THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP84-00161R000100170005-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 42
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 30, 2002
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: April 1, 1963
• Content Type: BOOK

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.THE CRAFT
OF
INTELLIGENCE,
by Allen W. Dulles
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 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
Allen W. Dulles
FEw BOOKS have been so long awaited as Allen Dulles' The
Craft of Intelligence.
Since the renowned international lawyer, diplomat and
authority on intelligence resigned as Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency in 1961, editors and publishers have be-
sieged his Washington home urging him to write this book.
Britannica's Book of the Year was the fortunate winner in this
free-for-all... -
The Craft 'of Intelligence is the work.of-the one man in the
world probably best qualified to write, this story of cloak-and-
dagger?'andless romantic dperatiohs iirthe international area of
espionage",counterespionage, propagaudaarid Itiridred activities.
Member of a distinguished family which included three
secretaries of state, the last of these his late brother, John
Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles has traveled widely. His first job
after graduation from Princeton was in the educational field in
India.
Then came the U.S. diplomatic service, the peace delegation
in Paris after World War I with Pres. Woodrow Wilson, other
international conferences and in the mid-1920s entrance into
the private practice of law with the famed firm of Sullivan and
Cromwell.
World War II interrupted his legal career. He was immedi-
ately tapped for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and spent
most of the war years, until the end of 1945, in Switzerland as the
top OSS operational officer on the continent.
After a few years of private law practice he returned to in-
telligence with the CIA in 1951 and after two years as deputy
director served as director of the agency for almost nine years.
In keeping with security practices, he made few public utter-
ances during this period.
Now he adds to three earlier books this authoritative study
of intelligence. Nothing quite like it, nothing so authoritative
and comprehensive, has before been published.
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THE CRAFT
OP
INTELLIGENCE
By ALLEN W. DULLES
1. INTELLIGENCE
In our time the United States is being challenged by a hostile
group of nations that profess a philosophy of life and of govern-
ment inimical to our own. This in itself is not a new develop-
ment; 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 ac-
complished 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 prepared
in a largely open fashion, while our antagonists have built up a
formidable 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.
Another change is that we have had to assume the responsi-
bility of leadership for the countries of the Free World. Ac-
companying this responsibility is a burden of unprecedented
dimensions placed upon both our policies and our measures for
military preparedness. As a result, our intelligence services have
had to equip themselves for an expanding range of problems
unlike any they have ever faced before.
This report concerns itself with how our intelligence services
have been developing and what they must be equipped to do in
this age of peril.
In the past, in wartime, our military commanders have had
military intelligence services available to them. Nevertheless, dur-
ing World War I we still found ourselves inadequately prepared
for our intelligence responsibilities, despite the high degree of
competence and devotion of a small group of able army and navy
intelligence officers. 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. The origin of this
agency was a summons by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
William J. Donovan in 1941 to come down to Washington and
work on this problem. The result was an organization known as
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Colonel (later Major General) Donovan is generally regarded
as the father of modern U.S. intelligence. Ile was eminently
qualified for the job. A distinguished lawyer, a veteran of World
War I with the distinction of having won the Medal of Honor, he
had divided his busy life in peacetime between the law, govern-
COMES OF AGE
ment service and politics, He knew the world, having traveled
widely. Ile 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. It was just after Pearl Harbor that I
was recruited by General Donovan, who had been a close friend
of mine for many years. I served with him until the end of the
war in 1945.
For a short time after V-J 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 in-
telligence operations. 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 repudiated 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.
Communists Overplayed Hand
If the Communists had not overreached themselves, our gov-
ernment 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 ex-
pected 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 during 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 gracefully
from Europe and 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
Hungary, 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. Meanwhile Mao had been consolidating his position on
the mainland of China. These blows in different parts of the
world aroused our leaders to the need for a world-wide intelli-
gence system. We were, without fully realizing it, witnessing the
first stages of a master plan to shatter the societies of Europe
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App
United Press International
William J. Donovan (left) visiting
a military school in Sofia, Bulgaria,
In Feb. 1941 in his capacity as per-
sonal representative of Pres. Frank-
lin U. Roosevelt. At right, Gen.
Nihoff, head of the school
and Asia and isolate the United States, and eventually to take
over the entire world,
In his address to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Tru-
man declared that the security of the country was threatened by
Communist actions and stated that it would be our policy
to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their
national integrity 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
conditions, a series of measures were taken by the government
to transform our words into action. One of the earliest was the
reorganization 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
bipartisan 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 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
various interim intelligence units which had functioned under
the aegis of the State and War departments in the period 1945-47.
1 have spent more than ten years with the Central Intelligence
Agency, eight as its director. During World War II I served
Allen Dulles, retiring after eight years as director of the CIA, received the Na-
tional Security medal from Pres. John F. Kennedy, who went to Langley, Va.,
Nov. 2S, 1961, to open the new CIA headquarters building
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A meeting of the U.S. Intelligence board, a group of military and civilian advisers to the CIA, with Allen Dulles
with the OSS, and even earlier, during my years in the diplo-
matic service (1916-26), I was often engaged in the gathering
of intelligence. Since returning to private life in 1961, I have
felt strongly that someone-even though he be a deeply-
concerned advocate-should tell what properly can be told about
intelligence as a vital element in the structure of government.
Probably intelligence is the least understood and the most mis-
represented of the professions. Many books and articles, thrillers
that are more fictional than factual, have been written over re-
cent years about "spy" work. From them the general reader must
have drawn some strange conclusions as to the real purposes and
activities of our intelligence service.
When, on November 28, 1961, President Kennedy came out to
inaugurate the new CIA headquarters building and to say good-
by to me as director, he expressed one reason why this misunder-
standing exists: "Your successes are unheralded, your failures
are trumpeted." For obviously one cannot tell of operations that
go along well. Those that go badly generally speak for them-
selves. The President then added a word of encouragement to
the several 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
support for our intelligence work in this country if only the in-
siders, a few people within the executive and legislative branches,
know anything whatever about the CIA, and all others continue
to draw their knowledge from the so-called inside stories by writ-
ers who have never been on the inside.
There are, of course, sound reasons for not divulging any intel-
ligence 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. A discussion of this reveals no secrets. What
must not be disclosed, and will not be disclosed here, is where
and how and when the precise means of the tradecraft are being
or will be employed in particular operations.
The CIA is not an underground organization. One need only
read the law to get a general idea of what it is set up to do. A
guiding principle of mine when I was Director of Central In-
telligence was always to keep secret, by every human means, only
those activities which should be secret, and not to make a mystery
out of what is a matter of common knowledge or is obvious to
friend and foe alike.
Futile Secrecy
Shortly after I became director I was presented with a good
illustration of the futility of certain kinds of secrecy. Dr. Milton
Eisenhower, brother of the President, had an appointment to see
me on some matter of mutual interest relating to the field of
education. The President volunteered to drop him off at my office.
They started out, I gather, without forewarning to the Secret
Service and were unable to find the CIA headquarters until a
telephone call had been put through for precise directions. This
led me to investigate the reasons for a secrecy surrounding my
location that was quite futile-the agency was, after all, listed
in the telephone book with its proper number and address, and
many cab drivers in Washington knew its location. But the gate
outside our headquarters bore only the sign "Government Print-
ing Office," which in fact had a shop on the premises. I learned
that the sightseeing buses going around Washington were mak-
ing it a practice to stop outside our front gate. The guide would
harangue the sightseers to the effect that behind the barbed
wire before them was the most secret, the most concealed place
in Washington-the headquarters of the U.S. spy organization,
the Central Intelligence Agency.
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As soon as I had a proper sign placed outside our headquar- and Defense departments, although of great value, is not enough.
ters, the glamour and mystery disappeared. We were no longer Then, in addition to getting the information, there is also the
either sinister or mysterious to visitors to the capital-we became question of how it should he processed and analyzed. I feel that
just another government office. there are good reasons for placing the main burden of responsi-
When we try to make a mystery out of everything relating to bility for preparation and co-ordination of our intelligence analy-
intelligence, we tend to scatter those efforts and energies which ses upon a centralized agency of government that has no respon-
should properly be directed toward maintaining the secrecy and sibility for policy. Quite naturally policy makers tend to become
security of operations where they are essential to success. Each wedded to the policy for which they are responsible, and State
situation has to be considered according to the facts, keeping in and Defense employees are no exception to this very human tend-
mind the principle of withholding from a potential enemy all use- ency. They are likely to view with a jaundiced eye intelligence re-
ful information about secret intelligence operations or personnel ports that might include elements casting doubt upon the wisdom
engaged in them. The injunction that George Washington wrote of existing policy decisions. The most serious occupational hazard
to Colonel Elias Dayton on July 26, 1777, is still applicable to we have in the intelligence field, the one that causes more mis-
many intelligence operations today: takes than any foreign deception or intrigue, is prejudice. I grant
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, Suc-
cess depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it,
they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising
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 "hard-
ware" and weaponry, and that we often fail to make the vital dis-
tinction between the type of things that should be secret and
those which, by their very nature, are not and cannot be kept
secret. Also, there are times when our press is overzealous in seek-
ing "scoops" with regard to future diplomatic, political and mili-
tary moves. We have learned the importance of secrecy in time of
war, although even then there have been serious indiscretions at
times. But it is well to recognize that in the "Cold War" our ad-
versary takes every advantage of what we divulge openly or make
publicly available.
To be sure, in our form of government, given the attitude of
the public and the press, it is impossible to erect a wall around
the whole business, nor do I suggest that this be done. Neither
Congress nor the executive branch intended this when the law of
1947 was passed. Furthermore, certain information must be
given out if public confidence in the intelligence mission is to be
strengthened and if the profession of the intelligence officer is
to be properly appreciated.
Most important of all, it is necessary that both those on the
inside-the workers in intelligence-and the public should come
to share in the conviction that intelligence operations can help
mightily to protect the nation.
that we are all creatures of prejudice, but by entrusting intelli-
gence co-ordination to our central intelligence service, which is
excluded from policy making, we can avoid, to the greatest pos-
sible extent, the bending of facts obtained through intelligence to
suit a particular point of view.
At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack many high officials
here and abroad were convinced that the Japanese, if they initi-
ated hostilities in the Pacific, would strike southward against the
"soft underbelly" of the British, French and Dutch colonial
areas. The likelihood that they would make the initial attack
directly upon their most dangerous antagonist, the United States,
was discounted. The Pearl Harbor attack was a classic instance
in which intelligence evaluation was not handled objectively. It
undoubtedly influenced later decisions concerning the organiza-
tion of our intelligence service.
Broad Range of Problems
Furthermore, both the State and Defense departments these
days have a vast range of absorbing problems to deal with-in
forming policy, planning for a wide variety of contingencies, and
implementing their policies in action. To burden them also with
the major responsibility for gathering and evaluating intelligence
would tend to subordinate that function to their other roles and
reduce the importance of the task an intelligence service must
perform.
That task is to provide the makers of our foreign policy-
primarily the President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary
of Defense, but including others in government strictly on a
"need-to-know" basis-with information on what is going on and
what are the likely future developments in the world about us.
Any information from any source that bears on the security of
the United States lies within the scope of the intelligence service.
Of course, particular emphasis is placed on information about
Does the United States need a central intelligence service? the countries whose policies are hostile to us, namely the Com-
This question has often been asked me. The inquirer then goes munist bloc. We must know as much as possible about their
on to point out that the Departments of State and Defense have power and their plans, about the types of military "hardware"
their own intelligence resources. Officers of the U.S. Foreign they are developing, particularly the missiles, nuclear bombs, air-
Service and various military attaches do collect information and craft and the other elements of their offensive strength which
these two departments have their intelligence experts who an- they could bring to bear upon us and our allies.
alyze incoming data. In general these people are well qualified and If anyone has any doubt about the importance of obtaining ob-
do a good job. Are not their accomplishments sufficient to our jective intelligence, I would suggest that he merely study the
needs? mistakes political leaders have made in the past because they
The answer given to this question in our time by both the were badly advised or because they misjudged the facts and
executive and legislative branches of government has been in the therefore the attitudes of other countries. When Kaiser Wil-
negative; Congress passed the legislation establishing the Central helm II ordered the invasion of France by way of Belgium in
Intelligence Agency and the President signed the bill. No effort 1914, he had been persuaded by his military leaders that the
has been made to repeal this legislation, for the character of violation of Belgian neutrality was essential to military success.
the Communist threat has made it necessary, even crucial, to But he relied too heavily on the judgment of these same military
our survival. The Soviet Union, Communist China and the en- men, who were reasonably sure, on military grounds, that Eng-
tire Communist bloc surround all their activities, both of a mili- land would not enter the war on behalf of the Belgians. The
Lary nature and of the sort we term subversive, with a wall of Kaiser had received ample warning from the political side and
secrecy and security. Tie int hence co f t t ure to appraise the available
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examples. Disregarding Churchill's warnings and various intelli-
gence sources, the British failed to comprehend both the inten-
tions and the growing military capabilities of Nazi Germany.
They especially underestimated Germany's striking power
through the air. Hitler likewise made a series of miscalculations.
After France had fallen and most of the Continent was in German
hands, he discounted the strength and determination of Britain
to hold out much longer and opened a second front against Rus-
sia in June 1941. Also, when he was advised of the plan for a U.S.-
British landing in North Africa in 1942, he reportedly refused
to pay attention to the available intelligence. I have been told
that he remarked casually, "They don't have the ships to do it."
In our own case, the warnings the United States received prior
to Pearl Harbor may not have been clear enough to permit the
President and his military advisers to pinpoint the attack on
Hawaii and the Philippines; but, had they been adequately
analyzed, they would have alerted us to the imminent danger of
sudden attack somewhere in the Pacific. As for Japan, success-
ful as was the Pearl Harbor attack, its government proved later
to have made the greatest miscalculation of all when it under-
estimated United States military potential.
Today's intelligence service finds itself in the situation of hav-
ing to maintain a constant watch in every part of the world, no
matter what may at the moment be occupying the main at-
tention of diplomats and military men. Our vital interests are
subject to attack in almost every quarter of the globe at any
time.
Unpredictable Involvements
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 (how many of us
even knew the latter existed?), or that Cuba would have be...
come 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 forew,irn 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 significance. Distance has lost much of its old
significance, while time, in strategic terms, is counted in hours
or even minutes. The oceans, which even in World War II pro-
tected this country and allowed it ample time to prepare for
eventual participation, are still where they have always been.
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 main 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 re-
sponsibility, 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 fore-
warned and forearmed. The situation becomes all the more com-
plicated 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. Obviously, then, the very nature of the intelligence
service has changed radically in the past two decades.
T~?~r t ,{IJ"6a n by the U.S.S.R.
~1Tc3~ifa~fis'E Karee llcrit testimony to this change.
Great areas of both countries are officially scaled off from foreign
eyes. The information that these countries release about their
military establishment is carefully controlled and patently mis-
leading, and yet accurate knowledge is needed for our defense and
for defense of the Free World. The Soviet Union has so far re-
fused to permit the inspection and control that are essential for
nuclear and conventional arms limitations. The Communist na-
tions brazenly assert that this secrecy is a great military asset
and an element of basic policy. As in Cuba, they arm in secret in
order to be able to attack in secret, as they did in Korea. In
1.955 the U.S.S.R. refused the "open skies" proposal of President
Eisenhower, which we were prepared to have applied to our
country on the same terns as to their own. It is the task of the
U.S. intelligence service to right the uneven balance of essential
knowledge about military capabilities and their preparation; to
do so it has no other choice than to break through the Com-
munists' shield of secrecy.
United States as Leader
The United States has been forced by the course of events,
particularly by the aggressive tactics of the Soviet Union, to
assume a role of leadership in the Free World. Not only da we
have formal allies. but there are many other friendly nations
who share our view of the Communist threat. Our partners in the
Free World are making a real contribution to the West's total
strength, and this includes contributions in matters of intelligence
that help keep the Free World forewarned. However, some of
our friends lack the resources to develop an effective intelligence
organization, and they look to the United States to play a major
role in this field and to advise them if we uncover hostile plans
against them. It is in our interest to do so. One of the most grati-
fying features of my work has been the co-operation established
between the U.S. intelligence service and its counterparts
throughout the world who make common cause with us in un-
covering aggressive moves of the Communists.
There is another side of the coin in intelligence work, known
most commonly as counterintelligence, devoted to warding off
the vigorous onslaught of espionage emanating largely from Com-
munist nations and aimed at penetrating our most important se-
crets in the fields of national defense and foreign policy.
Red Espionage Formidable
In the Soviet Union, we are faced with an antagonist who has
raised the art of espionage to an unprecedented height, while
developing the collateral techniques of subversion, deception and
penetration into a formidable political instrument of attack.
No other country has ever before attempted espionage on such
a scale. These operations have gone on in times of the so-called
thaw with the same vigour as in times of acute crisis. We have
the task of ferreting out and "neutralizing" hostile agents and
hostile activities that present a common danger to us and to our
allies and friends, and we also must keep our allies and friends
alerted.
The fact that so many Soviet spy cases have been uncovered
recently in several NATO countries is not due to mere chance. It
is well that the world should know what the Soviets know already,
namely, that the free countries of the world have been developing
increasingly sophisticated counterintelligence organizations and
have become more and more effective over the years in uncover-
ing Soviet espionage. Naturally, in all of our formal alliances we
have a direct interest in the internal security arrangements of
countries that may share some of our military secrets. If a NATO
document is filched from one of our NATO allies, it is just as
harmful to us as if it had been stolen from our own files. Herein
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lies one of the pressing reasons for co-operation in counterintelli- soever. It is, however, response le or the security investigation
1 't f if own in-
s
gence work.
No matter how much accurate intelligence it collects or how
efficient is its counterintelligence capability, an intelligence serv-
ice is not fulfilling its purpose unless it can serve a third and
extremely important function. This consists of analyzing the
intelligence and reaching judgments or estimates on the basis of
all information, both overt and secret, available on any subject
of importance to the national security. In the United States this
process is generally referred to as the production of national
estimates, in which all the various U.S. intelligence groups par-
ticipate under the leadership of the Director of Central Intelli-
gence.
The President Always Reachable
There is one aspect of intelligence work that may seem rather
mechanical, but nevertheless presents some very real and practi-
cal problems. This is the matter of getting intelligence to its
"consumers" in a manner that will ensure prompt and thorough
consideration of its implications for policy. At the present time
the responsibilities for this procedure have been clearly fixed. I
believe this is one of the major improvements realized through
the CIA.
Arrangements have been 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 officers. Experience over the years has proved that
this system really works. I don't recall a single instance, during
my service as director of the CIA, when I failed to reach the
President in a matter of minutes with any item of intelligence
Lfelt was of immediate importance. Today, it is a rare occasion
indeed when an important policy decision pertaining to foreign
affairs is made without an intelligence estimate first having been
submitted covering the essential considerations involved.
These are the things an intelligence service in a free society
should do, but there are others it should not do that are equally
important to understand. First, as has already been implied, an
intelligence service should have a clear understanding of its re-
lation to policy decisions. It should not consider itself a policy-
making organization, despite the fact that an intelligence estimate
and the conclusions in it may, and often do, have considerable in-
fluence on what policy is finally adopted. This proper function
of intelligence has given rise to the mistaken charge that intelli-
gence is meddling in policy. If the intelligence officer proposes
policy or colours his conclusions in order to influence policy de-
cisions he is acting improperly. Everything in the present
mechanism of intelligence reporting and the preparation of esti-
mates guards against this happening.
