TINKER WITH GADGETS, TAILOR THE FACTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201170014-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 14
• Publication Date: April 1, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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HARPERS
April, 1985
TINKER WITH GADGETS
TAILORTHE FACTS
The spy as techno-bureaucrat
By Andrew Cockburn
Among the books discussed in this essay:
The United States Intelligence Community, by Jeffrey Richelson. 384 pages. Ballinger Publishing. $39.95.
The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency, by James Bamford. 465 pages. Houghton Mifflin.
$16.95.
Secret Contenders: The Myth of Cold War Counterintelligence, by Melvin Beck. 158 pages. Sheridan Square
Publications. $14.95.
Warriors of the Night: Spies, Soldiers and American Intelligence, by Ernest Volkman. 443 pages. William Morrow.
$17.95. %
M16: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909-1945, by Nigel West. 266 pages. Random House. $16.95.
Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War 11, by
Waldyslaw Kozaczuk. 368 pages. University Publications of America. $24.
British Intelligence in the Second World War, edited by F. H. Hinsley. 3 vols., 2,120 pages. Cambridge University
Press. $126.50.
Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA, by Ralph W. McGehee. 250 pages. Sheridan Square Publications.
$14.95.
One of the problems of
secret intelligence these days may be that it has
only half gone public. Consider last fall's cu-
rious episode of the shipload of MIG fighter
planes that wasn't. Briefly, a Soviet cargo ship
freighted with MIGs packed in crates was wide-
ly reported, in the form of high-level leaks from
the Pentagon and the State Department, to be
nearing the coast of Nicaragua. How had this
alarming situation been discovered? U.S. "in-
telligence analysts" poring over satellite photo-
graphs had detected crates, of a type previously
used for transporting MIGs, piled on the dock
in the Black Sea port of Nikolayev near where
the aforementioned cargo ship had been
moored. Clouds over the port prevented the an-
alysts from actually watching the crates being
loaded onto the ship. But when the weather
cleared, both crates and ship were gone. Ergo,
the MIGs were on the ship.
By the time this process of reasoning and de-
Andrew Cockburn is the author of The Threat: Inside
the Soviet Military Machine. He is writing a book on
intelligence analysis.
duction had been carefully explained in the
newspapers and on television the American pub-
lic knew a lot about the significance of packing
crates and clouds-and a lot about circumstan-
tial evidence. Yet curiously, the Reagan Admin-
istration and the intelligence agencies failed to
take the matter to its logical conclusion. Hav-
ing gone so far, why did they not throw the
whole intelligence-gathering process open to
the public? The evening news could have dis-
played not only the original satellite. pictures of
the crates at dockside but also the relevant
pages of the "P. I. Key" (photo interpretation
key), a standard tool for this kind of analysis. It
is a catalogue of illustrations showing what a
crated MIG or an intercontinental missile or
whatever is likely to look like in a satellite pho-
tograph. Viewers could have been treated to a
briefing on the relative effect on a ship's water-
line of a cargo of planes, helicopters, or trac-
tors. Perhaps anchormen could have told those
interested where to mail away for defense atta-
che reports and significant articles in the Soviet
or Nicaraguan press, the perusal of which would
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have allowed do-it-yourselfers to conduct their
own analysis. Since most people are endowed
with the normal human ability to make things
up, they are as well equipped as any intelligence
officer to invent the necessary facts and thus
provide the Administration with what it wants.
As a matter of fact, the format for this kind of
exercise in participatory democracy is already
well established. The nightly intelligence round-
up could segue directly from the weather report:
"...however that cold front moving down
from Canada that you can see on our satellite
picture may make for
a chilly weekend.
You can also see on
the satellite picture a
rather impressive
buildup of Soviet ar-
mor near the West
German border. A
sample selection of
decrypted radio traf-
fic on the Warsaw
Pact command-and-
control channels in-
dicates that this is
no ordinary exer-
cise. So the outlook
for Saturday and
Sunday is an 85 per-
cent chance of war.
