Soviet Bloc are all supposed to prevent this kind of
thing from happening. It is possible, also, for them to communicate
safely with the West in a number of ways?surprisingly enough, even
by mail, as long as the address of the recipient looks harmless and.
the identity of the sender within the Bloc remains _concealed. Soviet
Bloc censorship cannot possibly inspect every piece of mail passing
to and fro over their borders since the volume is too great. Even if
a letter is censored or intercepted, it need give no clue whatever
about the identity of the sender if proper security precautions are?
followed. Various radio stations in Western Europe that broadcast,
to the Soviet Bloc solicit comments and fan mail from listeners and
usually supply a postbox to which such mail can be sent. They,:
receive many letters from behind the Iron Curtain. If a volunteer
who has mailed out information succeeds later in reaching the
West, he then, of course, finds a ready welcome there.
Some very helpful and important defectors have been diplomats
or intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. It is, of course, a
relatively simple matter for them while posted abroad in a free
country to walk out of their jobs one fine day and go to the Foreign
Office of the country to which they are accredited or a Western
embassy and request asylum. In the West, whenever this happens
and when the motives of the defecting diplomat appear to be bona
fide, asylum and protection and material assistance needed until
the diplomat can find a new livelihood in his new home are usually
granted.
If there is any hesitancy in extending these privileges, it is be-
cause the Soviets have from time to time mounted phony defections,
which is rather an unsatisfactory way of planting an agent but may
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have incidental benefits. The phony "defector," when interviewed
by persons in the country to which: he has "defected," may pick up
and be able to send back a certain amount of information, especially
concerning what is known or not known about his own country. A
further and final step in such phony defections is that the defector
may eventually "redefect." One day he will announce that he is
disillusioned with the West, that its not as represented, he repents
of his sins and wants to go home even if he is to be punished for
his original defection. This provides some propaganda repercussion,
is embarrassing to the country of haven, and is a convenient way
for the defector, who was really an agent, to return home and re-
port on the information he has been assembling. But this is the
exception and the Soviets have no", tried it much lately, chiefly, I
think, because it has not worked well. It has usually been possible
to discover quite early in the day _whether the man was bona fide
or not. In some cases, phony defectors have confessed that they were
planted.
Soviet and satellite intelligence officers, like the diplomats, also
have the advantage of posts and of trips abroad and some use such
occasions to make the break they may long have been contemplating.
Their defections are regarded as Most serious losses by the Soviets.
They may go to great lengths to prevent such defections from hap-
pening, even to using violence to force the return of a potential
defector, not to mention reprisals of various kinds should the de-
fection succeed or the defector's family remain under Soviet control.
The reader may recall the sensational news photos in 1954 which
showed a Soviet goon squad strong-arming the wife of defector
Vladimir Petrov, KGB Chief in Australia, in an attempt to get her
on a plane and take her back to Russia against her will. Only the
quick intervention of the Australian police saved Mrs. Petrov from
being abducted.
For these reasons the defection of intelligence officers is often
carried out with much less fanfare than those of more public per-
sonages like diplomats or scientists. The Soviet or satellite intelli-
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gence officer also usually has the advantage of knowing in some
degree how to get in touch with his "opposite numbers" in the West.
After all, part of his job was to probe for such information. When
he picks up and leaves, it is likely that he will head for a Western
intelligence installation rather than for a diplomatic establishment
or the nearest police station because he can be fairly certain of his
welcome there and that his defection will be handled most securely.
The defection of a staff intelligence officer of the opposition is
naturally a break for Western ccninterintelligence. It is often the
equivalent, in the information it provides, of a direct penetration
of hostile headquarters for a period of time. One such intelligence
"volunteer" can literally paralyze the service he left behind for
months to come. He can describe the internal and external or-
ganization of his service and the work and character of many of his
colleagues at headquarters. He can identify intelligence personnel
stationed abroad under cover. Best of all, he can deliver informa-
tion about operations. Yet he may not know the true identity of a
large number of agents for the reason that all intelligence services
compartmentalize such information. No one knows true identities
except the few officers intimately concerned with a case.
The West has been singularly fortunate in having many such
defectors come over to its side in the course of recent history. In
1937 two of Stalin's top intelligence officers stationed abroad de-
fected rather than return to Russia to be swallowed up in the purge
of the NKVD, which followed the purges of the party and of the
Army. One was Walter Krivitsky, who had been chief of Soviet
intelligence in Holland. He was found dead in a Washington hotel
in 1941, shot presumably by agents of the Soviets who were never
apprehended. The story that he committed suicide seems most un-
likely. The second was Alexander Orlov, who had been one of the
NKVD chiefs in Spain at the time of the Civil War. Unlike Krivit-
sky, he has managed to elude Soviet vengeance and has published
a number of books, one on Stalin's crimes and another on Soviet
intelligence.
An early postwar Soviet defector was Igor Gouzenko, whom I
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mentioned earlier. Gouzenko was a military intelligence officer in
charge of codes and ciphers in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa,
Thanks in large part to clues he brought with him, the inter,
national atomic spy ring which the Soviets had been running against
us during and after the last years of the war was uncovered.
Following the liquidation of Beria shortly after Stalin's death in
1953, it was clear to officers of the Soviet Security Service that any-
one who had served under him was in jeopardy. The new regime
would not feel sure of the loyalty of old-timers who knew too much.
The new regime could also make itself more popular by going
through the motions of wiping out the hated secret police of a
previous regime and quietly putting its own loyal adherents in
their places.
Among the major defectors to theWest at that time were Vladi-
mir Petrov, whom I have just mentioned; Juni Rastvorov, an in-
telligence officer stationed at the Soviet mission in japan; and Peter
Deriabin, who defected from his_post in Vienna. All these men had
at some time been stationed at intelligence headquarters in Moscow
and possessed valuable information that went far beyond their as-
signments at the time they defected. Deriabin later told his story in
a book called The Secret World.
In recent years two defections of a special kind have involved
Soviet intelligence personnel employed on assassination missions.
Nikolay Khokhlov was sent from Moscow to West Germany in
early 1954 to arrange for the Murder of a prominent anti-Soviet
einigre leader, Georgi Okolovich. Khokhlov told Okolovich of his
'mission and then defected. At Munich in 1957, Soviet agents tried
without success to poison Khokhlov. In the fall of 1961, Bogdan
Stashinski defected in West Germany and confessed that on Soviet
orders he had murdered the two. Ukrainian exile leaders Rebet and
Bandera some years earlier in Munich.
Recently, Soviet diplomat Aleksandr Ka.znachayey defected in
lBurma, where he had been stationed in the embassy. While KaZ-
nachayey was not a staff member of Soviet intelligence; he was 'a
"coopted worker" and was. used in intelligence work whenever his
position as a diplomat 'enabled him to perform certain tasks with
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53 The Craft of Intelligence 653
less risk of discovery than his colleagues in the intelligence branch.
His recent book describing what went on in the Soviet Embassy in
Rangoon2 has clone a great deal to debunk the picture of Soviet
2 Inside a Soviet Embassy, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962.
skill and American incompetence previously impressed on the
American public in the book The Ugly American.
All the important intelligence "volunteers" have not been Soviets.
Numerous high-ranking staff officers have defected from the satel-
lite countries and were able to contribute information not only
about their own services but, about Soviet intelligence as well,
Whatever impression of independence European satellite govern-
ments may try to give, they are, in matters of espionage, satrapies of
the U.S.S.R. When agents of the satellite services come over to the
West, they are a window on the policies and plans of the Kremlin.
Joseph Swiatlo, who defected in Berlin in 1954, had been chief of
the department of the Polish intelligence service which kept tabs
on members of the Polish Government and the Polish Communist
party, Needness to say, he knew all the scandal about the latter,
and the Soviets had frequently consulted with him.
Pawel Monat had been Polish Military Attach?n Washington
from 1955 to 1958, after which he had returned to Warsaw and was
put in charge of world-wide collection of information by Polish
military attachce?s. He served in this job for two years before defect-
ing in 1959. We will hear more of him later on.
Frantisek Tisler defected in Washington after having served as
Czech Military Attach?here from 1955 to 1959. The Hungarian
secret police officer, Bela Lapitsnyik, made a daring escape to free-
dom over the Austro-Hungarian border in May, 1962, and reached
Vienna in safety, only to die of poisoning, apparently at the hands
of Soviet or Hungarian agents; before he could tell his full story to
Western authorities.
The Chinese defector, Chao Fu, who had been serving as the
"security officer" in the Red Chinese Embassy in Stockholm until
he "disappeared" in 1962, was one of the first openly publicized
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cases of a defection from the Chinese Communist State Security
Service. There are others.
What has brought these men and others over to our side is natu-
rally a matter of great interest, not only to Western intelligence, but
to any serious student of the Soviet system and of Soviet life.
Gouzenko, for example, has told how he was gradually overcome
by shame and repugnance as he began to realize that the U.S.S.R.,
while a wartime ally of Britain, Canada and the United States, was
mounting a massive espionage effort to steal scientific secrets. This
moral revulsion eventually led to his defection.
The postwar defectors were_ not in a similar situation because the
Soviets after 1916 were no longer even pretending to be our friends.
Every Soviet official was well indoctrinated on this point and could
not easily survive in his job if he had any soft feelings about the
"imperialists." Nevertheless feelings akin to those which stirred
Gouzenko seem to have moved others. Most defectors have suffered
some kind of disillusionment or disappointment with their own
system.
When one studies the role the intelligence services play in the
Soviet world and their closeness to the centers of power, it is not
surprising that the Soviet intelligence officer gets an inside look,
available to few, of the sinister methods of operation behind the
facade of "socialist legality." To the intelligent and dedicated Com-
munist, such knowledge comes as a shock. One defector has told us,
for example, that he could trace the disillusionment which later led
to his own defection back to the day when he found out that Stalin
and the KGB, and not the Germans, had been responsible for the
Katyn massacre (the murder of about ten thousand Polish officers
during World- War II). The Soviet public still does not know the
truth about this or most of the other crimes of Stalin. But once a
man is aware of realities, "loss of faith" in the system within which
he is working, coupled often with personal disappointments, seems
to be the powerful driving factor in defections.
The names mentioned here by no means exhaust the list of all
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those who have left the Soviet intelligence service and other Soviet
posts. Some of the most important and also some of the most recent
defectors have so far chosen not to be "surfaced," and for their own
protection must remain unknown to the public. They are making
a continual contribution to . the inside knowledge of the work of
the Soviet intelligence and security apparatus and to exposing the
'Way in which the subversive war is being carried on against us by
CoMmunism.
Every effort is made to see to it that those who leave a Communist
Service are helped and assisted to establish a new life in the free
country of their choice and to be protected in it. The United States,
in particular, has always been a. haven for those seeking to leave
tyranny and espouse freedoni. It will always have a welcome for
those who do not wish to continue to work for the Kremlin.
B- BEAR R
11
tofusi ih Adv nary
In intelligence, the term "decbption? covers a wide ? variety of md--
neuvers by which a state attempts to mislead another state, gen-
erally a potential or actuid. enemy, as to its own capabilities and
intentions. Its best-known use is in wartime or just prior to the
'Outbreak of war, when its main purpose is to draw enemy defenses
away from a planned point c)l. attack, or to give the impression that
there will be no attack at all, or simply to confuse the opponent
about one's plans and purposes.
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As a technique, deception is as old as history. Notable instances
come down to us from Homer and Thucydides: the Trojan horse
that led to the fall of Troy and the strategy of the Greeks attacking
Syracuse in 415 B.c. in the latter case the Greeks infiltrated a plaus-
ible agent into the ranks of the Syracusans, lured them to attack the
Greek camp at some distance from the city and meanwhile put their
whole army on board ship and sailed for Syracuse, which was left
practically undefended.
During the kind of peace we now call Cold War, various other
forms of deception, including political deception, are being prac-
ticed against us by the Soviets, often involving the use of forgeries.
Deception took an even less subtle form in Cuba when the Soviets,
while vigorously denying any complicity in installing their inter-
mediate-range or offensive-type missiles, were caught in the act.
As a strategic maneuver, deception generally requires lengthy and
careful preparation. Intelligence must first ascertain what the enemy
thinks and what he expects, because the misleading information
which is going to be put into his hands must be plausible and not
outside the practical range of plans that the enemy knows arc
capable of being put into operation. Intelligence must then devise
a way of getting the deception to the enemy. Success depends on
close coordination between the military command and the intelli-
gence service.
After the Allies had driven the Germans out of North Africa in
1943, it was clear to all that their next move would be into South-
-ern Europe. The question was where. Since Sicily was an obvious
steppingstone and was in fact the Allied objective, it was felt that
every effort should be made to give the Germans and Italians the
impression that the Allies were going to by-pass it. To have tried to
persuade the Germans that there was to be no attack at all or that
it was going to move across Spain was out of the question, for these
maneuvers would not have been credible. The deception had to
point to something within the expected range.
For quick and effective placement of plausible deception directly
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into the hands of the enemy's high command, few methods beat the
"accident," so long as it seems logical and has all the appearances of
being a wonderfully lucky break for the enemy. Such an accident
was cleverly staged by the British in 1943 before the invasion of
Sicily and it was accepted by the Germans at the time as com-
pletely genuine. Early in May of that year the corpse of a British
major was found washed up on the southwest coast of Spain near
the town of Huelva, between the Portuguese border and Gibraltar.
A courier briefcase was still strapped to his wrist containing copies
of correspondence to General Alexander in Tunisia from the Im-
perial General Staff. These papers clearly hinted at an Allied plan
to invade Southern Europe via Sardinia and Greece. As we learned
after the war, the Germans fully believed these hints. Hitler sent an
armored division to Greece, and the Italian garrison on Sicily was
not reinforced.
This was perhaps one of the best cases of deception utilizing a
single move in recent intelligence history. It was called "Operation
Mincemeat," and the story of its execution has been fully told by
one of the main planners of the affair, Ewen Montagu, in the book
The Man Who Never Was.' It was a highly sophisticated feat, made
J.B. Lippincott Co., 1954.
possible by the circumstances of modern warfare and the techniques
of modern science. There was nothing illogical about the possibility
that a plane on which an officer carrying important documents was
a passenger could have come down, or that a body from the crash
could have been washed up on the Spanish shore.
Actually, the body of a recently dead civilian was used for this
operation. He was dressed in the uniform of a British major; in his
pockets were all the identification papers, calling cards and odds
and ends necessary to authenticate him as Major Martin. He was
floated into Spain from a British submarine, which surfaced close
enough to the Spanish coast to make sure that he would reach his
target without fail. And he did.
"Overlord," the combined Allied invasion of Normandy, in June,
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1944, also made effective use of deception?in this case not an iso-
lated ruse but a variety of misleading maneuvers closely coordinated
with each other. They succeeded, as is well known, in keeping the
Germans guessing as to the exact arca of the intended Allied land-
ing. False rumors were circulated among our own troops on the
theory that German agents in England would pick them up and
report them. Radio channels to agents in the French underground
were utilized to pass deceptive orders and requests for action to
back up the coming Allied landings; it was known that certain of
these agents were under the control of the Germans and would pass
on to them messages received from the Allies. Such agents therefore
constituted a direct channel to the German intelligence service. In
order to make the Germans think that the landings would take
place in the Le Havre area, agents in the vicinity were asked to,
make certain observations, thereby indicating to the Germans 4
heightened Allied interest in fortifications, rail traffic, etc. Lastly,
military reconnaissance itself was organized in such a way as to
emphasize an urgent interest in places where the attack would not
come. Fewer aerial reconnaissance sorties were flown over the Nor-
mandy beaches than over Le Havre and other likely areas. Rumors
were spread of a diversionary attack on Norway to prevent a con-
centration of forces in the North of France.
There are essentially two ways of planting deceptive information
with the enemy. One can stage the kind of accident the British did
in Spain. Such accidents are plausible because they do, after
frequently occur solely as a result of the misfortunes of ivar. His-
tory is full of instances where couriers loaded with 'important dis-
patches fell into enemy hands. The other way is to plant an agent
with the enemy who is ostensibly reporting to him about your
plans as the Athenians did at Syracuse. He can be a "deserter" or
some kind of "neutral." The problem, as in all counterespionage
penetrations, is to get the enemy to trust the agent. He cannot
simply turn up with dramatic military information and expect to
be believed unless he can explain his motives and how he got his
information. ?
A wholly modern deception channel came into being with the
use of radio. For example, ''a parachutist lands in enemy territory
equipped with a portable transmitter and is captured. He confesses
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55 The Craft of Intelligence 653
he has been sent on a mission to spy on enemy troop movements and
to communicate with his intelligence headquarters by radio. Such
an agent stands a good chance of being shot after making this con-
fession; he may be shot before he has a chance to make it. The
probability is high, however, that his captors will decide he is more
useful alive than dead because his radio provides a direct channel
-for feeding deception to the opponent's intelligence service. If the
intelligence service which sent the agent knows, however, that he has
been captured and is under enemy control, it can continue to send
him questions with the intent- of deceiving the other side. If it asks
for a report on troop concentrations in sector A, it gives the im-
pression that some military action is planned there: This was one
tactic used by the Allies in preparation for the Normandy landings.
A lesser and essentially defensive kind of deception involves the
camouflaging of important targets.
To deceive Nazi bombers during World War II, airfields in
Britain were made to look like farms from the air. Sod was placed
over the hangars and maintenance shack were given the appearance
of barns, sheds and outbuildings. Even more important, mock-ups
were set up in other areas to look like real airfields with planes on
them. Elsewhere mocked-up naval vessels were stationed where the
real might well have been.
The mounting of strategic deception calls for the close coopera-
tion and high security of all parts of government engaged in the
effort. For a democratic government this is difficult except under
wartime controls.
For the Soviets, of course, the situation is somewhat easier. With
their centralized organization and complete control of the press
and of dissemination of information within their country or to
foreign countries from the U.S.S.R., they can support a deception
operation far more efficiently than we can. Often the Soviets put
armaments on display with a-certain amount of fanfare in order to
draw attention away from other armaments they may have in their
arsenal or may plan to have. Sometimes they exhibit mock-ups of
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planes and other equipment, which may never see the light of day
as operational types.
For example, on Aviation Day in July, 1955, in the presence of
diplomatic and military representatives in Moscow there was a
"fly-by" of a new type of Soviet heavy bomber. The number far
exceeded what was thought to be available. The impression was
thus given that many more had lately come off the assembly line
and that the Soviets were therefore committed to an increasing
force of heavy bombers. Later it was surmised that the same squad-
ron had been flying around incircles, reappearing every few min-
utes. The purpose was to emphasize Soviet bomber production. In
fact, they were soon to shift the emphasis to missiles.
Deception can also use social channels. A Soviet diplomat drops
a remark in deepest confidence to a colleague from a neutral coun-
try at a dinner party, knowing that the neutral colleague also goes
to British and American dinner parties. This "casual remark" was
contained in a directive from the Soviet Foreign Office. When it is
studied in intelligence headquarters somewhere in the West, it is
found to agree in substance with something said by a Soviet official
at a cocktail party ten thousand miles away. Thus, the two remarks
seem to confirm each other. In reality both men were speaking as
mouthpieces in a program of political deception iAthich the Soviets
coordinate with their ever-shifting plots in Berlin, Laos, the Congo,
Cuba and whatever is next on the program.
One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the
Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and dur-
ing World War II that the Chinese people's movement was not
Communistic, but a social and "agrarian" reform movement. This
fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the
Far East and penetrated organizations in the West.
The Soviets have centralized the responsibility for planning and
launching deception operations in a special department of the State
Security Service (KGB) known as the "Disinformation Bureau." In
recent years this office has been particularly busy formulating and
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States, Britain and other countries of the Free World. Its intention
is to misstate and misrepresent the policies and purposes of these
countries. In June of 1961, Mr. Richard Helms, a high official of
the Central Intelligence Agency, presented the evidence of this ac-
tivity to a Congressional committee. Out of the mass of forgeries
available, he selected thirty-two particularly succulent ones, which
were fabricated in the period 1957-60.
He pointed out that the Russian secret service has a long history
of forging documents, having concocted the Protocols of Zion over
sixty years ago to promote anti-Semitism. The Soviets have been
adept pupils of their Czarist predecessors. Their forgeries nowa-
days, he pointed out, are intended to discredit the West, and the
United States in particular, in the eyes of the rest of the world; to
sow suspicion and discord among the Western allies; and to drive
is wedge between the peoples of non-Communist countries and their
governments by promoting the notion that these governments are.
the puppets of the United Rates.
The falsified documents include various communications purport-
ing to be from high officials to the President of the United States,,
letters to and from the Secretary of State or high State Department,.
Defense Department and USIA officials. To th.e initiated, these
documents are patent fabrications; while some of the texts arc
cleverly conceived, there are always a great number of technical
errors and inconsistencies. Unfortunately, these are not apparent
to the audiences for which the letters are intended, generally the
peoples of the newly independent nations. The documents are pre-
pared for mass consumption rather than the elite. One of the most
subtle, supposedly part of a British Cabinet paper, wholly misrepre-
sented the U.S. and British attitude with respect to trade-union
policies in Africa.
A typical Soviet forgery which appeared in an English-language
newspaper in India consisted of two spurious telegrams allegedly
sent by the American Ambassador in Taipeh to the Secretary of
State in Washington commenting on various wholly fictitious pro-
posals for doing away with Chiang Kai-shek. In order to explain
bow the "telegrams" had fallen into their hands, the Soviets cleverly
exploited the fact that 4 mob had shortly before raided our em-
bassy in Taipch,
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The forgery technique is particularly useful to the Communists
because they possess the means for wide and fast distribution. News-
papers and news outlets are available to them on a world-wide basis.
While many of these outlets are tarnished and suspect because of
Communist affiliations, they are nevertheless capable of placing a
fabrication before millions of people in a short time. The denials
and the pinpointing of the evidence of fabrication ride so far behind
the initial publication that the forgeries have already made their
impact in spreading deception. On the other hand, the technique of
forgery is not so readily available to Western intelligence in peace-
time, for, quite apart from ethical considerations, there is too much
danger of deceiving and misleading our own people and our free
press.
Sometimes one starts a deception only to find that maybe some-
thing valuable is being given away. For example, during the clays
before the thermonuclear (fusion) bomb was tested there were sev-
eral theories as to the scientific path to follow. Finally one was
hit upon which clearly seemed to be the most feasible; another path
which for a time had looked promising turned Out, so it was then
thought, to be a blind alley. Why not quietly sell the "blind alley"
to the oppositiona After all, they had sent us Klaus Fuchs. Accord-
ingly plans were made and everything was ready to proceed when
the urgent call came to "stop press." Apparently further research
had disclosed that the "blind alley" might be the true "McCoy."
When one deliberately misleads, sometimes friend as well as foe
is misled. And later the deceiver may not be believed when he
wishes to be. This is the situation of the Soviets today after Cuba.
Often the. very fear of deception has blinded an opponent to the
real value of the information which accidents or intelligence opera-
tions have placed in his hands.
As Sir Walter Scott wrote:
011, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
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If you suspect an enemy of constant trickery, then almost anything
that happens can be taken as one of his tricks. A collaterial effect
of deception, once a single piece of deception has succeeded in its
purpose, is to upset and confuse the opponent's judgment and
evaluation of other intelligence he may receive. FIe will be suspi-
cious and distrustful. He will not want to be caught off guard.
On January 10, 1940, during the first year of World War IT, a
German courier plane flying between two points in Germany lost
its way in the clouds, ran out of fuel and made a forced landing
in what turned out to be Belgium. On board were the complete
plans of the German invasion of France through Belgium, for
which Hitler had already given marching orders. When the Luft-
waffe major who had been piloting the plane realized where he had
landed, he quickly built a fire out of brush and tried to burn all
the papers he had on board, but. Belgian authorities reached him
before he could finish the job and retrieved enough half-burned
and unburned documents to be able to piece together the German
plan.
Some of the high British and French officials who studied the
material felt that the whole thing was a German deception opera-
tion. How could the Germans be so sloppy as to allow a small plane
to go aloft so close to the Belgian border in had weather with a
completely detailed invasion plan on board? This reasoning focused
on the circumstances, not on die contents of the papers. Churchill
writes that he opposed this interpretation. Putting himself in the
place of the German leaders, he asked himself what possible ad-
vantage there was at that moment in perpetrating a deception of
this sort, i.e., alerting Belgium and Holland by faking invasion
plans. Obviously, none. As we learned after the war, the invasion of
Belgium, which had been set for the sixteenth of January?six days
after the plane came down?was postponed by Hitler primarily be-
cause the plans had fallen into the Allies' hands.
