The power of secrets
Hammurabi's headquarters was a hive of activity around 1800 B.C., but one palace department saw most of the action. It was the king's intelligence agency, where captured tablets offered glimpses of the goings-on among neighboring tribes and far-flung military foes. Ancient analysts sorted through tips from market gossips, wandering entertainers, and chatty refugees. Even the queen filed reports. It was here in the heart of Mesopotamia that the most ancient of civilizations created the first classified document. "This is a secret tablet," an official had etched. It was a death warrant, perhaps for a palace mole. "If there is a ditch in the countryside or in the city," it reads, "make this man disappear."
Spying is a pursuit as old as civilization and a craft long practiced by the most skilled and treacherous of strategists. In the wake of 9/11 and amid looming showdowns with Iraq and North Korea, intelligence gathering is at the center of a debate over the rights of the individual and the needs of national security. And it is an issue that grows ever more urgent as the Department of Homeland Security prepares to open its doors this month in the largest reorganization of American government since Harry Truman signed the National Security Act half a century ago.
These are, of course, considerations that never much concerned the ancients. Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, masters of the spying game both, advised leaders to use espionage liberally. "Though fraud in other activities be detestable," Machiavelli wrote, "in the management of war it is laudable and glorious." The skills of tradecraft are praised by less likely sources as well. The Kama Sutra touts the virtues of secret writing; indeed, seduction and spying have long gone hand in hand. While Casanova is widely remembered as a flirt, he was also an intelligence asset in the service of King Louis XV.
Whorehouse, safe house. The Bible registers few qualms about espionage and chronicles the mingling of the two oldest professions in the book of Joshua. Rahab was a working woman with a small establishment in the red-light district of Jericho. Joshua sent spies to scope out the land, and she hid them. Thus, her brothel became perhaps the first safe house of record.
Spying was so prevalent in ancient Rome that the Greeks assumed that pretty much any time the Romans sent a diplomat to their soil, he was suspect. That might explain why the Greeks used the word for spies--kataskopoi--interchangeably with the word for diplomats, notes Col. Rose Mary Sheldon, an expert in ancient espionage at Virginia Military Institute. In hot pursuit of secrets, noble families spent a great deal of their time surreptitiously surveilling their fellow citizens. "Each senatorial family had its own private intelligence network," explains Sheldon. "No one group would have sanctioned the creation of a single intelligence organization that might fall into the hands of a rival faction."
But it would be state agencies like communist East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, that would take citizen-to-citizen spying to a high art. When West German government agents broke into the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall, they discovered row upon row of curiously filled glass jars: They contained scraps of fabric that had been collected by citizen spies. It was part of a bizarre scheme in which a Stasi informer would invite a friend to dinner, wait until he went to the restroom, and pat down the guest's chair with pretreated cloth. He would then seal it in a jar and hand it over to the Stasi. That way, if the dinner guest ever tried to defect, the Stasi would have his scent on record to share with tracking hounds. With 95,000 agents and 100,000 citizen informers, the Stasi is estimated to have kept tabs on roughly one third of East Germany's population.
America has long grappled with citizen surveillance in the face of security anxieties. In 1975, the Senate Intelligence Committee under Frank Church began looking into potential abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies, beginning with a request in the 1940s from the Army Security Agency to read all overseas cables sent by embassies, commercial firms, and private citizens through the Western Union Telegraph Co. The secretary of defense had assured the leery firm that this request "constituted a matter of great importance to national security." Later, the effort was expanded to include monitoring overseas phone calls when the Army requested that the National Security Agency root out possible foreign influences on Vietnam War protesters. In the face of what he believed to be impertinent--not to mention annoying--questions, James Jesus Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, was indignant. "It is inconceivable," he remarked in what he believed to be an off-the-record moment, "that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government." He was eventually forced into retirement.
To spy or not to spy. America grappled with the same collision of personal liberties and national security in May 2002, when the secret spy court at the Department of Justice, which rules on FBI wiretapping requests, took Attorney General John Ashcroft to task for improperly trying to broaden the FBI's spying abilities. Up to that point, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had never turned down an FBI wiretapping request. But Ashcroft appealed the decision based on the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and, in November, the court overturned its original ruling, paving the way for the considerable expansion of wiretapping--and removing a wall that had previously prevented criminal and counterintelligence investigators from collaborating. Fears of citizen surveillance also provoked robust cries of outrage when Terrorism Information and Prevention System advocates proposed enlisting the aid of telephone repairmen, truck drivers, and mail carriers in reporting the suspicious activities of customers, clients, and neighbors. The plan was stricken from the Homeland Security Act after comparisons were made to certain communist dictatorships.
Some would argue that the all-hands-on-deck approach, in the wake of a terrorist attack, has its place. Certainly, they argue, there are consequences to complacency. Gene Poteat, president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, lays blame for some of the biggest intelligence failures of the 20th century on a cavalier attitude toward clandestine self-protection. "We got out of the intelligence business" in World War I, he says. "[President Woodrow] Wilson claimed that if we needed intelligence, we could get it from our allies, the French and the English." But did that leave the United States vulnerable? Certainly the release of the Venona papers in 1995, detailing spy cables from the Soviet Union and intercepted by the United States in the 1940s, showed that a great deal had gone undetected. There were at least 240 Soviet agents who penetrated the U.S. government from 1935 to 1945--who were, in fact, spies, says David Major, former director of counterintelligence programs for the National Security Council. Witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he says, "was right for the wrong reasons." Oleg Kalugin, a former major general in the KGB, argues that McCarthyism brought America to its senses: "It has often been betrayed as an evil, but on the other hand, it was an awakening of America," he says, only a bit ruefully. "Not to condone McCarthy, but it was a more realistic approach."