We Have No Secret Police
of its own employees and for the physica securr y o
stallations. The spheres of operation of the Central Intelligence
Agency on the one hand and of the Federal Bureau of Investi-
gation on the other are quite distinct. Naturally, there must al-
ways be close co-operation between the two organizations, par-
ticularly in the matter of sharing information pertaining to
Communist espionage, for such information is acquired both at
home and abroad.
Once having clearly in mind the chief functions of intelligence
services in the Free World, one is able to look at the details-the
day-to-day operations of the service-in the proper perspective.
But first one should have at least a brief view of the role intelli-
gence has played in history.
III. INTELLIGENCE IN ITS
HISTORICAL SETTING
The history of intelligence activities is probably as old as the
rivalries between sovereign nations or communities. So long as
there is a need to protect vital interests and to promote the
power and welfare of a state or ruler, there is also a need for
intelligence. Thus the first instances of its use may be drawn
from the earliest recorded events.
Indeed it even has its place in mythology. The god Apollo
became enamoured of Cassandra, daughter of Priam of Troy, and
bestowed on her the ability to see into the future. With this gift,
her intelligence activities were worth more than those of any num-
her of conventional spies, and she turned in accurate "estimates"
of the consequences of abducting Helen to Troy and of accepting
the "Greek gift" of the Trojan horse. But Apollo, after he had
been rebuffed by Cassandra, added the proviso that her proph-
ecies should not be believed. Hence her intelligence forecasts
were disregarded. The result was the fall of Troy. While not all
intelligence officers have suffered the same fate as Cassandra,
it is a commonplace of history that intelligence is all too often
disregarded or not even solicited.
Moses Sent Forth Spies
The Bible contains accounts of several intelligence operations,
one of the earliest of which appears in chapter 13 of Numbers.
While Moses was in the wilderness with the Children of Israel,
he was directed by the Lord to send a ruler of each of the 12
tribes "to spy out the land of Canaan," which had been desig-
nated as their home. Moses gave them instructions to "see the
land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether
they he strong or weak, few or many." And "so they went up,
and searched the land." They spent 40 days on their mission and
returned hearing grapes and pomegranates and figs as well as
the report, "surely it floweth with milk and honey, and this is the
fruit of it." But 10 of the 12 members of the mission (Joshua
and Caleb dissenting) submitted that the military outlook was
bleak, that the Canaanites were "men of a great stature" and "the
cities ... walled and very great." This report so discouraged the
Israelites that they "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."
This particular intelligence mission had been doomed from
the start, and was obviously simply a means to test the faith of
the Israelites. Instead of a few technicians, an unwieldy number
of political leaders had been dispatched to do the job. Here was an
obvious case of allowing policy makers to impose their prejudices
upon the intelligence picture. But after the 40 years had expired
a more successful operation took place when Joshua sent out two
There is another rule which an intelligence service in a free
society should follow scrupulously: it should never become in-
volved in domestic security matters. In totalitarian systems the
intelligence function is often combined with internal security
operations, which include the liquidation of so-called "enemies of
the state" at home or abroad. Such was the case with Himmler's
Gestapo, the secret police in Japan under the militarists, and the
Russian security services under the tsars as well as during the
Communist regime. This warped use of the intelligence apparatus
and the wide notoriety it has obtained has tended to confuse
many people about the true functions of an intelligence service in
a free society. Moreover, there have been many instances-
most conspicuously in Latin America-in which dictators have
converted authentic intelligence services into private gestapos for
maintaining their rule.
" and they lnthis~N &V 6Po e e1i 2~~ ~11 a Ah~ 4ell to 1~s -0016 R'0001y60170005Iwere received in Jericho in the
 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
house of Rahab the ha sne v622 for d ee i e for this kind
I cf ljtl. p,/1 8? ~`~I' d'
instance on record of what is now called in the mtel igence tra e o~ servo Ion, ut t ey a so 0prove ed a s from which to
a "safe house." Rahab concealed the spies and got them safely establish regular networks of espionage. By the sixteenth century,
out of the city with their intelligence. The Israelites conquered most European governments were following the example of the
Jericho "and utterly destroyed it and its people except that Italian city-states.
Rahab and her family were saved." Thus was established the Because map making was an almost unknown art in earlier
tradition that those who help the intelligence process should be times, an important item of intelligence was information on local
rewarded. geography. Knowledge of a river ford might allow an army to
Throughout ancient history, from Cyrus the Great to Alexan- escape encirclement; discovery of a mountain path could show
der the Great to the Roman Caesars, the effective use of intelli- the way past a strong enemy position. Local inhabitants could
gence and espionage was a hallmark of the exploits of a successful usually be induced to give this kind of information, and Louis IX
military leader. Mithradates VI, the king of Pontus, fought the gave a large reward to a Bedouin who showed him where to
power of Rome to a standstill in Asia Minor, in part because he cross a branch of the Nile, thereby enabling him to stage a sur-
had become an outstanding intelligence officer in his own right. prise attack upon a Muslim army. Louis' son turned a strong
He mastered 22 languages and dialects and knew the local tribes defensive position in the Pyrenees by buying information about
and their customs far better than did the Roman conquerors. a little-used route through the mountains. Better known is the
During the Middle Ages, due as much to the fragmented politi- incident in the Crecy campaign when Edward III was nearly
cal situation as to the difficulties of transportation, supply and hemmed in by a large French army. A shepherd showed him a
mobilization, it was impossible to attain strategic surprise in mili- ford across the Somme, and Edward not only escaped pursuit
tary campaigns. It took weeks, even months, to assemble an army, but also obtained such a strong defensive position that he was
and even when the force had been collected, it could move only a able to break the French army when it finally attacked.
few miles a day. Sea-borne expeditions could move somewhat When European politics became more sophisticated with the
more unobtrusively, but the massing of ships was difficult to con- rise of nationalism, the first specialists began to appear on the
ceal. For example, in 1066 King Harold of England had all the scene-ministers and secretaries of cabinet who devoted much
essential intelligence long before William the Conqueror landed time to organizing the collection of secret information. In Eng-
at Hastings. He had been in Normandy himself and had seen land there were Sir Francis Walsingham and Lord Burghley for
the Norman army in action. He knew that William was planning Queen Elizabeth I, John Thurloe for Cromwell. In France there
an attack; he estimated the planned embarkation date and land- was a long series of police "lieutenants," running from the days
ing place with great accuracy; and, judging by the size of the of Louis XIII and Richelieu to Napoleon. The Minister of Police
force he concentrated, he made a very good guess about the num- for the latter, the notorious Joseph Foucbe, directed political
ber of William's troops. His defeat was not due to strategic in- espionage to uncover the plottings of Jacobins, royalists and
telligence deficiencies. He lost, rather, because his troops were emigres both at home and abroad.
battle-weary, sick and exhausted after a long forced march.
Medieval Europe in the Dark
A more organized kind of strategic intelligence collection was
needed when western Europeans came into conflict with people
outside their own area. They were not very well informed about
the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Slavs; they knew even
less of the Muslim world, and they were almost completely ig-
norant of anything that went on in Central and East Asia. Em-
peror Frederick II (1212-1250) tried to keep up contacts with
Muslim rulers (and was denounced as a heretic for his pains)
and Louis IX of France (1226-1270) sent emissaries to the
Mongols. Marco Polo's famous book about China contained ma-
terial that would have been useful for strategic intelligence, but
no one looked at it in that light. Throughout most of the Middle
Ages Italian merchants did obtain considerable information about
the East; unfortunately, they seldom had a chance to pass it on
to the people who determined Europe's policies in that direction.
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 opportunities created by the Mongol drive to the west. They
underestimated 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 intelligence support, but without it they had almost no
chance of making correct decisions.
In the fifteenth century the Italians made an important con-
tribution 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 judg-
Sir Francis Walsingham, who combined diplomacy with espionage In the service
of Queen Elizabeth I
Culver Pictures, Inc.
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 c a a 1/ v a s v e
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One of the great intelligence services of the nineteenth cen-
tury in Europe was that maintained not by a government, but by
a private firm, the banking house of Rothschild. In promoting
their employers' financial interests from headquarters in Frank-
furt-am-Main, London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, the Rothschild
agents were often able to gain vital intelligence before govern-
ments 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 se-
curities; those who watched his every move in the market did
likewise, concluding 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.
Disraeli's Suez Coup
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 in-
terest in 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 $44,000.000 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 gov-
ernment, enabling Disraeli to pull off one of the great coups of
his career. It was rumoured that some of the Rothschild "scoops"
were obtained by use of carrier pigeons. There was probably little
basis for the rumour, although it is true that one of the Roths-
childs, immobilized in Paris when the city was surrounded by
Germans in the Franco-German War of 1870, used balloons and
Maj. Allan Pinkerton (left), who organized an espionage system for the U.S.
during the Civil War, photographed with Pres. Abraham Lincoln and Maj. Gen.
J. A. McClernand at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac in Oct. 1862
Unitvrt Press inr~r,,oHonaa
possibly also carrier pigeons to communicate with the outside
world. The world heard of the armistice ending the war through
this means, rather than through conventional news channels.
Prussian espionage in the nineteenth century is perhaps the
first that can be credited with a mass organization. Previously
espionage had made use largely of a few highly-placed ihdi-
viduals. In preparing for the campaigns against both Austria in
1866 and France in 1870, Prussian intelligence, directed by Wil-
helm Stieber, enlisted the services of hundreds of low-level in-
formants in the countries Prussia intended to attack.
In United States history, only in wartime has there been much
evidence of government intelligence activity, at least until re-
cent times. George Washington fortunately possessed a keen
understanding of the value and methods of secret intelligence
and of the need for keeping such activities utterly secret-so
secret, in fact, that we may never have the full history of his in-
telligence operations. The most famous incident of American spy-
ing (and unsuccessful spying at that) in the Revolution is of
course the story of Nathan Hale, but there is some evidence that
the unfortunate outcome of this episode is exactly what drew
Washington's attention to the need for more professional and de-
pendable secret intelligence operations. Washington's financial
accountings show that he spent around $17,000, a lot of money in
those days, on secret intelligence and that one of his main tar-
gets, where he kept a complex network of agents and couriers,
was the New York area. Many supposed Tories with access to
British headquarters there were really secret agents of General
Washington. Of the many battles in which intelligence played an
important role in the Revolution, the Battle of Saratoga, the
turning point of the war, was by far the most outstanding.
Civil War Activity
During the Civil War, of course, both sides were intensely en-
gaged in intelligence activities, particularly espionage. A civil war
always presents difficult problems for the counterintelligence
officer. Each side has little difficulty in finding spies and agents
whose speech, appearance, and mode of living are identical with
those of the enemy. Almost the only way to uncover a spy under
these circumstances is to apprehend him in flagrante.
Nevertheless, just prior to and during the opening phase of the
Civil War our federal government had a dearth of organized in-
telligence facilities. Then certain intelligence and security work
was farmed out to the private Pinkerton's National Detective
Agency, originally hired only to guard the person of president
Lincoln and to run down plots against him and his Cabinet. In
the early days of the war, Pinkerton men were also watching
nearby Virginia for signs of sabotage, uprisings, and military
action that would have isolated and paralyzed the city of Wash-
ington. In later years Mr. Pinkerton's agency was to become a
famous detective organization in this country, specializing in pro-
tection of industrial properties. At that time, however, his men
were pinch-hitting in jobs which today are part of the duties of
three quite distinct government organizations: the Secret Service
(guarding the President), the FBI (dealing with domestic
counterespionage), and the CIA (collecting foreign intelligence).
When the United States entered World War I, initially it had
to rely largely on the French and British for tactical and strategic
intelligence. 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 H. Van Deman, who is considered by many to be
the moving force in establishing a U.S. military intelligence. His
work is described in what I consider the best account by an
American author of intelligence 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 I was
in Bern, and I can attest to the effective work that he and his
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The British and French, the Germans, and later the Italians,
entered World War II with highly developed secret intelligence
organizations in addition to military intelligence services. During
the war years when I was with the OSS, I had the privilege of
working with the British service and developed close personal
and professional relationships which remained intact after the
war. In Switzerland I made contact with a group of French
officers who were helping to build the intelligence service of
De Gaulle and the Free French. Near the end of the war, co-
operation was established with a branch of the Italian Secret
Service that declared allegiance to King Victor Emmanuel when
non-Fascist Italy joined the Allied cause. Through much of the
war, I was also working secretly with the anti-Nazi group in the
German Abwehr, the professional intelligence service of the Ger-
man army. This group was involved in secret plots against Hitler.
The head of the Abwehr, the extraordinary Admiral Canaris, was
executed by Hitler after records were discovered proving that
Canaris had co-operated with those who made the unsuccessful
attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944.
Legacy of World War II
This wartime co-operation with the intelligence services of
the Free World has contributed, I believe, toward creating a
certain unity of purpose among them today. NATO, SEATO, and
other security communities are examples of present-day co-
operation, needed to help the Free World counter the subversive
activities and Cold War tactics of the intelligence and security
services of the Soviet Union.
Essential to any discussion of the history of intelligence is a
consideration of the Soviet service, which is one of the most
tightly structured organizations of its kind in the world. It has
just celebrated its 45th anniversary with what, for the Soviets,
was a good deal of fanfare, considering their usual reticence
on this subject. On December 20, 1962, an article appeared in
Pravda written by the present Chief of Soviet State Security
(K.G.B.), V. Semichastniy, which opened with the words,
"Forty-five years ago today, at the initiative of Vladimir Ilyich
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 45 years of Soviet police history. 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 organiza-
tion as having a definite and unbroken continuity since the day
of its founding.
Dual Totalitarian Services
Most totalitarian countries have, in the course of time, de-
veloped not just one but two intelligence services with quite
distinct functions, even though the work of these services may
occasionally overlap. One of these organizations is a military
intelligence service run by the general staff and responsible for
collecting military and technical information abroad. In the
U.S.S.R. this military organization is called the G.R.U. (Intelli-
gence Directorate). G.R.U. officers working out of the Soviet
Embassy in Ottawa operated the atomic spy networks in Canada
during World War II. 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 se-
cret 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 neighbouring areas
the globe
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 ab-
sorb it. In Nazi Germany the "Reich Security Office," under
Himmler, during 1944 completely took over its military counter-
part, the Abwehr. 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, Khrushchev
placed one of his most trusted security chiefs, General Ivan
Serov, in charge of the G.R.U., apparently in order to keep an eye
on it.
But whether or not the security service of a totalitarian state
succeeds in gaining control of the military service, it inevitably
becomes the more powerful organization. Furthermore, its func-
tions, both internal and external, far exceed those of the intelli-
gence services of free societies. Today, the Soviet State Security
Service (K.G.B.) 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 is more than a secret police
organization, more than an intelligence and counterintelligence
organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation
and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other coun-
tries. It is an aggressive arm of Soviet ambitions in the Cold
War. If the Soviets send astronauts to the moon, I expect that
a K.G.B. officer will accompany them.
Tsarist Secret Police
Secret police were not invented by the Soviets, and even the
foreign operations of the K.G.B. have precedents in Russian his-
tory. The purpose of the tsars' 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 distinguished itself by tailing the venerable Leo Tol-
stoi around Russia. Tolstoi had long since become a world-re-
nowned 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
revolutionaries, radical students and emigres 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 discover the channels by which illegal literature
was being smuggled into Russia. When Lenin was in Prague in
1912, he unknowingly harboured an Okhrana agent in his house-
hold. The primary reason for secret police operations abroad is to
neutralize the political opposition of its own nationals in exile;
although the Okhrana generally limited itself to this mission,
Soviet State Security has not.
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
Commissions against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage." The
Cheka was a militant, terroristic police force that ruthlessly
liquidated civilians on the basis of denunciations and suspicion of
bourgeois origins. It followed the Red armies in their conflicts
with the White Russian forces, and operated as a kind of counter-
espionage organization in areas where sovietization had not yet
been accomplished. In 1921 it established a foreign arm, because
by that time White Russian soldiers and civilian opponents of the
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Bolsheviks who could manage to do so had fled to western Europe he had perpetrated both the killings.
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 tsar's Okhrana. It had not
only to penetrate and neutralize the Russian exile organizations
that were conspiring against the Soviets, but also to discover
and guard against the hostile acts of those Western powers anx-
ious to see the downfall of the Bolsheviks. It thus became a
political intelligence service with a militant mission. In order
to achieve its aims, it engaged in violence and brutality, in kid-
napping 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 the Soviet security murdered Gen-
eral Petliura, the exiled leader of the Ukrainian nationalists.
In 1930, again in Paris, it kidnapped General Kutepov, the leader
of the White Russian war veterans; in 1937, the same fate befell
his successor, General Miller: For over a decade Leon Trotski,
who had gone into exile in 1929, was the prime assassination tar-
get 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.
Lest anyone think that these violent acts against exiles who
opposed or broke with the Bolsheviks in the early days were
merely manifestations 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 proclaimed by Khrushchev in 1956, a
later generation of exiled leaders was wiped out. The only dif-
ference 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 1959, of Lev Rebet
and Stephen Bandera, leaders of the Ukrainian ernigres, were
managed with a cyanide spray that killed almost instantaneously.
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 K.G.B. agent Bogdan Stashinskiy gave
himself up to the German police in 1961 and acknowledged that
In 1922, the Cheka became the G.P.U. (State Political Ad-
ministration), which in 1934 became part of the N.K.V.D. (Peo-
ple's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). This was a consolida-
tion which finally brought together under one ministry all police,
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 reporting to it. In ad-
dition, it exercised control over the entire border militia, had an
internal militia of its own, ran all the prisons and labour 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
N.K.V.D. was split up, reconsolidated, split up again, reconsoli-
dated again, and finally split up once more into two separate
organizations. The M.G.B., now K.G.B., was made responsible
for external espionage and high-level internal security; the other
retained all policing functions not directly concerned with state
security at the higher levels and was called the M.V.D. (Ministry
of Internal Affairs).
Obviously, any clandestine arm that can so permeate and con-
trol public life-even in the upper echelons of power-must
he kept under the absolute control of the dictator. Thus, it
must occasionally be purged and weakened to keel) it from swal-
lowing up everything, the dictator included The history of Soviet
state security, under its various names, exhibits many cycles of
growing strength and subsequent purge, of consolidation and of
splintering, of rashes of political murders carried out by it and
similar rashes against it. After the demise of any leader who
had exploited it to keep himself in power, the service had to be
cut back to size. Stalin used the G.P.U. to enforce collectiviza-
tion and liquidate the kulaks during the early thirties, and the
N.K.V.D. during the mid-thirties to wipe out all the people he
Wide World
Body of Joseph Stalin lying In state
In Moscow in March 1953. Stalin, now
repudiated by the Soviet government,
was honoured by a line of mourners
that stretched for ten miles, 16
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A vera mease20 8?: IA-RDP84-00161
 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
did not trust or like in the Pat the r and ,p nd capture. b the
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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 "col-
lective leadership" felt they would not be safe until they had
liquidated its leader, Lavrenti Beria, and cleaned out his hench-
men.