Accidents like this are not the only events that raise the specter of
deception. It has already been pointed out that if you send a de-
ception agent to the enemy, you have to make him credible. Bona
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fide windfalls have sometimes been doubted and neglected because
they were suspected of being deception. This happened to the Nazis
-late in World War II in the case of "Cicero," the Albanian valet of
the British Ambassador to Turkey. He had succeeded in cracking
the Ambassador's private safe and had access to top secret British
documents on the conduct of the war. One day he offered to sell
_them to the Germans as well as to continue supplying similar docu-
ments.
His offer was accepted but some of Hitler's experts in Berlin could
never quite believe that this wasn't a British trick. Their reasons,
-however, were more complex than in the cases where deception
alone is feared. The incident is also an excellent example of how
prejudice and preconception can cause failure to properly evaluate
valid intelligence. For one thing, the Cicero documents gave evi-
dence of the massive Allied offensives to come and the growing
power of the Allies?information which collided head on with il-
lusions cherished in the highest Nazi circles. Second, competition
and discord among different organs of the German Government
prevented it from making a sober analysis of this source. The in-
telligence service under Himmler and Kaltenbrunner and the diplo-
matic service under Ribbentrop were at odds and, as a result, if
Kahenbrunner thought information was good, Ribbentrop auto-
matically tended to think it was bad. An objective analysis of the
operational data was out of the question in a situation where rival
cutthroats were vying for position and prestige. In the Cicero case,
Ribbentrop and the diplomatic service suspected deception. The
net Qffect was that, as far as can be ascertained, the Cicero material
never had any appreciable influence on Nazi strategy. Contrary to
the general impression, there is also no evidence that the Nazis
gained from Cicero any information about the planned invasion of
Europe except possibly the code word for the operation?"Over-
lord.''
A further ironical twist to this famous case is that the Nazi
intelligence service paid this most valuable agent hundreds of
thousands of pounds in counterfeit English notes. Cicero has been
trying ever since to get restitution from the German Government for
services rendered?in real money.
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EI I 1 IBEARER
12
How I t ig c Is Put to Us
Information gathered by intelligence services or compiled by the
analyst is of little use unless it is got into the hands of the "con-
sumers," the policymakers. This must be done promptly and in
clear, intelligible form so that the particular intelligence can easily
be related to the policy problem with which the consumers are
then concerned.
These criteria are not easily met, for the sum total of intelligence
available is very great on many subjects. Thousands of items come
into CIA headquarters every day, directly or through other agencies
of government, particularly the State and Defense Departments.
Many other items are added from the research work of scholars.
When we consider all we need to know about happenings behind
the Iron Curtain and in over a hundred other countries, this
volume is not surprising. Anywhere in the world events could occur
which might affect the security of the United States. How is this
mass of information handled by the various collection agencies,
and how is it processed in the State Department, the Defense De-
partment and the CIA?
Between these three agencies there is immediate and often auto-
matic exchange of important intelligence data. Of course, someone
has to decide what "important" means and determine priorities.
The sender of an intelligence report (who may be any one of our
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many officials -abroad?diplomatic, military or intelligence) will
often label it as being of a certain importance, but the question of
priority is generally decided on the receiving end. If a report is of
a particularly critical character, touching on the danger of hostili-
ties or some major threat to our national security, the sender will
place his message in channels that provide for atomatic dissemi-
nation to the intelligence officers in the State and Defense De-
partments and the CIA. The latter, as coordinator of foreign
intelligence, has the right of access to al I intelligence that comes to
any department of our government. This is provided for by law.
There is a round-the-clock watch for important intelligence com-
ing into the State and Defense Departments and the CIA. During
office hours (which in intelligence wO'rk are never normal), desig-
nated officers scan the incoming information for anything of a
critical character. Through the long night hours, special watch
officers in the three agencies do the Monitoring. They are in close
touch with each other and come to know each other well, and
continually exchange ideas about the sorting of clues to any de-
veloping crisis. In the event that any dramatic item should appear
in the incoming nightly stream of reports, arrangements have been
made as to the notification of their "immediate chiefs. The latter
decide who among the high policy officials of government?from
the President at the top to the responsible senior officers in State,
Defense and the CIA?should be alerted. The watch officers also
follow the press service and radio reports, including those of Soviet
and Chinese Communist origin. News of a dramatic, yet open,
character?the death of a Stalin, a revolt in Iraq, the assassination of
a political leader?may first become known through public means of
communication. Official channels today have access to the most
speedy means of transmission of reports from our embassies and our
overseas installations, but these messages must go through the proc-
ess of being enciphered and deciphered. As a result, news flashes
sometimes get through first.
After there has been an important incident affecting our se-
curity, one that has called for policy decisions-and actions, there is
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usually an intelligence post-mortem to examine how effectively the
available information was handled and how much forewarning had
been given by intelligence. Incidents such as the Iraqi revolution
of 1958 or the erecting of the wall dividing Berlin on August 13,
1961 required such treatment, since neither had been clearly pre-
dicted through intelligence channels. The purpose of the post-
mortem is to obtain something in the nature of a batting average
for the alertness of intelligence services. If there has been a failure,
either in prior warning or in handling the intelligence already at
hand, the causes are sought and every effort is made to find means
of improving future performance.
The processing, of incoming intelligence falls into three general
categories. The first is the daily and hourly handling of current in:
telligence. The second is the researching of all available intelligence
on a given series of subjects of interest to our policymakers; this
might be given the name "basic intelligence." For example, one
group of analysts may deal with the information available on the
Soviet economy, another with its agriculture, a third with its steel
and capital goods production, and still another with its aircraft and
missile development. The third type of processing involves the
preparation of an intelligence estimate and judgment based on the
whole volume of information on the subject of the estimate.
Of course, there is not time to submit every important item to
detailed analysis before it is distributed to the policymakers. But
"raw" intelligence is a dangerous thing unless it is understood for
what it generally is---an unevaluated report, frequently sent off
without the originator of the message being able to determine finally
its accuracy and reliability. Hence the policymakers who receive
such intelligence in the form of periodic intelligence bulletins (or as
an isolated message if its importanee and urgency require special
treatment) are warned against acting on raw intelligence alone.
Bulletins, both daily and weekly, summarize on a world-wide
basis the important new developments over the preceding hours or
days; they include such appraisal as the sender may give or as the
(ffA is able to add in consultation with representatives of the other
government intelligence agencies. These representatives meet fre-
quently for that purpose, going over the items to be included in the
daily bulleting. New information May still be added to the daily
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58 The Craft of Intelligence 653
is often included as to source, mariner of acquisition and reliability.
Some messages carry their own credentials as to authenticity; most
do not.
In addition to the current raw intelligence reports and the "basic
intelligence" studies, there are the position papers, generally called
"national estimates." These are prepared by the intelligence com-
munity on the basis of all the intelligence available on a certain
subject along with an interpretation of the "imponderables." Here
we come to a most vital function of the entire work of intelligence
?how to deal with the mass of information about future develop-
ments so as to make it useful to our policymakers and planners as
they examine the critical problems of today and tomorrow. Berlin,
Cuba, Laos; Communist aims and objectives; the Soviet military
and nuclear programs; the economies of the U.S.S.R. and Com-
munist China?the list could be almost indefinitely extended and is,
of course, not exclusively concerned with Communist Bloc matters.
Sometimes estimates must be made on a crash basis. Sometimes,
particularly where long-range estimates are involved, they are made
after long weeks of study.
One of the major reasons for the organization of the CIA was to
provide a mechanism for coordinating the work of producing in-
telligence estimates so that the President, the Secretary of State and
the Secretary of Defense could have before them a single reasoned
analysis of the factors involved in situations affecting our national
security. President Truman, who, in 1917,- submitted the legislation
proposing its creation, expressed in his memoirs the need for such a
mechanism:
The war taught us this lesson?that we had to collect intelligence in a
manner that would make the information available where it was needed
and when it was wanted, in an intelligent and understandable foi-m. If
it is not intelligent and understandable, it is useless.
He also describes the system by which intelligence was coordinated.
and passed on to policymakers:
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Each time the National Security Council is about to consider a certain
policy?let us say a policy having to do with Southeast Asia?it immediately
calls upon the CIA to present an estimate of the effects such a policy is
likely to have. The Director of the CL \ sits with the staff of the National
Security Council and continually informs as they go along. The estimates
he submits represent the judgment of the CIA and a cross section of the
judgments of all the advisory councils of the CIA. These are G-2, A-2,
the ONI, the State Department, the FBI, and the Director of Intelligence
of the AEC. The Secretary of States then makes the final recommendation
of policy, and the President makes the final decision.'
1 Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, Doubleday & Co., 1958.
What President Truman refers_ to as "the advisory councils of
the CIA" was established in 1950 as the Intelligence Advisory Com-
mittee, which later became the United States Intelligence Board
(USIB) and is of ten referred to as "the intelligence community."
USIB now has an additional member to those listed above?the
head of the newly created Defense Intelligence Agency, which co-
ordinates the work of Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence and is
playing in increasingly important role in the intelligence com-
munity. So too is the intelligence unit of the State Department,
whose head ranks as an Assistant Secretary of State. The USIB
meets regularly every week and more frequently during crises or
whenever any vital new item of intelligence is received. The Direc-
tor of Central Intelligence, who is chairman of the board, is re-
sponsible For the estimates produced by the board. However, if any
member dissents and desires his dissent to be recorded, a statement
of his views is included as a footnnte to the estimate that is finally
presented to the President and interested members of the National
Security Council.
Arrangements are made so that the President and other senior
officers of government, as required, can be instantly reached by the
Director of Central Intelligence or by their own intelligence offi-
cers in any emergency. Experience over the years has proved that
this system really works. There was not a single instance during my
service as Director when I failed to reach the President in a matter
of minutes with any item of intelligence I felt was of immediate im-
portance.
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The CIA has also set up a Board of National Estimates within the
Agency, on which sits a group of experts in intelligence analysis,
both civilian and military. The board prepares initial drafts of most
estimates, which are then coordinated with USIB representatives-.
?To deal with highly technical subjects, such as Soviet missiles, air-
craft or nuclear programs, competent technical subcommittees of
USIB have been established. And, in certain cases, experts outside
of government may be consulted.
Obviously, the procedure of preparing and coordinating an initial
draft of an. estimate, presenting it to the USIB, formulating the
hitter's final report along with any dissenting opinions and sub-
mitting it to the policymakers is time-consuming. There are times
when "crash" estimates are needed. One of these occasions was the
Suez crisis of November, 1956. I had left Washington to go to my
voting place in New York State when I received early on election
eve a telephone message from General Charles P. Gabel', Deputy
Director of the CIA. He read to me a Soviet note that had just come
Over the wires. Bulganin was threatening London and Paris with
missile attacks unless the British and French forces withdrew from
Egypt. I asked General Cabell to call a meeting of the intelligence
community, and immediately flew back to Washington. The USIB
met throughout the nigh", and early on election morning I took to
President Eisenhower our agreed estimate of Soviet intentions and
probable courses of action in this crisis.
The contents of this and other estimates are generally kept secret.
However, the fact that this mechanism exists and can operate
quickly should be a matter of public knowledge. It is an important
cog in our national security machinery.
When, on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy addressed the
nation on the secret Soviet build-up of intermediate-range missiles
in Cuba, the intelligence community had already been receiving
reports from agents and refugees indicating mysterious construction
of some sort of missile bases in Cuba. it was a well-known fact that
for some time past, Castro?or the Soviets purporting to be acting
for Castro?had been installing a whole series of bases for ground-
to-air missiles. These, however, were of short range and their major
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59 The Craft of intelligence 653
purpose apparently was to deal with possible intruding aircraft.
Since the reports received came largely from persons who had little
technical knowledge of missile development, they did not perrnit
a firm conclusion to be drawn as to whether all the missiles on
which they were reporting were of the short-range type or whether
something more sinister was involved.
The evidence that had been accumulated was sufficient, however,
to alert the intelligence community to the need for a more scien-
tific and precise analysis. Reconnaissance flights were resumed and
the concrete evidence was obtained on which the President based
his report to the nation and his quarantine action. This required,
of course, not only the most careful intelligence analysis but prompt
intelligence judgments. As the President stated, the air reconnais-
sance established beyond a doubt that more than antiaircraft
installations were being constructed on Cuban soil. This was a case,
incidentally, in which it was obviously necessary to give publicity
to intelligence conclusions. Khrushchev's subsequent statements and
actions testified to their accuracy.
Here was another case where a "crash" estimate was required.
Most of the estimating can be done on a more ordered basis, al-
though today there is a sense of urgency in the whole field of in-
telligence.
But whether an estimate has had weeks of analytical work behind
it or is produced "overnight," years of training in the whole trade-
craft of intelligence analysis are part and parcel of the final product.
For example, in the Cuban case, the estimate could only have been
produced quickly because of devoted work over many years by the
highest qualified technicians in photoanalysis. These men and
women had reached such competence from the study of earlier
photographs of missile sites that what would be entirely unintelli-
gible or subject to likely misinterpretation in the hands of the
novice produced clear and reliable intelligence for the experts
when they saw the films of the missiles in Cuba.
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There must be intelligence analysis on each and every country
where our interests may be affected, as well as in specified fields of
particular intelligence interest; for example, the Soviet achievements
in the fields of nuclear physics, ballistics, aerodynamics and space;
also in industry, agriculture, and transportation. Naturally, the
political, economic and social situations of many countries may also
be of significance. I recall once that I had to have quickly a massive
amount of information about Greenland. Within a matter of min-
utes, there was laid before me a study of the geography, geology,
climate, peoples and history of that little-visited area.
All this is by no means just -a question of automation, of filing
away old reports, and pushing the right buttons and getting the
answers. Automation is a help and speeds up the process. But as
we move further into the age of scientific achievement, the compli-
cated machines and scientific detection devices require the greatest
sophistication of the operators and analysts. Without this our
scientifically produced information as well as that furnished by the
tools of espionage would be of little use. For it is the patient analyst
who arranges, ponders, tries out alternate hypotheses and draws
conclusions. What he is bringing to the task is the substantive
background, the imagination and originality of the sound and
careful scholar.
There arc knowable things which happen to be unknown. Some-
times they are easy, sometimes 1:try difficult, to -find out about. But
there also are matters you cannot surely find out about at all. In
such cases, if the requirement for a reasoned guess is high enough,
we enter another phase of intelligence work?that of estimating.
You make estimates not only about the knowable things that are
not obvious; you make estimates also about those things which are
literally unknowable, as we shall see.
Here is an unsung and perhaps unspectacular part of intelli-
gence work but I have often seen spectacular results emerge from
it when our intelligence analysts are called upon to produce the
estimate that the policymaker req uires.
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Some estimates are requested by senior policy officers of govern-
ment to guide them in dealing with particular problems before them
or to get an idea of how others may react to a particular line of
.action we may be considering. Others are prepared on a regularly
scheduled basis, as, for example, the periodic reports on Soviet mili-
tary and technical preparations. Before some estimates are prepared,
,a hurry-up call is sent to those who collect the intelligence to try
to fill certain gaps in the information required for a complete
.analysis of a particular problem. Such gaps might be in the military
or economic information available, or in our knowledge of the in-
tentions of a particular government at a particular time.
Finally, estimates are often prepared because some member of the
intelligence community feels that a particular situation requires
attention. The cloud in the sky may be no bigger than a man's
hand, but it may portend the storm; and it is the duty of intelli-
gence to sound an alarm before a situation reaches crisis propor-
tions. While the charge is somelimes made that intelligence has
failed to warn of certain crises, the press and outsiders do not know
the number of times that it has given this warning because this,
again, is one of the sides of intelligence that is not advertised.
One general range of subjects that receives constant attention
and very frequent, regular estimates is the development of what we
call military hardware, particularly by the Soviet Union. This means
Soviet programs and progress in missiles, nuclear warheads, nuclear
submarines, advanced type of aircraft and anything that might ap-
proath a breakthrough in any of the sectors of this field, as well as
in the field of space. This is one of the most difficult tasks which
faces the intelligence estimator.
Here one has to deal with Soviet capabilities to produce a given
system, the role assigned to the system by die military and its true
-
priority in the whole military field. It is always difficult to predict
how much emphasis will be given to any particular system until
the research and development stage has been completed, the tests
of effectiveness have been carried out and the factories have been
given the order to proceed with actual production. While a Soviet
system is still in its early stages, our estimates will stress capabilities
and probable intentions; as hard facts become available, it is pos-
sible to give an estimate of the actual programming of the system.
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In 1954, for example, there was evidence that the Soviet Union
was producing long-range intercontinental heavy bombers com-
parable to our B-52s. At first, every indication, including the 1955
fly-by I have described, pointed to the conclusion that the Russians
were adopting this weapon as a major element of their offensive
strength and planned to produce heavy bombers as fast as their
economy and technology permitted. Certain estimates of the build-
up of this bomber force over the next few years were called for
by the Defense Department and were supplied by the intelligence
community. These were based on knowledge of the Soviet aircraft-
manufacturing industry and the types of aircraft under construction,
and included projections concerning the future rate of build-up
on the basis of existing production rates and expected expansion
of industrial capacity. There was hard evidence of Soviet capability
to produce bombers at a certain rate if they so desired. At the time
of the estimate, the available evidence indicated that they did so
desire, and intended to translate this capability into an actual pro-
gram. All this led to speculation in this country as to a "bomber
gap."
Naturally, intelligence kept a close watch on events. Production
did not rise so rapidly as had seemed likely; evidence accumulated
that the performance of the heavy bomber was less than satisfac-
tory. At some point, probably about 1957, the Soviet leaders ap-
parently decided to limit heavy bomber production drastically. The
bomber gap never materialized. This became quite understandable,
as evidence of progress in?the Russian intercontinental missile pro-
gram was then appearing and beginning to cause concern. Thus,
while previous estimates of capability in bomber production re-
mained valid, policy changes had necessitated a new estimate as to
future developments in this particular system.
Intentions can be modified or even reversed, and intelligence
estimates dealing with them can never be satisfactory. Witness how,
just recently, our own intentions concerning the Skybolt missile
have changed and how this must affect the calculations of Soviet
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The Soviet missile program, like that of the heavy bomber, had
various vicissitudes. The Soviets saw early, probably earlier than
we did, the significance of the missile as the weapon of the future
and the potential psychological impact of space achievements. They
saw this even before it was clear that a nuclear warhead could be
so reduced in weight and size as to be deliverable over great dis-
tances by the big boosters which they correctly judged to be within
the range of possibility. Given their geographical situation?their
strategic requirements differ from ours?they soon realized that even
a short- or medium-range missile would have great value in their
program to dominate Eureppe.
The origins of the program go back to the end of World War II,
when the Soviet Union, having carefully followed the progress
made by the Germans with their V-1 and V-2 missiles, made every
effort to gather together as much of the German developmental
hardware and as many German rocket experts as they could get
their hands on while they were conquering Eastern Germany. The
Soviets also hired a considerable number of German experts in
addition to those they seized and forcibly deported.
It is a mistake, however, to credit their missile proficiency today
largely to the Germans. The Soviets themselves have a long history
in this field and developed high competence quickly. They never
took the Germans fully into their confidence but pumped them dry
of knowledge, kept them a few years at the drawing boards and
away from the testing areas, and then sent most of them back home.
While these people proved to be a useful source of intelligence to
the West, they had never been brought into contact with the actual
Soviet development and could tell little beyond what they had
themselves contributed.
In the first decade after the end of the war we had only a scant
knowledge of Soviet missile progress. Drawing boards are silent, and
short-range missiles make little commotion. As the techniques of
science were put to work and the 13-2 photographs became available
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rafter 1956, "hard" intelligence began to flow into the hands of the
impatient estimators. Their impatience was understandable, for
great pressure had been put on them by those in the Department of
Defense concerned with our own missile programs and missile de-
fenses. Planning in such a field takes years, and the Defense Depart-
ment felt that this was a case in which it was justified in asking the
'intelligence community to project several years in advance the
,probable attainments of the Soviet 'program.
As in the earlier case of Soviet bomber production, the intelli-
gence community, I am safe in saying, would be quite content if it
were not called upon for such crystal-ball gazing. But since military
planning requires estimates of this nature, the planners say to the
intelligence officers: "If you won't give us some estimate as to the
future, we will have to prepare it ourselves. You intelligence officers
should really be in a better position to make the predictions than
we are." For the intelligence service to deny this would be tanta-
mount to saying it was not up to its job.
Thus early figures of Soviet missile production had to be de-
veloped on the basis of estimated production and development
capabilities over a period in the future. Once again it was necessary
to determine how the Soviet Union would allocate its total military
'effort. How much of it would go into missiles? How much into
'developing the nuclear potential? How much into the heavy
bomber, as well as the fighter planes and ground-to-air defense to
meet hostile bombers? How much into submarines? And; in general,
how much into elements of attack ttid how much into those of
'defense?
It was due to this measure of incertitude during the late 1950s
that the national debate over the so-called missile gap developed.
Then, based on certain proven capabilities of the Soviets and on,
our view of their intentions and over-all strategy, estimates were
made as to the number of missiles and nuclear _warheads which
would be available and on launchers several years in the future.
There is no doubt that tests of Soviet missiles in 1957 amt. after7 ?
ward showed a high competence in the 1CIINIT field. Soviet shots of
seven to eight thousand miles into the far Pacific were well adver-
tised, as, of course, was the orbiting of the first Sputnik. Their test-
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ing in the intermediate fields must also have been gratifying to
them. But would they use their bulky and somewhat awkward "first
generation" ICBM, effective though it was, as the missile to deploy,
or would they wait for a second or third generation? Were they in
such a hurry to capitalize on a Moment of possible missile superi-
ority that they would sacrifice this to a more orderly program? The
answer, in retrospect, seems to be that they chose the more orderly
program. As soon as this evidence appeared, the TCBM estimates, as
in the case of the bombers, were revised downward.
Today, after the Cuba incident, one may well ask whether their
recent actions do not indicate that they are in more of a hurry with
their missile program. They were willing to take great risks to get
some TRBM and MRBM bases in Cuba to create the eauivalent, as
a threat to us, of a considerable _additional number of ICBM bases
in the heartland of Russia.
In any event, the intelligence collected on Soviet missiles has been
excellent as to the nature and quality of the potential threat. Our
intelligence was also both good and timely as to Soviet production
of high-thrust engines and the work on Sputnik. And all this in-
telligence spurred us to press forward with our own missile and
space programs.
When one turns from the military to the political field, the
problems for the estimators are often even more complex. Analysis
of human behavior and anticipation of human reactions can never
be assigned to a cormmter, and they baffle Ihe most clever analyst.
More than a decade ago, in the autumn of 1950, this country had
to face in North Korea the difficult decision of whether or not to
push forward to the Yalu River and reunite Korea. If we did so,
would the Chinese Communists answer with a direct attack? Or
would they stay quiescent?if, for example, Korean rather than
U.S. and UN troops formed the hulk of the advance, Or if we did
not disturb the Chinese sources of electric power in North Korea?
At that time, we had good intelligence as to the location and
strength of the Chinese Communist forces on the far. side of the
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Yalu. We had to estimate the intentions of Moscow and Peking.
We were not in on their secret councils and decisions. In such cases
it is arrogant, as well as dangerous, for the intelligence officer to
venture a firm opinion in the absence of telltale information on the
positioning and moving of troops, the bringing up of strategic
supplies and the like. I can speak with detachment about the 1950
Yalu estimates, for they were made just before I joined the CIA.
The conclusions of the estimators were that it was a toss-up, but
they leaned to the side that under certain circumstances the Chinese
probably would not intervene. In fact, we just did not know what
the Chinese Communists would_ do, and we did not know how far
the Soviet Union would press them or agree to support them if they
moved.
One cannot assume that a Communist leader will act or react as
we would or that he will always be right in his estimates. For ex-
ample, normally one would not have "estimated" that Khrushch.ev
should choose the opening day of the Unaligned Nations Confer-
ence at Belgrade in September of 1961 to announce to the world,
without forewarning, that he Was breaking the gentleman's agree-
ment on suspension of nuclear -testing. Yet this is exactly what he
did. In Cuba in October of 1962, Khrushchey presumably "esti-
mated" that he could sneak his missiles into the island, plant them
and camouflage them, and then, at a time of his own choosing, face
the United States with a fait accompli. Certainly here he mis-
estimated?just as some on our side had misestimated that Khru-
shchev would not attempt to place offensive weapons in Cuba, right
under our nose.
