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The Plans of the Fortress
IN the United Kingdom during the last war seventeen men and one woman were convicted of spying under the Treachery Act of 1940. Fifteen of the men were hanged and one—a Luftwaffe NCO who was dropped by parachute and was wearing uniform when captured—was shot. One man was sentenced to penal servitude for life; the woman appealed successfully against a sentence of death and was given fourteen years. They were all low-grade agents, and the information—if any—with which they had provided the Germans before being caught was of negligible value.
The number of people executed for spying in Europe since the end of the war must run into several hundred. Most of the executions have taken place in countries behind the iron Curtain, and it seems safe to assume that many of those con- demned were condemned unjustly. But that still leaves an awful lot of dead spies, and presumably—since in peace-time spying is not a particularly difficult or dangerous job if the spy is a sensible person—an even larger number of live ones. With what success, one wonders, are their labours attended?
Very broadly speaking, there are two kinds of spy : the Lesser Spotted (to give them ornithological labels) and the Greater Starry-Eyed. The latter embarks on his (or her) duties for the sake of a cause, national or ideological. He (or she) normally possesses intelligence and courage and should, theoretically, be capable of producing better results than the Lesser Spotted. This commoner variety is really a sort of tout. often but not always quite clever but seldom reliable; he is in the game—unless he has been blackmailed into it—for the money. He is generally a person who has not been a success in more conventional walks of life.
No one can read the opening chapters of The Dreyfus Case, by Guy Chapman (an altogether admirable book) without forming the impression that the services which a spy could render to his employers were much greater sixty years ago than they are today. It is not merely that access to secret documents in the French War Office was almost ridiculously easy; what is more to the point is that if you got hold of the right document it really was—potentially at any rate—of great value to your employer. The plans of a fortress, the details of a new gun, a revised mobilisation scheme—these repre- sented, as it were, the court cards in the hand of a General Staff. `He's got the ace,' the spy could report, or `He's going to play the Queen next'; and his employers, in those days of slow-moving campaigns and simply equipped armies, could rearrange their own hand accordingly.
To the ordinary spy (as opposed to the defecting scientist) such opportunities are no longer open. All conventional weapons take so long to produce that information about those possessed by a potential enemy is really of not much more than academic interest to his putative victim. If Northland obtains details of Southland's new tank, and this tank turns out to be superior to Southland's best, there is very little that North- land can do about it beyond what she is doing already, which is to try and get her new tank through its teething troubles and into production as soon as possible. Nowadays, anyhow, the average spy seems to be content with less significant hauls, and is more likely to turn in a training manual or a list of unit locations in a sub-area than anything in the plans-of-the- fortress category.
Intelligence is only of real value in so far as it can be acted on. Fortunately for the spies, this is seldom realised by their masters, who very naturally come to regard the acquisition of secret information as an end in itself. Knowledge of an adver- sary's secrets always confers the illusion of power; it only confers the reality if the knowledge can be put to some prac- tical use.
In war intelligence is scarce; every scrap has potential value. Suppose for the sake of argument that I am a spy in Ruritanian pay and that I procure for my employers a confidential War Office document showing the revised establishment of a Mobile Bath Unit. In war not only would the sequestration and delivery to Ruritania of such a document be a consider- able achievement, but the statistics it contained might con- ceivably, taken in conjunction with other small clues, throw some light on Britain's man-power situation or her intention to wage Arctic Warfare or something of the sort. In peace- time, when the size of the British Army and the whereabouts of its component formations can be ascertained by reading Hansard and The Times, the Ruritanian General Staff would really—if they stopped to think—be better off without know- ing all there is to know about our splendid Mobile Bath Units: for my document is only going to clutter up their secret files and waste the time of the staff officer whose duty it is to analyse it and get the results printed as Appendix LXVIII to 'Notes on the British Army.'
Luckily for me, the Ruritanians do not stop to think. The section of the Ruritanian Secret Service by whom I am con- trolled are the last people to minimise the value of the docu- ment I have sent them, and lose no opportunity of pointing out to General Horkshor, their dreaded chief, how much more valuable authentic documents are than the unconfirmed rumours so often produced by other sections of the Service.
Presently I do better still. I send them a detailed report on drastic reorganisations which are shortly to be made in the layout of British infantry and armoured divisions. This really is a scoop. Immense kudos accrues to the section con- trolling me, and the reflected glory is but negligibly dimmed when, a few weeks later, General Sir Richard Gale outlines the drastic reorganisations to a press conference after a BAOR exercise.
I do not wish to minimise unduly the importance of the peace-time spy, or to lessen the abhorrence in which he is held in these relatively spy-proof islands. But it does seem worth pointing out that the traffic in secrets is very largely a bogus trade, because so many of its wares have no practical value and are recommended only by the fact that they are secret.
It is right that we should feel indignant over Burgess and Maclean; it is right that we should be reluctant to award the White Paper about them anything better than a gamma plus; and it is arguable—though the past four years have produced no evidence to support the argument—that the secrets they betrayed injured the causes that we stand for.
But the most important facts are that Burgess and Maclean have for some time been powerless to harm their countrymen or even to involve their country in scandal or expense. They represent an embarrassment to the Government of the day and an unlooked-for diversion on the flank of commercial tele- vision. But they are no longer (so to speak) on the rates. It looks to me as though we had learnt a useful lesson rather more cheaply than we might have.
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