On the face of it, spying should be easy. You go out into the world and try to uncover dangers that threaten your nation. You recruit agents, bribe and blackmail people in the know, put all this into a report, give it a reliability assessment and then hope that it makes its way to someone with the power to act on it.
It’s a sexy, well paid job, certainly not nine to five, with a reasonable pension and, like the mafia, secret recognition from those in the know. There are downsides: lots of moral dilemmas, the shame of using people, bitter bureaucratic infighting and the constant nagging doubt about whether it makes any difference to the bigger picture.
The government is convinced that it does and also seems to imagine that it’s a job that can be regulated, evaluated and probably sharpened up. Hence its new Labour solution, announced last week, that everything that has gone wrong in British intelligence recently can be put right by throwing some private enterprise initiatives into the mix.
Spying is much more complicated than it appears. How reliable is that Iraqi general to whom you have promised British citizenship, a place for his son at Oxford and £50,000 a year for the rest of his life? He has been reliable until now. But as things are collapsing in Iraq and he is anxious to secure his future, has he exaggerated his information — or even invented it? There is also the possibility that in the new circumstances he has changed sides. Like most relationships between spy and agent, this is a close personal one in which trust plays a large part. The officer will have to reach down into his instinct and make a decision on which lives could depend.
A long-time CIA agent recently blew the whistle on how the agency evaluated intelligence reports. It looked simple — ABCD for the reliability of the source, and 1234 for the accuracy of the information.
A1 meant that the source was unimpeachable and the information unquestionably true, while D4 indicated that the source was totally unreliable and the information demonstrably false. In his long career the agent said that he never saw an A1 and only a handful of D4s.
In nine cases out of 10 the designation was C3 — the source usually reliable, the information possibly true. Logically this meant that the usually reliable source was sometimes unreliable and that the information described as possibly true could just as possibly be false.
“It follows that US intelligence spent hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of 40 years ferreting out vital information that we did not as a matter of principle choose to believe — or for that matter disbelieve,” the agent said.
Every morning, and it works much the same in London, all this data was delivered to the president, and the prime minister of Britain, as an intelligence briefing. Then it was left for them to decide what might be true and what might not — hence Tony Blair’s constant theme during the run-up to the Iraq war: “If you only knew what I knew.”
British intelligence tried to add a little certitude to its reports by running them through the joint intelligence committee (JIC) whose experts (“more academic than practical”) contributed their own assessment.
But in the end more opinion tends to confuse matters. And since the JIC has more to do with politicians it is more sensitive to what those politicians want or hope to hear. These hopes get passed down the line and the original source can find himself under pressure to produce what his masters want rather than what he believes to be true. He usually does so.
How the insertion of a businessman into this process as a supposedly impartial assessor reporting to John Scarlett, the MI6 chief, will help is hard to imagine. Businessmen as spies is not a new idea for the profession. In the 1930s the businessman/spy was quite common. They were not successful and tended to vanish with the service bank account just before audit time. Others freelanced and sold their information to the highest bidder.
One aspect of the proposed reforms that would appeal to many involved is that it is almost impossible in the intelligence game to blame anyone for anything. No matter what goes wrong the intelligence community always has a plausible excuse. “You didn’t warn us about the insurgency that followed the Iraq war.” Excuse — “We didn’t have enough experienced people on the ground nor the funds to recruit them.”
Another example: “You said there was going to be an attack on Heathrow; it didn’t happen.” Excuse — “That was because the terrorists found out we were on to them and aborted their operation.” Another one: “Information about the time needed to fire weapons was vague and confusing.” Excuse — “Too many outsiders fiddled with our raw intelligence.”
Inquiries into the intelligence services produced little. There are only two certainties about such inquiries: the services will emerge with larger staff and a bigger budget. Oh yes, and nobody will resign and some may even be promoted.
Confronted with all the shortcomings of the secret services, its supporters reply that it would be unthinkable not to have a secret service, forgetting that we did not have one until 1911. Anything is better than nothing. But is this true? According to a study by the Royal Institute for International Affairs, western intelligence’s success in predicting Soviet moves was no better than that of America’s think tanks. The intelligence community does everything it can to avoid assessment of its efficiency, usually by falling back on the unanswerable statement: “We have had some marvellous successes but we can’t talk about them because they’re secret.”
A bold government could try an experiment to decide whether, stripped of its legends, the intelligence game is a vast confidence trick. The other great world collector and assessor of information is journalism. Let’s give a team of journalists and a team of spies an assignment to report on a specific international development and, based on that report, to produce an assessment of what is likely to happen.
The spies would use their usual covert sources, the journalists their open ones. The test would show us who had performed better. The odds look good for the journalists.
Sergei Kondrashov, a retired KGB chief of counter-intelligence, told me at a conference in Germany that if the KGB was forced to choose between a Russian mole in the US administration and a subscription to The New York Times, he would take The New York Times any day.
Phillip Knightley is the author of The Second Oldest Profession, a history of intelligence services.
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