SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST IN THE WORLD'S SCRAMBLE FOR SECRETS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100070083-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2011
• Sequence Number: 83
• Publication Date: December 5, 1975
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT.
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Henry L. Stimson, a fa-
mous US Secretary of
State, did not like spy-
ing. Well before World
War Two he closed
down the "Black
Chamber", America's
centre for breaking
the codes used by
other nations, making
the now-classic re-
mark: "Gentlemen, do
not read each other's
mail." One conse-
quence was Pearl Har-
hour, no co-ordinating
Survival of the fittest
in the world's
scramble for secrets
agency existed to correlate the many. separate
reports that presaged the Japanese attack.
Stimson was not as bright as the fifth century
Chinese sage, Sun Tzu who said: "The reason the
enlightened Prince and the Wise General con-
q uer the enemy whenever they move is that they
have prior knowledge of his plans."
Chairman Mao believes that even today: he
as a highly complex intelligence service, under
-ne Keng Biao, known as CELD, acronym for
Central External Liaison Department. Mao
knows that no country can do without spies. They
ire indeed wanted men - by their own countries,
Mid by their enemies.
But spies and their organisations are going
hrough a tough time. Those that used to co-
'perate now mostly distrust each other.
inerica's CIA is under a three-fold investigation
by a "blue ribbon" presidential commission and
,v Senate and House committees - and is having
o disclose painful secrets. In consequence Brit-
,in's SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, and its
indred, competitors D16 (espionage) and Dl5
counter-espionage), are reluctant to confide in
lie Americans at the vast CIA headquarters,
which cost almost R500 million and which hou-
_s 900) workers, at Langley, Fairfax County,
irginia, a R5 taxi-trip from the White House.
Similarly, neither the British nor the Ameri-
ans now trust the French Service de Documen-
ition Exterieure et Contre Espionage, or
DECE.
Over the past 15 years few espionage organisa-
ons have suffered so many damaging. scandals.
hrtil 1970, the SDECE recruited ex-convictsand
embers of the underworld as agents, valuing
lawn above brains. This inevitably led to mis-
aps.
In 1965 its agents were implicated in the
,~assination of a prominent Moroccan politi-
iain. Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the early leaders
the liberation movement. In the aftermath of
to murder, General Paul Jacquier was dis-
zissed. At the trial, sections of the French
:overnment, police, SDECE agents and mem-
?rs of the Paris underworld were implicated.
cneral Oufkir, four French gangsters and a
?oroccan secret agent were condemned in
'rentia to life imprisonment. An ironic sequel
that in 1972 Oufkir was shot after master-
i riding an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate
orocco's King Hassan during a garden party
in Rabat. .
The SDECE agents and the underworld
figures mentioned in the Ben Barka trial had
one thing in common: they were all members
of the Union Corse, an organisation that
originated centuries ago in the parched hills of
Corsica but is today centred in Marseilles, with
tentacles stretching far into the Parisian un-
derworld.
The Union Corse has immense political in-
fluence, stemming from the Corsicans' strong
ties with the French Underground during
World War Two. After the war many of the
more ruthless assassins among its 15 clanswere
recruited as SDECE agents, with a licence to
kill.
The late General De Gaulle issued a direc-
tive to his security services to consider the Uni-
ted States a potential enemy like Russia. This
caused the SDECE to divert men and re-
sources from Soviet to American targets,
which naturally played into the hands of pro-
Russian elements in the French secret service:
most subsequent operations against the Soviet
bloc were unsuccessful. For many years the
CIA studiously avoided intelligence co-
operation with the French because they
believed the SDECE was packed with double
agents. This assumption was strengthened by
an SDECE agent, Thyraud de Vosjoli, who
went over to the Americans and told the CIA
that a senior French official was a Russian spy..
His story was treated with reserve, but the CIA
Tools of the trade
Among substances recently shown to have
been developed for use by "security
organisations" are processed shellfish toxin
and cobra venom. An inventory made pub-
lic in the US last September included:
BZ: Blocks the transfer of impulses in the
nervous system, resulting in paralysis.
CARBACHOL: Causes faintness, diar-
rheoa and nausea.
CINCHONINE: An anti-malarial drug; an
overdose can result in cardiac arrest.
COLCHICINE: Paralyses muscles, lead-
ing to asphyxiation.
CYANIDE L-PILLS: Carried by agents in
-
knew that Russia's
KGB possessed in-
criminating evidence
about seven French
intelligence agents
based on their war-
time connections
with the Nazis -
material supplied to
Moscow by the
French Communist
Party from docu-
ments seized at the
end of the war. Other
Western countries
lose a lot through dis-
trust of the French, for they have documenta.
tion of extra-ordinary thoroughness.