The role of intelligence in the early phases of the Cuban crisis of
October, 1962, was the subject of a public report by the Prepared-
ness Subcommitee of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate,
under the chairmanship of Sena-tor John Stennis of Mississippi. The
subcommittee's main conclusion reads as follows: "Faulty evaluation
and the predisposition of the Intelligence Community to the philo-
sophical conviction that it would be incompatible with Soviet policy
to introduce strategic missiles into Cuba resulted :in intelligence
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judgments and evaluations which later proved to be erroneous." .
This criticism of intelligence was directed to the period in Sep-
tember and early October, prior to the obtaining of adequate
photography, when there had been certain intelligence estimates to
the general effect that it was Unlikely intermediate-range missiles,
i.e., missiles which could reads far into the United States, would be
? introduced into Cuba by the SoViets. There were some people, how-
ever, notably Mr. Nft.C.:one, the Director of Central Intelligence,
who had expressed at the time serious premonitions, but the intelli-
gence community generally felt that Khrushchev would not risk a
course of action so directly threatening to the United States and one
which subsequent activities showed he was prepared to abandon
abruptly in the lace of strong American reaction. Cuba is yet an-
other instance to warn us that one must be prepared for Khrushchev
to do the unexpected, the unusual, the shocking, confident in his
own ability to retreat, as well as to advance, when the opposition
gets too hot and also confident that he can make these .retreats with-
out seriously affecting his own domestic position. With complete
control of the media of communications within his own country,
he can explain away a retreat in Cuba as just another example of
the "peaceful" posture of the Soviet Union.
In the preparation of estimates with regard to Soviet policy, their
actions and reactions, it is almays well to have among the estimators
one or two persons who are designated to play the roles of the
Devil's Advocate, who can advance all the reasons why a Khrushchev
could take an unusual, dramatic or, as viewed from our own vantage
point, even an unwise and unremunerative course of action. Of
course, one would reach rather_ridiculotts conclusions, arid certainly
wrong conclusions in most cases, if one always came up with an esti-
mate that the abnormal is what the Soviet Union will probably do.
It is well, however, that the policymakers should be reminded from
time to time that such abnormalities in Soviet action are not to be
excluded..
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If some of our own estimators went wrong in the Cuban affair,
Khrushchev and his advisers committed an even more serious mis-
estimate in apparently concluding that he could get away with this
crude maneuver without a stern American rejoinder. Intelligence
officers have to face the fact that whenever a dramatic event occurs
in the foreign relations field?an event for which the public may not
have been prepared?one can usually count on the cry going up,
"Intelligence has failed again." The charge may at times be correct.
But there are also many occasions when an event has been foreseen
and correctly estimated but intelligence has been unable to advertise
its success.
This was true of the Suez invasion of 1956. Here intelligence was
well alerted as to what Israel and then Britain and France were
likely to do. The public received the impression, however, that
there had been an intelligence failure; statements were issued by
U.S. officials to the effect that the country had not been given ad-
vance warning of the action. Our officials, of course, intended to
imply only that the British and French and Israelis had failed to
tell us what they were doing. In fact, United States intelligence had
kept the government informed but, as usual, did not advertise its
achievement.
Sputnik is another example. Here, despite the general impression
to the contrary, the intelligence community predicted with great
accuracy Soviet progress in space technology and the approximate
time when their satellite would be orbited.
On other occasions the press and the public have been mistaken
about the actual role of intelligence in certain situations. Having
reached their conclusions about what the intelligence estimate must
have been in the light of the official action taken, they have pro-
ceeded to attack the military services even though, in fact, no such
estimate had been made.
Take, for example, the Bay of Pigs episode in 1961..Much of the
American press assumed at the time that this action was predicated
on a mistaken intelligence estimate to the effect that a landing
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would touch off a widespread and successful popular revolt in Cuba.
Those who had worked, as I had, with the anti-Hitler underground
behind the Nazi lines in France and Italy and in Germany itself
during World War II and those who watched the tragedy of the
Hungarian patriots in 1956 would have realized that spontaneous
revolutions by unarmed people in this modern age are ineffective
and often disastrous. While I have not commented on any details of
the 1961 Cuban operation and do not propose to do so here, I re-
peat now what I have said publicly before: I know of no estimate
that a spontaneous uprising of the unarmed population of Cuba
would be touched off by the landing.
Clearly, our intelligence estimates, particularly in dealing with
the Communists, must take into account not only the natural and
the usual, but also the unusual, the brutal, the unexpected. Actions
and reactions can no longer be estimated on the basis of what we
ourselves might do if we were in Khrushchev's shoes because, as
we have seen at the United Nations, he takes off his shoes. Often
Soviet moves seem to be influenced by the theories of Ivan Petrovich
Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist who induced certain re-
flexes in animals and then, by abruptly changing the treatment,
reduced the animals to a state of confusion. The Pavlovian touch
can be seen in Khrushchev's abrupt changes in attitude and action.
The scuttling of the Paris Summit Meeting in 1960, when he had
for years known about the U-2, the surprise resumption of nuclear
testing just at the time the nonaligned nations were assembling in
Belgrade in 1961, even the famous shoe-thumping episode, were
staged so that their shock effect .would help produce the results he
desired. He probably hoped for the same shock effects from the
missiles in Cuba. Estimates on how Khrushchev will act in a given
situation should take this characteristic into account.
The willingness of a country to accept unpopularity in defense of
its vital interests can be an element of strength. Often, because of
our desire to be "loved," this element has been lacking in American
foreign policy, but that does not mean that we should emulate the
"shock" techniques of a Khrushchev.
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? Of course, one rarely has knowledge of all the factors bearing on
any given situation. No one can predict with assurance the workings
of the minds of the leaders whose decisions make history. As a
matter of fact, if we were to set out to estimate what our own
policy decisions would be a few years hence, we would soon be lost
in a forest of uncertainty. And yet our estimators are called upon to
'decide what others will do. Unfortunately, the intelligence process
of making estimates will never become an exact science.
But at least progress has been made in assembling the elements
of a given situation in an orderly_manner so as to assist our planners
.and policymakers. It is possible, often, to indicate a range of prob-
abilities or possibilities and to isolate those factors which would
influence Kremlin or Peking decisions. In any event, we have come
A long way since Pearl Harbor arid the somewhat haphazard system
of intelligence analysis which prevailed at that time.
ENI BEARER11111313,A1.1111._aEARER BEARER
13
The Man on thelob? GL
THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
The establishment of a permanent intelligence organization in the
United States in 1947 resulted in the creation, for us, of a brand-
new profession?that of the intelligence officer. The profession is
small, to be sure, but it still is a fact that this country is now offer-
ing to carefully selected young men and women the opportunity to
Make a lifetime career of intelligence work.
A comprehensive intelligence organization like the CIA requires
among its recruits various types of people. There is need for the
student of foreign affairs, the analyst, the scholar with an inquiring
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63 The Craft. of Intelligence 653
mind. These are the men and women who can help to assemble
and analyze the vast intake of intelligence information on a wide
variety of subjects, and produce the national estimates, Some must
become experts in various technical fields, such as nuclear weapons,
missiles and aircraft; others must be able to explain the Soviet
economy, its industry and agriculture, and its military potential.
Others will have had experience in guerrilla or unconventional war-
fare or the desire to learn about it, or the capability of working on
the technical and logistical problems involved in supporting a
world-wide intelligence service which must adapt itself to the age
of great technological advances.
In addition to the scholar, the analyst and the technician, an in-
telligence agency must also recruit and train persons who will be-
come professional collectors of intelligence, and liaison officers with
friendly intelligence and security services throughout the world.
In this field two types of persons are required: the American staff
officer operating at home and abroad?often transferred from head-
quarters to the field and back again?and the undercover agent
himself, who may be an American but more often is of foreign
nationality.
Intelligence officers were trained by the thousands during World
War II, most of them to return to their civilian occupations when
the war was over. At present the Army, Navy and Air Force main-
tain peacetime intelligence units which include civilians. For the
most part the military personnel assigned to these units are on
rotation and for limited tours of service. Until recently a long tour
of duty in intelligence was viewed by the ambitious military officer
as a "graveyard" assignment, but this is no longer the case today.
However, the members of the armed forces who spend long tours
in intelligence work arc the exceptions.
From the day of its foundling, the CIA has operated on the as-
sumption that the majority of its employees are interested in a
career and need and deserve the same guarantees and benefits which
they would. receive if in the Foreign Service or in the military. In
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turn, the CIA expects most of its career employees to enter its serv-
ice with the intention of durable association. No more than other
large public or private institutions can it afford to invest its re-
sources of time and money in the training and apprenticeship of
persons who separate before they have begun to make a contribu-
tion to the work at hand. It can, in fact, afford this even less than
most organizations for one very special reason peculiar to the in-
telligence world?the maintenance of its security. A sizable turnover
of short-term employees is dangerous because it means that working
methods, identities of key personnel and certain projects in progress
will have been exposed in some measure to persons not yet suffi-
ciently indoctrinated in the habits of security to judge when they
are talking out of turn and when they are not.
The very nature of a professional intelligence organization re-
quires, then, that it recruit its personnel for the long pull, that it
carefully screen candidates for jobs in order to determine ahead of
time whether they are the kind of people who will be competent,
suitable and satisfied, and that once such people are within the
fold their careers can be developed to the mutual advantage of
the government and the officer.
How is recruitment carried out in an intelligence agency, in
particular in our own? Again the nature of the work for which the
candidate may be best suited to carry out is the controlling factor.
Initially you can't invite the prospect inside the plant and take
him on a tour to show him how varied and rewarding the pros-
pects are. Neither can you give him an illustrated booklet telling
him all about the agency. Actually, the CIA does circulate a booklet
about itself to inquiring- job candidates, but this booklet cannot
give information which would comfort the enemy or convey much
enlightenment to the candidate. The employer wants to know every-
thing about the candidate before employing him, but at that stage
he cannot tell much, about his organization or the job that awaits
the applicant if he is selected.
Obviously in such a situation it is up to the employer to judge not
only whether the candidate is suitable but whether he will be happy
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once he learns more fully what he is to do. The candidate must
take on good faith the employer's assurances. And the only way the
intelligence organization can give such assurances is to search as
deeply as possible into the life and mind of the prospect, for his
own benefit as well as the benefit of the organization.
Security investigations arc a purely negative part of this process.
They arc rigorous, as they must be, but the fact is that ninety-nine
out of a hundred Americans could pass a security investigation with-
out difficulty. It is not hard to understand why an intelligence
organization in these times cannot employ persons with close rela-
tives behind the Iron Curtain, or persons who were at one time as-
sociated with Communist or other anti-American movements, or
who in the past have displayed weaknesses in personal behavior or
moral judgment. Finding out these things about a man is however
relatively easy compared to finding out whether he is the right man
for the intelligence profession.
The difficulty here is that the jobs in intelligence are manifold
and there is room for many kinds of talent. And within any category
of jobs many different kinds of men and women may succeed in
different ways. There is likewise no fixed profile of personal charac-
teristics which can be used in the selection or personnel for intelli-
gence. But there are certain prerequisites without which, in all
probability, the candidate will neither succeed nor be happy in the
long run.
Generally speaking, a good intelligence officer must be of above
average intelligence and possess an inquisitive mind, particularly
the kind that lends itself to the understanding of other points of
view, other ways of thinking and behaving, even if they are foreign
to his own. Rigidity and closed-mindedness are qualities that do not
spell a good future in intelligence. The intelligence officer must be
endowed with an excellent moral sense, because while he is oc-
casionally required to perform, or to ask others to perform, acts
which are, according to the standards of our society, somewhat un-
usual, there is no justification for the somewhat popular view that
the work of intelligence is "dirty." It is often dangerous, always ex-
acting, but I can testify to the fact that, in a long career in thiS.
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64 The Craft of Intelligence 653
field, I have never been called upon to do acts which offended my
conscience and I have never asked others to do what I would not
willingly have done myself, if I had had the competence to do it.
It is well to remember, however, that we are in a struggle for
survival with a ruthless antagonist who uses any and all methods to
"bury us" and has no regard for the ordinary norms of international
conduct or international law. If we restrict our conduct, in dealing
with the Communists, to a legalistic course of conduct which they
reject, we will suffer the same fate as the boxer who strictly adheres
to the Marquis of Queensberry rules in fighting an antagonist who
ignores them. As I mentioned earlier, Secretary of State Stimson in
1929 said that gentlemen don't read other people's mail when he
caused our "Black Chamber" to be closed down; but, as Secretary of
War a little over a decade later, when he was fighting Hitler and
the Japanese war lords, he spent millions to read all the Nazi and
Japanese mail he could get his hands on.
It is not the duty of the recruit to resolve the moral problems in-
herent in the decisions such as those reached by a Stimson in war-
time or by the high policy oificials who sanctioned the U-2 flights.
If his makeup, however, is such that he prefers not to have anything
to do with such types of activity, he should seek other employment
or assignment to the analytical rather than the action side of the
intelligence career.
An intelligence officer must: not be overambitious or anxious for
personal reward in the form of fame or fortune. These he is not
likely to get in intelligence work. But he must bring to the task
that intangible which is one of the most necessary characteristics of
an intelligence officer?motivat ion. What motivates a man to devote
himself to the craft of intelligence?
One way to answer the question is to look at some of the people
who make up the ranks of American intelligence today and see how
they got there. Here is a man,- now a senior supervisor in CIA, who
fought in the European Theater in World War H, stayed on for the
occupation of Germany, was in Berlin during the airlift of 1948
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and was finally returned stateside and discharged. He discovered
after three months in his old job that the once attractive occupa-
tion of making money no longer satisfied him in a world of con-
tinuing international conflict, of which he had some knowledge
thanks to his wartime and postwar service. He wanted to be closer
to some front where he could feel he was "engaged," where he was
dealing with the things he felt counted most.
Another man, a younger one, graduated from college in the early
1950s. He majored in government and international affairs. His
father hoped he would go into the family business but the son didn't
want to settle down to this routine?not just then. He wasn't really
sure what he wanted to do but what interested him from the small
glimpse he had of it in his college studies, and what stirred him
every time he read the headlines, were the commitments and prob-
lems of the United States abroad and the Soviet challenge to our
way of life. He went to 'Washington to look for a job, worked for a
while in a branch of the government that had little to do with
foreign affairs, and then finally found in intelligence what he was
looking for.
Still a third man, from a small town in the Midwest, without a
college education, was drafted; assigned eventually to a signals unit
overseas, became fascinated with the Far East, witnessed the Chinese
Communist attack on Quemoy, was returned stateside and dis-
charged. Thanks to the training the Army gave him, he could have
gone into electronics, or perhaps opened a television repair shop.
Instead, he turned up one day at CIA offering his services and was
assigned to an important communications job overseas.
What all these men had in Common was an awareness of the con-
flict that exists in the world today, a conviction that the United
States is involved in this conflict, that the peace and well-being of
the world are endangered, and that it is worth trying to do some-
thing about these things.
What moved theni is a more complicated thing than pure patri-
otism and a deeper thing than a mere longing for excitement. There
is in the intelligence officer, whether he operates at home or abroad,
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a certain "front-line" mentality, a "first-line-of-defense" mentality.
His awareness is sharpened because in his daily work he is almost
continually confronted with evidences of the enemy in action. If
the sense of adventure plays some role here, as it surely does, it is
adventure with a large measure of concern for the public safety.
With this motivation, an alert, inquisitive and patriotic individual
with an adequate education can be molded into a good intelligence
officer. It is this complex "motivational" aspect of a man for which
the intelligence service must probe in the prospective employee.
Education, talent and the highest security clearances will not make
him an intelligence officer if he does not have this motivation.
The charge has been leveled against CIA that it recruits almost
exclusively from the so-called Ivy League colleges in the East with
an overtone that possibly we have too many "softies" and possibly
too many "liberals" for the tough job the CIA has to do. It is quite
true that we have a considerable number of graduates from Eastern
colleges. It is also true that in numbers of degrees (many of the CIA
personnel have more than one degree) Harvard, Yale, Columbia
and Princeton lead the list, but they are closely followed by Chicago,
Illinois, Michigan, University of California, Stanford and MIT. It
is interesting, however, to note that taking the approximately one
hundred senior officers of the CIA, statistics show that these officers:
have degrees from sixty-one different universities, representing all
parts of the country. It is, in fact, a highly heterogeneous group of
men, representative of the entire United States, with a certain num-
ber of the men having postgraduate degrees from foreign univer-
sities.
Everyone who applies in writing or in person to CIA can be cer-
tain that his application will receive serious consideration. If there
is no suitable position for which he could qualify, he is told so, as
soon as the papers he has submitted are studied. If he seems to have
some qualifications which recommend him for an existing Opening,
he will be invited for an interview. I F the interviewer is favorably
impressed and feels that the candidate seriously wishes to seek long-
term employment with CIA and is not just seeking the "thrills" of
what he thinks "espionage" work might bring, the long process of
tests and in vestigation.s begin.
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During and immediately following the Korean War period the
CIA expanded rapidly but the growth rate in recent years has been
at a relatively slow pace. Apart from vacancies in technical or cleri-
cal jobs, the agency has been taking in each year an entering class
made up of promising young men and women who are not slated at
the outset for any specific job but begin as "generalists." They are
trained in a variety of aspects of the business and only find their
proper niche after a few years of purposely diverse experiences.
They are called j0Ts, .funioi Officer Trainees. They will be the
future senior intelligence officers and leaders of CIA. To find men
of talent and promise, CIA does not rely solely, or even principally,
.on persons who apply to it for jobs. It goes out and looks for them
on the campuses of colleges and universities all over the country.
CIA does not do its hiring through the ordinary Civil Service
mechanisms which serve as a clearinghouse for many parts of the
.government. It does, however,give its employees the same insurance
and retirement benefits as are received under the Civil Service sys-
A:ern and its pay scale and its method of accruing annual leave and
sick leave arc the same.
CIA has been developing a Career Service plan with the aim,
among other things, of charting out ahead of time for a foreseeable
period of years various positions and posts to which an employee is
to be assigned. The plan is based, as feasible, on the employee's own
stated preferences, which are snatched against the likelihood of
.openings suitable to the employee and on the supervisor's judgment
of the employee's capabilities. Ambitious young men and women
may sometimes dream up career plans for themselves which are not
entirely practicable or which stem from a somewhat inflated estimate
of their own capabilities. Agency programming helps to air such
ambitions well in advance and to provide the employee with a
realistic assessment of his future. Chiefly, however, the idea is to
avoid arbitrary or makeshift assignments and to try to give some
sense and continuity to the series of jobs which a man or woman
may fill over a period of years.
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Women in CIA undergo much the same training as men and can
qualify for the same jobs except that overseas assignments for
women are more limited. One reason for this is the ingrained preju-
dice in many countries of the world against women as "managers"
of men?in their jobs, that is. An agent brought up in this tradition
may not feel comfortable taking orders from a woman and we
cannot change his mind for him in this regard. In World War II
American women shared risks in intelligence missions with men.
Some of them parachuted into France as members of American
jump teams who were sent in to support the French underground.
While there is little reason to assign them today to jobs which en-
danger life and limb, many of them have served as members of
intelligence units in hostile or "hardship" areas where for periods
of years they have worked alongside the men, completely isolated
from the amenities of modern life as they knew them at home.
A man who is more interested in intellectual pursuits than in
people, in observation and thought than in action, will make a
better "analyst" than an "operator." For this reason, it is no sur-
prise that people from the academic professions fill many of the
analytical jobs. But the operators are drawn from everywhere. There
is really no norm and no pattern. The main thing is that they be
lively, curious, tireless and endowed with a keen sense for people.
People who try for intelligence jobs usually have a considerable
background, as a result of their chosen studies, in international
affairs, history or languages; not because they planned an intelli-
gence career, but for the same reasons which would probably lead
them to an intelligence career. However, the so-called "tradecraft" of
intelligence is unique to a degree that there are few colleges which
provide studies which automatically place a man in a more ad-
vantageous position than another. The only influence previous
studies or experience have on a man's career in intelligence is to
direct him more toward the analytical or the collection side as the
case may be, or more toward one geographical area of the world
than another, or, if he is a technical expert, into some specialized
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area of intelligence. However, While the analyst may devote himself
to one such area or topic for years, the "operator" usually will not,
because his abilities in the craft itself are more important than any
specialized topical or area knowledge. He can expect to be moved
around many times in the course of his career. He gets this knowf-
edge of the craft from the training schools of the intelligence service,
from working as a junior officer with his peers, and finally from
assignments in which he is more or less on his own.
Training schools in intelligence draw on many methods used in
other professions in order to give the future intelligence officer not
only knowledge, but experience and confidence. Intelligence, unlike
many other professions, is not a business in which a few major or
even small mistakes in the actual practice of the craft can be chalked
up with a smile and a wisecrack, such as "Back to the old drawing
board." It has this in common with the military profession.
Intelli-
gence schools will give many courses about areas and languages that
are not too dissimilar from university courses except for the em-
phasis on those things of chief concern to the intelligence officer.
It will also give courses on the substance of intelligence itself, how
intelligence services work, how information is analyzed, how reports
are written, etc. But the guts of such training is the practical busi-
ness of field operations and to teach this intelligence schools draw
on the practice of law schools in using the case method, and of the
Army in creating simulated "liv6" situations in which the trainee is
expected to behave exactly as he would if he were on his own in a
foreign country.
In the "case" method, past operations of American intelligence
and of the intelligence services of other countries are studied. The
written materials given the students are not summaries or oral
presentations by instructors but are replicas of files containing all
the messages, reports, instructions, traffic between headquarters and
outposts, agent materials, results of investigations, of surveillances,
etc., in chronological order, so that the student can see the day-to-
day progress incl conduct of the case, sec it unfold before him like
the rather complicated plot of a very long novel. Having the advan-
tage of hindsight, he can sec where mistakes were made, what the
choices were, what was foreseen and not foreseen. The law student
studying the briefs of the lawyers, the presentations of counsel for
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the plaintiff and the defense before the court, statements of wit-
nesses, etc., can see in retrospect where one lawyer failed to ask a
witness a telling question, where a summation to a jury failed to
emphasize the most convincing evidence. Similarly, the student of
intelligence, through a study of real cases in all their detail, will
gradually begin to notice how the intelligence officer in a certain in-
stance may have neglected to ask his agent a question which, as it
later turned out, might have pointed to the latter's duplicity, how
he forgot to give him a danger signal to use in an emergency, how
a too complicated system of communicating between agents fouled
UP an important channel of information because one man simply
couldn't remember what he was supposed to do in a certain situa-
tion. This study of cases particularly brings to light the human fail-
ures that mark the history of intelligence and implants in the
young officer an appreciation of the Many unpredictable elements
which will play a role in his work and which it is his business to
prepare for and to expect in every job to which he will later be
assigned.
He will study in minute detail most of the famous cases in the
history of modern intelligence, some of which we have had reason
to cite in earlier pages, with equal attention to the reasons for
success and the reasons for failure. How did Redl, Sorge and other
noted spies of the past get away with it for so long and what brought
about their downfalls? How could the Soviets have compartmental-
ized the segments of the Rote Xapelie or of the Canadian network
so that the capture or defection of one member would not have
brought the whole structure tumbling down?
In this pursuit of specific methodology he also acquires a compara-
tive knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques
favored by different national intelligence services. He will begin to
see certain consistent national characteristics and aims displayed in
these methods in somewhat the same fashion as the student of for-
eign policy or of warfare sees them in a study of nations at peace
and at war. In some measure he will therefore learn what to expect
from some of his future opponents.
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The "live" situations in the training school are intended to
achieve somewhat the same end as combat training with live am-
munition. Pioneer work along these Jones was done during World
War II in the Army schools which.. trained prisoner-of-war inter-
rogators. The interrogator-trainee was put up against a man who
was dressed like an enemy officer or soldier, acted like one who had
just been captured, and spoke perfect German or Japanese. The
latter, who had to be a good actor and was carefully chosen for his
job, did everything possible to trick or foul up the interrogator in
any of the hundred ways which we had experienced in real inter-
rogation situations in Europe and the Far East. He refused to talk
or he deluged the interrogator with, a Hood of inconsequential or
confusing information. He was sullen or insolent or cringing. He
might even threaten the interrogator. After a few sessions of this
sort, the interrogator was a little better prepared to take on a real-
life POW, pseudo defector, etc., and was not likely to be surprised
by one.