In Khrushchev's now-famous address to the 20th congress of
the Communist party in 1956, in which he exposed the crimes of
Stalin, the main emphasis was on those crimes Stalin had com-
mitted through the N.K.V.D. This speech not only served to open
Khrushchev'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 dawning, Khrushchev sub-
sequently took various steps to wipe out the image of the security
service as a repressive executive body. Once again, a change of
name was in order. Khrushchev announced on September 3, 1962,
that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (M.V.D.) was now to be
called the Ministry of Public Law and Order. Just what 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.
New Soviet Controls
But internal control systems still exist, even though in new
forms. For example, under the terms of a decree published on
November 28, 1962, an elaborate control system hac been estab-
lished which, to quote the New York Times (November 29,
1962), "would make every worker in every job a watchman over
the implementation of party and government directives." In com-
menting 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 of Party and State Control.
With so many informers operating against such broad cate-
gories of crimes and misdemeanours, it should be possible to put
almost anyone in jail at any time. And indeed the press hag 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 mis-
demeanours. It should also be noted that 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 K.G.B., having succeeded
General Ivan Serov in 1958.
But all these shake-ups, purges and organizational changes
seem to have had remarkably little effect on the aims, methods
and capabilities of that part of the Soviet security service which
interests us most-its foreign arm. Throughout its 45 years it
has accumulated an enormous fund of knowledge and experience:
techniques that have been amply tested as to their suitability in
furthering its aims in various parts of the world, and files of in-
telligence information kept intact through all the political power
struggles. It has in its ranks intelligence officers (those who sur-
vived the purges) of 20 to 30 years' experience. It has on its
rosters disciplined, experienced 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 tsarist
days.
c een r an
early twentieth centuries developed the conspiratorial techniques
that later stood the Soviets in such good stead. The complicated
and devious tricks of concealing and passing messages, of falsi-
fying documents, of using harmless intermediaries between sus-
pect 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 with and many losses at the hands of
the tsar's police. When the Soviets later founded their own secret
police, these were the tricks they taught their agents to enable
them to evade the police of other countries. Even the very words
used by the Bolsheviks in their illegal days before 1917 as a
kind of private slang became, with time, the terms in official use
within the Soviet intelligence service.
A brief look at the end product of this tradition, the Soviet
intelligence officer, should provide a fitting close to a history of
intelligence work. To many he represents the culmination of cen
turies of the development of the breed. To my mind he represents
the species Homo Sovieticus in its unalloyed and most successful
form-this strikes me as much the most important thing about
him, more important than his characteristics as a practitioner of
the intelligence craft. It is as if he were the human end product
of the Soviet system, the Soviet mentality refined to the rrth de-
gree.
He is blindly and unquestioningly dedicated to the cause, at
least at the outset. lie has been fully indoctrinated in the politi-
cal and philosophical beliefs of communism and in the basic
"morality" which proceeds from those beliefs. This morality
holds that the ends alone count, and that any means that achieve
them are justified. Since the ingrained Soviet approach to the
problems of life and politics is entirely conspiratorial, it is no
surprise that this approach finds its ultimate fulfillment in intelli-
gence work.
Soviet Operative Ranks High
The Soviet intelligence officer throughout his career is subject
to a rigid discipline. As one man put it, 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 ostensibly be
an embassy chauffeur, but in truth his rank may be higher than
that of the ambassador and he may possess more of the kind of
power that really counts. At the same time, neither rank nor
seniority nor past achievement will protect him if he makes a mis-
take. When a Soviet intelligence officer is detected or his agents
are caught through an oversight on his part, he can expect de-
motion or dismissal, even prison.
It is no surprise, then, that the Soviet intelligence officer him-
self acquires a harsh, merciless attitude. There is no better exam-
ple of this than the story told about 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, or "speculation." In view of her close connec-
tion to a man as powerful as Abakmnov, the police officials mak-
ing the arrest sent a message to him asking how he would like the
case handled. They fully expected that he would request the
charges be dropped. Instead, he is reliably reported to have writ-
ten on the memorandum that had been sent him: "Why do you
ask me? Don't you know your duty? Speculation during wartime
is treason. Shoot her."
Abakumov met the fate of many Soviet intelligence officers
after the death of Stalin and the liquidation of Beria. By that
time he was in charge of the internal section of Soviet security
and controlled 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.
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
Despite ceAopm4edi fte Rt4easidieop /0%WshClAt'RD6844Q)1Pu1 Q0100170005-7
Russia today, the "terror" still holds sway within Soviet intelli-
gence itself; this arm of Soviet power cannot relax, cannot be
allowed any weakness.
The Soviet citizen usually does not apply for a job in the intel-
ligence service. He is spotted and chosen. Bright young men in
various positions, be it in foreign affairs, economics or the sci-
ences, are proposed for intelligence work by their superiors in the
party. To pass muster they must themselves be either party
members, candidates for party membership, or members of the
Komsomol, the Communist youth organization for the older age
groups. They must come from what appears to be an impeccable
political background, which means that there can be no "bourgeois
taint" to them or any record of deviation or dissent among their
immediate family or forebears.
An ambitious young man who is able to make his career in
one of the branches of intelligence service is fortunate by Soviet
standards. His selection for this duty raises him to the ranks of
the "New Class," the nobility of the new Russia. His prestige
equals and often surpasses that of the military officer. He receives
material rewards much above those given the similar ranks of
government bureaucracy in other departments. He has opportuni-
ties for travel open to few Soviet citizens. further, a career of
this kind can lead to high political office and important rank in
the Communist party.
But the Soviet security service suffers from the same funda-
mental weakness as does Soviet bureaucracy and Communist so-
ciety generally-indifference"to the individual and his feelings.
This indifference results in frequent lack of recognition for per-
sonal service, improper assignments, frustrated ambition and un-
fair punishment-all of which breed in a Soviet, as in any man,
loss of initiative, passivity, disgruntlement, and even disillusion-
ment. Furthermore, service in the Soviet bureaucracy does not
foster independent thought and the qualities of leadership. The
average Soviet official, in the intelligence service as elsewhere,
balks at assuming responsibility or risking his career. There is an
ingrained tendency to perform tasks "by the book," to conform,
to pass the bureaucratic buck if things go wrong.
Most important, every time the Soviets send an intelligence
officer abroad they risk his exposure to the very systems he is
dedicated to destroy. If for any reason he has become disillu-
sioned or dissatisfied, his contact with the Western world often
works as the catalyst that starts the process of disaffection. A
steadily growing number of Soviet intelligence officers have been
coming over to our side, proving that Soviet intelligence is by no
means as monolithic and invulnerable as it wishes the world to
believe.
IV. INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION
The collection of foreign intelligence is accomplished in a va-
riety of ways, not all of them mysterious or even difficult to
understand. This is particularly true of overt intelligence which
is information derived from newspapers, books, learned and tech-
nical 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 important sources of overt intelligence in the Soviet Union
are, of course, the newspapers Izvestia and Pravda, which trans-
late into "News" and "Truth." The former is an organ of the gov-
ernment and the latter of the party. There are also "little" Izves-
tias and Pravdas throughout Russia. A wit once suggested that in
Izvestia there is no news and in Pravda then: is no truth. This
is a fairly accurate statement, but it is, nevertheless, of real
interest to know what they publish and what they ignore, and
what turn they give to embarrassing developments that they are
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 remark to Western diplo-
mats at a Polish Embassy reception in Moscow on November 18,
1956, "We will bury you," was not quoted thusly in the Soviet
press reports, even though it was overheard by many. The state
press apparently has the right to censor Premier Khrushchev,
presumably with his approval. Later, of course, the remark
caught up with Khrushchev and he gave a lengthy and somewhat
mollifying interpretation of it. How and why a story is twisted
is thus at least as interesting as the actual content. Often there
is one version for domestic consumption, another for the other
Communist 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
government departments co-operating in accordance with their
own needs. The CIA has an interest in the "product" and shares
in collection, selection and translation. Obviously, to collect
such intelligence on a world-wide basis is a colossal job, 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 originate in Moscow and
Peking, some directed to domestic audiences and others beamed
abroad.
Trained Analysts Needed
All overt information is grist for the intelligence mill. It is
there for the getting, but large numbers of trained personnel are
required to sort and 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 re-
sume atomic testing, by means of a vague news item transmitted
by Radio Moscow for publicaion in a provincial Soviet journal.
A young lady at a remote listening post spotted this item, ana-
lyzed it correctly, and relayed it to Washington immediately.
Vigilance and perceptiveness succeeded in singling out one sig-
nificant piece of intelligence from the mountains of deadly verbi-
age that have to be listened to daily.
In countries that are free, where the press is free and the
publication of political and scientific information is not hampered
by the government, the collection of overt intelligence is of par-
ticular value and is of direct use in the preparation of our intelli-
gence estimates. Since we are that kind of a country ourselves,
we are victims of this kind of collection. The Soviets pick up
some of their most valuable information about us from our pub-
lications, particularly from our technical and scientific journals,
published transcripts of congressional hearings and the like. A re-
cent defector from the Polish diplomatic mission in Washington
has told us that his embassy is assigned the task of collecting
this literature for Moscow's use. There is no problem in ac-
quiring it. The Soviets simply want to spare themselves the ef-
fort in order to be able to devote their time to more demanding
tasks; also, they feel that a Polish collection agent is likely to
have less trouble than a Russian in picking tip the required mate-
rial.
Information is also collected in the ordinary course of con-
ducting 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 negotia-
tions calls for a certain measure of secrecy. But information
22 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
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THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
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telligence service for the preparation of estimates. Such informa-
tion may contain facts, slants and hints that are significant, espe-
cially when coupled with intelligence from other sources. If the
Foreign Minister of X hesitates to accept a United States offer
on Monday, it may be that he is seeing the Soviets on Tuesday.
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.
Our effort in 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 are not covered by such material. Or, this
material may lack sufficient detail, may be inconclusive, or may
not be completely reliable. Naturally, this is mote often the
case in a closed society. We cannot depend on the Soviets making
public, either intentionally or inadvertently, what our government
wants to know; only what they wish us to believe. When they do
give out official information, it cannot always be trusted. Pub-
lished statistics may credit a five-year plan with great success;
economic intelligence from inside informants shows 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 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 de-
ception within it. For all these reasons. clandestine intelligence
collection (espionage) must remain an essential and basic ac-
tivity of intelligence.
Clandestine intelligence collection is chiefly a matter of cir-
cumventing obstacles in order to reach an objective. Our side
chooses the objective. The opponent has set up the obstacles. Usu-
ally he knows which objectives are most important to us, and he
surrounds these with appropriately difficult obstacles. For exam-
ple, when the Soviets started testing their missiles, they chose
launching sites in their most remote and inapproachable waste-
United Press International
Official Soviet photograph of what was
represented as the wreckage of the
U-2 plane piloted by Francis Gary
Powers, shot down over Soviet terri-
tory in May 1960. It was a pile of
junk assembled for propaganda rather
than the actual plane. The real wreck-
age was later put on display
over its people, the more obstacles there are. 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 de-
ception, whose key installations may be buried a thousand miles
off the beaten track.
In this particular situation our government determines what
the objectives are and what information it needs, without regard
to the obstacles. It also establishes priorities among these objec-
tives according to their relative urgency. ICBMs will take prior-
ity over 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 informa-
tion 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 intelligence must do the job, then
it is usually because serious obstacles are known to surround the
target.
Free and Denied Areas
In the eyes of Western intelligence, the world is divided into
two kinds of places-"free areas" and "denied areas." Its major
targets lie in the denied areas, that is, behind the Iron and
Bamboo curtains, and are comprised of the military, technical
and industrial installations-the capabilities-that constitute the
backbone of Sino-Soviet power. Also among the major targets
are the plans of the people who guide the Soviet Union and
Communist China-their intentions concerning warfare and their
"peaceful" political intentions. All information about such tar-
gets is called "positive intelligence."
The Berlin Wall not only shut off the two halves of a politi-
cally divided city from each other and severely limited the num-
ber of East Germans escaping to the West. It also was supposed
to plug one of the last big gaps in the Iron Curtain, the barrier
of barbed wire, land mines, observation towers, mobile patrols
and "sanitized" border areas that zigzags southward from the
Baltic. The erection of the Berlin Wall is intended to be the final
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 THE CRAFT OF,d0'p~erdlV"ase 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161R000'J07Q005-7
step in sealing off eastern Europe, a process that took 16 years
to accomplish. Yet it is still possible to get under or over, around
or even through the barrier of the Iron Curtain. It is just the first
of a series of obstacles. Behind that first wall are segregated and
restricted areas and, behind these, the walls of institutional and
personal secrecy. This combination protects everything the Soviet
state believes could reveal either its strengths or weaknesses to
the inquisitive West.
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 ob-
serve or discover the desired facts without arousing the attention
of those who protect them. The information must then be de-
livered to the 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 objec-
tive, 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 impossible to main-
tain because the agent's presence in the area is secret and illegal,
Technical Know-How Required
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 dis-
cover about one, even when you are standing right next to it.
And even for the rare person who might be competent in both
fields, just getting close to such a target is hardly enough to ful-
fill today's intelligence requirements. What is needed is a thor-
ough 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 tour-
ists now and then in order to give the world the impression that
U.S. espionage is a vast effort exploiting even the innocent
traveler.
Of far more long-term value than reconnaissance is "penetra-
tion" by an agent, meaning that he somehow is able to get in-
side 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 elicit the desired information from persons
who come to trust him and who are entirely unaware of his true
role. In popular parlance, this operation is called a "plant."
The plant is a tried and true method of espionage. In our own
history we have the example, in Revolutionary War days, of the
adroit British spy, Dr. Edward Bancroft, who was born in the
Colonies and who successfully wormed his way into the employ
was
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negotiating in PariAJYPMVdd CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
24
Benjamin Franklin dictating to Edward Bancroft, the trusted secretary-assistant
who was an espionage agent for Britain during the Revolution
loyalty to the American cause, Bancroft worked as Franklin's
secretary and assistant for little pay. His real mission was to
report to George Ill's government on Franklin's progress with
the French. He passed his messages to the British Embassy in
Paris by depositing them in a bottle hidden in the hollow root
of a tree in the Tuileries Gardens. Whenever he had more in-
formation 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 op-
ponents' consumption.
To deflect possible suspicion of their agent, the British once
even arrested Bancroft as he was leaving England, an action in-
tended to impress Franklin with his bona fides and with the
dangers to which his devotion to the American cause exposed
him. Everything depended, of course, on the acting ability of
Dr. Bancroft, which was so effective that when Franklin was
later presented with evidence of Bancroft's duplicity he refused
to believe it. Even as wise and able a diplomat as Franklin could
be fooled by a spy whose credentials rested on his own claims.
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 lan-
guage and background. Today, when the lines that separate one
nation from another are so sharply drawn with respect to basic
outlook and frame of reference, 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 II was the Sorge network in the Far East. The agents of
a German Communist, provided the Soviets with
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 Approved For Release 2002/06/18: CIA-RDP84 T61 O'11001ff0.0O9= 'LLIGENCE
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not only gave him excellent cover but also provided him 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. 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 1942, it would have discovered that Sorge had
been a Communist agent and agitator in Germany during the
early 1920s.
Soviet Espionage in the West
Shortly thereafter, we were being subjected to similar treat-
ment 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 pre-
vious Communist affiliations lay in the files of Western security
and intelligence services, even while the agents held respon-
sible positions in the West, but they were ignored until it
was too late. Because physicists like Fuchs and Pontecorvo
moved from job to job among the allied countries-one year in
Great Britain, another in Canada and another 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-particularly if
Richard Sorge, German newspaperman who was acting as press advisor In Tokyo
while running a spy ring for Soviet Russia In Japan in the early 1940s
Approved
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Italian atomic scientist Bruno Pontecorvo, who left his top-secret post at Brit-
ain's Harwell Research establishment in 1950 and flew to the U.S,S.R. This
photograph was taken at one of his rare public appearances in Moscow
of Nazi origin-seem often to have been discounted at a time
when Russia was our ally and Hitler our enemy, and when the war
effort required the technical services of gifted scientists.
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 Pontecorvos.
Today, investigation of persons seeking employment in sensitive
areas of the U.S. government and related technical installations
is justifiably thorough and painstaking.
An agent who performs as a plant in our time must have more
in his favour than acting ability; he can succeed only if there is
no 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 fictitious personal history which have to be "backstopped."
An agent made over in this fashion is referred to as an "illegal."
If you were really born in Finland, but are supposed to have
been born in Munich, Germany, then you must have documents
showing your connection to that city. You have to be able to act
like someone who was born and lived there. Arrangements have
to be made in Munich in order to confirm your origin there in
case you are ever investigated. In most Western countries the
lax procedures involved in issuing duplicates of most vital sta-
tistics-birth certificates, records of marriage, death, etc.-make
it relatively easy for hostile intelligence services to procure valid
documents for "papering" their agents. The Soviets have fre-
quently taken advantage of this fact, and it would certainly be
in our interest to tighten up this laxity.
 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
Approved For Release 20021Q611 ?,orgl -arRpI{&4.cW16tli Ai3~003h7 A0fi4sory capacity,
for directing espionage networks, rather than for penetration jobs
that increase the danger of discovery. Lonsdale was such a man,
and so was Rudolf Abel, who masqueraded in Brooklyn as a
photographer and who, after his conviction as a spy, was ex-
changed for the downed U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, in 1962.
An alternative procedure to attempting to place one's own
agent within a highly sensitive foreign target is to find somebody
who is already there and recruit him. This technique must be
adapted to suit each case. The main thing is to find an insider who
is willing to co-operate and who also is "cleared" and qualified
in his position. Often, however, such a person is not quite at the
right spot to have access to the information you need. Or you
might have to settle for someone just beginning a career that will
eventually lead to his employment in the area of the target. Some
maneuvering and manipulation is needed to get your man, who is
more or less an amateur in espionage, in the place where he can
acquire the information without arousing suspicion.
Most of the notorious instances of Soviet penetration of im-
portant targets in Western countries were made possible by the
recruitment of someone already employed inside the target.
David Greenglass, although only a draftsman at Los Alamos dur-
ing World War II, had access to secret details of the internal
construction of the atomic bomb. Judith Coplon, while employed
in a section of the Department of justice responsible for the
registration of foreign agents in the United States, regularly
copied FBI reports crossing her desk concerning investigations of
espionage in the United States. Joseph Scarbeck was only an ad-
ministrative officer in our embassy in Warsaw, but after he had
been trapped by a female Polish agent and blackmailed, he
wide world managed to procure for the Polish intelligence service (operating
Klaus Fuchs, scientist member of the ring that fed atomic secrets to Soviet under Soviet direction) some of our ambassador's secret reports
rison
itish
B
p
r
Russia, arriving at an East German airport after his release from a
The Soviet "illegal" may be a Soviet national or a native of Lieut. Gen. Waiter Bedell Smith, former Director of the CIA
tieee,
r~
l
t
P
er
e
e
ress
almost any country in the world. His actual origin is of no great United
I f!
importance, since it is completely buried under a new nationality
and a new identity. A national chosen for such work will be sent
to live abroad for as many years as it takes him to perfect his
knowledge of the language and way of life of the other country.
He may even acquire citizenship in the adopted country. But
during this whole period he has absolutely no intelligence mission.