Now back to Chuck
and Bob."
Considering the
very, very large sums
of money currently
being expended by
the Administration
on various U.S. in-
telligence activities
(realistic guesses
hover around the
$20 billion a year
mark), allowing the
ublic to participate
p
in the process might be an easy way of giving it
some value for its tax dollars. While the exact
sum is likely to remain secret (it is entirely pos-
sible that no one, in or out of government,
knows precisely how much is involved), the
sheer size of the machine that has to he fed indi-
cates that the amount is huge. It is not, after
all, just a question of the Central Intelligence
I Agency. The "community," as it cozily terms
itself, also includes the National Security
Agency; the National Reconnaissance Office;
the Defense Mapping Agency; the Air Force,
Navy, Army, and Marine intelligence organiza-
tions; the State Department's Intelligence and
Research Bureau; the FBI; the intelligence divi-
sions of the Departments of Commerce, Agricul-
ture, and the Treasury; the Drug Enforcement
Administration; and the Federal Research Divi-
sion of the Library of Congress.
Jeffrey Richelson, a professional student of
intelligence organizations, makes a practice of
correlating information from public sources,
such as Aviation Week & Space gy, deducing therefrom conclusions that the au-
thorities would prefer to keep secret. The United
States Intelligence Community, a painstaking and
fascinating portrait, details complexity past cal-
culation. For exam-
ple, those working
for the Defense Me-
teorological Satellite
Program, which falls
within the purlieus of
the First Space Wing
of the Air Force
Space Command,
spend much of their
time telling the Na-
tional Reconnais-
sanceOfice (NRO),
which operates all
U.S. Photo satel-
lites, when places of
interest like Moscow
or Odessa are ob-
scured by clouds and
thus not worth the at-
tentions of the NRO's
space-borne cam-
eras. Meanwhile, the
First Space Wing's
Space Defense Oper-
ations Center, better
known as SPADOC,
includes among its
responsibilities the
monitoring of en-
emy satellite activi-
ties. This monitor-
ing is done so that
SPADOC might better issue fast and accurate
SATRANs (Satellite Reconnaissance Advance
Notices), warnings to those who have some-
thing to hide that a Soviet satellite is due over-
head. Elsewhere in the community's acronym
galaxy the FOSICs (Fleet Ocean Surveillance
Information Centers) of the U.S. Navy gather
information from satellites, ships, land stations,
aircraft, and underwater sensors in order to pro-
duce CASPERs (Contact Area Summary Posi-
tion Reports) on shipping around the world;
when FOSICs aren't busy with CASPERs,
there remain to he done DEPLOCs (Daily Esti-
mated Position Locators) on ships both at sea
and in port.
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Satellites not only take ordinary photo-
graphs. They also take infrared pictures, which
depict objects by means of the heat they emit.
Infrared pictures can easily be taken at night.
Information can also be gathered after dark by
using "image intensification," which works
much the same way a night scope does on a
sniper's rifle. Moreover, it is possible to "see"
objects on the ground by using radar. All this
being so, it may seem strange that simple every-
day clouds were able to prevent Our Side from
seeing what happened to those crates on the
dockside. The problem is that infrared cameras
can see through clouds only slightly better than
the human eye. One might think that radar sat-
ellites are the answer. Unfortunately, pictures
taken through clouds by radar are hopelessly
fuzzy. Without getting too technical, the
shorter the wavelength of the radar used to
scan a target territory, the better the pictures.
But radar can see through clouds only if the
wavelength employed is substantially bigger
than a raindrop-which results in a picture too
fuzzy to be useful.
While a great deal of intelligence gathering
involves looking at things, even more effort is
devoted to listening to things (people, mostly).
Thus we have SIGINT satellites for picking up
signals intelligence, which may consist of the
godless Bolsheviki communicating with each
other (COMINT) or else simply emitting elec-
tronic signals of one kind or another (ELINT).