West Germany's secret service, the BND
(Bundesnachrichtendienst) and counterintel-
ligence service, BFV, employ about 6000 peo-
ple plus an unknown number of clandestine
agents and spend about R50 million a year in
their operation out of their headquarters at
Pullach, near Munich.
In 1970, shortly after General Gerhard Wes-
sel had taken over from the famous General
Gehlen, the BND went through similar
agonies to those the CIA is now experiencing
over allegations of spying on fellow
Americans. The BND had been spying on
journalists and industrialists considered to be
"political enemies."
On the other side of the Berlin Wall, in
Normannenstrasse, Minister of State Security
Erich Mielke is wanted in West Germany fora
murder back in the Thirties. His secret ser-
vice, the SSD with operational head
Lieut-General Markus Wolf, has a network of
16 areas and 220 district offices n East Ger-
many, and reputedly has a staff of 15 000. Yet,
it probably does not match the evil of the Nazi
Party's own Sd and Third Reich's Gestapo, the
Ge h e i m est aat sp of itze i.
Further east, at No 2 Dzershinsky Street in
Moscow, close to the Kremlin, is the head-
quarters of Yuri Andropov (71), chairman of
the Committee for State Security - another of
those innocuous titles the international spy or-
World War II; blocks the absorption of
oxygen by the body's cells, resulting in an
agonising death by asphyxiation.
DESMETHOXY RESERPINE: Reduces
blood pressure; chronic use leads to severe
mental depression.
DEHYDROACETIC ACID: Impairs
kidney function and causes vomiting and
convulsions.
NEUROKININ: Produces severe pain.
SALMONELLA: Causes intestinal inflam-
mation and dysentery.
STRYCHNINE: Kills by causing convul-
sions and failure of the nervous system.
2-4 PYROLO: Causes amnesia.
M-246: Produces paralysis.
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Cover Story
ganisations favour as "cover".
The committee is Komitet Gasudarstvennoi
Bezopasnosti, or KGB for short. This is the
latest acronym in a sinister series dating back
to Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina, Peter the
Great's Special Office of the Czar and Lenin's
Cheka. After Lenin's time came the simple-
sounding General Political Administration,
which was the OGPU or GPU of lurid
memory, followed by Lavrento Beria's NKDV
in 1934 and the KGB in 1954.
Soviet spy chiefs have included Ivan Setov,
Alexander Shelepin, Vladimir Semichastny -
no one laughed at the name - and now Andro-
poy, another name without mirth.
Andropov was a Communist Youth leader
in his twenties and ambassador to Hungary
during the 1956 uprising. As he was also the
KGB boss in Hungary, he helped to settle that
little-rness for Moscow.
Andropov's HQ building is split in two. Half
is the admin office with a vast documentation
centre that is a blackmailer's paradise. For 50
years the secret police have been building up
dockets compiled on data from agents work-
ing at home and abroad and from members of
communist parties in more than 50 countries.
This mass of personal information was once
described by an Australian Royal Commis-
sion on espionage as "a farrago of fact, falsity
and filth".
The other half of Andropov's building is
used for the infamous Lubianka prison, where
Stalin had thousands of his opponents tor-
tured and eliminated. Andropov is said to have
a headquarters staff of 3 000 and about 323 000
employees in all, with a budget of rather more
KGB chief YuriAndropov - said to have a bud-
get of more than R 1000 million or 100 times
SA's entire defence quota
than RI 000 million a year, or 100 times South
Africa's entire defence quota. Opponents es-
timate that he has about 20000 operative and
"illegals" abroad, 16000 in West Germany
alone;' and that, like the CIA, he maintains
about 60 "stations" in foreign countries. (Bri-
tain and France, it is believed, maintain about
30 secret service stations in other countries.)
Russia has another security set-up - the
Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the
Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Army
General Staff, or GRU. Apparently KGB and
GRU are as much rivals in the USSR as the
IF
twin security agencies in the US, the UK and
France.
Britain got into the war and spy business
long before most other countries. After the
Danes had overrun his country Alfred the
Great organised a concert party of innocent
troubadors and mountebanks, with himself as
star, and entertained the invaders in their
strongholds until they were privy to all the in-
vaders' plans. The old Firm still goes strong,
but it too has had its scandals like the
Americans, the French and the Germans.
There is now a mysterious Co-ordinator of
Intelligence, Sir Peter Wilkinson, in Harold
Wilson's Cabinet Office, to sort out the squab-
bles between SIS, D15 and D16 and the
Special Branch. There is also a Director-
General of Intelligence, since 1973 Sir Louis
Le Bailly.