This is the method essentially in use in intelligence training today.
The situations are, of course, more complicated than those which
confront an interrogator. Also, the intelligence school goes one step
further in creating situations which can best be compared to the
training of a psychiatrist, who must first himself undergo analytical
treatment in order to qualify fully as a healer of the mentally ill.
The "live" situations in which the intelligence trainee is placed are
not only those which he may someday meet as an intelligence officer.
He must also play the role of the "agent" in them, not because he is
likely to be an agent himself, but solely in order that he may begin
to understand what it feels like to be inside the agent's skin and to
develop greater sympathy and understanding?empathy would be
the right word?for the practical and emotional predicament of the
people who are going to work for him and take orders from him
and often risk their lives for him.
The practical difficulties which a career in intelligence impose
upon a man and his family stem partly from the conditions of
secrecy under which all covert intelligence work must be done.
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Every employee signs an oath which binds him not to divulge any-
thing he learns or does in the course of his employment to any un-
authorized person, and this is binding even after he may have left
government employment. What this means is that an employee can-
not discuss the substance of his daily work with his wife or his
friends. Few have resigned or complained because of this particular
constraint. Although it may sound like an almost paralyzing stric-
ture to people who are unused to it, it does not work the hardship
that may seem to be inherent in it. It may even have some social
advantages in the sense that it forces people to be a little inventive,
to develop hobbies and avocations .and to take an interest in other
things. I recall one outstanding intelligence officer (other than Rex
Stout's Nero Wolfe) who made a hobby of orchids, others who wrote
novels and mystery stories, still others who, in their leisure, turned
to music or painting. Most wives, after the honeymoon is over, easily
tire of hearing their husbands talk about the office and the intri-
cacies of their business, of the legal or governmental world in which
they work.
The makeup of the personnel of CIA is as representative of all
classes and places in America as any other branch of the government
or any large business organization, and more so than many. Some
of its members never attended college or never finished. Many are
-first-generation Americans, who often bring with them knowledge of
the more unusual languages, though this is by no means the only
reason why they might be employed.
An intelligence service in a free society is not only an institution
in a democracy in that it is the creation of the Congress and sub-
ordinate to the executive; it also mirrors in its membership the
society which it serves and inculcates in its officers the principle that
the necessary strictures of secrecy make it all the more important
that at all times the conduct and efficiency of its employees as public
servants must be exemplary.
If CIA recruitment fails to equip the Agency with the best minds
to keep the country's intelligence ahead of all its adversaries, in
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eluding the Soviet Union, we are not properly taking advantage of
the unique opportunities this coup try affords. Congress has ap-
propriated adequate funds and has given CIA a comprehensive
charter. The executive under three Presidents since its creation in
1947 has given CIA strong support. We have the greatest pool of
human resources available to any country in the world as our 185
million people, our citizenry, come of almost every race of people
on this globe. Furthermore, a hard core of highly skilled profes-
sionals from World War Il days, both from the ranks of the OSS
and from military intelligence work, have remained on or re-
enlisted in the CIA and furnish this country with a nucleus of ex-
perts, schooled in the hard experiences of wartime intelligence
operations of every kind.
THE AGENT
The intelligence officer engaged in covert intelligence collection
described above is a career staff member of the intelligence service,
an American citizen, on duty in a particular place, at home or
abroad, acting on the instructions of his headquarters. He is a
manager, a handler, a recruiter, also an on-the-spot evaluator of the
product of his operatives. The man whom he locates, hires, trains
and directs to collect information and whose work he judges is
the agent. The agent, who may be of any nationality, may produce
the information himself or he May have access to contacts and
sources "in place" who supply him with information. His relation-
ship with the intelligence service generally lasts as long as both
parties -find it satisfactory and rewarding.
If the staff intelligence officer succeeds in locating someone who is
attractive to the intelligence service because of his knowledge or
access to information, he must first ascertain on what basis the po-
tential agent might be willing to work with him, or by what means
he could be induced to do the job. If the agent offers his services,
the intelligence officer does not have this problem, but he must still
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ascertain what brought the agent to him in order to understand him
and handle him properly, and because he might, after all, have been
sent by the opposition as a penetration.
As motives, ideological and patriotic convictions stand at the top
of the list. The ideological volunteer, if he is sincere, is a man whose
loyalty you need rarely question, as you must always question the
loyalties of people who work chiefly for money or out of a desire for
adventure and intrigue.
Actually, ideology is not the most accurate word for what we are
describing, but we use it for want of a better one. Few people go
through the analytical process of proving to themselves abstractly
that one system of government is better than another. Few work out
an intellectual justification or rationalization for treason as did
Klaus Fuchs, who claimed that he could take an oath of allegiance
to the British Crown and still pass British secrets to the Soviet
Union because "I used my Marxian philosophy to establish in my
mind two separate compartments." It is more likely that views and
judgments will be based on feelings and on quite practical con-
siderations. Officials in Communist bureaucracies who are not utterly
blind to the workings of the state that employs them cannot fail to
see that cynicism and power-grabbing prevail in high places and that
the people are daily being duped with Marxist slogans and distor-
tions of the truth. Communism is a system which deals harshly with
all but its fanatical adherents and those who have found a way to
Profit from it. Every Communist country is full of people who have
suffered at the hands of the state or are close to someone who has.
Many such people, with only a slight nudge, may be willing to
engage in espionage against a regime which they do not respect,
against which they have grievances or about which they are dis-
illusioned.
The ideological agent today usually does not consider himself
treasonable in the sense that he is betraying his countrymen. He is
motivated primarily by a desire to sec the downfall of a hated re-
gime. Since the United States is not imperialistic and makes the
distinction of opposing Communist regimes rather than peoples of
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These countries, there can be a basic agreement in the aims of the
,ideological -agent and the intelligence services of free states.
The more idealistic agent of this type will not engage in espionage
lightly. He may at the outset prefer to, join some kind of under,-
ground movement, if there is one, or perhaps to engage in the
political activities of exiles which aim directly at unseating the
tyranny which dominates his country.
During World War II one of my best agents in Germany, whose
information was of the utmost importance to the Allied war effort,
never stopped trying to persuade me that he ought to be allowed to
take part in the then growing underground effort to get rid of the
Nazis. Every time I saw him I had to point out to him that by doing
this he would attract attention to himself and would only jeopardize
his security, but that his ability to continue to get us much-needed
information, what he was doing, was MOM valuable. It was obvious
that he felt frustrated, that he wanted to get into the fight. He had.
another point, which was that his position after the war was over
would be much better if he had helped bring down the Nazis.
Nobody would make a hero of him for having supplied intelligence
to the Allies. Unfortunately he was right in this. Another anti-Nazi
agent who collaborated with me at that time was willing to give,
eVery kind of information except the kind that might directly lead
to loss of lives of his countrymen in combat. These are distinctions
made by people of conscience.
Every intelligence service also makes use of people who work .
chiefly for money, or out of a love for adventure or intrigue. Some
people thrive on clandestinity or deception for its own sake, deriving
a-,certain perverse satisfaction from being the unknown movers of
events. Among Communist conspirators one frequently finds this
trait. People who knew Whittaker Chambers claim that there was a
definite streak of this kind in him. In the upside-down world of
espionage one also finds men driven by a desire for power, for self-
importance,. which they could. not satisfy in normal employments.
The agent is often in on big things. He can make himself interesting
and important to governments and sometimes gains access to aston-
ishingly high places.
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There is a fine passage in a World War I spy story of Somerset
Maugham's about why a certain man had taken to spying. Maugham
says:
He did not think [Caypor] had become a spy merely for the money; he
was a man of modest tastes. .. . Et might be that Ile was one of those men
who prefer devious ways to straight for some intricate pleasure they get
in footing their fellows . . . that he had turned spy . . . from a desire
to score off the big-wigs who never even knew of his existence. It might
be that it was vanity that had impelled him, a feeling that his talents
had not received the recognition they merited, or just a puckish, impish
desire to do mischief.1
W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden; or, The British Agent, Doubleday, 1927.
What Maugham shows us here is, of course, a fact that every good
writer and psychologist knows, and every good intelligence officer
also; that motives are rarely pure and single, but most often mixed.
The possibility of money and protection might often tip the scales
for the person who was ideologically motivated but did not quite
have the courage of his convictions. Some intelligence services feel
it is important that even the ideological collaborator accept from
time to time some money, or some kind of favor or gift, since this
makes the agent somewhat beholden to the service; it seals the bond.
Both Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley told how the
Soviets, who were running the penetrations of the United States
Government during World War ii, went to great lengths to foist
salaries or bonuses even on "de(icated" American Communists who
were working for them. When the latter consistently fought the idea
of accepting any sort of remuneration, the Soviets finally had their
way by presenting them with expensive Christmas gifts, which
couldn't be refused, such as oriental rugs?"a gift from the Soviet
people in gratitude for their help," as Boris Bykov, a Soviet military
attach?n Washington from 1936 to 1938, expressed it.2
2 Bykov made this remark to Whittaker Chambers, who quoted it in his
book, Witness (Random House, 19)2).
Among the cases of people who will commit espionage for pay
there are those who are in financial trouble?either debts they can,
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not meet or the misappropriation of government funds they have
no way of replacing. Fearing_ discovery and unable to raise funds
from any legitimate source, the subject may eventually turn to a
foreign intelligence service with an offer of_ information, if it will
pay him enough to rescue him. That crimes of "economic corrup,
don" are frequent behind the Iron Curtain is evidenced by the
particularly stringent measures recently taken by Khrushchev to
counter them, which I have already mentioned. A man who will try
to extricate himself in this fashion from criminal prosecution con-
trives his own entrapment in espionage and is likely to serve the
intelligence service well since he sees no other recourse. It can, after
all, find ways to denounce him at any time to his own authorities.
The peculiar nature of the Communist state sometimes affords
the West certain opportunities to bid for the services of "unwilling"
persons. We noted quite early in the day that the crime the good
Communist most easily commits and is most afraid of committing is
the political crime and that the main political crime among Com-
munists is wrong-thinking, deviationism of many possible sorts, fail-
ure to follow the party line, whatever that may happen to be at the
moment, in action or even in public statements. Frequently such
deviations have already been committed in the past, are irrevocable,
and only become crimes retroactively as the party suddenly finds
reasons best known to itself to clean house or revise its program and
its interpretation of Leninism. The purges of the last fifteen years
are all examples of cynical expediency in which doctrine was de-
clared in order to create scapegoats or justify major changes in
management, policy or governmental structure. Titoism was, of
course, the greatest political crime of leading Communists in the
early 1950s, and many sincere and dedicated Communists learned to
their dismay that they had been Titoists at a time before Titoism
existed and had to be punished for it. After the death and rejection
of Stalin, Stalinism, of course, became the major crime. And there
are many other minor ones.
The Western intelligence services, as the Communists well know,
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keep a close eye on these trends and have for years, morebver, been
keeping records Of the acts, speeches, personal and public lives of
Communist officials from the top right down into the lower levels of
:the party maChinery. When the firSt s'igns of a new house cleaning
:are perceived, Western intelligence services will frequently try to
'contact those persons whOM it believes are due for removal, disgrace
and possibly more drastic punishment, and will try to persuade them
that they are going to need help and can get help if they will
'cooperate. This is not so much an exercise of pressure as it is an
attempt to frighten a man out of his self-confidence and complacency
:and make him feel the need of a friend. One reason this has not
worked as well as it might is because of a typical human rationaliza-
tion in the face of :t generalized danger. "When the bombs begin to
'fall, they might fall on the house of the fellow across the street and
the fellow next door, but they won't fall on my house. I'll, take my
chances.' There are a number of once devout Communists now
sitting in jail for no reason other than an unfortunate unsuppressed
loyalty to their own countries (Titoists) or to Stalin who wish they
had accepted our invitations.
hi building an intelligence service, it is thus clear that one needs
a variety of people: the wise and discriminating analyzer and colla-
for of the raw intelligence collected from all the quarters of the
globe but heavily weighted with information on developments in
the Communist world; the technicians to help produce, marshal,
station and monitor all the scientific tools of intelligence, collection;
the staff officers, case officers and liaison officers to direct into proper
channels the search for intelligence by human means, through the
agents and other friendly intelligence services in, or having access
to, the critical target areas.
Each of these varied taks requires high skills and careful training.
The folklore of the trade is voluminous. At one time or another in
the intelligence operations carried on since the beginning of history,
there have been examples of all kinds of mistakes and mishaps, as
Well as triumphs that have turned the tide of battle or sa:ved great
tountries from destruction:
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14 -
Myths, Mishar and Miscinef-makeD3
MYTHS
A number of major and minor myths have grown up during the last
decade about CIA and the craft cif intelligence itself as we practice
it today, These myths are in part the creation of hostile propaganda
of Communist origin; more often they are the product of imagina,
tion or guesswork, thriving on a lack of public enlightenment and
on the suspicion any secret organization arouses. Sometimes these
myths grow out of news stories purposely launched to "flush" out
the facts. In such instances the bigger the exaggeration, the better
the chance, so the writers think, of drawing a denial or correction or
at least some answer other than "No comment," which for years
has been, and I believe properly, the stock reply when the press calls
on the CIA for information.
CIA makes policy
I have frequently been asked what "myth" about the CIA had
been the most harmful. I have hesitated in answering, I admit, be-
cause there were several to choose from, but finally chose the accusa-
tion that CIA made foreign policy, often cut across the programs
laid down by the President and the Secretary of State, and inter-
fered with what ambassadors and Foreign Service officers abroad
were trying to do,
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This charge is untrue but extremely hard to disprove without re-
vealing classified information. It is all the harder to disprove be-
cause to some extent it is honestly believed, and at times has even
been spread, by people in government who themselves are not "in
the know."
The facts are that the CIA has. never carried out any action of a
political nature, given any support of any nature to any persons.,
potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate
approval at a high political level in our government outside the
CIA.
Here is an example of one of the most recent myths of alleged
political interference by CIA. The charge was spread abroad that
the Agency secretly supported the OAS generals' plot against de
Gaulle. This particular myth was a Communist plant, pure and
simple. One of the .first to launch it, on April 23, 1961, was a leftist
Italian newspaper, 11 Paese (The (ountry), used from time to time
as a trial balloon for Communist propaganda; then Pravda took it
up and Tass sent it out to Europe and the Middle East, and the
leftist press of Western Europe echoed it. Genevieve Tabouis, a
well-known French writer who had a big following several decades
ago, kept the propaganda mill going with three fantastic stories
that gave Moscow new fuel. Meanwhile highly reputable Western
papers and columnists began repeating the rumors and an aura
of respectability was given to a-story which was intended to dis-
credit American policy in general and the CIA in partictdar.
In this, as well as in most such cases, there is absolutely no way
to disprove such rumors. There is nothing to get your teeth into.
It is only your word against the rumor market and in this particular
case high officials in the French Government did nothing to stop its
spread.
Another myth is the charge that CIA always supports dictator-
ships. This too has been subtly suggested in all manner of ways by
Moscow propaganda. Since CIA does not support Communists or
fellow travelers, it must, in Moscow's view, support capitalistic
warmongers, colonialists, et a/. There is nothing in between. Ergo
it must be dictators who are supported,
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The President and the State Department set the lines of foreign
policies; they ,alone determine the course of conduct of all elements
of the government in all areas of :foreign activity. Despite this fact
Of our governmental life, the. myth of mysterious and independent
policies and activities of the CIA persists and, I fear, it is only as we
get better educated to the facts and less inclined to fall for divisive
propaganda that these myths will collapse of their own hollowness.
With the Soviets using their vast subversive machine to upset free
institutions wherever they can, it is all very well to say that we
should satisfy everybody's curiosity?including that of the Soviet?by
advertising each step we take in the effort to _counter them, anti tell
whom we are helping and why and where, But this is the best way
to lose the battle and we should not be jockeyed or angered into
answering all these attacks, even if this means that troublesome
myths persist.
The Soviet Super Spy
Nobody minds being portrayed as invincible. I imagine the
Soviets derive a good deal of satisfaction from the popular image of
their intelligence officers and agents that exists in the mind of some,
Westerners. The value of the image is that it tends to frighten the
opponent.
If I seem to have lent any support to the myth of the Soviet
super spy in my earlier characterization of the Soviet intelligence
-
Officer, I would like to remind the reader that I was then writing
Of his training, his attitudes and 'his background rather than of his
achievements. The examples of Soviet failures are legion. Their
great networks of_ the past, often too large in size, eventually broke
up. or were exposed, both as a result of the vigorous measures of
Western counterintelligence and as a result of their own internal,
weaknesses. Their best-trained officers make technical slips, showing
that they too are fallible. Often, in situations where there is no'
textbook answer, no time to get instructions from.headquarters,and
When individual decision and initiative is required, the Soviet in-
telligence officer fails to meet the test.
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Soviet training of both intelligence officers and agents tries to drill
the human element out of intelligence work, but it cannot be done..
Harry Houghton helped to give himself away by spending the extra
money he earned from spying on real estate ventures. He wanted to
amass a fortune. Vassall spent it on fancy clothes. Each lived beyond
his regular income and this was boUnd, sooner or later, to attract
.11.tention. Hayhanen, the associate of Colonel Abel, one of Mos-
cow's best spies, was an alcoholic, He was bound eventually to break
up, to talk?and he did. Stashinki, the murderer, on Soviet orders,
of the two Ukrainian exile leaders, fell in love with a German girl,
and came into conflict with his KGB bosses over this relationship.
It was the main cause of his defection. The Soviets seem to have
taken too little note of these weaknesses.
The Soviets cannot eliminate love and sex and greed from the
scene. Since they use them as weapons to ensnare people, it is
strange that they fail to recognize their power to disrupt carefully
planned operations. A typical instance is described by Alexander
Foote in telling of his Soviet military intelligence network during
World War II.' Maria Schultz, a Soviet agent of long experience,
Op cit.
was married to one Alfred Schultz, ;mother old-line Soviet agent
who was under arrest in China for espionage. In Switzerland Maria
fell in love with a radio operator who had been assigned to work
with her, divorced her husband at long range and married the
operator. This bit of disloyalty dismayed her old servant, Lisa
Brockel, so severely that out of chagrin the latter one day called up
the British Consulate in Lausanne and told the officer who answered
the phone enough to endanger the whole Soviet network. Fortu-
nately for the Soviets, her English was terrible, she was hysterical
and the consulate thought she was just another crank.
Time and again the Soviets and satellites pick the wrong people
as agents. 'They misjudge character. They underestimate the power
of courage and honesty. Their cynical view of loyalties other than
their own kind blinds them to the dominant motives of free people.
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A good illustration of this failing on their part was the case of the
distinguished Rumanian businessman, V. C. Georgescu. In 1953,
shortly after his escape from Communist Rumania and when he
was seeking American citizenship, he was approached by a Com-
munist intelligence agent, acting under Soviet guidance, with a
cruel attempt at blackmail. The agent told Georgescu in so many
words that if he would agree to perform certain intelligence tasks
in the United States, his two young sons, who were still being held
in Rumania, would be released and returned to their parents. Other-
wise he could never expect to see his sons again. Georgescu coura-
geously refused any discussion of the subject. He threw the man out
of his office and reported the full details to the United States
authorties. The Communist diplomatic agent was expelled from the
United States. The whole case received wide publicity so harmful
to Rumania's relations with this country that the Rumanians finally
sought to repair their damaged prestige by acceding to President
Eisenhower's personal request for the release of the boys.
Soviet intelligence is overconfident, overcomplicated and over--
estimated. The real danger lies not in the mythical capabilities of
the Soviet spy but in the magnitude of the Soviet intelligence effort,
the money it spends, the number of people it employs, the lengths
to which it is willing to go to achieve its ends and the losses it is
willing and able to sustain.
We Americans are too na?
and too new at the job
Americans are usually proud, and rightly so, of the fact that the
"conspiratorial" tendencies which seem to be natural and inbred in
many other races tend to be missing from their characters and from
the surroundings in which they live. The other side of the coin is
that the American public, aware of this, frequently feels that both
in our diplomacy and in our intelligence undertakings we are no
match for the "wily foreigner." Foreigners likewise attribute to
Americans a certain gullibility and naivete. There are also other
,aspects of this same general notion. One is that the American official
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is arather closed-minded do-gooder, a bit of a missionary, who butts
into things he doesn't understand and insists on doing things his
Way. This is the "American" we see in Graham Greene's The Quiet
American. The Ugly American gives us another angle of the same
prejudice?lack of true understanding and appreciation ,of local
conditions and of local peoples abroad. The number of best-sellers
With this theme seems to show that it is a popular one and that we
like being depicted as a rather stupid people. It is little wonder then
that such mischief-creating prejudices also find their way into the
American and foreign criticisms of our operations abroad, including,
the intelligence service.
I would like to say first of all that I much prefer taking the raw
material which we find in America?na?, home-grown, even home-
spun?and training such a man to be a good intelligence officer,,how-
ever long the process lasts, to seeking out people who are naturally
devious, conspiratorial or wily, and trying to fit them into the in-
telligence system. The reader will have noted that when I described
our norms for the potential intelligence officer in an earlier chapter,.
Tdid not include such traits among them. The recruiter does ?n9t
look for slippery characters. He is much more likely to shim or re-
ject them. The American intelligence officer is trained to work in
intelligence as a profession, not as a way of life. The distinction is
between his occupation and his private character.
Hand in hand with this preconception goes the attitude that
American intelligence is young, it hasn't had time to grow up, it
can't possibly have produced a cadre of able officers in its brief
existence who can match the work of older services, be they friendly
or hostile ones. My answer to this is simple. We have seen nations
such as Japan and Russia, who until the turn of this century were
positively feudal, catch up with the technology of the twentieth
century in one generation without going through the centuries-long
evolution of Western societies. We have also seen that when a
country has had its standing industry and technology devastated, as,
happened to Germany and to some extent France and Italy in
World War II, it had a certain advantage when it began to re-
construct because it had lest the 6.cumbrance of superannuated
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methods and equipment and there was no reason not to start with
the latest and newest things.
American intelligence has been in precisely this position. During
World War II it learned from ..the old-line services the results of
centuries of experience. When the time came to found a permanent
service here after the war, it was possible, and it was indeed im-
perative, to construct this organization along lines that would enable
it to cope with contemporary problems and not with areas and con-
ditions that had existed fifty years before. It is not important that
American intelligence is young in years. What is important is that
it is modern, and not hidebound or tied to any outdated theories.
I would point here above all to its ability to adapt the most modern
instruments of technology to its purposes. In this it has been a dar-
ing pioneer.
Secret intelligence operations are not in the American tradition;
if engaged in, they should never be acknowledged
This is only in part a myth, and one that is on the wane. How-
ever, it is still true today that there are some Americans who are
suspicious of any "secret" agency of government. Certainly that
agency must assume the burden of proof that its claim to secrecy is
reasonable and in the nationalinterest.
Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of the dangers we face
in the Cold War and that they cannot all be met by the usual tools
of Open diplomacy. And even those who regret the necessity for it
are reconciling themselves to the Fact that national security requires
us to resort to secret intelligence operations. Interestingly enough,
have found little hesitation on the part of Congress to support and
to finance our intelligence work with all its secrecy. In the very law
setting up the CIA, Congress has enjoined the Agency to "protect
intelligence sources and metlio(ls from unauthorized disclosure,"
but has provided none of the tools to accomplish this, outside of
the CIA itself.
Naturally, when our intelligence operations go wrong and blow
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up in the press, there is bound to be criticism, and sometimes un-
justified criticism. Intelligence operations are risky enterprises, and
success can rarely be guaranteed. Since generally only the unsuccess-
ful ones become advertised, the public gains the impression that the
batting average of Intelligence is much lower than is really the case.
The ability of the CIA to recruit year after year a select and
very able group of our young c'ellege graduates shows that the hesi-
tation of Americans about intelligence in general has not gone very
deep in the younger generation. I have found that our young re-
cruits have a growing appreciation of intelligence work as a career
where they can make a real contribution to our national security.
In my ten years with the Agency 1 only recall one case out of many
hundreds where a man who had joined the Agency felt some scruples
about the activities he was asked to carry on. In this case he was
given the option of either an . honorable resignation or a transfer
to other branches of the work.
There was one sensational secret operation, now in the public
domain, which did worry some people in this country as being
"unlawful," namely the flights of the IT-2 airplane. People know
a good bit about espionage as it has been carried on from time
immemorial. The illegal smuggling of agents with false papers, false
identities and false pretenses across the frontiers of other countries
is a tactic which the Soviets have employed against us so often that
we are used to it. But to send an agent over another country, out
of sight and sound, more than ten miles above its soil, with a
camera seemed to shock because it was so novel. Yet such are the
vagaries of international law that we can do nothing when Soviet
ships approach within three miles of our shores and take all the
pictures they like, and we could do the same to them if we liked.