ELINT shelters under its wing a whole brood of
subcategories, including RADINT, monitoring
enemy radars, and-this is a hard one to guess
at-FISINT, which stands for Foreign Instru-
mentation Signals Intelligence and means pick-
ing up statements uttered by other
people's machines.
Back on the ground, the National Security
Agency, which is responsible for SIGINT, feels
it incumbent upon itself to intercept all tele-
phone calls transmitted on microwave radio cir-
cuits, which means practically all international
calls. Happily, the agency has so far failed to de-
velop a computer that can follow normal hu-
man speech in a reliable fashion, so it continues
to rely on plain old-fashioned human operatives
to listen to tapes of your telephone calls in the
hopes of picking up indicators of subversion or
espionage like "Lenin" or "Ed Meese." James
Bamford, in The Puzzle Palace, makes the agen-
cy sound so unpleasantly nosy that it has been
nice to observe the frightful tizzy into which its
officials were thrown by his book. Admiral Bob-
by Inman, NSA director during the period of
Bamford's researches, actually wrote to accuse
him of "holding the NSA [annual budget: $10
billion plus] hostage," and when Bamford went
on Larry King's radio call-in show in Washing-
ton, the agency went so far as to tape and tran-
scribe the entire program.
Using the NSA's resources to listen in on a
late-night talk show is hardly more futile than
the kind of operations recalled by Melvin Beck
in his splendid little memoir, Secret Contenders.
There was the time, for example, when the
CIA station chief in Mexico City succeeded in
bugging the apartment of the top KGB opera-
tive in all of Mexico (who of course operated
under diplomatic cover from the Soviet Embas-
sy). How many pages of convoluted musings
might such a counterintelligence triumph pro-
vide John le Carre? But reality proved more
prosaic, according to Beck:
What was the grade, value or level of the intelli-
gence we collected? I blush to put the question
now, because at the time it hadn't occurred to me
to raise it.... We had an exact tally on the love
life of the Colonel, toilet training Soviet style,
shopping lists and supermarket prices, husband-
wife spats and all the trivia of folksy apartment liv-
ing. When the Colonel and his wife had visitors,
there was reams of small talk to plough through.
But the secrets of running the KGB intelligence ef-
fort in Mexico remained locked up in the head of
the Colonel.
As should be clear by now, machines play a
dominant role in the collection of intelligence.
The NSA counts its computers by the acre and
burns forty tons of classified waste paper a week
(unlike the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which
shredded its secret documents as the mob beat on
the doors; the resulting confetti has been recon-
structed into, so far, thirty volumes detailing
the bureaucratic operations of the "nest of
spies"). The National Reconnaissance Office
produces more photographs than anyone could
ever look at. The human/machine interface, as
one might say in this sort of context, breaks
down in other ways as well. Ernest Volkman, in
Warriors of the Night, a lively tour d'horizon of
U.S. intelligence, tells the story of a handbag-
sized electronic listening device planted by CIA
agents in a forest near Moscow. The bug was ca-
pable of picking up Soviet microwave transmis-
sions and broadcasting them to an orbiting
satellite. The device was concealed in a fake
pine tree stump. This stump was then deposited
by the apparently arboreally ignorant agents in
a grove of aspens-which sadly (for the CIA)
excited the suspicious attention of Muscovite
tree fanciers out for a walk in the woods.
Whether doomed to such SNAFUs or not, a
system that relies on machines of ever greater
complexity is bound to engender grim pyramids
of bureaucracy. Richelson chronicles the luxur-
iant proliferation of interagency committees
like COMIREX (Committee on Imagery Re-
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quirements and Exploitation), which was born
of COMOR (Committee on Overhead Recon-
naissance) and which adjudicates on the thorny
question of which among the different agencies
gets to use satellites when and for what purpose.