Ile does nothing that would arouse suspicion. When he has be-
come sufficiently acclimatized, he returns to the Soviet Union
where he is trained and documented for his intelligence mission,
tested for his loyalties 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.
The Case of Gordon Lonsdale
Gordon Lonsdale, the "Canadian" who was caught in London
in early 1961 as the leading figure in an extensive Soviet spy ring,
was a Russian whose Canadian identity had been carefully built
up over many years. Here the Soviets used their "illegal" not to
work in Canada, where he would have been much more 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.
Because they have almost perfect camouflage and are conse-
quently immensely difficult to locate, "illegals" constitute the
gravest security hazards to countries against which they are
h the Soviets have been turn-
tat
id
ence
working. There is every ev
ing out such "illegals" at an accelerated rate since the end of
to the
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26 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 ROOO1OO17OOO5-7
 ?city,
jobs
man,
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Approved For Release 2002/06/18
CIA-RDP84-ck161k&1001 Oda-7 L L I G E N C E
right person-the one who is vulnerable-inside the target, to
reach him without being apprehended, to persuade him to co-
operate, to continue to communicate with him secretly after he
has been won over. This is where one can really begin to talk
about the techniques of espionage. There are techniques for
"spotting" agents, for recruiting agents, for directing agents, for
testing agents, and for communicating with agents. If the oper-
ation is very sensitive, the Soviets will use one of their "illegals"
to handle the case. The illegal, unless apprehended with the agent
or betrayed by him, can disappear into the woodwork if some-
thing goes wrong. There will be no trail leading to a Soviet dip-
lomatic installation to embarrass or discredit it. There are times,
however, when Soviet intelligence personnel stationed in an
embassy or some other official installation will handle recruited
agents or certain aspects of their operations. Sometimes the
"cover" of the embassy or trade mission lends advantages not
available to the illegal, and if the so-called "legal resident" is
caught in the act, all that happens is his enforced departure and
the subsequent arrival of a replacement to fill his shoes.
If, for example, the Soviets are anxious to find an agent in
a Western country who will provide intelligence on a certain
sensitive industry, they will use the built-in spotting mechanism
provided by their embassies or trade missions. With the object
of looking over candidates without their knowing it or the local
authorities knowing it, the Soviet trade mission will advertise
that it is interested in purchasing certain nonstrategic items
manufactured by the particular industry or one closely allied to
it. Manufacturers will be attracted and will visit the Soviet mis-
sion to talk over possible business. But it is just a ruse to entice
into the field of vision of Soviet intelligence, people with the
desired access. The visitors will he requested to fill out forms call-
ing for personal and business data, references, financial state-
ments, and the like. All this material is reviewed by the intel-
ligence officer stationed at the mission, who may also participate
in the personal interviews and get a direct look at the human
material under consideration. 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. Ostensibly, nothing has yet been done against
the law.
Wide World
David Greenglass, former U.S. army technician who was convicted as a member
of the Rosenberg atomic spy ring, In custody of a U.S. deputy marshal after
his arraignment in June 1950
to the State Department on the political situation in eastern
Europe. In Great Britain, Henry Houghton and John Vassall, al-
though of low rank and engaged chiefly in administrative work,
were able to procure classified technical information from the
Admiralty. Alfred Frenzel, a West German parliamentarian, had
access to NATO documents distributed to a West German par-
liamentary defense committee on which he served. Heinz Felfe,
in the West German intelligence service, whose case is still-pend-
ing in the German courts, had plenty of opportunity to pass
valuable information to the Soviets during the years he was
progressing up the ladder as a promising young intelligence ex-
pert.
The "Insider" Is Useful
All of these people, at the time they were recruited, were
already employed in some job that made them interesting to the
Communists because of their positions of natural access. In some
cases, they later moved up into jobs that increased their value to
the Soviets, and these transfers may in some instances have been
achieved under secret guidance from the Soviets. Houghton and
Vassall were both recruited while stationed at British embassies
behind the Iron Curtain. When each returned home and was as-
signed to a position in the Admiralty, his access to important
documents and other information naturally was broadened.
Similarly, had Scarbeck not been caught as a result of careful
counterintelligence efforts while still at his post in Warsaw, he
probably would have been of ever-increasing use to the Soviets
as he was reassigned to one United States diplomatic post after
another over the years.
In this kind of espionage operation, then, the first step is the
most crucial. Everything depends upon the ability to "spot" the
"Spotting of Agents"
The Communist party apparatus and Communist front organi-
zations can also be used to spot potential agents for espionage.
The evidence given in the Canadian trials shortly after World
War II by the defected code clerk from the Soviet Embassy in
Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, acquainted the public for the first time
with the elaborate techniques employed by the Communist party
under various guises. "Reading groups" and "study groups" for
persons quite innocently interested in Russia were formed within
Canadian defense industries, entirely for the purpose of spotting
and cultivating people who could eventually be exploited for the
information they possessed. The target in this case was the
atomic bomb.
However, the Communist party outside the Soviet Union has
been used only intermittently by the Soviet government for ac-
tual espionage. Every time some element of the Communist party
is caught in acts of espionage, this discredits the party as an
"idealistic" and indigenous 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 intel-
ligence work performed by local Communist parties. The value
Approved For Release 2002/06/18 :. CIA-RDP84-00161 ROOO1OO17OOO5-7
 of using personnel-ti6P!prt 1nPf ih`Yttgg~gn?TO9g P?/a4s- CIA- u `tU t4i`tQo 7tf~ehip4 -br to his government.
tionahle, since these amateur collaborators can expose not only If the potential victim has done nothing on his own to compro-
themselves but also the operations of the intelligence service mise himself, then he or she must he enticed into a compromising
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 ideo-
logical 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 became unpalatable, finally balked and went and told
their stories to the FBI. This problem came to a head for the
Soviets just after the end of World War II as a result of the
Gouzenko revelations. At that time the K.G.B. issued a secret or-
der to its officers abroad not to involve members of Communist
parties further in intelligence work.
In foreign and hostile countries, then, the Soviets must proceed
with some caution in recruiting resident agents. They have not
always done so, of course. Some of their attempts, particularly
through their UN personnel, have been so crude and barefaced
as to give the impression that the UN is being used by them for
the schooling of their spies.
Entrapping Victims
But 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 men or women agents
provocateurs, more vigorous tactics are customarily used to re-
cruit or entrap prospective agents. The Soviets often work on the
principle that in order to get a man to do what you want, you
try to catch him in something he would not like to have exposed
situation set up by K.G.B. operatives. Two of the most recent
cases involving this technique are those of Joseph Scarbeck in
Poland and John Vassall in the Soviet Union.
The sordid story of Vassall, the British Admiralty employee
who spied for the Soviets for six years both in the Soviet Union
and in 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 K.G.B. 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 behaviour is recorded on tape or on film. He is then
confronted with the evidence and told that unless he work, for
the Soviets the evidence 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 individual concerned-even if he is residing in the Soviet
Union. Sometimes his superior officer will want to play the man
back against the Soviet apparatus in order to ferret out all the
individuals and the tactics involved. But if the man approached
does not seem qualified to play such a role, especially if the ap-
proach was made behind the Iron Curtain, he is merely told to
break off from his tormentors and tell them he has disclosed
everything.
There is, of course, the other side of the coin. Western intel-
ligence is able to procure agents too, but does not use the same
methods. It is no secret that the piercing of the Iron and Bamboo
curtains is made easier for the West because of the volunteers
Camera Press-Pix from Public
Hungarian freedom fighters crossing
snow-covered fields to refuge in Aus-
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THE CRAFT OF INTELL1(.&L:1Vt_C
who come our way. We o tot1~ OW hers than is presently the case if it were not for the usual Soviet
'~ e kelfease i6/1 ac ~2 QQ~c61 i O00i1tO h1 ~0?f te~jers behind as
Often it comes to us throng peop e w o arc we acquai
. it. While this is not a one-way street, the West has gained far
more in recent years from volunteers than its opponents have.
The reason for this is the growing discontent with the system
inside the Soviet Union, the satellite nations and Communist
China. These volunteers are either refugees and defectors who
cross over the frontiers to us or they are people who remain "in
place" in order to serve us within the Communist societies.
Information from refugees is often piecemeal and scattered,
hnt fnr years it has added to our basic fund of knowledge about
European satellites of Soviet Russia. The upheaval of the nun-
I garian revolution in 1956 sent more than a quarter of a million
brought us up-
the
t
y
refugees fleeing westward. Needless
o say,to-date on every aspect of technical, scientific and military
achievement in Hungary and gave us an excellent forecast of
likely capabilities for years to come. Among the hundreds of
j thousands of refugees who have come over from East Germany,
other satellites and Communist China since the end of World
War II, many have performed a similar service.
"Defector"-a Misnomer
intelligence. The reader of the daily papers in the West knows
that among the defectors are soldiers, diplomats, scientists,
engineers, ballet dancers, athletes and, not infrequently, intel-
ligence officers.
On the other hand, the fate of those who have gone from our
V
side over to the other would not serve as a particularly good
advertisement for further such defections. Some of these people
have recently talked to Western visitors and have admitted, with-
out prompting, that their lot is miserable and that they have no
future. The scientific defectors, like the atomic physicist Ponte-
corvo, who continue to be useful to the Soviet in their tech-
nological efforts, seem to fare better than the others. The
Burgesses and MacLeans, the Martins and Mitchells have had
their day of publicity and now eke out a dull living, sometimes
as "propaganda advisors." Some of them still hope one day to
be able to return to the West.
It is occasionally the case that defectors from the Communist
side are not exactly what they seem. Rather, they have been
working "in place" as agents for the West for long periods of
time previous to their appearance as defectors, and have come to
the West only because they or we feel that the dangers of remain-
ing inside have become too great. In addition, some who come
over from the Soviet bloc have never been "surfaced" and remain
unknown to the public. The Soviets know, of course, that they
have left, but not to what precise location. This concealment is
desirable in some cases in order to protect the individuals in-
volved.
People who volunteer "in place" have many ways of doing so,
in spite of the isolation, the physical barriers and the internal
controls of the Soviet bloc. There are relatively safe channels
of communication with the West, including, surprisingly enough,
the mails. As long as the address on a letter looks harmless and
the identity of the sender (the agent "in place") remains con-
cealed, there is little danger. Soviet bloc censorship cannot pos-
sibly inspect every piece of the great volume of mail passing to
and fro over the borders. And even if a. letter is intercepted, it.
need give no clue whatever to the sender if proper security pre-
cautions are followed. Various radio stations in western Europe
broadcasting to the Soviet bloc can thus solicit comments and
"fan mail" from listeners, and receive letters by the thousands
from behind the Iron Curtain.
Science Vital to Intelligence
It has become imbedded in the jargon of international relations
and intelligence to describe the officials or highly knowledgeable
citizens of the Communist bloc who leave their country and come
to the West. And the West has had some defectors, too. It is,
however, a term that is resented, and properly so, by the persons
who come to freedom from tyranny. I do not claim that all so-
called defectors have come to the West for ideological reasons.
Some have come out of more mundane motives: in certain cases
because they have failed in their jobs; in some because they are
fearful that a shake-up in the regime will lead to their demotion
or worse; some are lured by the physical attractions of the West,
human or material. But a large number have come over for highly
ideological reasons. They were revolted by life in the Communist
world, by the tasks they were assigned by their superiors. They
yearned for something better and more satisfying. The term
"volunteer" is more suitable for these people, and I prefer to
use it whenever possible.
If the one who comes over to us has been part of the Soviet
hierarchy, he knows the strengths and weaknesses of the regime
that employed him-its factions, its inefficiencies and its cor-
ruption. As a specialist, he knows its achievements in whatever
was his chosen field-soldiery, science, education, diplomacy or
Secret Agents of the West
The fact that behind the Iron Curtain there are many people
who seriously consider taking this step is a matter of deep inter-
est to the intelligence services of the West. Our task is to make
them understand that they will be welcome and secure once they
have come out. Experience has shown that many of them hesitate
to take the final step, not because they have qualms about for-
saking a detested way of life, but because they are afraid of the
unknowns that await them. So an effort is made to show that they
are welcome and will be safe and happy with us. Every time a
newly arrived defector goes on the air over the Voice of America
and says he is glad to be here and is being treated well, countless
officials behind the Iron Curtain will take heart and go back to
figuring out just how they can get themselves appointed as trade
representatives in Oslo or Paris. Short-term visitors to the West
from the Soviet bloc would probably defect in far greater num-
np
on'
Anyone who knows how the latest filing and sorting machines
are used in personnel work will not be surprised to hear that if
the intelligence service is looking for a man who speaks Swahili
and French, has a degree in chemical engineering, is unmarried,
over 35 and under 5'8", all it has to do is push a button and
in less than 40 seconds it will know whether a man with these
qualifications is available, along with other information about
him. The same kinds of machines are used in sorting out and
assembling the data of intelligence itself.
But this is a small feat compared with how technology is used
in the collection of information. Many targets of contemporary
intelligence by their very nature suggest the creation of the
technical devices by which they can be observed. If a target emits
a telltale sound, then a sensitive acoustical device comes to mind
for monitoring it. If the target causes shock waves in the earth,
then seismographic apparatus will detect these. Moreover, the
need to observe and measure the effects of our own technological
experiments, e.g., with nuclear weapons and missiles, has hastened
the refinement of equipment which, with some modifications, can
also be useful for observing other people's experiments.
Radar and accurate long-range photography are the basic tools
of technical collection. Another is the collection and analysis of
air samples in the atmosphere in order to determine the presence
of radioactivity. Since radioactive particles are carried by winds
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 over national bor gpnb i OrRe1G s~ O2tG6/moo CI1~- ? f~flO4Gi ROPEY >~1 ~0~ 7late October of 1962.
Beginning in 1948 our government instituted a program calling
for round-the-clock monitoring of the atmosphere by aircraft
for the purpose of detecting any experimentation with atomic
weapons. After this program was installed, the first evidence of
a Soviet atomic explosion on the Asiatic mainland was detected
in September of 1949. Later refinements in instrumentation en-
able us to discover not only the fact that atomic explosions have
taken place but also the power and type of the atomic device
detonated.
Many targets, of course, do not betray their location and
nature by any such activity as bomb detonation or a missile
launching that can be traced from afar in the upper atmosphere.
To observe such targets, one must get directly over them at very
high altitudes, armed with long-range cameras. This requirement
led to the development of the U-2. It was safer, more accurate
and more dependable than anything that could be performed by
an agent on the ground. Its feats could be equaled only by the
acquisition of technical documents 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 ... all types of vital information. These
results were considered in formulating our military programs. We obviously
were the prime customer, and ours is the major interest.
In more recent days, it was the high-altitude U-2 reconnais-
sance flights which gave the "hard" evidence of the positioning
in progress and before they could be camouflaged, these bases
might have constituted 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.
Radar and the Battle of Britain
Scientific intelligence collection has proved its value a hundred
times over. Winston Churchill in his history of World War II
describes British development of radar and its use in the Battle
of Britain, as well as British success in bending, amplifying and
falsifying by scientific means the directional signals sent to guide
the attacking German aircraft. He concludes that "unless 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 be-
ing defeated, destroyed." Science as a vital arm of intelligence is
here to stay. We are in a critical competitive race with the scien-
tific development of the Communist bloc, particularly that of the
Soviet Union, and we must see to it that we remain in a posi-
tion of leadership. Some day this may be as vital to us as radar
was to Britain in 1940.
A technical aid to espionage of another kind is the concealed
microphone and transmitter, carrying live information in the
form of conversations from inside a target to a nearby listening
post. What the public knows as "tapping" telephones or as "bug-
San Diego, Calif., naval air station as seen from a plane flying at 70,000 ft. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower used this
photograph-in a television report to the nation in 1960, following the collapse of the Paris summit conference, to
Illustrate the power of aerial surveillance at great heights
ping..
ligen(
aturi.
and
teal::
,L l
tised
local:
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and
the t
tale
one
30 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
 Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to the UN, demonstrating to the Security council in May 1960 how a micro-
phone had been concealed within a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the U.S., that had been hung in the office of
the U.S. ambassador in Moscow as a gift from the U.S.S.R.
ging" or "miking" offices is called "audio-surveillance" in intel-
ligence work. Three things are required for this: excellent mini-
aturized electronic equipment, clever methods of concealment
and a human agent to penetrate the premises and do the con-
coaling.
The public usually hears of this activity only'when it is prac-
tised by law-enforcement or security organizations in their own
locality. But in June of 1960 Ambassador Lodge displayed before
the United Nations in New York a plaque of the Great Seal of
the United States which had been hanging in the office of the U.S.
Ambassador in Moscow. He showed how the Soviets had con-
cealed a tiny instrument in the seal which, when activated, per-
mitted a Soviet listening post to overhear everything that was
said in the ambassador's office. 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, tele-
phone men, plumbers, charwomen and the like.
Performing the same trick outside one's own country is some-
thing else. Any intelligence service must consider the possible
repercussions and embarrassments that may result from the dis-
covery 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 instance when the Soviets managed to place microphones
in the flowerpots that decorated the offices of a Western embassy.
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
themselves be neutralized, but sometimes they can he 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.
The Field of Cryptography
An area of intelligence which is only partly a technological
matter is that of cryptography. Codes and ciphers have been used
throughout history, and attempts have always been made to break
them. Today scientific knowledge is used to aid those who work
in this field. No nation ever willingly reveals its current successes
or failures in cryptography, but there are many instances from
the recent past now in the public domain that serve to illustrate
the important role that the deciphering of coded messages has
played in the collection of intelligence.
The diplomatic service, the armed forces and the intelligence
service of every country all use secret codes and ciphers to trans-
mit their long-distance communications between headquarters
Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7 31
 TIIE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
and posts abroa#l-O'V4t ItP6rr i ge}2QA2i/?8/t&'SeCI~11 P8i4 1iroi1r?s1 R1QQ917DO4c7O `a7 dirigibles, returning
commercial cable d' h' h
mes
or ra o, m w rc case they know that
any other government can generally obtain copies of the en-
ciphered cables sent from or to its area and can intercept and
record radio traffic passing from, to or over its territory. That
much is easy; the problem is to decipher such material. Since the
contents of official government messages on sensitive subjects,
especially in times of crisis, constitute the best and "hottest" in-
telligence that one government can hope to gather about another,
every government goes to great lengths to invent unbreakable
codes and to protect its code materials and its cryptographic per-
sonnel. For that reason, every intelligence service is continually
on the alert for opportunities which will give it access to cryp-
tographic materials of other governments. Should these be ob-
tained, the task of breaking a code is made easier. But there are
other, less dramatic, methods, for some codes and ciphers can be
broken by mathematical analysis of intercepted traffic.
The uncontrollable accidents and disasters of war sometimes
expose to one opponent cryptographic materials used by the
other. A headquarters or an outpost may be overrun and in the
heat of retreat code books left behind. Many notable instances of
this kind in World War I gave the British a lifesaving insight
into the military and diplomatic intentions of the Germans. Early
in the war the Russians sank the German cruiser "Magdeburg"
and rescued from the arms of a drowning sailor the German naval
code book, which was promptly turned over to their British allies.