Still, despite Soviet penetration of American government, says Poteat, the KGB made its share of intelligence mistakes, sometimes because it just didn't understand our open society. The Soviets were convinced, for example, that the United States was run by a secret underground government. "They were from a place where leaders picked their citizens," Poteat says, "and the ones they didn't want, they killed off. They just couldn't understand how we accomplished what we did from the bottom up."
When the Department of Homeland Security opens its doors January 24, its goal will be to collect and coordinate intelligence from the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, among others--to gather in a central location the kinds of facts that fell by the wayside before 9/11 and, ironically, became harder to obtain after the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen scandals. "Do you know what happens when we catch a spy?" asks Major. "We put up higher walls. But if you don't share intelligence, you don't connect the dots."
The trick, says Judge William Webster, the only CIA chief to have also served as the director of the FBI: "Getting as much information out as possible without impairing the rights of privacy that Americans have always considered dear. Everyone has a right to question, `Why are they doing these things?' "
These are questions that did not keep the ancients up at night but will continue to occupy nations indefinitely. "I cannot think that espionage can be recommended as a technique for building an impressive civilization," remarked journalist Rebecca West, who covered the Cambridge Spy Ring. "It's a lout's game."
Civilized or not, spies have won wars and influenced culture since long before America was born. Here are the lessons from those who have done it best--or worst, depending on your perspective. The playboys, the seductresses, the traitors, the enthusiastic but inept celebrities--all have tales to tell. So do the quiet heroes whose stories remain, for now, the most closely guarded of secrets.
Nancy Bentrup contributed to the reporting of the stories in this package.
Q & A
About this project.
Since the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., opened its doors in the summer of 2002, it has been one of the capital city's most unusual resources. Shedding light on a subject that had long lingered in the shadows, the museum highlights exhibits that range from spy gadgets of yesteryear to treasures of popular culture. Its board of directors, tradecraft experts and former officials at the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, as well as distinguished authors and professors, agreed to answer a series of questions posed by U.S. News on the nature of spycraft. They weighed in on queries that included naming the most underrated spy in U.S. history, the most damaging traitor to America, and the dumbest thing a spy has ever done. The questions prompted a great deal of lively discussion; by no means do their responses represent a consensus. Their answers are sprinkled throughout this package.
Who has been the most underrated spy working for the United States and why?
Richard Bissell, best known as CIA head of operations at the time of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He had earlier been manager of the stunning operation to build the U-2, the first high-altitude spy plane, which revealed the extent of the Soviet nuclear strike force--their most important secret in the early Cold War.
CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, author and professor of history, Cambridge University
Who has been the most damaging traitor to the United States and why?
John Walker. The chief of U.S. Naval Intelligence testified that had conflict erupted between the superpowers, material [he] supplied to the Soviets had "war-winning implications." We could read all correspondence between U.S. naval headquarters and your subs across the world. We could have delivered a pre-emptive strike.
Oleg Kalugin, retired KGB official
What is the dumbest thing a spy has ever done?
The support officer to [Soviet master spy] Rudolph Abel in New York had been given a hollow nickel with microfilm in it with instructions. He was a drunk and spent his nickel to a newsboy, who later dropped the change. The nickel fell apart and the film fell out.
H. KEITH MELTON, author, Ultimate Spy Book and technical adviser to U.S. intelligence services
What has been the biggest intelligence failure by any country?
No question, the failure of the Soviet KGB to sense the collapse of the Soviet Union. While U.S. intelligence and other U.S.S.R. observers, including media and academics, had insights into the country, none of them had the pervasive presence or sources of the KGB itself.
PETER EARNEST, former CIA officer and executive director of the International Spy Museum
What were the differences between Cold War spies in the U.S. and U.S.S.R.?
The Soviet Union was a closed society--everybody was watching everyone. KGB, their job was easy. They could ask questions in a U.S. bar like, "Hey, what's up at that secret site?" And someone would say, "Oh, didn't you know, they're testing a secret airplane." Sure, they made great successes, but, hell, it was easy for them.
Gene Poteat, president, Association of Former Intelligence Officers
What makes for a successful spy?
Blending in is very important. Also, spies are fearless about imposing on others. You have to get into someone's hotel room; you go up to the clerk and find a way. That takes a real willingness to be inappropriate, insinuate--to be insensitive, but at the same time have high emotional intelligence.
LT. GEN. (RET.) CLAUDIA KENNEDY, former deputy chief of staff for intelligence, U.S. Army
What is the most daring feat a spy ever accomplished?
The Navy intelligence service was working with the CIA off the Soviet coast. The Soviets were firing new test weapons; we wanted to know how far they could go. We were also interested in plugging into the cables that the Soviets had at the bottom of the ocean. They did it, and they did it brilliantly.
JUDGE WILLIAM WEBSTER, former director of both the CIA and the FBI
With Nancy Bentrup
This story appears in the January 27, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.