If a spy intrudes on your territory, you catch him if you can and
punish him according to your laws. That applies without regard to
the means of conveyance he has taken to reach his destination?
railroad, automobile, balloon or aircraft or, as my forebears used
to say, by shanks' mare. Espionage is not tainted with any "legality."
If the territory, territorial waters or air space of another country is
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violated, it is an illegal act. But it is, of course, a bit difficult for a
country to deny any complicity when the mode of conveyance is an
'aircraft of new and 'highly sophisticated design and performance.
As I said at the outset, some of our fellow citizens don't want
anything to do with espionage of any kind. Some prefer the old-
fashioned kind, popularized in the spy thrillers. Some would con-
cede that, if you are going to do it at all, it is best to use the system
that will produce the best results and is most likely to secure the
information we need.
The decision to proceed with the U-2 program was based on
considerations deemed. in 1955 to be vital to our national security.
We required the information necessary to guide our various military
programs and particularly our missile program. This we could not
do if we had no knowledge of the Soviet missile program. Without
a better basis than we then had for gauging the nature and extent
of the threat to us from surprise nuclear missile attack, our very
survival might bC threatened. Self-preservation is an inherent right
of sovereignty. Obviously this is not a principle to be invoked
frivolously.
In retrospect, I believe that most thoughtful Americans would
have expected this country to act as it did in the situation we faced
in the fifties when the missile race was on in earnest and the U-2
flights were helping to keep us informed of Soviet progress.
And while I am discussing myths and misconceptions, I might
tilt at another myth connected with the U-2, namely, that Khru-
shchev was shocked and surprised at it all. As a matter of fact, he
had known for years about the flights, though his information in the
early period was not accurate in all respects. Diplomatic notes were
exchanged and published well before slay 1, 1960, the date of the
-U-2 failure, when Khrushchev's tracking techniques had become
more accurate. Still, since he had been unable to do anything about
the U-2, he did not wish to advertise the fact of his impotence to
his own people and he stopped sending protests.
His rage at the Paris Conference was feigned for a purpose. At
the time he saw no _prospeet. of success at the 'conference on the
subject of Berlin. He was then in deep trouble with the Chinese
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72 The Craft of Intelligence 653
Communists. Following his visit to President Eisenhower in the
fall of 1959, he had been unable to placate Mao during his stop at
Peking en route back from the United States. Furthermore, he was
apprehensive of the reactions of the Soviet people to President
Eisenhower's planned trip to the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1960.
Influenced by all these considerations, he decided to use the U-2 as
a good excuse for torpedoing both the trip and the conference.
There is evidence of long debate in the Praesidium during the first
two weeks of May, after the 1_12 fell and before the date of the Paris
Conference. The issue was, I believe, whether to push the 15-2 issue
under the rug or use it to destroy the conference. There are also
reports that Khrushchey was asked why he had not mentioned the
overflight issue when he visited the President during his visit in
the fall of 1959, more than six months before the U-2 came down.
He is said to have remarked he didn't wish to "disturb" the spirit
of Camp David.
Finally, to conclude the LT-2 discussion, I should deal with one
other myth, namely, that when Powers was downed on. May 1, 1960,
everybody should have kept their mouths shut and no admissions of
any kind should have been made, the theory being that you don't
admit espionage.
It is quite true that there is an old tradition, and one which was
excellent in its day and age, that you never talk about any espionage
operations and that if a spy is caught, he is supposed to say nothing.
It does not always work out that way in the twentieth century.
The U-2 is a case in point. It isof course obvious that a large num-
ber of people had to know about the building of the plane, its real
purposes, its accomplishments over the five years of its useful life
and also the high authority under which the project had been
initiated and carried forward. In view of the unique nature of the
project, its cost til(l complexity, this proliferation of information
was inevitable. It could not be handled merely like the dispatch of
a secret agent across a frontier. Of course, all these people would
have known that any denial by the executive was false. Sooner or
later, certainly tins.' would jlaVe. leakcd.
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But even more serious than this is the question of the responsi-
bility of government. For the executive to have taken the position
that a subordinate of his had exercised authority on his own to
mount and carry forward such an enterprise as the 1J-2 operation
without higher sanction would have been tantamount to admission
of irresponsibility in government and that the executive was not in
control of actions by subordinates which could vitally affect our na-
tional policy. This would have been an intolerable admission to
make. Silence on the whole- affair, which I do not believe could
have been maintained, would have been tantamount to such an
admission. The fact that both in the U-2 matter and in the Bay of
Pigs affair the Chief Executive assumed responsibility of what was
planned as a covert operation, but had been uncovered, was, I
believe, both the right decision to take and the only decision that
in the circumstances could have been lived with. Of course, any
subordinate of the executive, such as the Director of Central Intelli-
gence, stood ready to assume all or any responsibility in either of
these affairs?even the responsibility of admitting irresponsibility
if called upon to do so. In theory, this may have appealed to some.
In actual practice, I believe it was quite unrealistic.
Today in the field of intelligence, many admissions are made,
either tacitly or by deeds and actions, as well as in words. When
the Soviet Union agreed to exchange Francis Powers for their spy,
Colonel Rudolf Abel, they were admitting what he was and who he
was, just as clearly as if they had published the facts in the news-
paper.
Intelligence has come a long way since the good old days when
everything could be shoved under the rug of silence.
CIA, the Bad Boy of Government
There are other kinds of myths, more of the spiteful or back-
biting sort, that one sometimes hears in more restricted and "know-
ing" circles. I doubt if many readers outside Washington have ever
even encountered them and Si) I will deal with them only in passing.
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They have to do primarily with CIA's relations with other parts of
our government, especially those with whom it works most closely.
First a all, it is in the nature of people and institutions that any
"upstart'' is going to be somewhat frowned upon and its instrusions
resented at first by the more Well-established and traditional organi-
zations. CIA had to prove itself and gain the respect of its elders
by showing what it could da and by submitting its employees and
its work to the test of time. It has, in my opinion, withstood this
test and earned the respect of its fellows in goverinnent. It has,. at
the same time, not swallowed up the personnel, the property or the
'functions of any other agency, despite its reputed size and its re-
puted budget. The statement that there are American embassies
where the CIA personnel outnumber the Foreign Service personnel
is a rather typical troublemaking bit of malice, as is the one that
the CIA personnel in embassies can do what they please. The
Soviets, it is true, have many embassies where the intelligence per-
sonnel outnumber the diplomats, but we do not. The Soviet am-
bassador is himself sometimes an officer of the KGB. I have yet to
hear of a case where the American ambassador was a CIA man. An
American ambassador is the commanding officer and everyone sta-
tioned under him, including the CIA personnel, is responsible to
him.
Since the FBI and the CIA work very closely in the field of
counterintelligence, it was to be expected that rumors would come
to life in some quarters that they were working against each other,
Or in competition, and that relations between them are not good.
The facts of the matter are that relations are on a wholly satisfactory
basis. Each agency passes to the other all information that belongs
to its special prmince. There is no failure of coordination.
Literary Myths?The Spy in Fiction
The spy heroes of the novels really don't exist, neither on our
side nor on the other. The Stall intelligence officer in peacetime is.
hardly ever dispatched, incognito or disguikd, into hostile territory
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on perilous or glamorous mission. Except for the "illegal," who is
placed abroad for very long periods, there is no conceivable point in
an intelligence service risking the capture and interrogation of its
officers, thereby jeopardizing its agents and exposing itself to diplo-
matic embarrassment. And there was little resemblance between
the exploits of James Bond, of which I read with the greatest
pleasure, and the retiring and cautious behavior of the real Soviet
spy, Colonel Rudolf Abel. The intelligence officer does not usually
carry weapons, concealed cameras or coded messages sewed into the
lining of his pants. Ife is not the target of luscious blondes sent by
the opposition who approach Ii un in bars or come out of closets in
hotel rooms,
if this were ever to happen, he would probably be withdrawn at
once from the area because one of his main principles is to avoid
being identified as an intelligence officer, except by those who work
with him. If there are dangers, tricks, plots, it is the agent who is
personally involved in them and not the intelligence officer, whose
duty is to guide the agent through them. And as for the agent him-
self, as well as his sources, the disciplines of intelligence today re-
quire abilities and technical knowledge combined with a talent for
inconspicuousness that automatically rule out fancy living, affairs
with questionable females and desperate subterfuges.
Alexander Foote describes one of the most valuable agents the
Soviets had during World War II in the following episode:
t arrived first and awaited with some curiosity the arrival of this agent
who had his lines so deep into the innermost secrets of Hitler. A quiet,
nondescript little man suddenly slipped into a chair at our table and
sat down. It was "Lucy" himself. ,1nyone less like the spy of fiction it
would be hard to imagine. Consequently hc was exactly what was wanted
for an agent in real life. Undistinguished looking, of medium height,
aged about fifty, with his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked
exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere
in the world,2
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2 Handbook tot spies. London., 1949, p. 137.
Most spy romances and thrillers are written for audiences who
wish to be entertained. They .would rarely be entertained if some-
one put the whole file of a successfully conducted espionage case
right into their hands. These cases are more interesting to the pub-
lic when they blow up with blood and thunder. It is thus rare for a
man who has actually worked for any length of time in a modern
intelligence service to write a serious novel about it that would at
the same time be true to life, even if he has the storytelling gift.
Many authors have served in intelligence. Yet when they wrote,
they generally avoided the subject.
One reason for this is, of course, the author's respect for secrecy,
either because he took an oath which requires tins respect from
him or because he is well aware of the need to guard the secrets to
which he was privy during his time of service.
But the other reason is that intelligence work requires vast at-
tention to detail which the outside world would regard as drudgery
?research, planning, analysis. The simplest operation is at bottom
complex because of human and political factors, problems of com-
munications, logistics and administration. And this is not enter-
taining complexity. Even the execution of the espionage task itself
often loses its romance, if all goes well.
I have always been intrigued by the fact that one of the greatest
author-spies in history, Daniel Defoe, never wrote a word about
espionage in his major novels. In the eyes of many, Defoe is ac-
counted the father of modern British intelligence. He was not only
a successful operative in his own right but later became the first
chief of an organized British intelligence system, a fact which was
not publicly known until many years after his death. His most
famous literary works, of course, are Robinson Crnsoe, Moll Flan-
ders and journal of the Plague Year. Try if you will to find even
the slightest reference to spies or espionage in any of these books.
No doubt Defoe carefully avoided writing about any actual espio-
nage plots known to him because of political considerations and an
ingrained sense of secrecy. But a man with his fertile mind could
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easily have invented what could have passed as a good spy story
,ind projected it into another time and another setting. I cannot
dispel the conviction altogether that he never did this because, hav-
ing the inside view of espionage, he saw little he thought would
amuse or move the reader if the latter were presented with a true
:tory of espionage as it was really practiced in his day, and, as a
novelist Defoe was above inventing nonsense.
Somerset Mangham makes the following comments on his years
:n intelligence work in his autobiography, The Summing Up:
The work appealed both to my sense of romance and my sense of
idiculons. The methods I 'was supposed to use in order to foil persons
who were following me; the secret interviews with agents in unlikely
)laces; the conveying of messages in a mysterious fashion . . . I could
sot but look upon as material that might one day be of use to me. But
t was so hackneyed that I doubted whether t should ever be able to
)rofit by it.
An unusual writer on certain aspects of intelligence work is Jo-
?eph Conrad. I would venture to suggest that Conrad's Polish back-
ground is responsible for his native insights into the ways of
amspiracy and the way of the spy. His own father was exiled, and
.wo 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 at-
tempts to dominate them.
Conrad, being the kind of man he was, 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, if any. Conrad does not even exploit the inherent
complexities of the spy stories he invents because it is not what
primarily interests hint, and a more complex plot than that of
The Secret Agent does not often occur. The main character, Verloc,
is an agent provocateur of an unnamed power (presumed to be
Czarist Russia). His mission is to penetrate anarchist circles in Eng-
land and to provoke them to deeds of violence (like the provoca-
teurs of the Okhrana). The purpose, however, is not to cause the
apprehension of the anarchists but to make the English aware of
the dangers of radicals and revolutionaries and therefore more
sympathetic to the Russian ruling class. This in itself is a subtle
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74 The Craft of Intelligence 653
and complex operation with overtones of what we today would call
psychological warfare. At the sante time Verloc reports to the Lon,
don police, who are quite aware of his employment by th.e Russians.
Conrad was evidently .fascinate(i by the moral quandary of the
double, as is further apparent in the best of his spy stories, Under
Western Eyes, and in the short story "The informer."
MISHAPS
In 1938 a Soviet intelligence officer working under cover 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 em-
ployed 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 care-
lessness 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 momen-
tarily 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 of ten 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 were going through at the soles. She took them to the
cobbler's one day on her own. It was a favor. The cobbler sug-
gested new heels also, removed the old ones and discovered that in
each was a hollow compartment containing some strips of paper
covered with writing.
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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 (whom I have already mentioned)
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, and a frequent visitor at 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 AdmiralCanaris 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 shortly landed her in a Swiss jail.
The Sorge Communist network in Japan was broken in 1942 as
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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 Commu-
nists 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 a Communist
but had forsaken Communism while living in the United States
-and had become a Seventh-Day Adventist. In 1936 she had returned
Ito 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 commithicatimtbetween 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 espio-
nage 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 only later
began 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.
nray sometimes be the fault of the intelligence service itself, not of,
the officer handling the agent, but of the technicians who produce
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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
gence 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 ob,
servant 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 con-
sul 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 ac-
complice 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 ref-
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erence 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
anti conviction of Kurt F. Ludwig and eight associates. It was Lud-
wig 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 under-
ground. 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 above ground showed, to the
inspector's immense dismay, that the snow just above 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 Vopo 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
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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, how-
ever, 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 dismantled shortly afterward.
There is no single field of intelligence work in which the acci-
dental mishap is more frequent or more frustrating than in com-
munications. 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 be-
neath 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 belowground, in buildings or out of doors. The Bolshe-
viks, like Dr. Bancroft, Franklin's secretary, used to prefer the
hollow of a tree. Today there are safer and more devious contriv-
ances 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 the 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
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of public toilets its 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 com-
munications, 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 despatched, he knew this as well as his
own name. NO need to write it down in any form. Three months
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later, however, when he gets his first message calling him to a meet-
ing, 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 per-
haps 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.
Misunderstandings or forgetting of complex arrangements can
lead to a delightful comedy of errors, especially when each party
to a meeting or other arrangement tries to outguess or "second
guess" the other. The agent misses the meeting because he mixed
up his pluses and minuses. The other party to the meeting was at
the spot at the right time. When the agent didn't turn up, the
other party imagined that the_ agent had mixed up his pluses and
minuses and so tries to guess just how he mixed them up. He picks
one of the four alternative combinations and goes to the spot
again at that time. But he guessed the wrong combination. The
agent in the meantime has remembered what was correct but it is
too late because the correct day, and hour have since rolled by. The
two men fail to meet.
Mishaps, whatever their wse and nature, can be divided intb
those which reveal or "blow" the existence of an undercover opera-
tion to the enemy or to local authorities (which are not always
identical) and those which simply cause the. Operation to fail or
-malfunction internally, such as when communications do not reach
'the right people but still do not fall into unfriendly hands. In either
'case, a major mishap, as in most of the cases I have been citing., may
'dose off the operation for good or stall it for a very long time until
'the damage can be repaired, the communications re-established, etc.
Minor mishaps in intelligence have a nastiness all their own. One
can never be quite certain whether they were damaging or not, and
whether the operation should be continued or called off. Most of
them have to do with losses of "cover,' with partial or temporary
exposure, instances where the inconspicuousness or anonymity of
the agent is not maintained and he is spotted, even if only momen-
tarily, as a person engaged in some kind of suspicious business, very
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-possibly espionage. I might add that it will not help the execution of
his task if the impression is made rather. that he is a crook, swindler
,or smuggler.
Anyone who has ever traveled under another name knows that
ithe greatest fear is not that you will forget your new identity while
.signing your name in the hotel register. It is rather that after you
have just signed the register, someone will walk into the lobby
whom you haven't seen for twenty years, come up to you, slap you
on the back and say: "jimmy Jones, you old so-and-so, where have
you been all these years?"
Any operation involving the use of a person traveling temporarily
or permanently under another name always risks the one-out-of-a-
thousand chance that an accidental encounter will occur with some-
one who knew the agent when he had another identity. Perhaps
the agent can talk or joke his way out of it. The trouble is that in
today's spy-conscious world the first thing most people would think
of is that espionage is the real explanation. If a great deal of work
has gone into building up the new identity of the agent, such an
accidental encounter might just ruin everything. The Soviet illegal
is usually assigned to countries where the risk of such accidental
encounter is minimal if not entirely nonexistent. Yet the following
instance shows how the possibility always exists and how the Soviets,
as well as the rest of us, have no way really of eliminating these
risks entirely.
In the Houghton-Lonsdale _case, as I have already stated, the
American pair called Kroger who had been operating the radio
transmitter were identified after their arrest as long-term Soviet
agents who had previously been active in the United States. The
FBI accomplished this identification on the basis of fingerprints.
Just as the identification was completed their New York office'
received a phone call from a gentleman who described himself as a
retired football coach. The week before, Life Magazine had shown
a series of photographs of all the persons apprehended in the Lons-
dale case. Thirty-live years ago, this gentleman told the FBI, he
had been coaching at a large public high school in the Bronx. At
that time a scrawny little fellow had tried out for the team- and he
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had never forgotten him. He had just seen Kroger's picture in Life,
and Kroger was that scrawny little fellow. He was absolutely certain
of it. But his name wasn't Kroger, it was so-and-so. And the coach
was right.
The Krogers had not tried to change their physical appearance
at all. Kroger ran an open business in London and the kind that
could have brought a variety of persons of all nationalities to him
interested in collecting rare books. What was the chance that some-
one else, not necessarily the coach, who remembered him from that
large public high school in the Bronx thirty or so years before
would walk into his office one day in quest of a book and recognize
him? Slight, but not impossible. The Soviets took the risk.
Minor mishaps may expose any of a number of elements that
point to espionage. They may in many cases simply show that
something out of the ordinary is going on, and whether this is in-
terpreted as espionage and is therefore damaging depends in great
measure on the innocence or sophistication of the beholder, whether
he is, let us say, a policeman or a landlord or just a passer-by. Fre-
quently they occur as a result of the agent practicing some of the
known dodges and subterfuges of the professional agent which are
however observed.
We once, somewhat unwisely perhaps, sent three men to see a
certain important personage who was occupying a suite of rooms
on one of the upper floors of a hotel in a large European city. Each
of them was a specialist and was needed for the opening gambit in
this operation. They were also not residing in the hotel or even in
the country in question and were entirely unknown there. Many
months later, after it had been established by other means of con-
tact that this gentleman was Willing to work with us, we sent one of
the three original officers to see him. After some debate, it was de-
cided the lesser of evils to send our officer to the hotel and not to
try to have the personage go out and meet us somewhere in the
city, where few secure facilities were available to us. The officer had
after all only been in the hotel once before, many months ago, and
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no one had the slightest means of knowing his business. Our man
gave the number of the desired floor to the elevator operator. He
was the only passenger. He looked over the operator, an old man
and nondescript, and was sure he had never seen him before. But
he was anxious to remember his face for the future because he
would purposely avoid this particular chap and his elevator on his
next few visits. Shortly before the elevator reached its destination,
the old man turned around and looked at our man. "Oh, how are
you?" he said. "I see you didn't bring your other two friends along
today." Harmless? Probably, but you can never tell. The main point
is that the officer was not SO inconspicuous as he had thought. Ele-
vator operators, like waiters and hotel people generally, remember
faces. In certain countries employees of this sort, bartenders, door-
men, are police informants._ Had he also guessed whom our man
might be visiting? Had he guessed the nationality of our man, who
spoke the local language well, but not perfectly? From his clothes,
his manners? It is the very inconclusiveness of these minor mishaps
which distinguishes them. The efficient intelligence service will take
no chances after even the most minor mishap but will change its
arrangements for contact and communications. It will even change
the personnel on the job if it is the latter who are attracting at-
tention.
MISCHIEF-MAKERS
One of the greatest sources of mischief for Western intelligence
and diplomacy are the Soviet forgeries which I have already men-
tioned. Next in line I would rank the scurrilous propaganda which
the Soviets manufacture, pretending to expose the personnel and
methods of our intelligence services. To the perceptive Westerner
these are generally funny, but their outlandishness is not likely to
be perceived by the audience for whom they are intended. In their
attempts to discredit American intelligence, the Soviets have pro-
duced for consumption behind the Iron Curtain and in neutral
areas no end of books, pamphlets, press articles and radio programs
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branding our intelligence service as vicious, reactionary and war-
mongering, and its officers, including its Director, as gangsters and
war criminals.
Such material is usually on the level of the lowest kind of war
propaganda and revels in trumped-up stories and doctored pictures
of atrocities. They have claimed that we torture people and have
shown pictures of the instruments we use. More of such material has
appeared in East Germany than elsewhere because the territory
of East Germany has been most vulnerable to Western intelligence,
and the Soviets rightly fear it and arc anxious to frighten the East
Germans away from any entanglements with the nefarious West.
One such work, published (in German) in East Berlin in 1959, is
called Alien's Gangsters in_Action. On its purple and yellow cover,
it shows a partially unclad damsel who is wired with microphones
and tape recorders and a miniature transmitter and antenna, all of
which one would not see if she were fully clothed. Its general ac-
curacy is attested to by the fact that it gives the address of CIA as
"24 E-Street, Washington/N.Y." As anyone could have found out
by consulting the Washington phone book, the old number was
2430 E, and, as we all know, the State of New York has not yet
gobbled up the city of Washington.
At times, however, though rarely, there is a touch of humor in
the Soviet propaganda blasts. Some years ago, in a year-end sum-
mary of events and personalities which appeared in hvestia, the
well-known Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenberg devoted a few terse lines
to me. He said in effect that if that spy Allen Dulles should ever
pass through the "Pearly Gates" into Heaven he would be found
mining the clouds, shooting the stars and slaughtering the angels. I
have found this a very useful introduction for . public, addresses
where I attempted to outline the duties of the Director of Central
Intelligence. Today llya Ehrenberg's writing generally seems to be
more appreciated in the West than in Moscow.
What has popularly become known as "brainwashing," while of
great psychological interest to the West, as it is important to study
defensive techniques, is never practiced by us, despite Soviet claims
to the contrary, for the simple reason that we are not interested in
yonverting people to our way of ,thinking either forcibly or by
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trickery, which is its main intent. We have never felt, as obviously
the Soviets and the Red Chinese and the North Koreans have, that
there is much to gain in putting a "brainwashed" person on the air
to denounce his own countrymen. We have enough people who
come over to us voluntarily from Communism and who need no
prompting.
Quite another kind of mischief-makers are the intelligence fabri-
cators and swindlers. Among these there is the agent whose real
sources "dry up" and who is therefore threatened with being pin out
of business. He knows what kind of information the intelligence
service wants and he has its confidence. If he has no other means of
livelihood and is not basically honest, it is understandable that he
might come upon the idea of keeping the sources "alive" and
functioning after they are really "dead" by writing their reports
himself and fabricating their Contents. Sooner or later the intelli-
gence service will catch on, probably on the basis of internal evi-
dence?errors in fact, discrepancies, an obvious paucity of hard
data, a certain amount of embroidery that wasn't there before, even
errors in style. Or the hoax might be exposed quite another way.
The agent has to see his sources from time to time. When he does,
he not only delivers to the intelligence service the information he
collects, but writes a report on his meeting with the source, describ-
ing the circumstances of the meeting, the general welfare and state
of mind of the source and many other matters which an intelligence
service keeps track of. "Look here," says the intelligence officer to
the agent. "You say you saw X on the twenty-fifth. That's very in-
teresting because we happen to know that he was out of the country
all that week." This is not a pleasant moment for the intelligence
officer if he is talking to a man-who once did good work for him.