British salvage operations on sunken German submarines turned
U.S. marine corps bombers attacking the "Mogami" during the battle of Midway
W id, world
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 U-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 com-
munications with their underwater fleet 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 immediate military or diplomatic gain, or
one can hold back and continue to accumulate an ever-broadening
knowledge of the enemy's movements and actions in order even-
tually to inflict the greatest possible damage.
The "Black Chamber"
During World War I the first serious American cryptographic
undertaking was launched under the aegis of the War Depart-
ment. Officially known as Section 8 of Military Intelligence, it
liked to call itself the Black Chamber, the name used for cen-
turies 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 tele-
graph operator, had by 1918 become a first-rate professional out-
fit. One of its outstanding achievements after World War I was
the breaking of the Japanese diplomatic codes. During negoti-
ations at the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1921, the
United States wanted very much to get Japanese argeement 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 tremendous 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
down 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 Chamber remained intact, serving chiefly the State De-
partment, until 1929 when Henry Stimson, who had become Sec-
retary of State under President Hoover, refused to allow his
department to avail itself further of its services, after which,
it had to close down. "Gentlemen," so Stimson claimed, "do not
read each other's mail." Later, however, while serving as Secre-
tary of War under President Roosevelt during World War II,
he came to recognize the overriding importance of intelligence,
especially cryptographic intelligence.
When the fate of a nation is at stake and the lives of its military
men are in the balance, gentlemen do read each other's mail-
if they can get their hands on it.
Our navy had, fortunately, begun to address itself to the prob-
lems of cryptography in the early 1920s, with particular emphasis
on the Japanese, since U.S. naval thinking at that time foresaw
Japan as the major potential foe of the United States. By 1941,
the year of Pearl Harbor, navy cryptographers had broken most
of the important Japanese naval and diplomatic codes and ci-
phers; and later we were often able to forecast 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 our navy sought because it was able to learn from
intercepted messages that a major task force of the Imperial
Japanese Navy was gathering off Midway. Our information con-
cerning its strength, disposition and intention gave Admiral
Nimitz the advantage of surprise. Our successes in breaking
32 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
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point of view of an intelligence dtlicer this was un ou6ec y re- 2gram ~ Itao fhe Assoc fe ress Hit t i i u 1 c like a
grettable.
One of the most spectacular of all cryptographic coups in the
field of diplomacy 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 of decipherment was
performed by the experts of "Room 40," as British naval crypto-
graphic headquarters was called. The message had originated with
German Foreign Secretary Zimmermann in Berlin and was ad-
dressed to the German Minister in Mexico City. It outlined
the German plan for the resumption of unrestricted submarine
warfare on Feb. 1, 1917, stated the probability that this would
bring the United States into the war and proposed that Mexico
enter the war on Germany's side; with victory, Mexico would
regain its "lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona."
The famous Admiral Hall, Chief of British Naval Intelligence,
had this message in his hands for over a month after its inter-
ception. 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 of
British competence in breaking their codes. Finally, and without
any satisfactory solution having been found, the urgency of the
war situation caused Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary,
to communicate the Zimmermann message formally to the Amer-
ican Ambassador in London. The receipt of the message in Wash-
ington caused a sensation at the White House and State Depart-
ment, and created serious problems for our government-how
to verify beyond a doubt the validity of the message and how
to make it public without letting it seem merely an Anglo-Amer-
ican ploy to get the United States into the war. Robert Lansing,
who was then Secretary of State, and was an uncle of mine, later
told me about the dramatic events of the next few days which
brought America much closer to war.
Diplomatic Cables Abused
The situation was complicated by the fact that the Germans
had transmitted the message via their ambassador in Washington,
Count Bernstorff, who relayed it to his colleague in Mexico City,
and that they used American diplomatic cable facilities to do
so. President Wilson had granted the Germans the privilege of
utilizing our communication lines between Europe and America
on the understanding that messages to their representatives in the
western hemisphere would be devoted to furthering the possi-
bility of the peace which Wilson was so earnestly trying to
mediate at the time. 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 arrange-
ment turned out to be of great advantage in what happened next.
First of all, it meant that the State Department had in its pos-
session a copy of the encoded Zimmermann telegram which it
had passed to Bernstorff-unaware, of course, of its inflammatory
contents. Once this copy was identified, it was forwarded to our
embassy in London, where one of Admiral Hall's men re-de-
ciphered 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 diplomats 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 deceive the Ger-
mans about the real source from which we had obtained the in-
formation. In the end the impression given the Germans was
that the famous message had leaked as a result of some careless-
ness or theft in one of the German embassies which had received
copies of it. They continued using the same codes, which dis-
played a remarkable but welcome lack of imagination on their
bombshell. In April we declared war on Germany.
Intelligence Requires Guidance
I have described some of the manifold activities involved in
gathering intelligence. The diverse needs for information and
the varying opportunities for acquiring it make it imperative
that some orderly system govern the world-wide collection
process. Without appropriate guidance, intelligence officers in the
field could spend much of their time duplicating each other's
work and could exert disproportionate efforts in the attempt to
get information in one place that could be obtained much more
simply and quickly in another. It is the task of the intelligence
headquarters, with its world perspective, to establish the basic
guidelines along which intelligence officers in different places try
to pattern their work. This is accomplished, for long-range pur-
poses, by setting up a list of priorities that give the order of
importance of tasks to be undertaken in any one area. It also
often happens that headquarters will assign crash jobs to in-
telligence officers in areas where it is believed that much-needed
information might be available.
The function of headquarters was illustrated 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 available 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 in-
stituted and eventually the text of the speech was found-but
many miles from Moscow. It was necessary in this case for head-
quarters to alert all possible sources and to make sure all clues
were followed up to produce this intelligence coup for the west.
Forbidden Fruit
There are also times when headquarters must perform a nega-
tive function, warning its agents to avoid material-no matter
how valuable it may seem-in order not to jeopardize some other
intelligence source. When I was stationed in Switzerland during
World War II, I received an instruction not to try to obtain any
foreign codes without prior instructions. I did not know it at the
time, but shortly beforehand an attempt by our intelligence to
get a German code in Portugal had so alerted the Germans that
they changed a code we were already reading.
Soon afterward one of my most trusted German agents, who
spoke with authority, told me that if I wished, he could get me
detailed information about their diplomatic codes and ciphers.
This put me in quite a quandary. If I showed no interest, this
would have been a giveaway that we had them already; no intelli-
gence officer would otherwise reject such an offer. I expressed
great interest and sparred for time to think over how this could
best be worked out. The next day I told him that as all my traffic
to Washington had to go by radio (Switzerland was surrounded,
in late 1942, by Nazi and Fascist forces) it would be too difficult
and too perilous for me to communicate what lie might give me
on the German codes. I said I should prefer to wait till France
was liberated-the Normandy invasion had already taken place
-so I could send out his code information by diplomatic pouch.
He readily accepted this somewhat specious answer. Sometimes
even the seemingly ripest apples of intelligence should not be
plucked.
In a world where so many countries have some kind of repre-
sentation abroad and where trade and travel occur in the most
unpredictable patterns, no intelligence service and no intelli-
gence officer rules out the possibility of the random and unex-
pected and often inexplicable windfall. This happens despite the
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 TILE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
best-planned geiAppgciVedeFOrrR&IeasenZOO2dO1s8rieCIAbRQFRi&I4-004 6r1 QO1sQO17Q005e7 and returned
thing on his mind feels safer about talking to an intelligence
officer 10,000 miles away from home, so he waits for the oppor-
tunity of a trip abroad to seek one out. Suddenly Korea may
become the place where one picks up valuable information on
Czechoslovakia. It can happen that way.
A final word on the craft of intelligence as it is practised today
requires comparison of the open and the closed society. Each
in its distinctive way contains weaknesses of which an opposing
intelligence service can take advantage, and strengths which make
the opponent's job more difficult. Altogether it must be said
that in our open society we make it far too easy for our op-
ponents to learn of our military secrets. Much that we can acquire
from the Soviets only through an enormous investment of man-
power and money, they can get from us merely by reading what
we publish.
Some years ago my predecessor as director of the CIA, General
Walter Bedell Smith, was disturbed by this situation and decided
to make a test. He co-opted the services of a group of able and
qualified academicians from one of our large universities for
some summer work. He asked them to examine open publica-
tions, news articles, hearings of the Congress, government re-
leases, monographs, speeches and the like, in order to determine
what kind of estimate of U.S. military capabilities the Soviets
could put together from unclassified sources. "Their conclusions
indicated that in a few weeks of work by a task force on the open
literature our opponents could acquire a very good general idea
of our order of battle.
But when it comes to clandestine collection of intelligence-and
neither side can depend wholly on overt intelligence-then our
opponents' agents run up against the FBI and other law-enforce-
ment agencies in this country. Our system also provides other
obstacles which are inherent and require no special effort on
our part-our free society does not breed deep-set and widespread
disaffection, as does the Communist society. Even though we
have had a share of "ideological" Communists and cases of en-
trapment, the Soviets have today no large pool of malcontents
and haters of our system from which to draw when they look for
resident agents. They know that the local Communist party is
too closely watched to recommend it for clandestine work.
Communist Mind Isolated
It is also a fact that the closed society produces the kind of
isolated mentality that cannot understand the workings and the
mentality of a free society. The same "wall" that Soviet'citizens
carry with them when they go abroad, which makes it difficult
for us to get close to them, tends to cut them off from the societies
and governments they wish to penetrate. For one thing, they often
consider much of the overt intelligence available to them as in-
tentional deception their own suspicion betrays them. Their
judgment of the true loyalties of prospective recruits is often bad.
When they approach nationals of western European and North
American countries under the impression that they have found a
willing source, they often discover that their names are in the
papers soon afterwards because the source was not really willing
at all. Hundreds of Americans of Russian and east European
origin whom the Soviets or their satellites have tried to approach
have reported such approaches to our authorities immediately
after they were made.
An outstanding case of this kind was that of the Rumanian
V. C. Georgescu. In 1953, shortly after Georgescu's escape from
Communist Rumania and while he was seeking U.S. citizenship,
a Communist intelligence agent acting under Soviet guidance
made a cruel attempt to blackmail him. Georgescu was given to
understand that if he would agree to perform certain intelligence
tasks in the United States, his two young sons, who were still
parents. Otherwise he could expect never to see his sons again.
Georgescu courageously refused any discussion of the subject,
threw the man out of his office and reported the full details to the
FBI. The Communist agent, who was in the diplomatic service,
was expelled from the United States. The whole case received
such wide publicity that Rumania finally sought to repair its
damaged prestige by acceding to President Eisenhower's personal
request for the release of the boys.
The ease with which the Soviets can place their intelligence
officers in Western countries is an enormous advantage for their
intelligence work. I have already described how the Soviets use
their embassies and trade missions abroad for cover. They also
use their mission at the United Nations and have even placed
their intelligence personnel in such bodies as the sacrosanct Sec-
retariat of the United Nations, whose employees are supposed to
be international civil servants. Recently two Soviets were ex-
pelled from this body and from the United States for their at-
tempt to recruit a politician of the state of New York who
reported the whole incident to the FBI. To the Soviets, no inter-
national organization is sacrosanct.
These advantages which the Soviets have in the West cannot
be matched behind the Iron Curtain. There are no immigrants
and few long-term visitors to the Soviet Union. So far, no inter-
national body has chosen to settle there or has been invited to do
so. A Soviet citizen cannot walk into a foreign embassy without
having to explain later to the police what he was doing there. The
Soviet people are taught to distrust the foreigner (although they
do not always follow instructions) and the Soviet internal police
have the mission of seeing to it that the foreigner does not get
into sensitive areas. Under these conditions, espionage operations
are difficult to initiate from scratch behind the Iron Curtain. The
possibility that agents can he sought and found and cultivated
there without the knowledge of local police is so limited that no
intelligence service is going to try to solve many of its problems
by this means. Fortunately, there are other ways of achieving
the objectives of intelligence collection.
Our free societies, with all their blessings, cannot be made over
merely to even the balance sheet of intelligence. But some of the
loopholes, some indiscretions, some of the carelessness in our
handling of public information can possibly be dealt with more
effectively than they are today.
V. COUNTERINTELLIGENCE
I have emphasized that in today's spy-conscious world each
side tries to make the acquisition of intelligence by its opponent
as difficult as possible by taking "security measures" in order
to protect classified information, vital installations and personnel
from enemy penetration. I have also indicated that these meas-
ures, while indispensable as basic safeguards, become in the end
a challenge to the opponent's intelligence technicians to devise
even more ingenious ways of getting around the obstacles.
Clearly, if a country wishes to protect itself against the un-
ceasing 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 coun-
tries are after, how they are proceeding and what people they are
using. It can best accomplish these tasks by penetrating the inner
circle of hostile services where the plans are made and the agents
selected and trained, and, if the job can be managed, by bringing
over to its side "insiders" from the other camp.
Operations having this distinct aim belong to the field of coun-
terespionage and the information that is derived from them is
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 tiled counterintelligence. Counterespionage is inherently a pro
Jive and defensive operation. 4ppiQv rFKsRelea> 2.OO
,ionage against one's country. Given the nature of Communist
ns, however, counterespionage on our side inevitably entails
uncovering of secret aggression, subversion, sabotage, kid-
>ping, even assassination. Although such information is not, like
itive intelligence, of direct use to the government in the forma-
o, of policy, it often alerts the government to the nature of the
usts of its opponents and the area in which political action is
.ug planned. On October 30, 1962, U.S. and Venezuelan officials
'nitored a secret Cuban radio signal directing acts of terrorism
inst the Venezuelan oil fields. Before adequate preventive ac-
1 could be taken saboteurs, believed to be Communists, suc-
kled in doing serious damage to the oil production facilities
, C. Here counterintelligence helped mitigate the damage and
ointed the Cuban source of the threat. This allowed better
ective action to be taken for the future.
he function of counterespionage is assigned to various U.S.
ties, each of which has a special area of responsibility. The
s province is the territory of the United States itself; this
1_uiization guards against the hostile activities of foreign agents
our own soil. The CIA has the major responsibility for coun-
aspionage outside the United States, thereby constituting a
Guard line of defense against foreign espionage-it attempts to
ect the operations of hostile intelligence before the agents
h their targets. Each branch of the armed forces also has a
,nterintelligence arm whose purpose is mainly to protect its
imands, technical establishments and personnel both at home
1 abroad against enemy penetration.
Co-ordination of Agencies
he effectiveness of this division of labour depends. upon the
ordination of the separate agencies and on the rapid dissemi-
;on of counterintelligence information from one to the other.
case of the Soviet "illegal" Colonel Rudolf Abel supplies an
-I ration of this co-ordination. A close associate and co-worker
'olonel Abel's in the United States was on his way back to
Soviet Union to make his report. While in western Europe,
decided to defect. He contacted a U.S. intelligence office in
ountry where he felt it safe to do so, showing an American
,,port obtained on the basis of a false birth certificate. He told
itastic story of espionage in the United States, including spe-
,a as to secret caches of funds, communication among agents
l 'is network and certain details regarding Colonel Abel. All this
,'rmation was immediately transmitted to Washington and
=ed to the FBI for verification. The agent's story stood up in
cry respect. He was brought back quietly and willingly to the
-rited States. As soon as he reached our shores, the primary
,ponsibility for handling the investigation and legal procedures
the case was transferred to the FBI and the Department of
c;tice. The case had originated abroad with CIA which con-
iued to handle its foreign angles.
The traditional purposes of counterespionage are "to locate,
entify and neutralize" the opposition. In more specific terms,
his means to find out where and who the hostile spy is-and pos-
,ly the spymaster, too-in order to thwart his work and even
illy to put him out of business. "Neutralizing" can take many
,rms. Within the United States an apprehended spy can be prose-
;Jed under the law; so can a foreign intelligence officer who is
ought red-handed having contact with agents, provided he does
:ot. have diplomatic immunity. If he has immunity he can only
`io expelled. But there are other ways of neutralizing agents, and
x e of the best is by exposure or the threat of exposure. A spy
not of much further use once his name, face and story are in
lie papers.
Counterespionage operations are often compared to chess, and
Wide World
Soviet spy Rudolf Abel In his cell In the federal courthouse In Brooklyn, N.Y.,
after his arraignment In Aug. 1957. Col. Abel's detection and arrest were
brought about by co-ordination between the CIA, which first got the tip In
Europe, and the FBI and the Justice department, which handled the case In
the U.S.
the Soviets are notoriously good chess players. These operations
require enormous patience and adroitness. They may take months
to plan and years to bring to fruition. Our target is massive and
diverse, for the Soviets use not only their own intelligence ap-
paratus in their operations against us but also those of their Euro-
pean satellites-Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and
Bulgaria-all of whom are old in the ways of espionage. Chinese
Communist espionage and counterespionage operations are largely
independent of Moscow, though many of their senior personnel
were schooled by Soviet. intelligence.
The most sophisticated operations of counterespionage, and the
most rewarding if they succeed, are directed against the staff and
the installations of the opponent's intelligence service. One of the
most famous cases in history was that of Col. Alfred Redl, who
from 1900 to 1907 was chief of counterespionage in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire's military intelligence service, and was later
its representative in Prague. From 1902 until the time he was
unmasked in 1913, Redl actually had been a secret agent of the
Russians and had revealed to them everything he knew of his
own country's intelligence operations-in this case, almost every-
thing there was to know. But that wasn't all. As a leading officer
of the intelligence service, Redl was a member of the General
Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army and had access to all the
General Staff's war plans. These too he gave to the Russians.
35
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
Redl had been bla"cl~rr~a~ ~~n~o ~~rl ~~ ie2~ s~ /e lY ClAs8QR&4a0V1A GQMQ?17008Ws on serious charges,
in his career on the basis of two weaknesses-homosexuality and then the revolutionary group had to do something extreme, some-
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overwhelming venality.
't'oday, when the headquarters of an intelligence service is as
"impenetrable" as the best minds assigned to the task can make
it, counterespionage usually aims at more accessible and vul-
nerable targets. These are chiefly the offices and units that in-
telligence services maintain in foreign countries from which their
field operations in espionage and counterespionage are directed.
In the case of the Soviets, such, offices are often located in em-
bassies, consulates and trade delegations. These locations provide
"cover"; i.e., they conceal the intelligence unit and at the same
time afford its members the protection of diplomatic immunity.
A factor which counterespionage exploits is the need and desire
of the opposing side for information, for positive intelligence.
If a stranger walks into an embassy in the Free World and with a
worried look on his face goes up to the receptionist and tells her in
a hoarse whisper that he has some important information which
he would like to put into the hands of the "right person," it is
likely that he will sooner or later be talking to the "right person."
No intelligence service can afford to turn away such an offer of
information, not, at least, without giving it careful scrutiny. Some
of the most crucial intelligence ever received has been delivered
by people who unexpectedly walked into an embassy one day in
just this fashion. Therefore, counterespionage often tries to
"plant" an agent with the opposing service by fixing him up with
information which will make him appear useful. It is hoped that
the agent will get himself hired by the opposition on a long-term
basis, become more and more trusted and will be given increas-
ingly sensitive assignments.
The Soviets used this method against Allied intelligence offices
in West Germany and Austria during the 19S0s. Refugees from
the East were so numerous at that time that it was necessary to
employ 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 con-
ditions behind the Curtain which could not fail to make them
seem of great interest to Western intelligence. As a result, it later
turned out that some people employed as interrogators and assist-
ants were Soviet agents. Their task for the Soviets was to find
out about our methods and targets, to get acquainted with our
personnel and also to keep tabs on the countless refugees who
innocently told them their stories.
