Espionage

I

Introduction

Espionage, the secret collection of information, or intelligence, that the source of such information wishes to protect from disclosure. Intelligence refers to evaluated and processed information needed to make decisions. The term can be used with reference to business, military, economic, or political decisions, but it most commonly relates to governmental foreign and defense policy. Intelligence generally has a national security connotation and therefore exists in an aura of secrecy.

Espionage, or spying, is illegal according to national laws; for example, see Espionage Act of 1917. Spying proceeds against the attempts of counterespionage (or counterintelligence) agencies to protect the secrecy of the information desired.

In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, is the main agency for gathering secret information that may bear on national security. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, has the primary responsibility for counterespionage activities within the U.S., coordinating its work with the CIA, which is responsible for such operations outside the U.S. During the cold war both the FBI and the CIA concentrated their attention primarily on the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB), or State Security Committee, of the USSR. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the breakup of the KGB into several new units, the mission of the CIA came under reexamination by both Congress and the administration. At least initially, the agency remained responsible not only for the collection and analysis of information, but also for counterintelligence overseas and for various forms of covert action (political intervention, secret propaganda, paramilitary activities) that require deep secrecy. Select committees of both the House and the Senate continued their oversight of CIA operations.

International espionage methods and operations have few boundaries. They have been romanticized in popular fiction and the mass media, but in reality, espionage exists in a secret world of deception, fraud, and sometimes violence. Espionage involves the recruiting of agents in foreign nations; efforts to encourage the disloyalty of those possessing significant information; and audio surveillance as well as the use of a full range of modern photographic, sensing, and detection devices, and other techniques of eliciting secret information.

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II

Justification and International Sanction

In order to adopt and implement foreign policy, plan military strategy and organize armed forces, conduct diplomacy, negotiate arms control agreements, or participate in international organization activities, nations have vast information requirements. Not surprisingly, then, many governments maintain some kind of intelligence capability as a matter of survival in a world where dangers and uncertainties still exist. The cold war may have ended, but hostilities continue in parts of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

All nations have laws against espionage, but most sponsor spies in other lands. Because of the clandestine nature of espionage, no reliable count exists of how many intelligence officers—only a small percentage of whom are actually spies—there are in the world. A common estimate is that the U.S. today still employs some 200,000 intelligence personnel. The number that was generally ascribed to the Soviet intelligence establishment in the 1980s was 400,000, a figure that undoubtedly included border guards and internal security police.

III

The Gathering of Intelligence

Intelligence work, including spying, proceeds in a five-step process. Initially, what the decision makers need to know is considered, and requirements are set. The second step is collecting the desired information, which requires knowing where the information is located and who can best obtain it. The information may be available in a foreign newspaper, radiobroadcast, or other open source; or it may be obtained only by the most sophisticated electronic means, or by planting an agent within the decision-making system of the target area. The third step is intelligence production, in which the collected raw data are assembled, evaluated, and collated into the best possible answer to the question initially asked. The fourth step is communicating the processed information to the decision maker. To be useful, information must be presented in a timely, accurate, and understandable form. The fifth and crucial step is the use of intelligence. The decision maker may choose to ignore the information conveyed, thus possibly courting disaster; on the other hand, a judgment may be made on the basis of information that proves inaccurate. The point is that the decision maker must make the final crucial judgment about whether, or how, to use the information supplied. The intelligence process can fail at each or any of these five basic steps.

A

Recruitment of Agents

Today, scores of developed nations have efficient intelligence organizations with systematic programs for recruiting new agents. Agents come from three main sources: the university world, where students are sought and trained for intelligence careers; the armed services and police forces, where some degree of intelligence proficiency may already have been attained; and the underground world of espionage, which produces an assortment of persons, including criminal informers, with relevant experience.

Those who do the actual spying, which may involve stealing information or performing disloyal acts of disclosure, are led to this work by various motivations. Greed or financial need is a leading incentive in many cases, but other motivations, such as ambition, political ideology, or nationalistic idealism, can figure importantly: Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a highly placed Soviet officer, provided valuable information to Western intelligence services in the belief that the West must be warned of danger. H. A. R. (“Kim”) Philby, the notorious English spy, worked for the Soviet Union on ideological grounds.

Some spies must be carefully recruited and enticed into cooperation; others volunteer and are termed “walk-ins.” The latter must be handled with extreme caution, as it is common for double agents to be among the volunteers. Double agents are spies who pretend to be defecting, but in reality maintain their original loyalty. Counterintelligence staffs are always skeptical of walk-ins or defectors and restrict their use for positive espionage purposes. In some cases, the most valuable spy of all is the “agent-in-place,” the person who remains in a position of trust with access to highly secret information, but who has been recruited by a foreign intelligence service; such a spy is known as a “mole.”

A high-priority espionage target is the penetration of the various international terrorist organizations. If the leadership of such units can be infiltrated by spies, advance knowledge can be obtained of the location and identity of intended victims, the nature of the disguises being used by the hit team, and the secret sources of weapons. Such information could be used to foil terrorist operations. International drug traffic, it has been asserted, can similarly be thwarted by effective espionage, but the problem is complex, and only limited success has been achieved.

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