The organizational complexity of the intelli-
gence community is so dense these days that
fledgling CIA analysts spend much of their early
careers being taught how to navigate the maze of
agencies and committees, or, to put it
another way, how to be bureaucrats.
Vastly expensive, dominated by machines
that demand the services of armies of managers
and accountants, geared, as Melvin Beck aptly
observes, to conducting "operations for oper-
ations' sake," modem intelligence has come to
resemble modem medicine. It is hard to say
exactly how this came about, but it probably
began on the very day the Truman Administra-
tion decided to institutionalize and fund a huge
peacetime intelligence organization on the alto-
gether spurious grounds that it was vital to U.S.
security. The fact that the United States had
become the dominant world power was certain-
ly no justification for the move. Despite an as-
siduously maintained myth to the contrary,
Britain got along quite nicely without an intel-
ligence community for most of the time it was
Top Nation. As Nigel West informs us in M 16,
his study of British intelligence in the years be-
fore World War 11, the British Secret Service
was not created until 1909, or long after the
empire had been established and secured. But
back to the medical analogy: the medical-indus-
trial complex-promotes itself by giving away ar-
tificial hearts while infant mortality rates in the
ghettos continue to be high; the intelligence-
industrial complex advertises its surveillance
satellites as being able to read license plates
from outer space, but has to learn about the
death of Yuri Andropov from the Moscow cor-
respondent of the Washington Post. In both
areas of 'endeavor the ends, be they a healthy
populace or well-informed policymakers, exist
only to justify the costly and bureaucrat-inten-
sive means.
It is therefore a huge relief to read about the
dawn of machine intelligence and be brought
back to a simpler era. In Enigma, Waldyslaw
Kozaczuk tells the story of the tiny group of Pol-
ish mathematicians who broke Enigma, the
machine for enciphering communications that
was developed by the Germans before and dur-
ing World War II. Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Ro-
zycki, and Henryk Zygalski were recruited to
work on codes and ciphers by the Polish.Gener-
al Staff because they were exceptionally bril-
liant mathematicians. Not only did they
discover a method for reading Enigma (at a time
when British cryptanalysts had given up the
task as hopeless); they also devised what
amounted to a primitive computer, which
helped with some of the necessary calculations.
(They christened their machine "the bombe"
after a particularly delicious chocolate pudding
they happened to be consuming in a Warsaw
restaurant when they had theed idea.)
intelli-
gence codebreakers supplied perfect
gence about the disposition of the German in-
vaders to the Polish high command-and to
absolutely no effect. They then escaped via Ru-
mania to France. After the fall of France in June
1940, they embarked on one of the most extra-
ordinary operations in the history of intelli-
gence gathering. The Polish codebreakers,
together with a group of exiled Spanish Repub-
lican cryptanalysts, were put to work by the Re-
sistance in a lonely chateau dubbed CADIX
near Nimes. There they calmly intercepted and
deciphered the secret messages of the German
forces.
Naturally, they could not litter the country-
side with large antennae for intercepting radio
transmissions. So Colonel Gustave Bertrand, a
French intelligence officer and the Poles' pro-
tector, arranged for tNe collaborationist Vichy
government's listening posts to intercept Ger-
man transmissions and pass them onto the cha-
teau. In addition, the Poles strung aerials from
the chateau's roof.
Thus equipped, they were able to pick up
high-level German communications from as far
to the east as Russia and from Rommel's forces
in distant Libya. As the estimable Colonel Ber-
trand later pointed out, the success of the oper-
ation demonstrated that "even with limited
resources, given a team of determined people,
in this field one can attain such goals as one
wishes to set oneself"-a statement which
would certainly sound foreign to the denizens of
today's intelligence palaces sprawled around
Washington, D.C.
The cryptological cottage industry went out
of business when the Germans occupied Vichy
France in November 1942. The Poles fled just
ahead of the Wehrmacht and made their way,
via an internment in a Spanish jail, to England.