The head of DI 5 - people still think of it as
MI5 -. is Sir Martin Furnival Jones, who is
responsible for counter-espionage in British
territories. For a long time this master spy-
catcher, originally a lawyer, was faceless: he
appeared in the Honours list in 1957 as
"E.M.F. Jones, attached to the War Office".
Nobody has yet publicised the identity of the
head of D16, which is "responsible forgather-
ing covert intelligence and mounting sub-
versive activities in non-British territories". It
is rather like the CIA's "Office of Policy Co-
ordination", the innocent name for the so-
called "Black Side" that carried out
clandestine operations such as overthrowing
the Communist Chilean government and plan-
ing assassinations.
The Secret Intelligence Service, very much
CIA ex-chief William Colby - whose former or-
ganisation is going through a tough time as its
secrets are revealed
an Old School Tie organisation, is closely link-
ed with British embassies abroad and main-
tains a gentlemanly feud with DI 6.'Its chief for
the past two years has been Maurice Oldfield.
He succeeded Sir John Rennie, who afteronly
a few months'tenure of his hush-hush office re-
signed after he had burst into dreadful
notoriety when his son was exposed as aheroin
pusher. Young Rennie had been trapped by
wily agents of China's CELD.
The British secret service agencies do not
have to disclose their budget nor the number of
their employees to Parliament and are ans-
werable only to the Prime Minister. Thus they
are happier than the presently miserable CIA,
with its total of 16000 employees. The CIA
might even be compelled some day to disclose
whether it spends R650 million slr RI 750 mil-
lion a year - the range of current guestimates.
Its boss, Director William E. Colby, a Prince-
ton graduate who spent his career on the
clandestine side, was sacked last month'by
President Gerald Ford, and is now out in the
cold. His former CIA chief, James Schles-
singer, has also been fired as Secretaryof State
for Defence.
The military DIA (Defence Intelligence
Agency) which was created in 1961 and has al-
ways aimed at taking over the civilian CIA,
born 1947, is breathing down the neck of the
CIA's new chief, George Bush.
The American public and politicians have
brought about the compulsory undressing of
the CIA. Like Henry Stimson, they have an
aversion to foreign involvement and to spying.
They are. showing all the signs of disapproving
of the clandestine "Dark Side" and of plots to
assassinate "unsuitable" foreign politicians.
So they are well on their way to debagging
and emasculating the secret service man who
used to be only faceless. Cloak-and-dagger
people an ineffectual without dagger or cloak.
Indeed, the blunting of the CIA's dagger
may be the reason the Soviets plus their KGB
have got into Angola first. And therein lies
much concern for South Africa.
South Africa and some of the countries
friendly with it swop officially accepted profes-
sional "spies" - accredited military attaches.
Abroad, the Republic has stationed senior of-
ficers as armed-forces attaches at eight of its 24
embassies. These are in London, Washington,
Paris, Lisbon, Rome, Buenos Aires, Canberra
and, perhaps surprisingly, Malawi. A military
adviser is also attached to the accredited diplo-
matic representative in Rhodesia. Some of
these officers are also accredited to the capitals
of other countries conveniently close to their
bases.
Seventeen foreign embassies-function in
Pretoria. Defence, army, naval and air at-
taches are on the staffs at five of them - the
British, American, French, Portuguese and
Argentine embassies; and Rhodesia's ac-
credited diplomatic representative in Pretoria
maintains army and air "counsellors".
The United States and the United Kingdom
have heavyweight teams, with senior officers
representing each of their services. The British
naval, military and air attaches may become
political footballs: Labour's Left-wing re-
cently demanded that they be withdrawn and
that the armed-forces attache at South Africa
House in Trafalgar Square should be
disaccredited.
The American attaches in Pretoria are
acknowledged. Any CIA operatives who may
be in South Africa are not:
The military men sent abroad in their coun-
tries' interests are overt and respectable,
known to and entertained by Defence Minis-
5 DECEMBER 1975TOTHE POINT
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Cover Story
Public Relations cannot come up with an ans- jail, of the Afrikaans poet and painter Breyten
wer. But in reality if also means that there may Breytenbach. Living in Paris in self-imposed
be no publication, without clearance, of exile with his Vietnamese wife, Breytenbach
reports of battle casualties or details of new returned to South Africa under an assumed
equipment- particularly important purchases, name with plans for an underground organisa-
of aircraft or tanks, say, from friendly foreign Lion named Okhela, or Atlas, to overthrow the
powers, particularly France and Italy, who white government and replace it with a black
might be embarrassed internationally. This is one.
the prime reason, not a vain hope of secrecy, Geldenhuys, a former assistant to Van den
for not publicising accretions to the Repub- Bergh, is tipped as the next Commissioner of
lie's armed strength. In fact, if South Africa is Police. That would mean only a short move
buying submarines or jets from France, every from one floor to another in police head-
intelligence service in the world, on'both sides quarters in the Wachthuis building in Pretoria.