Provocation Frequently Used
s
thing more serious than merely holding clandestine meetings.
a result, we encounter some astounding situations in the Russia
of the early 1900s.
The most notorious of all tsarist provocateurs, the agent Azeff,
appears to have originated the idea of murdering the tsar's uncle,
the Grand Duke Sergius, and the Minister of the Interior, Plehve.
These murders were actually committed by the terrorists at the
instigation of Azeff solely for the sake of giving the Okhrana
the opportunity of arresting them. One of Lenin's closest asso-
ciates from 1912 until the Revolution, Roman Malinovsky, was a
tsarist police agent and provocateur, suspected by Lenin's entou-
rage but always defended by Lenin. Malinovsky did his share of
revealing the whereabouts of secret printing presses, secret meet-
ings and the conspiracies of the revolutionaries to the police, but
his main achievement was far more dramatic. Since he openly
played the role of an active Bolshevik, he got himself elected,
with police assistance and with Lenin's blessing, as representative
to the Russian parliament, the Duma, where he led the Bolshevik
faction and distinguished himself as an orator. The police often
had to ask him to restrain the revolutionary ardour of his
speeches. Indeed, there is some question in the cases of both Azeff
and Malinovsky as to where their allegiance really lay. Since each
played his role so well, he seems frequently to have been carried
away by it and to have believed in it, at least temporarily..
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Today provocation is chiefly an operation of security services
behind the Iron Curtain directed against foreign intelligence of-
ficers and diplomatic personnel: It may also be employed against
newsmen or even casual tourists, either to get rid of a reporter
who knows too much or to create the image of massive Western
espionage against the Soviet Union. It is sometimes even used as
a basis for blackmail. The usual method is to provoke the victim
into an illegal or degrading act, to expose or blackmail him and
make him liable to prosecution or to expulsion if he is protected
by diplomatic immunity. Of course, when blackmail is involved
there is no disclosure if the target agrees to "play the game."
When you read in the paper that an individual has been ex-
pelled from one of the Soviet bloc countries, frequently this is
either a case of a completely arbitrary charge being made or else
it is the result of a provocation. The routine goes like this: one
day the target is contacted at home, 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. The provoc-
ateur offers important information. If the target bites and takes
up contact with the man, he may be unpleasantly surprised dur-
ing the course of one of his meetings by the sudden intervention
of the local security police. The provocateur is "arrested" for
giving information to a foreign power. The target himself may
find his name in the paper; if he is a diplomatic official his em-
bassy will receive a request from the local foreign office that he
leave the country within 24 hours.
What is gained through this technique is that if the victim
really was engaged in the collection of intelligence, then the So-
viet Union is rid of him and has also served warning that it will
not put up with any kind of snooping. His replacement will prob-
ably restrict himself accordingly. He will certainly be careful
about offers from the "underground." And if the victim is a pri-
vate citizen knowledgeable in the ways and wiles of Communism,
then the Soviet will have deprived the West of another person
whose advice and counsel would be useful to us.
The most characteristic tool of counterespionage operations is
the double agent, and he comes in many guises. In an area like
West Germany, with its concentration of technical and military
This same tactic can be used to quite a different end, namely,
provocation, which has an ancient and dishonourable tradition.
The term agent provocateur points to its origin in France where
the device was formerly used during times of political unrest. But
it was the Russians who made a fine art of provocation. It was
the main technique of the tsarist Okhrana in smoking out revolu-
tionaries and dissenters and was later taken over by the various
Soviet police organs. In tsarist times an agent would join a sub-
versive group and not only spy and report on it t o the police, but
also incite it to take some kind of action in order to give the police
a pretext for swooping down on it and arresting some or all of its
members. Since the agent reported to the police exactly when
and where the action was going to take place, they had no
problems.
Actually, such operations could become immensely subtle, com-
plicated and dramatic. The more infamous of the tsarist agents
provocateurs have all the earmarks of characters out of Dostoev-
ski. 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
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
installations of both the German Federal Republic and NATO, The British roundup of five Soviet agents in the Lonsdale ring
there is a steady flood of ageApfpmved fortR ie *20O2/06918uarcIA-RDP84e 04619 ROOQiIlQQ I7QNStiY surveil-
airfields, supply depots, factories, United States military posts
and the like. Many of these agents are caught. Many give them-
selves up for a variety of personal motives. Such agents become
doubles when they can be persuaded to continue the appearance
of working for the Soviet bloc but under Western "control."
Soviet agents who are caught by Western officials often agree to
become double agents because they find it preferable to sitting in
jail for a couple of years.
Using the Double Agent
In order to "build up" a double agent of this kind he is al-
lowed to report harmless positive information back to his original
employers, the Soviets. It is hoped that the latter, pleased with
his success in acquiring information, will give him new briefs
and directives. Such briefs in themselves are counterintelligence
information because they show us what the opponent wants to
know and how he is going about getting it. Sometimes it is pos-
sible, through such an agent, to lure a courier, another agent or
even an intelligence officer into the West. When this happens,
one has the choice of simply watching the movements of the
visitor-hoping he will lead to other agents concealed in the
West-or of arresting him. If he is arrested, the operation is
naturally over, but it has succeeded in neutralizing another person
working for the opposition.
A more valuable double for our counterintelligence is the
resident of a Western country who, when approached by the
Soviet or other bloc intelligence service to undertake a mission
for them, quietly reports the encounter to his own authorities.
The advantages are twofold. The Soviets rarely approach a West-
erner unless they have something serious in mind. Secondly, the
voluntary act of the person approached in reporting this event
points to his trustworthiness. In such a case the target of Soviet
recruitment will usually be told by his own intelligence authorities
m.o "accept" the Soviet offer and to feign co-operation, meanwhile
reporting all the activities and missions which he undertakes for
!.he Soviets. He is provided with "reports" which his principals
desire to have fed to the Soviets. This game can then be played
until the Soviets begin to have some reason 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 had checked in with the FBI
early in the game, the Soviets ran a network of extremely impor-
tant agents in the United States, most of them in political and
intellectual circles. Morros reported on them regularly to the FBI.
Surveillance Must Be Covert
"Surveillance" is the professional word for shadowing or tail-
ing. Like every act of counterespionage, it must be executed with
maximum 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 elude 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.
Tf a person is only suspected of being an enemy agent, close ob-
servation of his actions over a period of time may lead to fur-
ther 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 uncover the network to which he belongs and the channels
through which he reports.
lance. Henry Houghton, an Admiralty employee, was suspected
of passing classified information to an unidentified foreign power.
Scotland Yard observed him meeting with another man on a
London street, but the encounter was so brief it was impossible
to tell for certain whether anything had passed between them or
whether they had even spoken to each other. However, the fact
that both men acted so furtive and were apparently extremely
wary of surveillance convinced the British that they were on the
right track. The Yard had enough trained men in the immediate
area to have the second man followed as well. He eventually led
them, after many days of tireless and well-concealed surveillance,
to a harmless-looking American couple who operated a second-
hand bookstore. The role, if any, of this couple could not be im-
mediately 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. While under surveillance, the two of them, walking down
the street carrying a market bag, were approached from the rear
by the same man as before. He was ready to relieve Houghton
and the girl of the market bag, clearly a prearranged method for
passing the "goods."
Three at one swoop, all caught in the act, was something the
police could not afford to pass up, and the three were arrested on
the spot. A few hours later, the American couple met the same
fate. The man Houghton met was Gordon Lonsdale, the Soviet
"illegal" with Canadian papers who was running the show. The
Americans had previously been 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 here. In London they
had been operating a secret transmitter to relay Lonsdale's in-
formation to Moscow. Microfilms found in their apartment
eventually led to the apprehension of John Vassall, another
Admiralty employee. Good counterespionage operatives never
close in on an agent without first having exhausted all the possi-
bilities of locating and identifying everyone else associated with
the agent.
A Bonanza for Intelligence
One of the biggest bonanzas for counterespionage is the defec-
tion of a staff intelligence officer of the opposition. It provides
the equivalent of a direct penetration of hostile headquarters for
a period of time. One such intelligence "volunteer" can paralyze
for months to come the service he left behind. He can describe the
internal and external organization of his service and the work
and character of many of his former colleagues at headquarters.
He can identify some intelligence personnel stationed abroad un-
der cover. Best of all, he can deliver information about opera-
tions. He is not likely to know the true identity of a large number
of agents, of course, for all intelligence services compartmentalize
such information, and only the few officers intimately concerned
with a case will know exactly who the agents on that case are.
The West has been singularly lucky in having many of these
bonanzas in the course of recent history. In 1937 two of Stalin's
top intelligence officers stationed abroad defected rather than
return to Russia to be swallowed up in the purge of the N.K.V.D.
One was Walter Krivitsky, who had been chief of Soviet intelli-
gence in Holland. In 1941 he was found dead in a Washington
hotel, shot by unknown agents, presumably Soviet, who were
never apprehended. I shall never accept the story that he com-
mitted suicide. The second was Alexander Orlov, who had been
one of the N.K.V.D. chiefs in Spain at the time of the civil war.
Unlike Krivitsky, he has managed to elude Soviet vengeance.
An early postwar Soviet defection was that of Igor Gouzenko,
a member of Soviet military intelligence, who had been in charge
37
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 _, , #eese 2002/06/18 CIA-RDP84-00161 R04Q1QOfi0005-7
Wide world
Head In shadow Is that of Peter
Deriabin, former major in the Soviet
secret police, who sought asylum in
the West in 1954. At left, Associated
Press reporter Pay Shaw. Interviewed
in 1959, Deriabin permitted no pic-
tures of his face, even though he was
wearing a disguise
of codes and ciphers in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. Thanks
in large part to information Gouzenko brought with him, the most
lethal of all Soviet espionage efforts, to procure the secrets of the
atom bomb, was stopped.
The years 1954-55 were the occasion of multiple desertions.
After Stalin's death and the liquidation of Beria shortly after-
ward, it was clear that anyone prominent in the Soviet security
service was in jeopardy. Among the major defections to the West
at that time were those of Vladimir Petrov, who had been K.G.B.
chief in Australia; Juri Rastvorov, an intelligence officer sta-
tioned at the Soviet Mission in Japan; and Peter Deriabin, who
defected from his post in Vienna. All of these men had at one
time or another been stationed at intelligence headquarters in
Moscow and possessed valuable information that went far beyond
their assignments at the time they defected.
Two defections of a special kind that have occurred in recent
years involved Soviet intelligence personnel employed on assas-
sination missions. Nikolay Khokhlov was sent from Moscow to
West Germany in early 1954 to arrange for the murder of a
prominent anti-Soviet emigre 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 Stashinskiy defected in West Ger-
many 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 Kaznachayev defected
in Burma, where he had been stationed. While Kaznachayev was
not a staff member of Soviet intelligence, he was a "co-opted
worker" and was used in intelligence work whenever his position
as a diplomat enabled him to perform certain tasks with less risk
of discovery than his colleagues in the intelligence branch. His
recent book describing what went on in the Soviet Embassy in
Rangoon has done a great deal to debunk the picture of Soviet
skill and American incompetence previously impressed on the
American public in the book The Ugly American.
All the important intelligence "volunteers" have not been So-
viets. Numerous high-ranking staff officers have defected from the
satellite countries and were able to contribute information not
only about their own services but about Soviet intelligence as
well, for the Soviets manage and direct the satellite services, not
at long range but in person. They do this through a so-called ad-
visory system. A Soviet "advisor" 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 advisor is supposed to be shown all significant material con-
cerning the work being done, and must give his consent to all im-
portant operational undertakings. Ile is to all intents and purposes
a supervisor, and his word is final.
As a sidelight on Soviet relations to its satellites, and as an
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 nae tee e t s intere ;
xcellent example of counter30P
o note that the Soviets do bPbd o'hrt~~~a~ii "t~S2/ x?
ontrol the satellite intelligence services. This is not because the
latter are incompetent, but because the satellite services are evi-
dently 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 satel-
lite services who can supply them with information on plans, per-
sonnel, conflicts in the local management, disaffection and the
like, which might not have come to the attention of the advisor.
Key Satellite Aides Fled
Joseph Swiatlo, who defected 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. Pawel Monat had been Polish military attache in Washing-
ton from 1955 to 1958, after which he returned to Warsaw and
was put in charge of world-wide collection of information by
Polish military attaches. He served in this job for two years be-
fore defecting in 1959. Frantisek Tisler defected to us after hav-
ing served as Czech military attache in Washington from 1957
to 1959. The Hungarian secret police officer Bela Lapusnyik
made a daring escape to freedom over the Austria-Hungary bor-
der in May of 1961 and reached Vienna safely, only to die of
poisoning, apparently at the hands of Soviet agents, before he
could tell his full story to Western authorities.
What has brought all these men over to our side is naturally a
matter of great interest not only to Western intelligence but to
any serious student of the Soviet system and of Soviet life.
Revelations by Vladimir Petrov, Soviet embassy official who had acted as the
Soviet's espionage chief In Australia until he became disillusioned with com-
munism, set off a major Investigation In 1954. Petrov and his wife, who had
also served as an espionage officer, were granted sanctuary in Australia
Wide Worid
Wide World
Jozef Swiatlo, Polish security official who turned against communism in 1954
and was given asylum In the U.S.
Gouzenko, as code clerk for Soviet intelligence, saw all the traffic
that passed back and forth between the Soviet Embassy in Ot-
tawa and Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow during
World War II. He 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 tremendous espionage effort to steal their scien-
tific secrets. The moral revulsion of the man on learning of Soviet
machinations against its "friends" eventually led to his defection.
Soviet Insiders Disillusioned
The postwar defectors did not have similar motivation because
the Soviets no longer affected friendship with the West after 1946.
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 Gouzenko's seem
to have inspired these defections. Many of these men suffered
some 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 centres of power, it is not
surprising that the Soviet intelligence officer gets an inside look,
available to few, of the sinister and hypocritical methods of op-
eration behind the facade of "socialist idealism." To the intelli-
gent, dedicated Communist, such knowledge comes as a shock.
One defector has told us, for example, that he could trace the dis-
illusionment which later led to his own defection back to the day
when he found out that Stalin and the K.G.B., and not the Ger-
mans, had been responsible for the Katyn massacre (the murder
of 10,000 Polish officers during World War II). The Soviet pub-
lic still does not know the truth about this or most of the other
crimes of Stalin. This "loss of faith" in the system within which
one is working, coupled often with personal disappointments,
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
seems to be theA9pi J &JiPB' tZ6[6A4e2G621()6/1 8 : CIAADP84 'O 1 -1ROO&*OOfFROOS.-'t'his country has always
Of course, these names by no means exhaust the list of all those been a haven for those seeking to leave tyranny and espouse
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." They
too have made, and are making, a continual contribution to our
inside knowledge of the work of the Soviet intelligence and se-
curity apparatus and of the way in which the subversive war is
being carried on against us by Communism. There have also been
defectors from Communist China.
Every effort is made to see to it that those who leave a Com-
munist service are helped and assisted in every way, whether they
openly acknowledge their previous connections or try to preserve
Soviet bombers over Moscow's Red Square during a May Day parade
TikhomirofJ-Magnum
continue to work for the Kremlin and against the
VI. CONFUSING THE ADVERSARY
Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote the well-known lines
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
was not thinking of intelligence deception, but his words describe
quite correctly what this kind of operation frequently entails.
When one intentionally misleads, friends as well as foes arc some-
times misled, and there is always the danger of subsequently not
being believed when one wants to be. Deception is tricky business,
especially in time of peace and in the absence of wartime controls.
And deception is easier in the closed society, which can manipu-
late its information media and hide what it wants, where and
when it wants.
In intelligence, the term deception covers a wide variety of ma-
neuvers by which a state attempts to mislead another state, gen-
erally a potential or actual 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 of attack, or to give the impression
that there will be no attack at all, or simply to confuse the op-
ponent about one's plans and purposes. During the kind of peace
we call the Cold War, various other forms of deception, including
political deception, are practised against us by the Soviets. These
involve the propagation of false and misleading information, the
faking of documents and the use of forgeries. This is considered
important enough so that a special section in the Soviet intelli-
gence service called the "disinformation bureau" is responsible
for mounting such operations.
Soviet Parades Used for Deception
Deception as to military capabilities is chiefly a short-range
tactical maneuver gauged to conceal the possession or location
of certain weapons-or, sometimes, the lack of them. The So-
viets have used military parades to place armaments on display
that are intended to draw attention away from other armaments
they may have in their arsenal or may plan to have. Mock-ups of
planes and other equipment never intended to be operational have
also been exhibited. In 1955 the Soviets gave the impression,
during an exhibition on Red Aviation Day, that they were em-
phasizing heavy bomber production, whereas in fact they were
shifting their emphasis to missiles. Visiting diplomats and mili-
tary observers were permitted to see a "fly-by" of heavy bombers
in numbers far exceeding what was thought to be the available
squadron strength in the area. The impression was thereby given
that many more heavy bombers were coming off the assembly
lines that we had calculated. Later it was learned that the same
squadron of bombers had been flying around in circles, reappear-
ing every few minutes with the intention of misleading the ob-
servers.
Deception techniques of this sort were utilized by both sides
during World War II. Airfields in Britain were made to look like
farms from the air. Sod was placed over the hangars and main-
tenance shacks 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. Else-
where mocked-up naval vessels were stationed where real ones
might well have been.
As a strategic maneuver, deception operations generally re-
quire lengthy and careful preparation. One must ascertain what
 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
the enemy thinks and wAp e4sF c I~ q Q)g2t q6/~qcj IA RDP>~4 0report t em. 0161 RO 001100170005-agents in the up , closest co-ordination between the supreme military command French underground were utilized to pass deceptive orders and
and the intelligence service. Thus these operations are always of requests for action to back up the coming Allied landings; it
major stature and are, for the most part, one-time gambles for was known that certain of these agents were under the control
high stakes. The intelligence problem is to get information into of the Germans and would pass on to them messages received
the hands of the enemy by some means and in some form so that from the Allies. Such agents therefore constituted a direct chan-
he will believe a certain move is to be made by his opponent. The nel to the German intelligence service. In order to make the
information itself must be plausible and not outside the prat- Germans think that the landings would take place in the Le Havre
tical range of plans that the enemy knows are capable of being area, agents in the vicinity were asked to make certain oh-
put into operation. servati fl 1
n
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
southern Europe. The question was where. Since Sicily was an
obvious stepping stone 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 bypass 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 things would not have been credible.
The deception had to point to something within the expected
range.
The Contrived Accident
For quick and effective placement of plausible deception di-
rectly into the hands of the enemy's high command, few methods
beat the "accident," so long as it seems logical and has all the ap-
pearances of being a wonderfully lucky break for the enemy. Such
an accident was cleverly staged by the British in 1943 and it was
no doubt accepted by the Germans at the time as completely
genuine. Early in May of that year the corpse of a British ma-
jor was found washed up on the southwest coast of Spain near
the town of Huelva, between the Portuguese border and Gibral-
tar. A courier briefcase was still strapped to his wrist containing
copies of correspondence to General Alexander in Tunisia from
the Imperial 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 armoured division to Greece, and the Italian
garrison on Sicily was not reinforced.