The intelligence swindler, as distinct from the real agent who
has gone wrong, is a man who specializes in this sort of thing with-
out ever having been a good agent for anybody. Like any other kind
of swindler, he latches onto the latest racket except that his forte is
to prey entirely on intelligence services and from long experience he
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knows how to find their offices and how to get in the door. Fabri-
cators and swindlers have always existed in the intelligence world,
but the recent growth and significance of technical and scientific
discoveries, especially their military applications, afforded new and
tempting fields for the swindlers. The weakness they could exploit
was the lack of detailed scientific knowledge on the part of the in-
telligence officer. Although every modern service will train and brief
its field officers as thoroughly as possible in scientific matters of con-
cern to it, it clearly cannot turn every intelligence officer into a
full-fledged physicist or chemist. The result is that many a good
field officer may go for a neat offer of information and continue
working with an agent until the specialists at home have had time
to analyze the data and unhappily inform him that he is in the
toils of a swindler.
Immediately after World War II the most popular swindle by
all odds played on the new and world-wide interest in atomic
energy. We were swamped with what we began to call "uranium
salesmen." In all the capitals of Europe they turned up with
"samples" of LT-235 and LT-238, in tin canisters or wrapped in cotton
and stuffed into pill bottles. Sometimes they offered to sell us large
quantities of the precious stuff. Sometimes they claimed their
samples came from the newly opened uranium mines of Czechoslo-
vakia, where they had excellent sources who could keep us supplied
with the latest research behind the Iron Curtain. There were many
variations on the theme of uranium,
The chief characteristic and the chief giveaway of the swindler, as
in most swindles, is the demand for cash on the line. First comes the
tempting offer accompanied by the sample, then the demand for a
large sum, after which the delivery of the main goods is to follow.
Since no intelligence service allows its field officers to disburse more
than token sums until the headquarters has reviewed a project in
all detail, it is very rare that an intelligence service actually loses
any money to a swindler. All it loses is time, but this is also
precious, sometimes more precious than money. If the offer has any
glimmer of truth to it and is not immediately recognizable as a
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swindle, an intelligence officer, for reasons I have already set forth
many times, will try to hold on for a while in order to ascertain
what he has. This can turn into a wasteful game of wits between
the clever swindler and the intelligence officer, the latter refusing
to let go entirely, the former fighting for all he is worth to put
himself across and to parry all questions that would show him in
his true light.
After uranium, there was a vogue in infrared, then came bogus
information on missiles, and no doubt at this moment the swindlers
are regrouping and working up reports on the Red Chinese develop-
ment of a death-ray through the use of lasers. The logic here is
that the Red Chinese are behind in H-bomb research and rather
than go to the expense of catching up will devote all their energy
to lasers.
A more laborious and less easily identi liable kind of fabrication is
that produced by what we call "paper mills." They turn out paper
by the yard and do not depend on hot items as the swindlers do.
Often their information is plausible, well reasoned and beautifully?
brgani'zed. There is only one fault with it. It doesn't come from ? the
horse's mouth as claimed.
In their heyday the paper mills exploited the situation created by
the existence of the iron Curtain and thrived in the late forties and.
early fifties when most of. the Western services had not yet satisfac-
torily solved the problem of piercing the Curtain. During this
period many of the intelligentsia of Eastern Europe who had fled
their homelands and had little hope of earning a living as refugees
discovered that the intelligence services of the 'West were anxious
to talk to them about conditions in the areas they had recently left
behind them. The less scrupulous among them easily hit upon the:
idea of keeping these services supplied with what they needed. For.
this, of course, it was important to have "sources" behind the Iron
Curtain, trusted friends in important jobs who had stayed behind,
also clandestine means of staying in contact with these friends?
couriers, smuggled correspondence, radio networks, etc. What made,
if difficult to prove that the information delivered was spurious was
the fact that the authors were often well versed in the structure and
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habits of the governments and military organizations of their home-
lands and could take material from newspapers published behind
the Curtain and from radio bioadcasts and embroider on the in-
formation or interpret it with a good deal of art. Frequently one
had quite worthwhile information. The only trouble was it cost
more than it was worth and didn't derive from the sources it claimed
to derive from.
A group of former military_ men who had escaped from one of
the Balkan countries to the West once promised us the plans of the
latest postwar defenses in the Adriatic and Aegean areas, complete
with harbor fortifications, missile ramps and the like. For this they
wanted a good many thousands of dollars in gold. They agreed to
show us a few samples of the papers before we paid up. These
were supposed to be photo copies of official military drawings with
the accompanying descriptive documents. They had allegedly pro-
cured the material from a trusted colleague, an officer who had re-
mained behind and was now _employed in the war ministry of an
iron Curtain country. In addition, there was a courier who knew the
mountain passes, a brave man who had just come out with the
plans and quickly returned home. FIe couldn't stay out in the West
because his absence would be noted at home, and this was danger-
ous. If we wished to buy into tins proposition, the courier would
make a trip every month and the colleague in the war ministry
would supply us with what we, wanted on order.
The plans were beautiful. So were the documents. There was
only one little flaw we noticed at the very first reading. Midway
through one of the documents there was a statement that the new
fortifications were being built by "slave" labor. Only an anti-
Communist would use that term. There is, after all, no admitted
slavery under Communism. Our military friends in their fervor
had given themselves away. It was obvious that they themselves had
drawn up the beautiful plans and documents in somebody's cellar
in Munich. There was no brave courier and no friend in the war
ministry, as they later admitted.
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These paper mill products were usually cleverly conceived, well
constructed and nicely attuned to the desires of the prospective
purchasers and therefore almost impossible to reject on first glance.
There was almost always a trained draftsman in the crowd and the
paper mill rarely failed to comc up with elaborate and many-colored
charts and tables drawn on a large scale showing nctworks of
sources, subsources, letter drops, courier lines, safe houses and all
the accouterments of professional espionage. As the result of a
common drive on the pan of the United States and other intelli-
gence services, these mills have now for the most part been elimi-
nated.
Cranks and crackpots run a close second after the fabricators as
mischief-makers and time-wasters for the intelligence service. The
reader would be amazed to know how many psychopaths and people
with grudges and pct foibles andphobias manage to make connec-
tions with intelligence services all over the world and to tie them
in knots, if only for relatively short periods of time. Again the in-
telligence service is vulnerable because of its standing need for
information and because of the unpredictability of the quarter from
which it might come.
Paranoia is by far the biggest cause of trouble. Since espionage
is now in. the atmosphere, it is no wonder that people with paranoid
tendencies who have been disappointed in love or in business or
who just don't like their neighbors will denounce their friends and
foes and competitors, or even the local garbage man, as Soviet spies.
During World War I, many German governesses employed by
families on Long island were denounced at one time or another
and mostly for the same reason. They were seen raising and lower-
ing their window shades at night, secretly signaling to German
submarines which had surfaced offshore. Just what kind of sig-
nificant information they could pass on to a submarine by lowering
their shades once or twice was usually unclear, but then it is typical
of paranoid delusions that there is a "bad man" close by, although
it is never quite certain whache wants. Trained intelligence officers
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ean frequently spot the crank by just this trait. There is usually very
little positive substance to the crank's claim. The waiter at the
Esplanade is spying for an Iron Curtain country. Ile was seen
:surreptitiously making notes in a corner after he had just taken
..overly long to serve two people who are employed in a government
.office. (He was probably adding up their bill.) It may later turn
,out that he had once accidentally spilled soup on the source, who
was convinced he had done it on purpose.
Cranks and crackpots sometimes manage to wander from one
intelligence service to another and they can cause serious trouble if
they are not spotted early in the game because they may have,
learned enough from the one experience to bring some substance-,
to the next. A young and rather attractive girl once turned up in
Switzerland with a story of her adventures behind the Iron Curtain,
and in West Germany and of her work in intelligence for both the
Russians and one of the Allied services. Her story was long and
.
took months to unravel. It was clear that she had been where she
said she had been because she could name and describe the places
and people and knew the languages of all the places. Most damn-
ing was her claim that certain Allied intelligence officers, including
sorne Americans stationed in Germany, were working for the Soviets?
Our investigations eventually revealed that the girl had turned
up as a refugee in Germany with information about the Soviets
and the Poles, who had apparently employed her at one time in a.
purely clerical capacity. While the process of interrogation and
checking was going on, she had come into contact with numerous,.
Allied intelligence officers and had gotten to know their names. She
apparently hoped for employment, but was finally turned down,
since it was clear that she was a little wrong in the head. She next
wandered into Switzerland, where she came to our attention. Her
story by then had expanded and now included the men she had met.
in Germany, not in their true roles, but as actors in a great tale of
espionage and duplicity. When she got through with us and went on
to the next country, it is quite likely that the story got even bigger
and that we who had just spoken with her also figured now as
agents of the Soviets or worse. One of our people had the theory that .
the Russians had sent her to the West because, without any training'
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80 The Craft of Intelligence 053
at all, she was a perfect sabotage weapon. She could be guaranteed
to waste the time of every intelligence service in Europe and pre-
vent them from getting on with their regular job.
She was, however, typical of certain unbalanced persons who
imagine spies everywhere and weave fantasies in which they them-
selves become the center of a complicated and exciting web of inter-
national intrigue. There are also people who are convinced that
their hearing aids are mysteriously timed to secret short-wave mes-
sages coming in at all hours from foreign intelligence centers and
who regularly report the arrivals and departures of spies from this
source.
1111.1-alMi--1111
15
? MAINIVOIXWMIMI E.;
EAR ER
ThR litigeititCdWr
Shortly before the Bolshevik revolution. of October-November, 1917,
a nation-wide election was held. in Russia for delegates to a Con-
stituent Assembly, which was to choose the leaders of a new Russia.
This was the last, possibly the only, free vote the people of Russia
ever had. Even under the chaotic conditions which prevailed in the
fall of 1917 in war-torn Russia, about thirty-six million votes were
cast for 707 Assembly seats. Iii. this vote, the Bolsheviks received
only about a quarter of the total and 175 seats. Unable either to
control or intimidate the Assembly, Lenin dissolved it by brute
force and the use of goon squads.
Here is Lenin's gloating judgment;
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Everything has turned out tor the best. The dissolution of the Constitu,
ent Assembly means the complete and open repudiation of the democratic
idea in favor of the dictatorship concept.
This will be a valuable lesson.
Anti so it proved to be. The pattern was set for the techniques
used in the destruction of freedom in other countries. Lenin here
showed that a minority backed by illegal force could trample on a
majority which relied on democratic methods.
It was some thirty years later before Communism felt it was
strong enough to try these tactics outside of the area Russia had
controlled in 1914, but as the war ended in 1915, Communism was
on the march again. By then the Communists were consolidating
their frontiers on the Elbe River deep in Western Europe, and
had their forces of occupation and their subversive apparatus at
work installing Communist regimes in Poland, Rumania and Bul-
garia. Shortly thereafter they took over Czechoslovakia and had also
begun their advance to the China Sea in the Far East.
A major part of the strategy of the Communists in the Cold War
today is the secret penetration of free states. The means they use,
the target countries they select and the soft areas in these targets
are concealed as long as possible. They exploit secret weaknesses and
vulnerabilities of opportunity and, in particular, endeavor to pene-
trate the military and security_ forces of the country under clandes-
tine attack.
I include this issue?the most serious one we as a nation and the
Free World face today?in a book on intelligence because intelli-
gence has a major role to play here. The subversion campaigns of
Communism generally start out using secret techniques and a secret
apparatus. It is against them that our intelligence assets must be
marshaled in good time and used as I shall inclicate. Among the
tasks assigned to intelligence, this is one that ranks in importance
alongside those I have described: collecting information, counter-
intelligence, coordinating intelligence and producing the national
estimates,
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Of course, the whole range of Communist tactics in the Cold War
is broader than the type of covert action and political subversion
such as we have seen in Czechoslovakia and Cuba. It also includes:
limited wars and wars by proxy, as in Korea and North Vietnam;
guerrilla wars, as in South Vietnam; civil wars, as in China; the use
and abuse of their zones of "temporary" military occupation, as in
the Eastern European satellites and North Korea.
The Communists have not always succeeded, and this is clue in
no small measure to the employment of intelligence assets, not only
of our own but also those of our friends and allies, including those
of. friendly governments under Communist attack. Their stooges
took over power in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954, and
they were driven out. They tried to disrupt the Philippines and
Malaya by guerrilla tactics, and they were defeated. They lavished
arms deliveries on Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Indonesia, hoping these
states would join the Comnumist Bloc, and so far they have had
only a very modest -return on these particular investments.
On the whole, however, they can look with satisfaction on what
they have accomplished by subversion in the two decades since the,
Allied victory over Hitler and the 'Japanese war lords was assured
in 1944. For it is wise to remember that the Communist program
was well under way by the time of our peace talks with them at .
Yalta and Potsdam. Then they were thinking not of peace but of
how they could use the common victory, and their zones of military
occupation, for further Communist conquest.
In the last fifteen years, their progress has been considerably
slowed down but by no means stopped. Beginning in 1947, they
ran into a series of road blocks: the United States stood firm in
Greece, at Berlin and in Korea, and later on a broad front that
reached to the Chinese offshore islands and Vietnam; helped by the
Marshall Plan and other aid, Europe and Japan staged spectacular
economic recoveries; Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung have been-.
more and more divided on the tactics to pursue, although they are
still together on the basic objective of burying the Free World.
In 1961, the Soviet policy of covert aggression rather than "hot"'
nuclear war, which had undergone considerable rethinking in the
Kremlin after Stalin's demise and the experience in Hungary in
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81 The Craft of Intelligence 653
1956, was vigorously restated by_. Khrushchev under the general
heading of 'wars of liberation." In his speech of January 6 of that
year, this is how he outlined Communist power and Soviet tactics.
Here are some scattered excerpts From this speech that everyone
should read and ponder.
Our epoch is the epoch of the triumph of Marxism-Leninism.
Today . . . socialism is working for history, for the basic content of the
contemporary historical process constitutes the establishment and con-
solidation of socialism on an international scale.
The time is not far away when Marxism-Leninism will possess the minds
of the majority of the world's population. What has been going on in the
world in the 43 years since the triumph of the October Revolution com-
pletely confirms the scientific accuracy and vitality of the Leninist theory
of the world socialist revolution.
The colonial system of imperialism verges on complete disintegration,
and imperialism is in a state of decline and crisis.
Later on in his speech, Khrushchev cited Cuba as the typical ex-
ample of an uprising against United States imperialism. He then
added:
Can such wars flare up in the future? They can. Can there be such
uprisings? There can. But these are ?wars which are national uprisings. In
other words, can conditions be created where a people will lose their
patience and rise in arms? They can, What is the attitude of the Marxists
toward such uprisings? A most positive one. These uprisings must not be
identified with wars among states, with loud wars, since in these uprisings
the people are fighting for implementation of their right for self-deter-
mination, for independent social and national development. These are
uprisings against rotten reactionary regimes, against the colonizers. The
Communists fully support such just Wars and march in the front rank with
the peoples waging liberation struggles.
Now Communist parties are functioning in nearly 50 countries of these
continents [Asia, Africa and Latin America]. This has broadened the
sphere of influence of the Communist movement, given it a truly world-
wide character.
Khrushchev concluded;
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Comrades, we live at a spendid time: Communism has become the in-
vincible force of our century.
This then is the credo, the charter as it were, of the Communist
blueprint for world domination by world-wide subversion.
This country had been slow to arouse itself to the dangers we
face from the tactics of Communism, which Khrushchev so clearly
described in 1961. Since Lenin's (lay this had always been a part of
the Communist program. With Khrushchey, it became its major
weapon in the foreign field.
In 1947 President Truman proclaimed the doctrine which bears
his name and applied it particularly to the then present danger of
subversion facing Greece and Turkey. The doctrine, in effect, was
that where a government felt that its "free institutions and national
integrity" were threatened by Communist subversion and desired
American aid, it would be our policy to give it. A decade later, this
policy was restated in more precise language with respect to the
countries of the Middle East in what became known as the Eisen-
hower Doctrine.
But these doctrines contained the general proviso that action
would be taken if our aid were sought by the threatened state. Such
was the case in Greece in 19d7, and in Lebanon ten years later. In
both instances, our assistance was invited in by a friendly govern-
ment. The Truman and Eisenhower doctrines did not cover, and
possibly no officially proclaimed policy could cover, all the in-
tricacies of situations where a country faces imminent Communist
take-over and yet sends out no ?cry for help.
There have been occasions, as in Czechoslovakia, when the blow
was sudden. Then there was no time for the democratic Czechs to
send us an engraved invitation_to help them to meet that blow. We
knew that the danger was there, that well over one-third of the
Czech Parliament and several members of the Cabinet had Com-
munist leanings and that the regime was seriously infiltrated, but
the free Prague government of' time day was overconfident of its own
ability to resist. Between daylight and dusk, the Communists took
over without firing a shot.
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In Iran a Mossadegh and in Guatemala an Arbenz came to power
through the usual processes of government and not by any Com-
munist coup as in Czechoslovakia. Neither man at the time dis-
closed the intention of creating a Communist state. When this
purpose became clear, support from outside was given to loyal anti-
Communist elements in the respective countries, in the one case, to
the Shah's supporters; in the other, to a group of Guatemalan
patriots. In each case the danger was successfully met. There again
no invitation was extended by the goneininent in power for outside
help.
During Castro's take-over of Cuba we were not asked by him For
help to keep the Communists out; he was the very man who was
bringing them in. These cases and others?and Laos today is not the
only one facing us?show the danger of a slow infiltration by Com-
munists and fellow travelers into a government where the last
thing the infiltrators wish is outside intervention to check Com-
munism.
What are we to do about these secret, underground creeping
techniques such as were used to take over Czechoslovakia in 1948
and Cuba ill recent years under the cloak of a Castro? Because
Castro in one of his rambling and incoherent speeches has boasted
about early Marxist views, the hindsight specialists are now saying
that this should have been recognized years ago and action taken.
Exactly what action, they do not specify except for those who advo-
cate open military intervention. But thousands of the ablest Cubans,
including political leaders, businessmen and the military, who
worked hard to put Castro in and were risking their lives and fu-
tures to do so, did not suspect that they were installing a Com-
munist regime. Today they are in exile or in jail.
Before attempting to discuss this, I propose to review the main
assets which the Kremlin can marshal for these tasks of subversion.
To simplify a complicated subject, I shall address myself solely
to the apparatus of the U.S.S.R. Communist China, it is true, has
similar aggressive purposes, but in the decade since they consoli-
dated their position on the mainland, they have had neither the
time nor the resources to develop a technique of subversion which
is today comparable to that of the Soviet Union. This is one of the
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82 The Craft of Intelligence 653
reasons for the emphasis they place on direct military action, as they
have shown in the cases of Korea,- Taiwan, India and Tibet. It may
also be one of the reasons for the policy rift between them and the
Soviet Union. The Chinese Communists feel that in their own case
they cannot now rely on the more subtle techniques of the Soviet
and would like to induce the latter to support direct military action.
So far this is a policy that Khrushthey finds too dangerous, although
he is not averse to using "nuclear blackmail" as a threat to intimi-
date other countries. In this way Soviet military power influences
the psychology of the situation, particularly in trying to soften up
_countries within easy range of its missiles and air force.
The first element of the KremEn's nonmilitary apparatus of sub-
version is the galaxy of world-wide Communist parties. Here .is
Khrushchev's boast made as late as April, 1963:
The international Communist movement has become the most in-
fluential political force of our epoch. . . . Before World War TI Communist
parties existed in 43 countries and counted in their ranks a total Of
4,200,000 menders. Today. Commniiist parties number 90 and the toM1
_number of their members exceeds 42,000,000.1
1 New York Times, April 22, 1963.
Most of these ninety parties are outside the Communist Bloc but
respond to discipline from the parent party in Moscow; in a limited
but growing number of cases they look to the Chinese Communist
-party in Peking. Khrushchev's total numbers include only those Who
are actually party members and not the large numbers who vote
the Communist ticket--when voting is permitted.
The most powerful Communist parties numerically outside the
Bloc are the parties in France, in Italy, India and Indonesia, but
numerical strength is not always the real test. For the purpose of
subversion, the element of an effective hard core of dedicated,
disciplined members may be a More important factor than actual
party membership. Wherever there is an organized Communist
party, and that means in about every important country of the
world and in many of the less important, there is generally a nucletts
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of dedicated Communists who can become an effective spearhead for
subversive action.
Unfortunately, also, the local communist parties in many coun-
tries have been able to establish themselves as the major party of
protest against the regime in power. Thus they draw to their ranks,
not necessarily as party members but as fellow travelers, on such
issues as nationalism, anticolonialism and "reform," a large number
of supporters who are really not Communists at all or who know
and care little about Marxism and all its theories. At election time
the Communist party apparatus rallies together all these people
and many others who are merely seeking a change and na?ly
believe that the Communist party represents their best or some-
times their only vehicle for effecting a change.
Representatives of the Communist parties in the Free World
regularly attend the party congresses in Moscow, of which the last,
the twenty-second, was held in 1961. Here they are received as hon-
ored guests of the Congress and often are given special briefings.
At the Twenty-first Party Congress held in 1959, the Communist
delegates from Latin-American countries were given special atten-
tion. They were gathered together as a group and given secret guid-
ance as to their methods of operation. At this particular time, to
mislead the rest of the world and particularly the United States,
they were told to play down Marxism and Communism but to build
their ranks by appealing to nationalism and using anti-American
slogans. All this was not lost on Castro. In some cases where it is
expedient, local Communist parties are even permitted to take posi-
tions which differ from the official Kremlin line, and this is done
by prearrangement with Moscow.
The tasks assigned by Moscow to Communist parties in Free
World countries, and to the other elements of the Communist ap-
paratus, are tailored to the estimated capabilities of the particular
parties or "fronts," to the "softness" of the countries where they
operate and to the general program of the Kremlin, i.e., the order
of precedence for eventual take-over set by Moscow. For example,
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in the case of the Communist party of the U.S.A., where they have
little hope of converting the country to Communism in the fore-
seeable future, the objectives assigned to the Party are relatively
,modest. They are told to stress propaganda against armaments in
general and nuclear tests in particular; against American policy in
.Latin America; against NATO and our other alliances and our
overseas bases. In England it is much the same; the "ban the bomb"
is a chosen rallying theme. In countries where Communism has
better prospects and more power, the horizon of objectives and tasks
is raised. In France and Italy, the Communist party and its allies
poll a vote which generally represents between 20 and 30 percent of
the voters and, to the dismay of many who mistakenly believed that
economic recovery alone would eliminate or at least weaken Com-
munism, the Communists gained over a million votes in the Italian
general elections of 1963. Here and in Indonesia, Japan and in
several countries of this hemisphere, as well as in Asia, the Com-
munist parties take more aggressive positions. So far, in Africa,
both north and south of the Sahara, Moscow's activities, both direct
and through the local Communist parties, have been 'miscon-
ceived and ill-concealed.
A series of Communist front organizations supplement the work
of the local parties and are used as tools for reaching specialized
objectives. For example, the Communists through the World Feder-
ation of Trade Unions and its multiple branches, control the
strongest labor organizations in many countries of the world?
France, Italy and Indonesia in particular?and are able to manipu-
late significantly the unions in japan, in many countries of this
hemisphere, and in certain countries of Africa and Southeast Asia,
where trade unions are in their infancy. In the area of labor rela-
tions, the party makes particular use of its ability to "hitchhike" on
popular local issues and to exploit them. Sometimes even where they
do not actually control a union, well-organized and activist Corn-.
munist minorities in unions can provide vocal and riotous leader-
ship for mass demonstrations, and force a hesitant majority to
engage in strikes and walk-outs,. which are not openly attributable to:
any Communist initiative. Such activity at crucial times may para-
lyze the economy of an entire country.
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Other Communist front organizations include the World Peace
Congress, various youth organizations, women's oganizations and
organizations of specific professions. These they try to surround
with a degree of respectability and to lure into membership the
unsuspecting and the gullible, particularly on their "peace" and
"ban the bomb" issues.
At various intervals the Soviets at great expense to themselves
have held "Youth Congresses," to which the youth of the world
have been invited, but only the Communist youth get their way
paid. Initially these meetings were held in areas behind the Iron
Curtain?Moscow, East Berlin and Prague?but in recent years the
Soviet managers of these affairs have become bolder. The last two
meetings were held outside the Bloc, -first in Vienna and then in
Helsinki. However, they found the climate of opinion so unfavor-
able in these capitals that they are now reconsidering whether to
repeat the experiment.