But when they finally arrived there, in July
1943, no one wanted to be reminded that these
nondescript refugees had originally provided
the key to the otherwise impenetrable German
ciphers. Just before the war broke out in 1939,
the Polish government had given the secret of
the bombe to the British. It was Poland's contri-
bution to the alliance, passed on in the hope of
winning favor with more powerful partners.
The British radio intelligence operation had by
1943 become a big business centered on Bletch-
ley Park, outside London, where thousands of
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men and women decrypted and translated Ger-
man signals. Vital to the effort were hundreds
of bombes, although the female naval personnel
who tended them had no idea from where the
name had come. The month before the Poles
landed, the panjandrums of Bletchley Park had
seen off a high-ranking U.S. military intelli-
gence delegation, which had been tremendous-
ly impressed by what it was given to believe was
an exclusively British achievement.
Bletchley Park, with its access to the German
machine ciphers, was vital to the British war ef-
fort. Its information
gathering was of
course crucial in
fighting the Ger-
mans. But it was also
a major contribution
to the alliance with
the Americans-
one that could he set
against the undeni-
able fact that by
1943 the United
States was supplying
most of the men,
weapons, and mon-
ey for the War With
Germany. Thus the
role of the Poles in
making Bletchley
Park possible was
something better
not discussed. This
is made mournfully
clear in the dense
volumes of the offi-
cial history of British
intelligence in World
War I l edited by F. H.
Hinsley (himself an
alumnus of Bletchley
Park). Hinsley is de-
cidedly sniffy about
the Poles' contribu-
tion to the breaking of Enigma, suggesting that
their help was purely marginal: "the British
bombe was of quite different design from the
Polish and much more powerful."
The Poles were consigned to an intelligence
unit attached to the Polish exile army, and were
not allowed to work on Enigma. After the war,
Rejewski returned to Poland and lived in rea-
sonably comfortable obscurity until he died in
1980. Rozycki died during the war, while Zy-
galski stayed in England and worked as a lectur-
er at Battersea College until his death in 1980.
They had been victims of the fact that, since
intelligence imparts the power to define reality
for other people, states will guard their right to
exclusive possession of that power very jealously
indeed.
Despite his relative reticence on the subject
of the Poles, Hinsley offers a great deal of fasci-
nating material about the operation of the first
industrial-scale machine intelligence system-a
system which, like its bloated successors in the
United States today, depended on the enemy's
use of machines on which its own machines
could eavesdrop. Volume 3, for example, re-
counts the instructive story of what happened
to British intelligence gathering on the German
antihomber defenses
once the Germans
stopped using radar
to detect the Brit-
ish bombers. Radar,
which is essentially
a radio transmitter
that waits for an
echo of its signal off
a target, can be lo-
cated and identified.
By the end of 1943,
however, the Ger-
mans were tracking
the British bombers'
simply by listening
for all the electronic
noise coming from
the planes' own
navigational and de-
fensive radars. Since
the British had
nothing to listen in
on-you can't listen
for a radio receiv-
er-they had no idea
how the Germans
were shorting their
bomber squadrons
out of the night
skies. The British
were naturally reluc-
tant to accept that
all their elaborate antiradar devices were not
only useless but actively dangerous, since they
acted as beacons to attract the Germans.
Ernest Volkman touches on the same phe-
nomenon when he discusses the less than com-
prehensive intelligence on the Iran-Iraq war
being garnered by the United States. He reports
in his book that the Iranians have been foiling
the best efforts of American electronic espio-
nage by sending sensitive military communi-
cations by hand. The United States faces simi-
lar problems in El Salvador, where the guerrillas
no longer transmit much useful information by
radio.