This was perhaps one of the best cases of deception utiliz-
ing 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 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.
A British Major's Corpse
Actually, 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 1944, also made effective use of deception-in this case not
an isolated ruse but a variety of misleading maneuvers closely
co-ordinated with each other. These succeeded, as is well known,
in keeping the Germans guessing as to the exact area of the in-
tended Allied landing. False rumours were circulated among our
own troops on the theory that German agents in England would
sere )y nuicatmg to the Germans a heightened
Allied interest in fortifications, rail traffic, etc. Lastly, military
reconnaissance itself was organized in such a way as to em-
phasize an urgent interest in places where the attack would not
come. Fewer aerial reconnaissance sorties were flown over the
Normandy beaches than over Le Havre and other likely areas.
There are essentially two ways of planting deceptive informa-
tion with the enemy. One can stage the kind of accident the
British did in Spain. Such accidents are plausible because they
do, after all, frequently occur solely as a result of the misfor-
tunes of war. History is full of instances where couriers, loaded
with important dispatches, fell into enemy hands. The other way
is to plant an agent with the enemy who is ostensibly reporting to
him about your plans. 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.
Captured Radio Put to Use
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 con-
fesses he has been sent on a mission to spy on enemy troop move-
ments and to communicate with his intelligence headquarters by
radio. Such an agent stands. a good chance of being shot after
making this confession; 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 pro-
vides a direct channel for feeding deception to the opponent's
intelligence service. If the intelligence service that 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 concentra-
tions in sector A, it gives the impression that some military action
is planned there. This was one tactic used by the Allies in prepara-
tion for the Normandy landings.
The mounting of strategic deception requires the complete
co-operation and the complete security of all parts of govern-
ment engaged in the effort. For this reason, large-scale deception
is difficult for a democratic government except under wartime
controls. For the Soviets, of course, the situation is different.
With their centralized organization and complete control of the
information media within their country they can support a decep-
tion operation far more efficiently than a free country can. When
a Soviet diplomat drops a remark in deepest confidence to a col-
league from a neutral country at a dinner party, he usually does
so knowing that the neutral colleague also attends dinner parties
with Westerners. The particular remark was contained in a direc-
tive sent to him by his Foreign Office. When it is studied in intelli-
gence headquarters somewhere in the West and is found to agree
in substance with a remark made by a Soviet military attache at
a cocktail party 10,000 miles away, the two remarks may errone-
ously be thought to confirm one another.
In reality both originated with the same master source in the
Kremlin. Both Russians were acting as mouthpieces for an ex-
tremely well co-ordinated and well-timed program of political de-
ception mani ulated month by month i j fiction with
n
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 THE CRAFT OF IAW(Whecf For Release 2002/06/18 : CLA-~DP84-00 1 JF,Q9PXQ9',7PQQ 7
massive of-
ocu
the Soviets' ever-shifting aggressive probes and plots in Berlin,
Cuba and whatever is next on the program.
the Congo
L
,
aos,
One of the most successful acts of long-range political de-
ception ever launched against the West took place before and
during World War II. It had the gullible in the West believing
that the Chinese People's Movement was not Communistic but
was solely a social and agrarian reform. This was not accom-
plished by open Communist propaganda. Instead the fiction was
planted by means of Communist-controlled journalists in the Far
East and various "front" or penetrated organizations.
Real Accidents Suspect
Any discussion of deception would be incomplete without men-
tioning how often the fear of being deceived has blinded an op-
ponent to valid intelligence accidentally coming into his hands.
If you suspect an enemy of constant trickery, then almost any-
thing that happens can be taken as one of his tricks. A collateral
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. He will be
suspicious and distrustful. He will not want to be caught off
guard.
On January 10, 1940, during the "phony war," 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
d t to be Belgium. On board were the complete plans of
u
thing, t e icero
fensives to come and the growing power of the Allies-infor-
mation which collided head on with the illusions cherished in
the highest German circles. Secondly, competition and discord
among different organs of the German government prevented it
from making a sober analysis of this source. Particularly, the
intelligence service under Himmler and Kaltenbrunner and the
diplomatic service under Ribbentrop were at odds and, as a re-
sult, if Kaltenbrunner thought information was good, Ribben-
trop automatically 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 serv-
ice suspected deception. The net effect was that, as far as can
be ascertained, the Cicero material never had any appreciable
influence on Nazi strategy. Of course, at this late date they did
not have many alternatives open to them anyway.
A further ironical twist to this famous case is that the Nazi
intelligence service paid this most valuable agent in counterfeit
English pound notes, and he has been trying ever since to get
restitution from the German government for services rendered
-in real money.
Long History of Forgery
Certainly one of the most active agencies in the propagation
of intentional deception is the office in the Soviet intelligence
service (K.G.B.) called the disinformation section. In recent
years this office has been particularly busy in formulating and
distributing what purport to be official documents of the United
States, Britain and other countries of the Free World. Its in-
tention is to misstate and misrepresent the policies and purposes
of these countries. In June of 1961 Richard Helms, a high
official of the Central Intelligence Agency, presented the evi-
dence of this activity to a congressional committee. Out of the
mass of forgeries available, he selected 32 particularly succulent
ones, which were fabricated in the period 1957-60.
turne o
the German invasion of France through Belgium, for which
Hitler had already given marching orders. When the Luftwaffe
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 op-
eration. How could the Germans be so sloppy as to allow a small
plane to go aloft so close to the Belgian border in bad weather
with a completely detailed invasion plan on board? This reason-
ing focused on the circumstances, not on the 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 advantage there was in perpetrating a de-
ception of this sort. Obviously, none. As we learned after the
war, the invasion of Belgium, which had been set for the 16th of
January-six days after the plane came down-was postponed
by Hitler primarily because the plans had fallen into the Allies'
hands.
The Ambassador's Valet
ACcidents like this are not the only events that
spectre of deception. It has already been pointed out that if you
send a deception agent to the, enemy, you have to make him
credible. Thus bona 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 Tur-
key. He had succeeded in cracking the ambassador's private safe
and had access to top secret British documents on the conduct
of the war, and one day offered to sell them to the Germans as
well as to continue supplying similar documents.
Some of Hitler's experts in Berlin could never quite believe
that this wasn't a British trick, but for more complex reasons
than in some cases where deception is feared. The incident is
an excellent example of how prejudice and preconception can
cause failure to pr~g, ,yoWi 7Or Release 2002/06/18
42
He pointed out that the Russian secret service has a ong
of forging documents, having concocted the Protocols of
tor
hi
y
s
Zion over 60 years ago to promote anti-Semitism. The Soviets
have been adept pupils of their tsarist predecessors. Their for-
geries nowadays, 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 West-
ern allies; and to drive a wedge between the peoples of non-
Communist countries and their governments by promoting the
notion that these governments are the puppets of the United
States.
The falsified documents include various communications pur-
porting 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 the
initiated, these documents are patent fabrications; while the
texts are 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 prepared for mass consumption rather
British
the elite. One of the most subtle, supposedly part a
cabinet paper, wholly misrepresented the U.S. and British atti-
tude with respect to trade-union policies in Africa.
The forgery technique is particularly useful to the Communists
because they possess the means for wide and fast distribution.
Newspapers and news outlets are available to them on a world-
wide basis. While many of these are tarnished and suspect be-
cause of Communist affiliations, they are nevertheless capable
of placing a fabrication before millions of people in a short time.
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TELEGRAM. SENT
Tel 9ECSTATE
WASHINGTOd
Date; April 9. 1957
Cbereed W: Embaaay
50B, April 4, 5 p.m,
HOST INQtEDIATH
TOP SECRET
your telegram No. 1348 of April 2, 1957
At the present moment it would be a aprather parently lffiCIXV~
prefer,
to carry out version No. 1, which y
owing to the lack of people in Gt.mmo'e entourage whom we
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that a final decision should be taken
,Will astll soon depasend
In any case I age possible.
561, April 9. 5:3o p.m.
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Typical of documents forged for propaganda purposes and made public in media of popular circulation are these two
spurious telegrams supposedly sent to the Secretary of State In Washington. Published In an English-language
newspaper in the Far East, the documents alleged that American official agencies were plotting to assassinate Chiang-
kal-Shek
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 available to Western in-
telligence in peacetime, for, quite apart from ethical considera-
tions, there is too much danger of deceiving and misleading our
own people.
There is another type of deception that occasionally crops up
which does not have its source with Communist intelligence serv-
ices but which complicates the task of the Western intelligence
officer and particularly the analyst. This deception is the product
of what are called "papermills" in intelligence parlance. A paper-
mill is a producer of phony intelligence, primarily for profit and
not for the sake of the deception.
In the latter days of World War II and in the postwar era when
thousands of the intelligentsia of eastern Europe were uprooted
from their homes and sought refuge in the West they came to
rely on their wits for a living. Many had had important posts
in the countries they were forced to leave, and possessed wide
education and knowledge of languages and peoples. Some of the
less scrupulous among them found that an excellent way to make
a living for a time was to fabricate intelligence reports based on
supposed contacts with their homeland. These papermill fabri-
cations could be cleverly conceived, well constructed and well
attuned to the desires of prospective purchasers and therefore
almost impossible to reject at first glance. Many of them had a
good market and brought a good price. Unfortunately for the
fabricators, they were often too zealous in seeking more than
one market for their product. In time-but it took much time and
effort-U.S. and other intelligence services that had been vic-
timized made a common drive to eliminate the papermills. The
effort has been very largely successful.
VII. HOW INTELLIGENCE IS PUT TO USE
Information gathered by intelligence services is of little use
unless it is got into the hands of its "consumers," the policy
makers. This must be done in good time and in clear, intelligible
form so that the particular intelligence can easily be read and
properly related to the policy problem with which it deals.
These criteria are not easily met, for the sum total of intelli-
gence received is immense. Thousands of items come into CIA
headquarters every day, directly or through other agencies of
government, particularly the State and Defense departments.
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
Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7 43
 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
is this mass of inf MvWdr ei gi4O02/DW48
agencies, and how is i processed in the State Department, the
Defense Department and the CIA?
Between these three agencies there is immediate and often
automatic exchange of important intelligence data. Of course,
someone has to decide what "important" means and determine
priorities. The sender of an intelligence report (w]io may be
any one of our 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 hostilities or some major threat to our national
security, the sender will place his message in channels that pro-
vide for automatic dissemination to the intelligence officers in
the State and Defense departments and the CIA. The latter, as
co-ordinator of foreign intelligence, has the right of access to
all 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
coming into the State and Defense departments and the CIA.
During office hours (which in intelligence work are never nor-
mal), designated officers scan the incoming information for
anything of critical character. Through the long night hours, spe-
cial 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 are continually exchanging ideas about the sorting out
of clues to any developing crisis. In the event that any dramatic
item should appear in the incoming nightly stream of reports, ar-
rangements have been made as to the notification of their im-
mediate chiefs. The latter decide who among the high policy of-
ficials of government-from the President at the top to the re-
sponsible 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 origin. News
of a dramatic, yet open, character-the death of a Stalin, a re-
volt 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 trans-
mission of reports from our embassies and our overseas installa-
tions, but these messages must go through the process of being
enciphered and deciphered. As a result, news flashes sometimes
get through first.
Post-Mortem Analyses
After there has been an important incident affecting our se-
curity, one that has called for policy decisions and actions, there
is usually an intelligence post-mortem to examine how effectively
the available information was handled and how much forewarn-
ing 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 predicted through intelligence channels. The pur-
pose 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
intelligence. The second is the researching of all available intelli-
gence on a given series of subjects of interest to our policy
makers; 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 proc-
CW RDM&OOi Pr$ QDQIQO1aaiQQQ 7ence estimate and
judgment based on the whole volume of information on the sub-
ject of the estimate.
Of course, there is not time to submit every important item to
detailed analysis before it is distributed to the policy makers. 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 policy makers who
receive such intelligence in the form of periodic intelligence bul-
letins (or as an isolated message if its importance and urgency
requires special treatment) are warned against acting on raw
intelligence alone.
These bulletins-both daily and weekly-summarize on a
world-wide basis the important new developments over the pre-
ceding hours or days; they include such appraisal as the sender
may give or as the CIA is able to add in consultation with rep-
resentatives of the other government intelligence agencies. These
representatives meet frequently for that purpose, going over the
items to be included in the daily bulletin. New information may
still be added to the daily bulletin up until the early morning
hours of the day on which it is issued. When this intelligence
is sent forward, explanatory material is often included as to
source, manner of acquisition and reliability. Some messages carry
their own credentials as to authenticity; most do not.
Position Papers
In addition to the current raw intelligence reports and the
"basic intelligence" studies, there are the position papers, gen-
erally called "national estimates." These are prepared by the in-
telligence community on the basis of all the ,intelligence available
on a certain subject along with an interpretation of the "impon-
derables." Here we come to a most vital function of the entire
work of intelligence-how to deal with the mass of information
about future developments so as to make it useful to our policy
makers 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 econo-
mies of the U.S.S.R. and Communist 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 why the CIA was organized was to
provide a mechanism for co-ordinating intelligence work so that
the President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of De-
fense could have before them a single reasoned analysis of the
factors involved in situations affecting our national security.
President Truman, who, in 1947, submitted the legislation pro-
posing 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 form. If it
is not intelligent and understandable, it is useless.
He also describes the system by which intelligence was co-ordi-
nated and passed on to policy makers:
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 immedi-
ately calls upon the CIA to present an estimate of the effects such a
policy is likely to have. The Director of the CIA 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 State then makes the final
recommendation of policy, and the President makes the final decision.
What President Truman refers to as "all the advisory councils
of the CIA" was established in 1950 as the Intelligence Advisory
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44 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
Committee, which later beApprtbvddi"rSR4NvaA 1kIO2/06PttPrp to D 4?-b0F6'1R( (f1`oOqs -e drawn as
Board (USIB) and is often referred to as "the intelligence com-
munity." 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 an increasingly important role
in the intelligence community. So too is the intelligence unit of
the State Department, whose head ranks as an assistant secre-
tary of state. The USIB meets regularly every week and more
frequently during crises or whenever any vital new, item of in-
telligence is received. The Director of Central Intelligence is re-
sponsible for the estimates arrived at by the board, but if any
member dissents and desires his dissent to be recorded, a state-
ment of his views is included as a footnote to the estimate that is
finally presented to the President and interested members of
the National Security Council.
To facilitate its work in making estimates, the CIA has set up
the Board of National Estimates, on which sits a group of experts
in intelligence, both civilian and military. The board has no fixed
size or term of office but generally comprises about a dozen
members. It is an integral and vital part of the agency, and its
members are officials of the agency serving on a full-time basis.
The military members are eminent retired officers who owe their
allegiance to CIA and not to a particular military service. It is
the duty of the board to prepare initial drafts of most estimates
and to co-ordinate these drafts, at the working level, with repre-
sentatives from the USIB membership. To deal with highly tech-
nical subjects, such as Soviet missiles, aircraft or nuclear pro-
grams, competent technical subcommittees of USIB have been
established to work with the Board of National Estimates in
making early drafts of estimates. And, in certain cases, experts
outside of government may be consulted.
Bulganin's Missile Threat
Obviously, the procedure of making an initial draft, passing
it on to the USIB, formulating the report along with'any dissent-
ing opinions, and finally submitting it, is a time-consuming proc-
ess. There are times when "crash" estimates are needed on the
spur of the moment. 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 was intercepted early on elec-
tion eve by a telephone message from General Charles P. Cabell,
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 night, and
early on election morning I took to President Eisenhower our
agreed estimate of Soviet intentions and probable courses of ac-
tion 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 mis-
siles in Cuba, the intelligence community had already been re-
ceiving reports from agents and refugees indicating mysterious
construction of some sort of 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 purpose apparently was to deal with pos-
sible intruding aircraft. Since the reports received came largely
from persons who had little technical knowledge of missile de-
whether something more sinister was involved.
The evidence that had been accumulated was sufficient, how-
ever, to alert the intelligence community to the need for a more
scientific and precise analysis of what was going on. Reconnais-
sance flights were resumed and the concrete evidence obtained
on which the President based his report to the nation and his
action. This required, of course, not only the most careful in-
telligence analysis but immediate intelligence judgments. As the
President stated, the air reconnaissance established beyond a
doubt that more than antiaircraft installations were being con-
structed on Cuban soil. This was a case, incidentally, in which
it was obviously necessary to give publicity to intelligence con-
clusions. Khrushchev's subsequent statements and actions testi-
fied to their accuracy.
A Sense of Urgency
Most of the estimating can be done on a more ordered basis
than in such situations, although today there is a sense of
urgency in the whole field of intelligence. Some estimates are
requested by senior policy officers of government 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 military
and technical preparations. Before some estimates are pre-
pared, a hurry-up call is sent to those who collect the intelli-
gence 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 intentions of a particular government at a
particular time.
Few fields have proved more difficult of analysis than that of
certain Soviet weapons systems. Here one has to deal with Soviet
capabilities to produce a given system, the role assigned to the
system by the military and its true priority in the whole mili-
tary 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
possible to give an estimate of the actual programming of the
system.
In 1954, for example, there was evidence that the Soviet Union
was producing long-range intercontinental heavy bombers
comparable to our B-52s. At first, every indication pointed to
the conclusion that the Russians were adopting this weapon as
a major element of their offensive strength and planned to pro-
duce 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 Depart-
ment and were supplied by the intelligence community. These
were based on knowledge of the Soviet aircraft manufactur-
ing 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 in-
dustrial 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 ac-
tual program. All this led to speculation in this country as to a
"bomber gap."
Naturally, however, intelligence kept a close watch on events.
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
Production did n~RPFOaYeApFd4S1' Bed ~s 0 6/18 :CIA-RD ~84-0161 R000100170005-7
dence accumulated that th evi- say to he mte tgence officers: If you won't give us some esti-
e per ormance of the heavy bomber
was less than satisfactory. At some point, probably about 1957,
the Soviet leaders apparently 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 program was then appearing
and beginning to cause concern. Thus, while previous estimates
of capability in bomber production remained 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 d'ith 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 intelligence.
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 achieve-
ments. They saw this even before it was clear that a nuclear
warhead could be so reduced in weight and size as to be deliver-
able over great distances by the big boosters which they cor-
rectly 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
Europe.
Don't Underrate Soviets
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 develop-
mental 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 Ger-
man experts in addition to those they seized and forcibly de-
ported.
It is a mistake, however, to credit Soviet 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, they had never been brought into
contact with the actual Soviet development and could tell' only
what they had themselves contributed.
The first decade after the end of the war was a period when
we had only a scanty 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 U-2 photographs became available after 1956, "hard" intel-
ligence 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 con-
cerned with our own missile programs as well as with our own
missile defenses. Planning in such a field takes years, and the
Defense Department 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-hall gazing. But our
military planning requires estimates of this nature. The planners
mate as to the future, we will have to prepare it ourselves-but
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 tantamount 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 one had to
decide bow the Soviet Union would allocate its total military ef-
fort. 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, now much into elements of attack and how
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, on the basis of certain proved capabilities of the Russians
and of estimates of their intentions and over-all strategy, con-
clusions were reached as to the numbers of missiles and nuclear
warheads that would be available and on launchers several years
in the future.
