Spies in Perspective
By STRIX MEN are much more afraid of snakes than they have any need to be; and something of the same disproportionate alarm, rooted in instinct, colours their attitude towards spies.
This is especially true of spies who are also traitors. The member of a foreign embassy who collects secret intelligence in the country to which he is accredited does not—when he is caught, declared persona non grata and expelled --arouse in its citizens any strong feelings of revulsion; they realise that he was doing his duty, and are glad that he did it clumsily. But the man who spies on his own country is in a very different category. For one thing, his con- duct is odious and unnatural; for another, his exposure automatically sets in motion fears— more acute in war than in peace—that there are others, perhaps many others, like him, that (so to speak) the whole wardrobe is full of moths. The effect of all this is to invest the traitor-spy with an aura of menace which, except in rare cases, is far more portentous than his activities warrant.
All over the world intelligence services, by playing on the cupidity, the vanity, the fears, the lusts or the idealism of individuals, are collecting information of one sort and another.. Some ont is secret; some of it is alleged to be secret; some of it is false, though seldom demon- strably so; a great deal of it is valueless. This mass of data is fed into a bureaucratic machine.
'Is fed into': yes, but it also feeds the machine, which, if its intake of intelligence were reduced, would itself tend to dwindle in size and in- fluence. There may, just conceivably, be coun- tries where this has happened in the years since the last war—where the number of men and women engaged on secret intelligence duties (ex- cluding cryptography, with which l am not here concerned) has actually fallen, and where less money than formerly is now spent upon espion- age and all the arts and crafts connected with it. But it is a safe bet that in the vast majority of States,• and probably in all, the bureaucracy behind the spy has grown, and continues to grow, in size, in technical resources, and sometimes in power.
'The bureaucracy' is a slightly misleading term. Whereas most countries deem it logical and convenient to have—for instance—one Ministry of Finance or one Ministry of Agri- culture, no country has yet found it possible to organise one monolithic intelligence service. The spy's masters are only one of several government agencies concerned with the collec- tion of intelligence; they work in collaboration —or, to be realistic, in competition--with the intelligence staffs of the three armed services (who are competing with each other), with the counter-espionage department (who are compet- ing with the police) and with whatever other clandestine bureaux or organisations happen to to exist in that particular country under its current regime.
For sonic reason which flag never been satis- factorily explained, secret intelligence work, like Grand Opera; is a breeding ground for jealousy. This fact, which has almost the force of a law of nature, is responsible for the invariable failure (except on paper) of all efforts to inte- grate, or even 'effectively to co-ordinate, the intelligence agencies of any nation. The atmo- sphere of interdepartmental rivalry in which the whole game is played is of great though indirect benefit to the spy.
Spying in peace-time, especially in a democ- raty, IS not particularly difficult or dangerous. Nevertheless, for an intelligence service to open a regular, reliable, clandestine channel of access to a source of confidential information in the country of a potential enemy is not a negligible achievement. The spy has to be 'recruited': vetted as far as that is possible: provided with the tools and accessories of his trade—perhaps a camera, perhaps ciphers and a wireless trans- mitter, probably a series of passwords and rendezvous: and, finally, rewarded, unless, of course, it is a case of blackmail or intimidation.
All this takes time; and when at length the spy begins to transmit—through, let us say, the Ruritanian Embassy in London—regular reports, containing material clearly not intended for the public eye, to Section 3 (b) of the Secret Service in Strelsau, there is no disposition in that agency to underestimate the importance of their achieve- ment. It puts them one up on their colleagues in 3 (a) and 3 (c), it enhances the prestige of the officer in charge of the whole section, and it will help the head of the Secret Service to deal with any implied criticisms of his organisation's effectiveness at the next meeting of the Intelli- gence Co-ordinating Committee.
Thus his controllers automatically acquire a vested interest in the spy. The mere fact that he exists and is able to transmit intelligence is proof that they are doing a difficult job success- fully; with the utility of the intelligence he trans- mits they themselves are not directly concerned., Much of it is technical. Occasionally, per haps, a suitably placed spy will score a break- through, and the Ruritanian authorities will realise that they have in their hands the clue to some new process or invention which they can, so to speak, pirate. But this cannot happen very often, and although in peace-time the amount of secret technical intelligence collected by spies must be enormous, I suspect that most of it has for practical purposes very little value; some of it is trivial, some of it is rapidly obsolescent, and— since information, however secret, which cannot be acted on confers only marginal benefits on those who acquire it—almost none of it is of any real use.
This, however, is not apparent to the spy, or to his controllers, or to their colleagues in another branch of intelligence who evaluate the material supplied by the spy (and who, if he did not supply it, would have no raison d'etre). Nor, if the spy is caught, are his captors under any temptation to play down the importance of the secrets he was betraying, or the amount of damage he was thereby doing to the State. Thus everybody concerned with the spy is involved in a tacit, unconscious conspiracy to inflate his sig- nificance.
Even when, in time, the spy's employers have to admit, if only to themselves, that he is failing to justify the high hopes they once placed on him, they are seldom in a position to discard him, because he knows too much. It is easier to threaten him with liquidation than to carry out the threat. Although for one reason or another he is no longer in a position to deliver the goods, the only safe course open to his masters is to keep him on their books, to main- tain the contact, to encourage him to go on reporting faits divers. When a spy comes to grief, and it emerges that he has been 'working for' a foreign power for a whole decade or more, we are shocked by the revelation that he managed to escape detection for so long; we do not stop to ask ourselves how much, over the years, of the information he conveyed to his em- ployers was worth the trouble which he and they took to get it.
In exceptional cases—George Blake was one, Dolnytsin sounds like one--the spy can do severe damage by betraying details of his own country's intelligence service, including the identities of secret agents operating in territory controlled by his employers; this is one of the instances—very rare in peace-time--where the government controlling the spy can directly further its interests by acting on the information supplied to it.
I Am not trying to argue that most spies are harmless, or that few secrets are worth guard- ing. It ought, obviously, to be made as difficult as possible for an agent to purloin and transmit to Ruritania the plans of Britain's latest missile, the dreaded Newt; but, even if for some bizarre reason the British Government does not, after wasting two years and many millions of pounds on the project, decide tb scrap Newt, 1 fail to see what practical advantage their possession of the plans will confer on the Ruritanians. It may give them new ideas, some of which can, in time and if not already obsolete, be in- corporated in their own missiles, but I suspect that in the end their main gain will be a strengthening of their conviction that the Ruritanians are damned clever and the British are bloody fools, From our point of view this may be a bad thing, but it is hardly a disaster.
I hope I have not, in what I have written, been unfair to the spy and his controllers, or un- realistic about their, capabilities. Espionage and counter-espionage are and always will be a part of the world we live in. The members of both professions deserve to be taken seriously; but before we assume, as we commonly do, that the spy's deeds are as noxious as his motives are base, I think we ought to take account, not only of the difficulties under which he works, but of the curious standards and conventions govern- ing the bureaucracy which he serves. '
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