The many and obvious failings of sophisti-
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cared machine intelligence systems are bound
to generate nostalgia for the certitudes of old-
fashioned spying. Volkman makes this his bot-
tom line, concluding his book with a good deal
of harrumphing about the need for HUMINT,
that is, Human Intelligence. There would seem
to be good sense in this, especially when one
contemplates the ever expanding technofanta-
sies of the community's bureaucrats. The trou-
ble is that HUMINT has just as great a
potential for SNAFUs-albeit less costly ones
-as the various technical means of gathering
intelligence.
Moreover, developing the sort of spies who
will tell you something interesting-or merely
recruiting ones who are not in fact working for
the other side-is easier urged than done. In
Deadly Deceits, Ralph W. McGehee recounts
how thousands of CIA man-years went into re-
cruiting one Chinese Communist official, all
with total lack of success. It may be that the
CIA has been slightly more successful at re-
cruiting spies in the Soviet Union in recent
years, but Oleg Penkovsky, by common agree-
ment the most useful agent the CIA ever pos-
sessed, was repeatedly rejected when he first
offered his services and got in only on the strong
recommendation of the more perspicacious (or
hard-up) British.
And yet this thought lingers: perhaps the
community has no desire to find good spies-or
even to monitor fine-tuned machines. The
plain truth of the matter is that HUMINT and
COMINT and ELINT and all the rest are really
only elaborate covers for the most important
source of all. IMAGININT. Though the role of
"creativity" may be carefully obscured by the
agencies, information about its operation does
occasionally leak out. In September 1982, for
example, the House Intelligence Committee
published a report on U.S. intelligence activi-
ties in Central America. The report discusses a
"major intelligence briefing based primarily on
an analysis of sensitive intelligence" that was
delivered to the committee in March 1982.
One of the forty-seven "viewgraphs" contained
in the briefing, titled "Guerrilla Financing
(Non-Arms)," suggested that the Salvadoran
guerrillas were receiving money in addition to
weapons, showing a total of some $17 million
annually. The report explains how the "$17
million" figure was arrived at:
This resulted from an extrapolation which, as out-
lined by the briefer, seemed particularly tenuous.
It was based on a single piece of evidence indicat-
ing the monthly budget Ifor the Salvadoran guer-
rilla) commander on one front. The extrapolation
would have required that figure to be representa-
tive of the budgets of the other four factions, and
all five factions to be equally active on each of the
five fronts.
In a question for the record, the Committee
asked about these assumptions. In its response, the
intelligence community said it was unable to com-
ment on whether the original monthly figure was
representative, and instead explained that the bot-
tom line of $17 million which appeared on the
briefing slide was "not an estimate" but was in-
tended only to indicate that "relatively large sums
of currency" were going to the guerrillas.
Experienced observers can spot traces of
IMAGININT all through the official news
these days, especially the news on Central
America. Former CIA analyst David MacMi-
chael has revealed that IMAGININT is the
only source of intelligence on what President
Reagan has decreed to be the "flood of arms"
from Nicaragua to El Salvador. John Horton,
the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for Lat-
in America, resigned last year after being called
on the carpet for his dereliction in not consult-
ing IMAGININT while working on an impor-
tant paper. The lack of IMAGININT input
made it impossible for him to realize that Mexi-
co was then on the verge of revolution.
All this is not to say that intelligence agen-
cies behave in this manner as a result of an im-
mutable law of nature. In the wise words of
Colonel Bertrand, "A team of determined peo-
ple"-preferably small-can actually make the
truth official. This was indeed the case with sec-
tions of U.S. intelligence during World War II.
But such determined teams are hard to find
these days.
It has long been a truism of intelligence anal-
ysis that the information jigsaw can be put to-
gether only by using all sources. Estimates of the
movements of the Soviet leadership, for exam-
ple, can be based both on a supersecret program
to intercept their car-telephone conversations
and on their appearances in Pravda. It is also a
truism, or at least it should be, that the most
inspirational source for an intelligence agency
these days is the one that tells it which way the
political wind blows. Which brings us back to
our weatherman. ^
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