There is no doubt that tests of Soviet missiles in 1957 and
afterward showed a high competence in the.ICBM field. Soviet
shots of seven to eight thousand miles into the far Pacific were
well advertised and not ignored by our intelligence. Their test-
ing in the intermediate fields must also have been gratifying
to them. But would they use their bulky and somewhat awk-
ward "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 mo-
ment of possible missile superiority that they would sacrifice
this to a more orderly program? The answer, in retrospect,
seems to be in the negative, indicating that they chose the more
orderly program. As soon as this evidence appeared, the ICBM
estimates-as in the case of the bombers-were quickly revised
downward.
Intelligence Good on Cuba
Today, after the Cuba incident, one may well ask whether pres-
ent Soviet actions do not indicate a change of attitude toward
their missile program. They were willing to take considerable
risks to get some IRBM and MRBM bases in Cuba to create the
equivalent, as a threat to us, of a considerable additional num-
ber of ICBM bases in the heartland of Russia. Now they seem
to be more in a hurry.
In any event, the intelligence collected on Soviet missiles was
excellent as to the nature and quality of the potential threat.
Our intelligence was also both good and timely as to Soviet pro-
duction of high-thrust engines and the work on Sputnik. And all
of this intelligence 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. Analy-
sis of human behaviour and anticipation of human reactions in a
given situation can' never be assigned to a computer, and some-
times they baffle the 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, what would be the reaction of the Chinese Communists?
Would they answer with a direct attack, or would they stay
quiescent under certain conditions-if, for example, Korean
rather than U.S. and UN troops formed the bulk of the advance
or if we did not disturb the Chinese sources of electric power
in North Korea?
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
At that time, we had goo ,i A pb~ el~r o 4/O sadiAul bPWQw 61 ~*0~t004 t a sponta-
strength of the Chinese Com cost `fo`rces on t e far s~ e of the neous uprising of the unarmed population of Cuba would ensue.
Yalu. We had to guess, or to put it better, 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 ab-
sence 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 estimates, for these were
made just before I joined the CIA. The conclusions of the esti-
mators were that it was a toss-up, but they leaned to the side that
under certain circumstances the Chinese would probably not
intervene. In fact, we just did not know what the Chinese Com-
munists 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. For example, normally one would not have "esti-
mated" that Khrushchev should choose the opening day of the
Unaligned Nations Conference at Belgrade in September of 1961
to announce to the world, without forewarning, that he was break-
ing the gentleman's agreement on suspension of nuclear testing.
Yet, this is exactly what he did. In Cuba in October of 1962
Khrushchev presumably "estimated" 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 misestimated, just as some
on our side had misestimated, that, because of the risks involved
and the difficulty of maintaining secrecy, Khrushchev would not
attempt to place offensive weapons in Cuba, right under our nose.
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
tailed again." As we have seen, the charge may at times be cor-
rect. But there are also many occasions when an event has been
foreseen and correctly estimated but intelligence has been un-
able to advertise its success, at least at the time.
Intelligence Knew of Suez
This was true of the Suez invasion of 1956. Here, intelligence
was well alerted as to both the possibility and later the probability
of the actions taken by Israel and then by Britain and France.
The public received the impression that there had been an in-
telligence failure; statements were issued by U.S. officials to
the effect that the country had not been given advance 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 without, as usual, advertising its achieve-
ment.
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
proceeded to attack the intelligence services even though, in fact,
there had been no such estimate made. Take, for example, Bay of
Pigs episode in 1961. Much of the American press assumed at the
time that this action was predicated on a mistaken intelligence es-
timate to the effect that a landing 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 never discussed any details of the 1961 Cuban op-
eration and do not propose to do so here, I repeat now what I
Clearly, our intelligence estimates must take into account not
only the natural and the usual but also the unusual, the brutal,
the unexpected. It is no longer wise to estimate actions and re-
actions on the basis of what we ourselves might do if we were in
Khrushchev's shoes because, as we have seen at the United Na-
tions, he takes off his shoes. Very often Russian policy moves
seem almost to be based on the ideas of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov,
the noted Russian physiologist who died in 1936. His experi-
ments included inducing certain reflexes in animals and then, by
abruptly changing the treatment, reducing the animals to a state
of confusion. The Pavlovian touch can he seen in Khrushchev's
abrupt changes in attitude and action, intended to give rise to
confusion and dismay in his adversary. The scuttling of the
Paris Summit meeting in 1960, 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 certain
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.
Of course, the trouble with estimating is that one rarely has
knowledge of all the factors hearing on any given situation. No
one can clearly foresee the future or predict with assurance the
workings of the minds of the leaders whose decisions make his-
tory. 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 in-
telligence process of making estimates will never become an exact
science.
But at least progress has been made in assembling the ele-
ments of a given situation in an orderly manner so as to assist
our planners and policy makers. It is possible, often, to indicate
a range of probabilities 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 and the somewhat
haphazard system of intelligence analysis which prevailed at that
time.
VIII. INTELLIGENCE IN OUR FREE SOCIETY
From time to time the charge is made that an intelligence or
security service is a potential threat to our freedoms and that
there is something sinister about the secrecy surrounding its
operations that is inconsistent with the workings of a free society.
There has been some sensational writing about the CIA's sup-
posedly making national policy on its own, and playing fast and
loose with its secret funds. The Soviet Union and its Commu-
nist allies have persistently mounted the most vicious attacks on
U.S. intelligence by means of press, radio and other means of
communication. Many of these attacks occur in non-Communist
media and are not immediately recognizable as of Communist
origin. Innocently or otherwise, many writers, especially on the
left, have taken up the refrain and, at times, more conservative
publicists have been misled into repeating a good deal of Commu-
nist propaganda on the subject. Of course, I have taken Commu-
nist attacks as a compliment and a measure of our adversaries'
fear of the CIA.
I have already pointed out that in both tsarist 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 freedoms at home and to carry out terrorist operations
abroad. This fact has added to the confusion of many about the
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
exact function of an intellOPPrgM9keFQ,iiR9 ,2 1306/c181.tieCIi4-RDPB1440Q164RQOO1OD17QOO ira1 Roscoe
rather unexpected quarter, comes a comment by Supreme Court
Justice William O. Douglas. He suggests that "the press does not
cover the operations of the Pentagon adequately, nor can it
report truthfully on the C.I.A.," which, he alleges, generates
"policies," the dangers of which "are not known even to many
of the informed press." (Freedom of the Mind, American Library
Association, Chicago, Ill. [1962], p. 8.) It is understandable,
of course, 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 ques-
tioning and to attack.
Harry Howe Ransom, who has written a study of our intelli-
gence service in relation to the nation's security, puts the issue
this way :
CIA is the indispensable gatherer and evaluator of world-wide facts for
the National Security Council. Yet to most persons CIA remains a mys-
terious, super-secret, shadow agency of government. Its invisible role, its
power and influence, and the secrecy enshrouding its structure and op-
erations, raise important questions regarding its place in the democratic
process. One such question is: How 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? (Central
Intelligence and National Security, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass. [1958], p. vi.)
I propose to answer this and other questions and criticisms. In
fact, in writing this article, I have been motivated by the desire
to put intelligence in our free society in its proper perspective.
As 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 statute and
partly under National Security Council directive. It was set up
under an act of Congress on the recommendation of the President
after exhaustive congressional hearings and with practically unan-
imous bipartisan support. The law specifically provides "that the
Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law enforcement powers
or internal security functions." It does not make policy, and all
its actions must be consistent with the government's policy and
approved by those responsible for that policy. Like the State
and Defense departments, it has certain publicly assigned func-
tions. Also like these departments, it must keep much of its work
secret.
Henry Hillenkoetter, who had distinguished service in the navy
and in naval intelligence; (2) General Walter Bedell Smith, who,
in addition to an outstanding military career, had been for almost
three years U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and
an undersecretary of state; (3) myself, about whom any com-
ment here would be out of place, except for the mention of a long
period of government service and many years in intelligence
work; (4) John A. McCone, the present director, who has per-
formed outstanding service in both the Truman and the Eisen-
hower administrations in many important government posts-as
a member of the President's Air Policy Commission, as a deputy
to the Secretary of Defense, as undersecretary of the air force,
and then as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Com-
mission.
The law provides that a civilian must be either in the posi-
tion of director or deputy director. While, theoretically, it is pos-
sible 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 Marshall S. Carter under John McCone.
I have gone into these details about the backgrounds of those
in positions of leadership in the CIA because one has a right to
expect from such men the highest degree of integrity and re-
sponsibility.
Relations with the President
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 the operations of the agency. During
8 of my 11 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 con-
cerning the handling of its funds. I recall his telling me that we
should set up procedures in the agency for the internal account-
ing 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 Gen-
eral 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 CIA appropria-
tions subcommittees of Congress and to the Bureau of the Budget
for every penny expended, whatever its purpose.
During the earlier years of the agency there was a series of
special investigations of its activities. I myself was the head
of a committee of three that in 1949 reported to President
Truman on CIA operations. There were also studies made un-
der the auspices of two Hoover commissions, one in 1949 and
one in 1955. These dealt with the organization of the execu-
tive branch of government and included studies on our intel-
ligence structure. The latter 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 President 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.
Following the report of the 1955 Hoover Commission, I dis-
cussed with President Eisenhower one of the commission's rec-
It Can't Happen Here
This country certainly wants no part of an organization like
the Okhrana of the tsars or the N.K.V.D. of Stalin or the
K.G.B. of Khrushchev. We have been nauseated by what we have
read of Himmler's Sicherheitsdienst and by the military secret
service of Japan in pre-World War II days. The very nature of
our government and of our society under the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights would outlaw such organizations- as these. They
could never take root in this country. But even if these factors
were not enough, there is a whole group of safeguards, both legal
and practical, surrounding the work of the CIA.
The Central Intelligence Agency is placed directly under the
National Security Council, which, in effect, means that it is under
the President. The chief executive himself, therefore, has the
responsibility for overseeing the operations of the CIA. The Na-
tional 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 may from time to time direct.
It is the President 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 15 years since the agency was
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48 Approved For Release 2002/06/18 : CIA-RDP84-00161 R000100170005-7
 lg
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presidential watchdog board staffed by civilians. This would take
the place of ad hoc investigation committees from time to time.
President Eisenhower agreed completely with this recommenda-
tion and appointed a "President's Board of Consultants on For-
eign Intelligence Activities," the chairman of which for some
time was the distinguished head of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, James R. Killian, Jr. President Kennedy, shortly
after he took office, reconstituted this committee with a slightly
modified membership, but again under the chairmanship of Dr.
Killian. The files, the records, the activities and the expenditures
of the Central Intelligence Agency are open to this presidential
committee, which meets several times a year and whose recom-
mendations and advice I found of inestimable value in my work.
A "Watchdog" Considered
The other recommendation of the Hoover Commission in this
connection-that a congressional watchdog committee should
also be considered-has had a somewhat more stormy history.
In 1953, even before the Hoover recommendations, Senator Mike
Mansfield had introduced a bill to establish a joint congressional
committee for the CIA, somewhat along the lines of the joint
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 ab-
sence abroad, General Cabello 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 Mans-
field, It had considerable support, as 35 senators from both parties
were co-sponsors and the resolution had been reported out fa-
vourably by the Senate Rules Committee in February of 1956, but
one vote of strong dissent came from Senator Carl Hayden, who
was also the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Senator Hayden was supported by Senator Richard Russell,
Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and by Sen-
ator Leverett Saltonstall, the senior Republican member of that
Committee. In April the Senate, after a most interesting debate,
voted against the watchdog committee resolution by a surpris-
ingly large majority. In opposing the resolution, Senator Russell
said: "Although we have asked him [Allen W. Dulles] very
searching questions about some activities which it almost chills
the marrow of a man to hear about, he has never failed to an-
swer us forthrightly and frankly in response to any questions we
have asked him." The issue was decided when this testimony was
supported by former Vice-President (then Senator) Alben Bark-
ley, who spoke from his experience as a member of the National
Security Council. Be was joined in opposition by Senator Stuart
Symington, who had intimate knowledge of the workings of the
agency from his days as Secretary of the Air Force. On the final
vote of 59 to 27, 10 of the measure's original co-sponsors reversed
their positions and joined with the majority to defeat the pro-
posal. They had heard enough to persuade them that, for the
time being at least, the measure was not needed.
Congress Holds Purse Strings
Possibly the strongest argument against a special congressional
watchdog committee is the fact that procedures have been set
up-and have been functioning well for almost a decade-
whereby Congress exercises its legislative control over what is,
after all, very distinctly a function of the executive branch.
Congress, of course, holds the purse strings and, through the
House and Senate Armed Services committees, also oversees
legislative and other requirements of the agency. Appropria-
control over the scope of operations-how many people CIA can
employ; how much it can do; and, to some extent, even what it
can do. Obviously, the entire CIA budget cannot be thrown open
to general knowledge either in Congress or in the executive
branch. But any general public impression that the senators and
representatives can exert no power over the CIA is quite mis-
taken.
The procedures for dealing with the CIA budget are worked out
by the Congress itself. Even before a congressional subcommittee
sees the CIA budget, moreover, there is a review by the Bureau
of the Budget, which must approve the amount set aside for it.
This, of course, includes presidential approval. Then the budget
is considered by a subcommittee of the Appropriations Commit-
tee of the House, as is the case with other executive departments
and agencies, The only difference is that the amount of the CIA
budget is not publicly disclosed outside of the subcommittee hear-
ings.
This subcommittee includes three members of the majority and
two members of the minority from the Appropriations Commit-
tee. The present chairman of the committee, Clarence Cannon,
is also chairman of the CIA appropriations subcommittee. Until
his recent retirement, the senior minority member of the sub-
committee was John Taber. Two men with longer experience in
congressional procedure and two more careful watchdogs of the
public treasury could hardly be found. This subcommittee is en-4
titled to see everything it wishes to see with regard to the CIA
budget and to have as much explanation of expenditures, past and
present, as it desires.
All this was clearly brought out in a dramatic statement that
Mr. Cannon made on the floor of the House on May 10, 1960,
just after the failure of the U-2 flight of Francis Gary Powers:
The plane was on an espionage mission authorized and supported by money
provided under an appropriation recommended by the House Committee
on Appropriations and passed by the Congress.
He then referred to the fact that the appropriation and the ac-
tivity had also been approved and recommended by the Bureau
of the Budget and, like all such expenditures and operations, was
under the aegis of the chief executive. He discussed the authority
of the subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee to recom-
mend an appropriation for such purposes and also the fact that
these activities had not been divulged to the House and to the
country. He recalled the circumstances during World War II
when billions of dollars were appropriated, through the Manhat-
tan project, for the atomic bomb under the same general safe-
guards as in the case of the U-2, i.e., on the authority of a sub-
committee of the Appropriations Committee. He referred to the
widespread espionage by the Soviet Union, to the activities of
their spies in stealing the secret of the atomic bomb. Alluding to
the surprise attack by the Communists in Korea in 1950, he jus-
tified 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 this plane was taken,
is their answer to that demand.
He took occasion to commend the CIA for its action in sending
reconnaissance planes over the Soviet Union for the four years
preceding Powers' capture and concluded:
We 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 appropri-
ate safeguards, been laid before the representatives of the people
in Congress.
In addition to the scrutiny of CIA activities by the House
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 THE CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE
Appropriations CommApprtQMedsFOI5 ReWaenMZ(10 le18 : C 4A. 890161RQQPAQAMQQ5,77, legislative and
house Armed Services Committee. The chairman of this sub-
committee is Carl Vinson, who for years has been head of the
Armed Services Committee itself. To this body the agency reports
its current operations to the extent and in whatever detail the
committee desires; here the interest lies not so much with the
financial aspects of operations as with all the other elements of
our work. In the Senate, there are comparable subcommittees of
the Appropriations and Armed Services Committees.
Fifteen years ago, when the legislation to set up a central in-
telligence agency was being considered, the congressional com-
mittees working on the matter sought my views. In addition to
testifying, I submitted a memorandum, published in the record
of the proceedings, in which I proposed that a special advisory
body for the new agency should be constituted to include repre-
sentatives of the President, the Secretary of State and the Secre-
tary of Defense. This group should, I proposed, "assume the
responsibility for advising and counseling the Director of Intelli-
gence and assure the proper liaison between the Agency and
these two Departments and the Executive." This procedure has
been followed.
Open to Public Criticism
Of course, the public and the press remain free to criticize
the actions taken by intelligence, including those which are ex-
posed by mishap or indiscretion. This holds just as true for
intelligence activities 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 particularly its director must stand ready to assume
responsibility wherever that is possible. There have been times,
as in the cases of the U-2 descent on Soviet territory and
the Cuban affair of April 1961, where the chief executive has
publicly assumed responsibility. Here, if the CIA had attempted
to take the position that it had planned and carried out the ac-
tion unguided and alone it would have been tantamount to admit-
ting that the executive branch of the government was not on the
job. Of course, in intelligence operations, silence is the best policy
where silence is possible. It is not possible when it cannot be
maintained without calling into grave question the vigilance of
the executive.
There are many safeguards prescribed within the agency itself
to protect against its meddling in policy matters. In addition, ,the
established practice is that no one in the agency, from the di-
rector on down, may engage in political activities of any nature,
except to vote. A resignation is immediately accepted-or de-
manded-whenever this rule is violated; any member with po-
litical aspirations is given to understand that re-employment-
in case his plunge into the political arena is unsuccessful-is un-
likely.
other-which surround our intelligence work and help to ensure
that the CIA under our government operates solely within es-
tablished policies.
In the last analysis, however, the most important safeguards
are the kind of leadership the intelligence service has and the
character of the people who work for it. The efficacy of our laws
and regulations depends upon the respect of our citizens for
them, as well as upon the courts which enforce them. The hopes
or fears which our citizens may have with regard to U.S. intelli-
gence and its operations must centre on the integrity of those on
the job-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 seen
a group of men and women more devoted to the defense of our
country and its way of life than those who are working in the
Central Intelligence Agency. Our people do not go into the in-
telligence service for reasons of financial reward or because the
service can give them, in return for their work, high rank or
public acclaim. Their accomplishments must remain, as President
Kennedy has remarked, largely unsung. They are there because
of the fascination of the work and the belief that through their
service they can personally make a contribution to our nation's
security. Most of the senior officers have had long years of serv-
ice; the new recruits, from whose ranks the agency of the future
will be built, are chosen with utmost care and given thorough
training before they begin work.
No More Controls Needed
I do not believe that there is need for more controls on our
intelligence work. Rather, one should stress the need for all of
us, to be more alert, more aggressively prepared to meets the re-
quirements of this age. It is not by our intelligence organization
that our liberties will be threatened, but rather by our. failure
to understand the nature of the dangers facing us throughout
the world today. If we have more Cubas, if some of the coun-
tries of the non-Communist world that are in jeopardy today
are further weakened, then we could well be isolated and our
liberties, too, could be threatened.
We understand the military threat in the age of nuclear mis-
siles, and we are spending billions-properly so-to counter it.
It is the invisible war that we must meet-Khrushchev's wars
of liberation, the subversive threats orchestrated by the Soviet
Communist party with all its ramifications and fronts, supported
by the vigorous penetration activities of secret agents and
espionage. We cannot afford to put intelligence in chains; we
must continue to support it and enable it to play its protective
and informative role in preparing us to meet the dangers unique
to this era.
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