Moscow's directing hand can help to guide and manipulate all
these diverse assets of the Communist "presence" in a particular
country through the State Security Service (KGB), personnel lo-
cated in Soviet embassies and trade missions. The KGB, in addition
to its regular intelligence function, can direct the activities of the
local "apparat" set up in country X to promote a subversive pro-
gram; they can act as Moscow's paymaster for the operations of the
local party and fronts and will keep Moscow advised of progress.
Valerian Zorin, who later became Soviet Ambassador to the UN,
masterminded the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 9/18 from
within the Soviet Embassy in Prague. The Soviet Embassy in
Havana was apparently also the center from which the early phases
of the Communist infiltration of the Castro movement were di-
rected.
Wherever possible Soviet tacticians will maneuver Communists
or their sympathizers into key government positions and attempt to
penetrate the target country's military and security structure with
the idea of eventually taking them over. In the Allied Control Com-
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missions which were set up in most of the Eastern European coun-
tries at the end of World War II immediately after the Germans
had withdrawn, the Soviet contingents consisted largely of intelli-
gence personnel. While the British and American representatives,
specialists in military government and civil affairs, were trying to
create some semblance of order and liberty and to restore the public
utilities and the economy in devastated countries like Rumania and
Hungary, their Soviet "colleagues" on the control commissions were
spending all their time contacting reliable native Communists, or-
ganizing the conspiracies which were shortly to emerge as "united
fronts" dominated by Communists and laying the groundwork for
an efficient political police under KGB tutelage.
The vigor with which such tactics may be applied will depend
as a general rule upon the circumstances in the target country: the
extent of local unrest and of the local hostility to the regime in
power, the capacity of the Soviet Union or Communist China to ex-
ploit latent vulnerabilities and suborn local political leaders and,
finally, upon the strength of the Communist apparatus in the
country in question.
Operating in countries which have recently obtained their free-
dom from colonial status, the Communist movement endeavors to
present itself as the protector of the liberated peoples against their
former colonial overlords. In support of these activities, promising
young men and women from the target areas are invited to Moscow
for education and indoctrination in the expectation that they may
become the future Communist leaders in their homelands. AlsO
they bring to the Bloc for training in intelligence and subversion
individuals of a different type who on their return will help td
direct the local Communist party apparatus.
As a part of the apparat, Moscow also vigorously uses all the in-
strumentalities of its propaganda machine. In one year, the Soviets,
according to the Soviet Ministry of Culture's report, published and
circulated approximately thirty million copies of books in various
foreign languages. This literature i widely and cheaply distributed
through local bookstores, made available in reading rooms and in
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their information and so-called cultural centers, In many countries
throughout the world, they control newspapers and have penetrated
and subsidized a large number of press outlets of various kinds
which do not present themselves openly as Communist.
'With some of the most powerful transmitting stations in the
world, they beam their messages to practically every major area a(
the world. They step up (and adjust) their propaganda to the par-
ticular target areas which they consider to be the most vulnerable,
as their policy dictates. An organization known as the All Union.
Society for Cultural Relations Abroad, which poses as an inde-:
pendent organization but is strictly controlled by the Communist
party of the Soviet Union, endeavors to establish cultural ties with
foreign countries, supply Soviet films and arrange programs to be
given by Soviet artists.
Then the foreign news agency of the Soviet Union, well known as'
Tass, a state-controlled enterprise, has offices in more than thirty
major cities of the Free World. It adjusts its "news" to meet Soviet
objectives in the recipient country. All these instruments of propa-
ganda. are part and parcel of what is called the "agitprop."
- These organizations and assets teamed together are, in a sense-,
Moscow's orchestra of subversion. Many of these instruments, and
in some cases all of them, can be and are used under Moscow's care-
ful supervision to bring pressure on any country they are seeking to
subvert:, or as a background to prepare for future subversion. They
keep the orchestra playing, even to those countries like the United
States,. where the burying process, even by their estimation, is far
? removed,
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This is the machine of subversion we face today in the Cold War
which the Communists have forced upon us, and I have added a
glance at the history of the immediate past. On our part, to meet
this threat we will need to mobilize our assets and apply them
vigorously at the points of greatest. danger and in time?before a
take-over or before a new Communist regime becomes firmly in-
stalled?for history so far has indicated that once the Communist
security services and the other elements of the apparat get their grip
on a country there is no turning back. There are no more free
elections, no right of protest.
Our assets against this threat are first of all our declared foreign
policy, for which the State Department under the President has the
burden of responsibility. Second, by the defense posture we can
convince the Free World that we and our Allies are both strong
enough and ready enough to meet the Soviet military challenge,
and that we can protect, and are willing to protect, the free coun-
tries of the world, by force if need be. If the free countries feel that
we are militarily weak or unready to act, they are not likely to
stand firm against Communist subversion.
The third element is what intelligence service must help to
provide: (1) It must give our own government timely information as
to the Communist targets, that is to say, the countries which the
Communists have put high on their schedule for subversive attack.
(2) It must penetrate the vital elements of their subversive appara-
tus as it begins to attack target countries and must provide our
government with an analysis of the techniques in use and with
information on the persons being subverting or infiltrated into local
government. (3) It must, wherever possible, help to build up the
local defenses against penetration by keeping target countries aware
of the nature and extent of their peril and by assisting their internal
security service wherever this can best be done, or possibly only be
done, on a covert basis.
Many of the countries most seriously threatened do not have in-
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ternal police or security services adequate to the task of obtaining
timely warning of the peril of Communist subversion. For this they
often need help and they can only get it from a country like the
United States, which has the resources and techniques to aid them.
Many regimes in the countries whose security is threatened welcome
this help and over the years have profited greatly from it. In some
cases, especially in South America, a dictator has later taken over an
internal security service previously trained to combat Communism
and has diverted it into a kind of Gestapo to hunt down his local
political opponents.
Too often a threatened country feels that it can go it alone and
sometimes too late awakens to the danger or comes quickly under
the effective control of those who are promoting a Communist take-
over. In these situations, there is no easy answer if no resistance is
made and no call for help is sent out as the Communist apparatus
slowly crushes out freedom. Often the apparatus uses its access to
democratic processes, the ballot box and a parliamentary system, to
infiltrate with what are called "popular front" governments. Then
the mask falls away, the non-Communist participants in the coali-
tion are eliminated and a Communist dictatorship has hold of the
land and the secret police take over. Then it is too late indeed for
protective action. Czechoslovakia and Cuba are examples of this
pattern.
Wherever we can, we must help to shore up both will to resist and
confidence in the ability to resist. By now we have had a good many
years of experience in combating Communism. We know its tech-
niques, we know a good many of the actual "operators" who run
these attempts at take-over. Whenever we are given the opportunity
to help, we should assist in building up the ability of threatened
countries and do it long before the Communist penetration drives
a country to the point of no return.
Fortunately for the Free World, because of the nature of the sub-
versive activities in which the disparate Communist parties are
engaged and the large numbers of untrained personnel involved, it
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is difficult for them to maintain adequate security and secrecy. It is
revealing no state secret to state that a very large number of the
Communist parties and front organizations throughout the world
have been penetrated. Often their plans and the personnel can be
known. Dramatic information has already been published in regard
to the effective work of the FBI in its penetration and neutralization
of the Communist party of the United States and its various ap-
pendages.
Obviously it is somewhat more difficult for us to ferret out Com-
munist activities in other parts of the Free World. Often it has been
possible to achieve solid results which have prevented the Com-
munists from reaching their objectives. Many Communist plots to
subvert friendly governments have been discovered and thwarted.
Local publicity in the early stages of a planned "Putsch," pinpoint-
ing the plotters, tying them in to Moscow and Peking, has proved
effective. This has been particularly useful in dealing with the
bogus "front," "youth" and "peace" organizations of the Corn-
munists and their highly advertised meetings and congresses. Here
a free press is also a great asset.
Formidable as is the Communist subversive apparatus, it is vulner-
able to exposure and to vigorous attack. The indigenous Com-
munist parties are often torn between local, nationalistic issues and
the over-all policies of Communism. It is hard for them to shift as
fast as Moscow does. One day they must bow down to a Stalin; then
Khrushchev tells them that Stalin is a bloodstained tyrant who be-
trayed the "ideals" of the Communist Revolution. They preach
Moscow's peaceful intentions and then have to explain the brutal
crushing of the Hungarian patriots, just as earlier, in 1939, their
strong appeal as an anti-Nazi force was dissipated overnight by
Moscow's alliance with Hitler to destroy Poland, which Molotov
called the "ugly duckling" of the Versailles Treaty
As long as Khrushchev or his successors, and Mao and his, use
their subversive assets to promote "wars of liberation"?which means
to them any overt or covert action calculated to bring down a non,
Communist regime?the West should be prepared to meet the threat..
Where the tactic takes the form of open, hot or guerrilla warfare'
as in Korea, Vietnam or Malaya, the West, on its side, can provide)
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85 The Craft of Intelligence 653
assistance openly in one fashion or another. But Western intelli-
gence must play its role early in the struggle while subversive action
in preparation is still in the plotting and organizational stage. To
act, one must have the intelligence about the plot and the plotters
and have ready the technical means, overt and covert, to meet it.
Of course, all actions of this nature undertaken by intelligence in
this country must be coordinated at the level of policymaking and
any action by an intelligence service must be within the framework
of our own national objectives.
This country and our allies have a choice. We can either organize
to meet the Communist program of subversion and vigorously oppose
it as it insinuates itself into the governments and free institutions
of countries unable to meet the danger alone, or we can supinely
stand aside and say this is the affair of each imperiled country to
deal with itself. We cannot_guarantee success in every case. In Cuba,
in North Vietnam and elsewhere, there have been failures; in many
cases, many more than. is publicly realized, there have been successes,
some of major significance. But it is not wise to advertise these cases
or the resources used.
Where Communism has achieved control of the governmental ap-
paratus of a country, as it had, for a time, in Iran and Guatemala
and as it still has in Cuba and in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany,
Hungary, Poland and the, other Eastern satellites and in North
Vietnam and North Korea, should we as a country shy away from
the responsibility of continuing efforts to right the situation and to
restore freedom of choice to the people? Are we worried that the
charge be made that we too, like Khrushchev, have our own policy
of "wars of liberation"?
In answer to the second of these two questions I would point out
that this issue, one important for our survival, has been forced
upon us by Soviet action. In applying the rule of force instead of
law in international conduct, the Communists have left us little
choice except to take counteraction of some nature to meet their
aggressive moves, at least when our vital interests are involved.
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Merely to appeal to their better nature and to invoke the rules of
international law is of little use. We cannot safely stand by and
permit the Communists with their "salami" tactics, so well adver-
tised by Rakosi in Hungary, to take over the Free World slice by
slice. Furthermore, we cannot safely take the view that once the
Communists have "liberated" in Soviet style a piece of territory,
this is then beyond the reach of corrective action. It is certainly not
beyond our corrective reach in the early stages of take-over and
before the apparatus has become so firmly entrenched that only
physical, i.e., military, force could be effective.
If the people of a particular country, of their own free will, by
popular vote or referendum, should adopt a Communist form of
government, that might present a different situation. So far this just
has never happened. Neither Russia, nor mainland China adopted
Communism in this way. Certainly Poland, Hungary, Cuba and the
others did not do so.
In the conduct of foreign relations it must, of course, be recog-
nized there are limits to the power of any country. A country's en-
lightened self-interest, with all the facts taken into consideration,
must guide its actions rather than any abstract principles, sound as
they may be. No country could undertake as a matter of national
policy to guarantee freedom to all the peoples of the world under
the dictatorship of Communism or any kind of dictatorship. We
cannot go galloping around like Sir Galahad on his white charger
ridding the world of all its ills.
On the other hand, we cannot safely limit our reaction to the
Communist strategy of take-over solely to those cases where we are
invited in by a government still in power, or even to those instances
where a threatened country has exhausted its own, possibly meager
resources in the "good fight" against Communism.
We ourselves must choose, hopefully with the support of other
leading Free World countries who may be in a position to help,
keeping in mind both the interest we have in maintaining our own
national security and in working toward establishing a world at
peace under law.
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In the light of the policies already laid down by Presidents
Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy over the last decade and a half,
I do not see how we can choose otherwise than to act affirmatively as
instances of Communist aggression continue to threaten the Free
World. If so, we will need the understanding support of the people
of this country based on knowledge of what the issues are and why
we are acting.
We will also need better planning in government and better
timing for the actions we take so that we may be as sure as it is
possible to be that we are acting in good time and with adequate
resources. And we must also realize that here, both in the field of
information as to the peril and that of covert action, the intelligence
services have an important role to play, new to this generation per-
haps, but none the less vital.
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11111111111_
EAR ER
-EA
RE
16
= ARE-
S entity i a Fr Sod i t
Free peoples everywhere abhor government secrecy. There is some-
thing sinister and dangerous, they .feel, when governments "shroud"
their activities. It may be an entering wedge for the establishment
of an autocratic form of rule, a covet-41p for their mistakes.
Hence it is difficult to persuade free people that it may be in the
national interest, at times, to keep certain matters confidential, that
their freedoms may eventually be endangered by too much talk
about national defense measures and delicate diplomatic negotia-
tions. After all, what a government, or the press, tells the people, it
also automatically tells its foes, and any person who through malice
or carelessness gives away a secret may be betraying it to the Soviets
just as clearly as if he secretly handed it to them. What good does it
do to spend millions to protect ourselves against espionage if our
secrets just leak away? On balance I feel that government is one of
the worst offenders.
Our founding fathers put the guarantee of freedom of the press in
our Bill of Rights, and it became the First Amendment to the
Constitution: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the free-
doms of speech or of the press." As a result of this and other con-
stitutional safeguards, it has generally been judged that although
we have several espionage laws, we could not enact federal legisla-
tion comparable to that in effect in another great democracy, Great
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Britain. The British Official Secrets Act provides penalties for the
unauthorized disclosure of certain specified and classified informa-
tion and sanctions legal procedures which permit the guilty party
to be prosecuted without disclosing publicly classified information.
Our own situation can, I think, be improved. Out of long experience
during my years in the CIA, I have hopes that something can be
done and I propose to make certain suggestions.
Anyone working in our own intelligence organizations in this
country comes to realize that it is necessary to plan with care and
skill if he is to succeed in keeping his activities secret. In fact, in
my own experience in planning intelligence operations, I always
considered, first, how the operation could be kept secret from the
opponent and, second, how it could be kept from the press. Often
the priority is reversed. For the intelligence officer in a free society
this is one of the facts of life.
I have dwelt frequently here on the extremes to which the Soviet
Bloc goes to protect and conceal, not only military and political
secrets, but even facts pertaining to the health and welfare of the
nation. By contrast we even conduct our space experimentation and
the major part of our missile testing at Cape Canaveral before the
public and the world press.
The question is whether we can improve our security system,
consistent with the maintenance of our free way of life and a free
press, and whether, on balance, it is worthwhile to try at least to
limit our security lapses and indiscretions. I am persuaded that it is.
Basically there are three areas to be considered, first, the "give-
away," what is published with official approval; second, the "con-
trived leak," what is secretly passed out 10 the press by disgruntled
or dissatisfied government officials who dislike a particular policy
and feel that they must defend the position of their "service" against
the encroachment of a rival service or the exponents of a conflicting
policy; third, the "careless leaks." As a people we talk too much; we
like to show that we are in the know.
The recent disclosures of Pawel Monat, a Polish intelligence
officer trained by Communist experts to carry on espionage in the
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'United States, dramatize our national weaknesses. Colonel 'Monat
Was a high. official of the Polish intelligence service before he was
assigned to Washington in 1955 as Military Attache. About three
'
years later, in the spring of 1958, Monat returned to Poland, and
after a year of further intelligence Work there, and reflection on
what he had experienced in the -U.S.A.,' he decided to abandon his
work and Communism. In 1959, he sought 'asylum in the United
States through our embassy in Vienna. Here are 'some'of the things
he has to say about espionage in the United States' in h.k book'
-Spy in the U.S.:
, America is a delightful country in which to carry out espionage. As a
country it is rather ingenuous about keeping its secrets. . . . One of the
weakest links in the nation's security . . . is the yearning friendliness of
her people.... They crave public recognition....
was able to find one American after another who seemed impelled?
after a drink or two?to tell me things he might never have told ins own
I spy in the U.S., Harper & Row, 1961.
But it was obviously in published form that Monat found his
most precious sources. "Americans," he Says, "are not only .careless
and loquacious in their speech, they also give away far more than is
good for them in public print."
Then he goes on to outline what he was able to get from one
issue of Aviation Weekly, the "24th- Annual Inventory of Air
Power," which ran to 372 pages. "It would," he says, "have taken
us months of work and thousands of dollars to agents to ferret out
the facts one by one. . . . The magazine handed it all to us on a
silver platter."
- He pays tribute also to the publication Missiles and Rockets and
very particularly to what he referred to as "house organs" of the
Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, which fight "the battle of inter-
service rivalry" in print, and to the stream of manuals and reports
published by each of the services. Finally, he emphasizes the value
to the Communist intelligence effort of "Congressional hearings on
the defense budget," whidi he lists as one of his best sources.
"It must be extremely 'difficult," Monat adds, "for the U.S. mili-
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tary to try to 'defend the nation and its freedoms when the very
sinews of its defenses are being exposed, day by day, to anybody who
can read."
Douglass Cater of The Reporter magazine has frequently written
about this whole problem aml has dealt with it exhaustively and
fairly. Describing in his book, The Fourth Branch of Government,
the frustrations of both the Truman and the Eisenhower administra-
tions, he writes: "President Truman once claimed that '95% of our
secret information has been published by newspapers and slick
magazines' and argued that newsmen should withhold some informa-
tion even when it had been -made available to them by authorized
government sources."2 This I feel, is a good deal to ask of any
2 Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
newspaperman.
In a press conference held by President Eisenhower in 1955, Cater
quotes the President as saying: "For some two years and three
months I have been plagued by inexplicable undiscovered leaks in
this Government." Cater also refers to a statement by Secretary of
Defense Charles E. Wilson in which Wilson estimated that this
country was giving away military secrets to the Soviets that would be
worth hundreds of millions of dollars if we could learn the same
type from them.
The intelligence community has been well aware of this problem,
and when he was Director of CIA Bedell Smith was so disturbed by
the situation that he decided to make a test. In 1951 he enlisted the
services of a group of able and qualified academicians from one of
our large universities for some summer work. To save their time he
furnished them publications., news articles, hearings of the Congress,
government releases, monographs, speeches, all available to anyone
for the asking. He then commissioned them to determine what kind
of an estimate of U.S. military capabilities the Soviets could put
together from these unclassified sources. Their conclusions indicated
? that in a few weeks of work by a task force on this open literature
our opponents could acquire important insight into many sectors of
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our national defense. In Lief., when the findings of the university
analysts were circulated to President Truman and to other policy-
makers at the highest level, they were deemed to be so accurate that
the extra copies were ordered destroyed and the few copies that were
retained were given a high classification.
Is there any way to stop the giveaway? One large and important
sector of this problem is within the control of the government and
the Congress, that is, what the executive branch of government itself
publishes or allows to be published and the results of Congressional
hearings and investigations...
In. this field there is certainly evidence of influential Congressional
sentiment in favor of a move to curtail indiscriminate hand-outs.
On March 7, 1963, Representative George Mahon, a highly respected
member of the Congress and Chairman of the House Defense Ap-
propriations Subcommittee; in a House speech widely reported in
the press, demanded an end to what he said was "outrageous and
intolerable damage to the Government's intelligence effort.
The President, the Vice President, and the Speaker of the House should,
undertake to coordinate a course of action for the purpose of halting the
rapid erosion of our national intelligence effort. . . . Officials in Moscow,
Peking, and Havana must applaud our stupidity in announcing publicly
facts which they would gladly spend huge sums of money endeavoring to
obtain. Responsibility on our part is urgently required.3
3 Con gressio?al Record, March 7, 1963, p. 35.19.
I, of course, re-cognize that in connection with appropriations and
other legislation, particularly our defense budget, committees of the
Congress need to receive a substantial amount of classified informa-
tion from the executive. Does it necessarily follow that this must be
published in great detail? It is often the intimate and technical de-
tails that are the most valuable to the potential enemy and of little
interest to the public. I question whether, with respect to these
technical details, there is a -public "need to know."
It is also often said that Congress can't keep a secret. Past history
belies this. The Manhattan Project, through which the atomic
bomb was developed and billions of public funds spent, was a well-
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kept secret in a vital area of our national defense.
The reader may object that secrets can be kept in wartime but
not under Cold War conditions. From almost ten years of experi-
ence in dealing with the Congress, I have found in my contacts with
the subcommittees for the CIA of the Armed Services Committees
Of the House and Senate, and the Appropriations Committees of the
two houses, that secrets can be kept and the needs of our legislative
bodies met. In fact, I do not know of a single case of indiscretion that
has resulted from telling these committees the most intimate. details
Of CIA activities, and that included the secret of the U-2- plane, it
is true, of . course, that it is more difficult to preserve secrecy on
Matters which have to. go before the entire Congress and receive its
vote of approval. But it is not necessary to include intimate details
of the kind that may have to be disclosed to certain Congressional
committees by the Department of Defense in connection with its
exhaustive budget presentations.
I would conclude that if ,this.whole subject matter were discusse&
frankly and fully between the executive departments and the Con-
gress, a, method could be found for preventing the flow to hostile'
quarters of a major part of the information which the adversary ?
now obtains. There would still be a substantial trickle, to be sure,
but not the great flood of information which is now available. is
this not worth exploring?
A more difficult area is that of the press, periodicals and particu-
larly service and technical journals. I recall the days when the in-
telligence community was perfecting plans for various technical
devices to monitor Soviet missile testing and space operations. The
technical journals exerted themselves to give the American public,
and hence the Soviet Union, the details of radar screens and the like,
which for geographic reasons, to be effective, had to be placed on the ?
territory of friendly countries close to the Soviet Union. These coun-
tries were quite willing to cooperate as long as secrecy could be
preserved. This whole vital operation was threatened by public
disclosure, largely through our own technical journals, to the great
embarrassment of our friends who were cooperating and whose posi-
tion vis-a-vis the Soviets was complicate
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lotions and rumors. Except for a small number of technically
minded people, such disclosures added little to the welfare or happi-
ness or even to the knowledge of the American people. Certainly
this type of information did not fall in the "need to know" category
for the American public.
Undoubtedly it is of the greatest importance in this nuclear
missile age to keep the American people informed about our gen-
eral military position in the world in ample detail. Or course we
should have an informed public opinion, backed up with hard facts,
authoritatively presented. There has been at times too much talk
about bomber and missile gaps and the like. Personally, I am con-
vinced that at no time has our military position been inferior to
that of the Soviets. It is well that Our people should know that and
the Soviet Government, too. But _what we don't really require is
detailed information as to where every hardened ,missile site is
located, exactly how many bombers or fighters we will have or the
details of their performance.
The giveaway is generally a result of weaknesses in our over-all
governmental structure. However, both contrived and careless leaks
can be attributed to interests and acts of special groups or indi-
viduals within the government. The contrived leak, the name I give
to the spilling of information without the authority to do so, has
occurred most often in the Defense Department and at times in the
State Department. There have been cases where subordinate officers
felt that their particular service or the policy which it is promoting
was being un fairly handled by the press or even by higher officials
of government because "all" the facts were not available to the
press and public. It is, in effect, an appeal by subordinates, over the
heads of superiors, to public opinion. This occurred recently in
connection with the transfer of major responsibility in the whole
field of strategic missiles from the Army to the Air Force. At times
also, information regarding State Department policies has been
leaked by subordinates who disapproved of what was going on or by
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other agencies, generally the military, where there have been dif-
ferences from State Department policy.
Douglass Cater cited a particularly disturbing leak of a private
memorandum written by Secretary of State Rusk to Secretary of
Defense McNamara, in which Rusk allegedly proposed that even
"massive Soviet attacks on Europe should be met with conventional
weapons." The story, Cater reports, "had not been based on the
memorandum directly, only on an `interpretation' of it, supplied by
someone in the Air Force who was obviously hostile to the Secretary
of State's position." He adds that it took an estimated one thousand
man-hours of investigation before the Air Force general suspected
of leaking the Rusk memorandum story could be identified, after
which he was "exiled" to Maxwell Field, Alabama.
The careless leak, one not due to malice or plan, may be the result
of someone talking thoughtlessly out of turn, perhaps encouraged
by an astute reporter. By questioning enough people, the latter is
often able to put together the true story of highly classified de-
velopments or programs in the making. All this is hard to deal with
because reporters, who are directly or indirectly the beneficiaries of
such leaks, refuse to disclose the sources and it becomes almost
impossible to obtain conclusive evidence as to who the guilty party,
or parties, may be.