of the Iron Curtain, knows it almost im- Nearby, Poynton Centre's eighteenth floor
mediately. 1, accommodates the Defence Force's Direc-
. Nevertheless South Africa, like every other torate-General of Military Intelligence, whose
sophisticated country, tries to make it difficult task it is to acquire and process information,
for foreign agents to get too complete a pic- and the Directorate of Counter-intelligence,
ture of its military state. Prime Minister John whose task it is to deny information to the
Vorster has laid overall responsibility for the "enemy" and others. These groups are head-
nation's safety on the lofty shoulders of ed by the Chief of Staff Intelligence, Lieut-
General Hendrik van den Bergh, who as his General Hein de V. du Toit - the only, general
personal adviser ranks as secretary for sec officer h
u
Ge/denhuys: caught Russian spy Log/nov
- w osc photograph is not available for
rity intelligence. He carries more weight than publication.
ters, Service chiefs, diplomats and dignitaries. lea
-OSL net ministers. "Lang ns heavily ily on his deputy nlthe Bureau for direct personal authoriitty from Vorser has an
They are invited to watch and study military State Security, Hans Brummer, whose highly overriding role of co-ordination. This is a con-
exercises, manoeuvres and displays of wea- responsible role carries no police or para- sequence of a mortifying lack of co-operation
pons and equipment. All the information they military rank. The bureau is based in Concil- some years ago between the.then Director of
gather, plus their evaluations and opinions, is lium House, Pretoria, but its police-trained Military Intelligence, a brigadier, and the
flown home in the untouchable diplomatic agents operate in many countreis, often in Security Police, then headed by Van den
bags. Attaches do not rely only on their own close if tacit association with their security Bergh. The Defence Force intelligence chief
eyes and ears. They have unacknowledged agencies. sclose
were agents who could be termed spies but, like The bureau is strictly an intelligence-glean- mdid aking in Paris 'while'the'police o ntheir own
commercial travellers who prefer to be known ing operation. It does not function as a law- were making investigations in Cape Town into.
as representatives, are usually dignified by the enforcement agency and, like the CIA in certain student activities,
name of operatives or agents. America and D 15 in Britain, has no powers of The upshot was that it took far longer than it
Assembling military intelligence is not arrest or subpoena. It advises, and refers these might have done for the police to lay their
usually the difficult, dangerous and dramatic functions to, the Security Police branch of the hands on the army's suspects. "Lang Hendrik"
business novelists make it out to be. Most of it SAP under Major-General Mike Geldenhuys demanded, and got, the power to ensure that
depends on intelligence in the other sense of (50). Van den Bergh, however, did personally such a muddle could not occur again - at least
the world: the commonsense collection, colla- arrest the most notorious Red agent caught in not if he could help it.
tion and interpretation of facts fairly easily South Africa, Yuri Loginov-but left it to Gel- Van den Bergh, Geldenhuys and even Du
ascertainable. Uncensored newspapers, maga- denhuys to produce the Russian, like a rabbit Toit are not so much concerned with
lines, newsreels, radio, TV and other pub- from a hat, as an exhibit for the Press. sophisticated military spiesaswith potential in-
lished material - even telephone directories - The Special Branch has been consistently filtrators, agitators and saboteurs, some of
provide masses of data. A Johannesburg jour- successful in rounding up agitators and plot- them South African-born and living here,
nalist some years ago wrote an article headed ters. Its latest, and quite theatrical, success was others political exiles indoctrinated and
"How To Be A Spy in One Easy Lesson". He the detection, arrest and subsequent convic- trained in Russia, China
pointed out that the locations of many arm
Algeria Ta
li
i
i
h
,
y
nzan
on w
a
t
a sente ltkf
,,,nceas wee o nine years in and hostile areas elsewhere.
and air force units all over the country were
pinpointed in directori
F
es
or example th C/A h
.,eeadquarters: 9000 workers at Langley, Virginia
Pretoria directory in the Governm
t
en
(Defence-Air Force) section when listing No I
Fighter Squadron said: "See Pietersburg". The
Defence Force entries are no longer as speci-
1'ic and detailed as they were.
Not much military data in South Africa is
really top secret. Defence Minister Piet Botha
and the Newspaper Press Union have reached
it fairly workable agreement on self-censor-
,;hip and consultation on matters that might be
?,ensitive. In practice, when it seems possible
that the Defence Act or the Official Secrets
\ct might be breached, the accredited military
: orrespondent of a major publication may
.:onsult the Minister or the Chief of the De-
'ence Force, at any hour,' if their Director of
OTHE POINT5 DECEMBER 1975 9
IF
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