During my eleven years of service with the Central Intelligence
Agency I have attended scores of meetings at the highest level of
government where a scene like the following has been enacted. It
has been quite the same whether the administration has been Re-
publican or Democratic. A high official of government, often the
very highest, would come into a meeting brandishing a newspaper
article and saying something like this: "Who is the so-and-so who
leaked this? It was only a couple of days ago, here around this table,
that a dozen of us reached this secret decision and here it is all out
in the press for our enemy's edification. This time we must find
out who is responsible and string him to the nearest lamp post.
We can't run a government on this basis any more. This thing must
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stop. Investigate and report and this time get us some results. I
don't propose to tolerate this sort of thing in this administration
Any further."
And then the wheels start to Move. A committee on security whips
into action; the FBI may be called in if it is surmised that a viola-
tion of a statute is involved. In due course the investigation comes
op with the following results.
It is found that the particular decision of government which
leaked out was set down in a. secret or top secret memorandum of
which, initially, there were perhaps a dozen copies for distribution
to the various departments, agencies and bureaus of government
which might be involved, on a strict "need to know" basis. Several
.hundred people then had access to this memorandum, because it
was reproduced in multiple copies by department heads for the
in-
formation of their subordinates. Messages also might have been
"..Sent to officials in various parts of the world where action might bc
required. When such an investigation has been concluded, it is often
established that anywhere from five hundred to a thousand people
'might have seen the document, or heard of its content and have
talked about it to X, Y and Z. No official will ever admit a violation
of security was involved in this process, And no newspaper man or
pUblicist will ever give away a source.
After the investigation is closed the verdict is that the offense has
been committed by a person or persons unknown and undetectable.
"Somewhere in the course of this proceeding the Director of Central
. Intelligence is generally reminded that the law setting up the CIA
provides that it shall be the duty of the Director of Central Intelli-
gence to "protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthor-
ized disclosure." He is then asked what is being done to carry out
the mandate of the law.
His reply generally is that the law has given him no investigative
authority outside of his own agency and, in fact, has made it ex:-
pressly mandatory that he shall exercise no internal security func-
tions. Furthermore, this particular provision of the law, as the
history of the legislation shows, was primarily intended to place
Upon the Director of Central Intelligence responsibility to see td
the security of his own operations.
I have to admit, and do so with a mixture of regret and sadness,
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that during my years of service in the CIA I did not succeed in
making much progress in finding an acceptable and workable for-
mula for tightening up our governmental machinery or slowing
down the tempo of frustrating leaks of sensitive information of
value to a potential enemy.
I do not admit, however, that it is impossible to do anything to
improve the situation and I have felt that a frank discussion of the
problem was in order. The British through their Official Secrets Act
and other related procedures have a better system in this particular
field than do we and they are a_ country that prizes and protects the
freedom of the press as do we.
I start from the premise that nothing should be attempted which
would effect the freedom of the press. Freedom, however, does not
necessarily mean complete license where our national security is
involved and the First Amendment of the Constitution never in?
tended this.
I do not suggest that we try to deal with this phase of the prob-
lem of security through legislation, except in the tightening up of
some of our espionage laws, as I shall explain. Rather the govern-
ment should put its own house in order by an understanding be-
tween the executive and the congress and then seek the voluntary
cooperation of the press.
Here is a possible order of procedure: (1) the executive branch of
government, particularly the Departments of State and Defense and
the intelligence community, should do what they can to prevent the
unnecessary publication of information that is valuable to our ene-
mies and to deal more effectively with the leaks from. the executive
branch; (2) in conference with Congressional leaders and in agree-
ment with them, steps should be taken to restrict the publication of
sensitive hearings in the field of our national security, particularly
in the military field. After some progress has been made in (1) and
(2), there should be quiet (hopefully) discussions between selected
government officials most immediately concerned and the leaders of
the press and other news media, radio, television, technical and
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service journals, to determine to what extent there can be mutual
agreement for setting up machinery to keep the press confidentially
advised as to the matters in which secrecy is essential to our security,
particularly those pertaining to military hardware and sensitive in-
telligence operations.
Before doing this, it might well be worthwhile for the interested
members of government and of the press to take a look at what has
been accomplished in Great Britain through the D notice system,
whereby on a voluntary basis the press cooperates with the govern-
ment to prevent compromise of military secrets. In suggesting we
study this system, I recognize that there are vital differences between
the situation here and that in the British Isles, where there is such a
large centralization of press and publications in one great city,
namely, London. There is in this country no comparable center of
authority in the matter of press and publicity, and it would be
harder here to find any relatively restricted group of men in the
field of news media whose judgment would be accepted by the press
in all parts of the country. And in all fairness, I should also point
out that the cooperation of the British press with the government is
the result of the enforceability of the Official Secrets Act and is not
in all cases purely voluntary. Newspapers frequently consult the
government to be sure that material they intend to publish does not
run counter to security standards.
This system is now over fifty years old, having been set up a year
after the coming into force of the Official Secrets Act of 1911, al-
though it has no formal legal sanction.
It operates through a committee consisting of four government
representatives?the permanent heads or the War Office, the Admi-
rahy, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Aviation?and eleven
representatives of the various news media. Where there is a sensi-
tive national security matter which might well leak to the press,
the secretary convenes the committee and the facts are presented. If
all the .press members concur, the notice goes out to the press. In
urgent cases the 'secretary is authorized to issue a D notice on his
?own responsibility but with the concurrence of at least two press
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members. 11 later other press?members object to the I) notice, it may
have to be withdrawn, although this situation this never arisen since
the emergency -powers have only been exercised on the rarest oc-
casions where time was of the essence. The range of subjects covered
by D notices are military matters, the publication of which would
be prejudicial to the national interest, but the press does not insist
on a rigid interpretation of this formula. A recent report of a com-
mittee headed by Lord Radcliffe, which was reviewing British. se-
curity problems, also considered the effectiveness of the I) notice
system. It commented that "There have been cases of non-observance
. . . more often accidental than deliberate and they have never
been persisted in after the secretary has taken the .matter up With
the responsible editor." By its operation, the Radcliffe report in-
dicates, the British government has succeeded "year in and year out
in keeping out Of newspapers, radio, and television a great deal of
material . . . which needs to be concealed and which would be
useful to other powers to possess and which so far as we cati
see could not have been kept out in any other way." The Radcliffe
report, in stressing that the P notice procedure "appears to suit the
needs of both sides," added that according to the evidence before
the committee "neither side wishes to amend the present system"
and it recommended the cont. inuance of the system along the present
lines.
The point of studying this system would obviously be to see
whether any of its features could usefully be adopted in this country,
to help deal with our own security problem. I would add that this
procedure has nothing whatever to do with the case which has been,
much discussed on both sides of the Atlantic of the two British
newsmen, Daily Mail and Doily Sketch reporters, who served re-
spectively six months and three months in jail because they refused
to tell a tribunal set up by Parliament to investigate the case of
William Vassall the sources of stories they had written about him.
There was a third reporter, who escaped a jail sentence because .
his reputed source voluntarily came forward and admitted to being
the one who was the origin of the information. There is a sus-
picion that the two men who served the jail sentences would have
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had some difficulty in producing actual sources even if they were so
minded because their stories were very likely .figments of their
imaginations.
My final point in a program to improve our security posture is
that we should review and tighten up our espionage laws in certain
respects. Since 1946, on several occasions, attempts, all abortive, have
been made by the executive branch of government to amend the
Espionage Act so that prosecution would not fail merely because of
difficulties in establishing "an intent or reason to believe" that the
Information wrongly divulged or passed to a foreign government was
"to be used to the injury of the ri;nited States or to the advantage of
a foreign nation." This is hard to prove. Fortunately, the require-
ment of proof of such intent has already been eliminated in cases
involving restricted data under the Atomic Energy Act and with
regard to disclosure of classified information in the field of "com-
munications intelligence." The requirement still holds, however, in
cases where other types of secret and classified information are
divulged. Much secret information has been divulged without au-
thorization, even passed to foreign governments, Where the defense
would be made that the culprit was really trying to help our govern-
ment by helping an ally?as the Soviet Union was for a time after
1941. There are other problems of a security nature which arise
under our existing legislation when it is necessary to prove that a
case is related to "the national defense and security," as our present
espionage law requires.
Comparable British legislation is based on the theory of privilege,
that all official information belongs to the Crown and that those who
receive it officially may not lawfully divulge it without the authority
of the Crown. This theory of government privilege in such matters
seems a sound one. In our country there are many cases where the
disclosure in court of all the details of secret information wrong-
fully acquired or retained or passed on to the adversary may be con-
trary to the public interest. There are even times when prosecution
has to be abandoned rather than divulge this classified information.
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Some persons who have been guilty of serious actions affecting our
security were never prosecuted for one or more of the above reasons.
The knowledge that our government is only likely to prosecute in
the most heinous cases of espionage gives certain people the assur-
ance that they can commit minor infringements against the espion-
age laws with impunity. The knowledge has not been lost on the
Soviets.
If we drive a car in the streets with reckless abandon and inflict
injury to life or property, there is no difficulty in prosecuting; but if
our innermost secrets are handled with carelessness, there is little
that can be done about it.
One security in the world of today is a very precious thing. One
important element of it is bow we guard our vital secrets. Today
this phase of security is not being given the attention it deserves.
piEr BEARERBEARER
17 -
i Our Fr Soci tv
From time to time the charge is made that an intelligence or security
service may become a threat to our own freedoms, that the secrecy
under which such a service must necessarily operate is in itself
vaguely sinister and that its activities may be inconsistent with the
principles of a free society. There has been some sensational writing
about the CIA's supposedly supporting dictators, making national
policy On its own, and playing fast and loose with its secret funds.
Harry Howe Ransom, who has written a study on Central Intelli-
gence and National Security puts the issue this way:
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CIA is the indispensable gatherer and evaluator of world-wide facts
for the National Security Council. Yet to most persons CIA remains a
mysterious, super-secret shadow agency of government. Its invisible role,
its power and influence, and the secrecy enshrouding its structure and
operations raise important questions regarding its place in the democratic
process. One such question is: Bow shall a democracy insure that its secret
intelligence apparatus becomes neither a vehicle for conspiracy nor a sup-
pressor of the traditional liberties of democratic self-government?1
I. Harvard University Press, 1958.
It is understandable that a relatively new organization in our
government's structure like the CIA should, despite its desire for
anonymity, receive more than its share of publicity and be subject
to questioning and to attack, In writing this analysis of intelligence,
have been motivated by the desire to put intelligence in our free
society in its proper perspective. As I have already indicated, CIA
is a publicly recognized institution of government. Its duties, its
place in our governmental structure and the controls surrounding it
are set forth partly by statutes, partly by National Security Council
directives. At the same time, as in many other departments of gov-
ernment, much tbouti its work must be kept secret.
have already pointed out that in both Czarist and Soviet Russia,
in Germany, in .Japan under the war lords and in certain other
countries, security services that exercised some intelligence functions
were used to help a tyrant or a totalitarian society to suppress free-
doms at home and to carry out terrorist operations abroad.
Moreover, there have been many instances?most conspicuously
in Latin America?in which dictators have converted authentic in
tclligence services into private Gestapos for maintaining their rule.
This warped use of the intelligence apparatus and the wide
notoriety it has obtained have tended to confuse many people about
the true functions of an intelligence service in a free society.
Our government in its yery nature?and our open society in all
its instincts?under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights auto
matically outlaws intelligence organizations of the kind that have
developed in police states. Such organizations as Himmler's Gestapo
itnd Khrushchev's KGB could never take root in this country. The
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law which set up CIA specifically provides "that the Agency shall
have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-
security functions." Furthermore, it is the servant, not the maker, of
policy. All its actions must Stem from and accord with settled "na-
tional policy. It cannot act without the authority and approval of
the highest policymaking organizations of the government.
The legislation, which was adopted with bipartisan support,. also
threw other legal and practical safeguards around the work of the
CIA. But these accorded for the most part with the safeguards that
hedge any bureaucracy.
The Central Intelligence Agency is placed directly under_ the
National Security Council and is, therefore, immediately under the
President. Thus it is the Chief Executive himself who has the
responsibility for overseeing the operations of the -CIA.
The National Security Council directives are issued under the
authority of the National Security Act of 1947, which provides that,
in addition to the duties and functions specifically assigned under
law, the CIA is further empowered to
perform for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies such additional
services of common concern as the National Security Council determines
can be more efficiently accomplished centrally . . . perform such other
. functions and duties relating to intelligence affecting the national security
as the National Security Council inay from time to time direct.
It is thePresident who selects, and the Senate which confirms, the
Director and the Deputy Director of the Agency, and this choice is
no routine affair. In the fifteen years since the Agency was created,
it has had four Directors: (1) Rear Admiral Roscoe Henry Hilleo-
koetter, who had distinguished service in the Navy and in Naval
Intelligence; (2) General Walter Bedell Smith, who, in addition to
?an outstanding military career, for almost three years was American
Ambassador to the Soviet Union before he was Director and, after-
ward, Under Secretary of State: (3) the writer?and here any corn-
Anent by me would be out of place, except at least to mention a long
period of government service and many yearsin intelligence Work;
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and (4) John A. McCone, who before being named Director in 1961
had done outstanding service in both the Truman and the Eisen-
hower administrations in many itnportant government posts?as a
member of the President's Air Policy Commission, as a Deputy to
the Secretary of Defense, as Under Secretary of the Air Force, and
then as Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
The law provides that a civilian must be in the position of either
Director or Deputy Director. (While, theoretically, it is possible to
have both of these jobs in civilian hands, military men cannot fill
both positions as the law now stands. The practice over the past
decade has been to split them between a military man and a
civilian.) The last two directors, both civilians, have had highly
experienced military men for deputy directors?General Charles
Pearre Cabell during my tenure, and now Lieutenant General Mar-
shall S. Carter under John McCone.
From my own experience in the Agency, under three Presidents,
I can say with certainty that the Chief Executive takes a deep and
continuing interest in its operations. During eight of my eleven
years as deputy director and director of the CIA, I served under
President Eisenhower. I had many talks with him about the day-to-
day workings of the Agency, particularly concerning the handling
of its funds. I recall his telling me that we should set up procedures
in the Agency for the internal accounting of unvouchered funds, i.e.,
funds appropriated by Congress and expendable on the signature of
the Director, which would be even more searching, if that were
possible, than those of the General Accounting Office.
While obviously many expenditures must be kept secret as far as
the public is concerned, the CIA always stands ready to account to
the President, to the responsible appropriations subcommittees of
the Congress, and to the -Bureau of the Budget for every penny ex-
pended, whatever the purpose.
During the earlier years of the Agency, there were a series of
special investigations of its activities. I myself, as I have mentioned,
was the head of a committee of three that in 1949 reported to Presi-
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dent Truman on CIA operations. There were also studies made
:tinder the auspices of two Hoover Commissions, One in 1949 and one
in 1955. These dealt with the, organization of the executive branch
of government and included studies on our intelligence. structure.
Mie survey conducted in 1955, during my directorship, included a
'report prepared by a task Force under the leadership of .General
Mark W. Clark; at about the _same time, a ,special survey of certain
of the more secret operations of the Agency was prepared for Presi-
dent Eisenhower by a task force under General James Doolittle. It
Is interesting to note that General Clark's task force, expressing
concern over the dearth of intelligence data from behind the Iron
-Curtain, called for ''aggressive leadership, boldness and persistence.''
. We were urged to do more, not less?the U-2 was already on the
'drawing boards and was to fly within the year.
- One of die recommendations that emerged from the Hoover
Commission survey in 1955 called for establishing a permanent
Presidential civilian board, often called a watchdog committee.
This would take the place of ad hoc investigation committees from
time to time. I discussed with President Eisenhower how this could
be done. He appointed a "President's Board of Consultants on
Foreign intelligence Activities," which for some time was chaired
by the distinguished head of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology, James R. Killian, Jr. President Kennedy, shortly after he
took office, reconst ituted this Presidential committee with a slightly
modified membership and again under the chairmanship of Dr.
Killian. In April, 1963, Dr. Killian resigned and an eminent lawyer
and expert in government, Mr. Clark Clifford, succeeded him as
chairman. The files, the records, the activities, the expenditures of.
the Central Intelligence Agency are open to this Presidential corn-
inittee, which meets several times a year.
-. The other recommendation of the Hoover Commission, that a
Congressional watchdog committee should also be considered, had a
sornewhat more stormy history.
In 1953, even before the Hoover recommendations, Senator Mike,
Iansfield had introduced a bill to establish. a joint Congressional
Committee for the CIA, somewhat along the lines of the Join(
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92 The Craft of Intelligence 653
Committee on Atomic Energy. On August 25, 1953, he wrote me a
letter to inquire about CIA's relations with Congress and asked the
Agency's views on the resolution he had submitted. In my absence
abroad, General Cabell, my deputy, replied that "the ties of the
CIA with the Congress are stronger than those which exist between
any other nation's intelligence service and its legislative body."
A few years later this issue came to a vote in the Senate in the
form of a concurrent resolution sponsored by Senator Mansfield. It
ha C considerable support, as thirty-five Senators from both parties
weie co-sponsors, and the resolution had been reported out favor-
ably by the Senate Rules Committee in February of 1956, but one
vot of strong dissent came from Senator Carl Hayden, who was also
the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Cominittee. Senator
yden's viewpoint was supported by Senator Richard Russell,
ch. irman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and by Senator
Le crett Sahonstall, the senior Republican member of that com-
mi tee. In April the Senate, after a most interesting debate, voted
agi inst the watchdog committee resolution by a surprisingly large
rn jority. In opposing the resolution, Senator Russell said: "Al-
th ugh we have asked him [Allen W. Dulles] very searching ques-
tions about some activities which it almost chills the marrow of a
n to hear about, he has never failed to answer us forthrightly and
fr nkly in response to any questions we have asked him." The issue
wi s decided when this testimony was supported by former Vice
Pr .sident (then Senator) Alben Barkley, who spoke from his ex-
pe ience as a member of the National Security Council. He was
jo ncd in opposition by Senator Stuart Symington, who had intimate
ki owledge of the workings of the Agency from his days as Secretary
of the Air Force. On the final vote of 59 to 27, ten of the measure's
original co-sponsors reversed their positions and joined with the
majority to defeat the proposal. They had heard enough to persuade
them that, for the time being at least, the measure was not needed.
During the debate it was pointed out with a great deal of cm-
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phasis that procedures serving the intended end had already been
set up and had been functioning well for some years.
Any public impression that the Congress exerts no power over
C A is quite mistaken. Control of funds gives a control over the
scope of operations?how many._ people CIA can employ, how much
it can do and to some extent what it can do. Even before a Con-
g essional subcommittee sees the CIA budget, there is a review by
ti e Bureau of the Budget which must approve the amount set aside
I r CIA and this, of course, includes Presidential approval. Then
ti e budget is considered by a subcommittee of the Appropriations
( ommittee of the House, as is the case with other executive depart-
n ents and agencies. The only difference in the case of the CIA is
t sat the amount of its budget is not publicly disclosed, except to this
s sbconsmittee, which includes three members of the majority anti
t o members of the minority on the Appropriations Committee.
The chairman of the subcommittee is Clarence Cannon, and a
ore careful watchdog of the public treasury can hardly be found.
his subcommittee is entitled to see everything it wishes to see with
r gard to the CIA budget and to have as much explanation of
c penditures, past and present, as it desires.
All this was clearly brought out in a dramatic statement that
Ir. Cannon made on the floor of the House on May 10, 1960, just
.fter the failure of the 11-2 flight of Francis Gary Powers: "The
I lane was on an espionage mission authorized and supported by
oney provided under an appropriation recommended by the
louse Committee on Appropriations and passed by the Congress."
He then referred to the fact that the appropriation and the
ii ctivity had also been approved and recommended by the Bureau
I the Budget and, like all such expenditures and operations, was
under the aegis of the Chief Executive. He discussed the authority of
he subcommittee of the '1ppropriations Committee to recommend
an appropriation for such purposes and also the fact that these
activities had not been divulged to the 1-louse and to the country.
He recalled the circumstance5 during World War II when billions
of dollars were appropriated, through the Manhattan Project, for
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he atomic bomb under the same general safeguards as in the case of
he U-2, i.e., on the authority of a subcommittee of the Appropria-
tions Committee, Ile referred to the widespread espionage by the
Soviet Union, to the activities of their spies in stealing the secret of
he atomic bomb. Alluding to the surprise attack by the Communists
in Korea in 1950, he justified the U-2 operation in these words:
Each year we have admonished . the CIA that it must meet situations
of this character with effective measures. We told them, "This must not
happen again and it is up to you to see that it does not happen again"
. . . and the plan that they were following when the plane was taken is
their answer to that demand.
Mr. Cannon took occasion to commend the CIA for its action in
sending reconnaissance planes over the Soviet Union for the four
yprs preceding Powers' capture and concluded:
Wc have here demonstrated ,conclusively that free men, confronted by
the most ruthless and criminal_ despotism, can under the Constitution of
the United States protect this nation and preserve world civilization.,
I cite this merely to show the extent to which even the most secret.
of the CIA's intelligence operations have, under appropriate safe-
guards, been laid before the representatives of the people in Con-
gress.
In addition to the scrutiny of CIA activities by the Appropria-
tions Committee, there is also a subcommittee of the House Armed
Services Committee, chaired by Congressman Carl Vinson, who for
years has been head of the Armed Services Committee itself. To this
subcommittee, the Agency reports its current operations to the ex-
tent and in the detail the committee desires, dealing here not so
much with the financial aspects of operations but with all the other
elements of our work. In the Senate, there are comparable sub-
committees of the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees,
Fifteen years ago when the legislation to set up a Central
Intelli-
gence Agency was being considered, the Congressional committees
working on the matter sought my views. In addition to testifying, I
submitted a memorandum, published in the record of the proceed-
ings, in Which .1 proposed that a special advisory body for the new
Agency should be constituted to include representatives of the
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President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. This
group should, I proposed, "assume the responsibility for advising
and counseling the Director of Intelligence and assure the proper
liaison between the Agency and these two Departments and the
Executive." This procedure has been followed. All operations of an
intelligence character which involve policy considerations are sub-
ject to such approval.
Of course, the public and the press remain free to criticize the
actions taken by intelligence, including those which arc exposed by
mishap or indiscretion. This holds just as true for intelligence activi-
ties as for any government operations except where the national
security is involved. When an intelligence operation goes wrong and
publicity results, the Intelligence Agency and its Director, in par-
ticular, must stand ready to assume responsibility wherever that is
possible. There have been times, as in the case of the U-2 descent
on Soviet territory, and the Cuban affair of April, 1961, where the'
executive has publicly assumed responsibility, and for good reasons
as I have already explained.
It is an established rule not only that the Agency should keep out
of policy matters but that its personnel should keep out of politics:
No one in the Agency, from the Director on down, may engage in
any political activities of any nature, except to vote. A resignation is
immediately accepted?or dema-nded?where this occut's and the po-
litical aspirant is given to undo-stand that quick re-employment, in
case of any unsuccessful plunge into the political arena, is unlikely:
In the last analysis, however, the most important safeguards lie
in the character and self-discipline of the leadership of the intelli-
gence service and of the people who work for it?on the kind of men
and women we have on the job, their integrity and their respect for
the democratic processes and their sense of duty and devotion in
carrying out their important and delicate tasks.
After ten years of service, I can testify that I have never known a
group of men and women more devoted! to the defense of our,
Country and its way of life than whose who are Working in the-
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Central Intelligence Agency. Our people do not go into intelligence
for financial reward or because the service can give them, in return
for their work, high rank or public acclaim. They are there because
of the opportunity to serve their country, the fascination of the
work and the belief that through this service they personally can
make a contribution to our nation's security.
It is not our intelligence organization which threatens our liber-
ties. The danger is rather that \tie will not be adequately informed of
the perils which face us. If we have more Cubas, if non-Communist
countries which are today in jeopardy are further weakened, then
we could well be isolated and our liberties, too, could be threatened.
The military threat. in the nuclear missile age is well understood,
and we are rightly spending billions to counter it. We must similarly
deal with the invisible war, Khruslichev's wars of liberation, the
subversive threats orchestrated by the Soviet Communist party with
all its ramifications and fronts, supported by espionage. The last
thing we can afford to do today is to put our intelligence in chains.
Its protective and informative role is indispensable in an era of
unique and continuing danger.
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