incompetence
Secret agents across the globe have become a laughing stock after a series of rather embarrassing gaffes. We report on the world’s second oldest profession
Peter Hillmore and Ed Vulliamy
Spying is not what it used to be. Gone is the ideology, gone is the efficiency. The FBI last week arrested three middle-aged former student radicals and accused them of spying. First for the East Germans and then for any government that wanted their services: Russia, South Africa – anyone deemed suitable recipients of their treachery.
The FBI had to apologize for forging correspondence between Deputy Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils and the three accused, in an act of international bad faith that appears to be the hallmark of United States intelligence operations.
It was also reported last week that the CIA and the National Security Agency mounted a bugging operation on international statesmen, many of them America’s staunchest allies.
Such was Washington’s trust in its friends that even a boat taking leaders attending a Pacific Rim conference on a fishing trip was loaded with eavesdropping equipment.
In Bosnia, the Americans bugged everything that the United Nations command in Sarajevo transmitted. But fellow spies cannot be surprised that the Americans do not trust their allies, for they do not trust each other much.
In Bosnia, the CIA and the diplomatic service were often in conflict, with the State Department and its ambassadors demanding to see all communications between the agency and its men in the field, and the CIA in turn spying on even the US ambassador to Zagreb.
The CIA does not seem to have an exalted view of its own agents. Inside its vast headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there is a gift shop. Outside is a notice advising staff: ”Do not wear CIA-branded merchandise if operating undercover.”
Following the arrest of the three suspected spies from the Old Left, it was revealed that they had all failed their security vetting, yet all got sensitive jobs with access to secrets.
Gone are the days when the ruthlessly efficient Mossad could send agents at night by boat to Tunisia. While the current head of Israel’s Labour Party, then a general, hovered overhead in a signals aircraft, they entered the home of Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Abu Jihad, in 1988 and killed him, after bundling his wife and child into another room.
Now Mossad cannot even make the two-hour drive from Tel Aviv to Amman and dispose of a Palestinian enemy efficiently.
Instead of winning SAS-style admiration, Mossad’s incompetence has led to an international and internal crisis. Canada gets angry about the use of false passports.
The botched assassination attempt on Khaled Meshal has worried MI6; it appears that Britain does not go in for this sort of thing, preferring – according to a former British agent – ”to sub-contract it to Mossad”.
The murder in Belgium of the British inventor Gerald ”Supergun” Bull before the Gulf War is widely believed to have been such an act.
The fact that the Amman enterprise was even contemplated has led several Israeli ministers to threaten resignation and to panic in the Prime Minister’s office.
This is not a good time to be a spy. Perhaps the agency that has reached the real nadir of efficiency and public esteem is our own National Intelligence Agency (NIA). This month thieves broke into the organisation’s Rietvlei headquarters, getting through an electrified perimeter fence before walking off with R1,77- million of specialised equipment, including a debugging machine. Among the suspects are the crime syndicates whom the NIA are supposed to be surveilling.
Other embarrassing revelations have included a shooting incident involving the head of the NIA and the theft of 11 minibuses from the agency.
Britain’s MI5 (the internal equivalent of the US’s FBI) is reeling from the revelations of former member David Shayler, who told how it tapped phones, trailed innocent people and planned to burgle their houses. Its reaction has been petulant. When Shayler’s girlfriend, Annie Machon, an MI5 agent, arrived back in London from Spain she was hauled off for questioning by burly men from Special Branch and the Security Service, even though her lawyer had informed the authorities of the time of her arrival.
The authorities then searched the couple’s flat, smashing up furniture as though they were goons of a Third World dictatorship.
MI6 (the external equivalent of the CIA) also has image problems. The agency has been forced to negotiate a ”sweetheart deal” with ”Mr T”, a disgruntled former operative, buying his silence before he sold his story.
There are times when staff feel its headquarters, a futuristic building on the Thames at Vauxhall Cross, London, is a metaphor for MI6: glamorous on the outside but cramped within.
It is not like the old premises in Mayfair, where staff used to grow tomatoes in window boxes.
Nowadays staff enter their brash HQ with a swipe card and pin number, and find themselves in a hive of corridors unmarked and directionless, except for signs saying ”Exit”. Staff are not allowed to discuss their work with colleagues, even when they are in MI6’s secure and mediocre canteen (they could be sitting next to a proto Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean or Kim Philby).
Even the nice parts of Vauxhall Cross have their disadvantages. There is a pleasant bar overlooking the river.
Younger spies relaxing there tend to hug the shadows in case Japanese tourists who point their cameras while passing on a tour boat are from a rival agency – even a friendly one.
A former intelligence agent recalled how everyone used to swan about until the counter-intelligence people had some telephoto pictures taken from the top of the neighbouring tower block and then presented the spies with prints of themselves with pints and gin and tonics, along with the sneering comment: ”You call yourself a spy.”
The 2 000 people – mostly men – who work for MI6 like calling themselves spies and are very much at the sharp end of the business. They have to deal with defectors from nasty regimes such as Algeria and Libya.
Their job is to ”turn” diplomats or disgruntled terrorists who have valuable information. Occasionally, they will spirit a big diplomatic fish to safety in Britain to go to the head of the queue of asylum- seekers.
There are another 2 000 people in MI5, many of them women, except in the section dealing with counter-surveillance in Northern Ireland where most have been drafted in from the Special Branch.
There are also 6 000 at the GCHQ listening centre in Cheltenham and a number of Military Intelligence agents, including those men who crashed an ”ambulance” of the North Humberside health authority in Bosnia.
Britain divides its intelligence operations in this way: defence intelligence, international arms trade and nuclear proliferation absorb about 35 per cent; intelligence on foreign states, their internal politics, etc, 10%; slipping stolen secrets to British diplomats involved in negotiations, including economic espionage, 20%; counter-terrorism, 20%. Counter-intelligence, counter- espionage, drugs and international crime make up the rest.
This means MI6 has the lion’s share of the work. Mark Galeotti, a former intelligence analyst now running the transnational unit at Keele University, calls it ”very Oxbridge and stuffed with very courteous and clubbable chaps, damn fine people, just the sort to cultivate a foreigner into betraying his country”.
It seems very different from the atmosphere at Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. A former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, has described ”the twisted ideals and self- centred pragmatism … coupled with this so-called team’s greed, lust and total lack of respect for human life”. He also reported nights of orgies and naked bathing parties (fortunately, the Thames would be too cold).
Another former agent says MI6 operates on a shoestring and restricts itself to pure intelligence: it has no vast analytical branch, like those of the CIA and Germany’s BND. It is strictly tasked by the Joint Intelligence Committee; one task is Russia and organised crime, another Islamic terrorism, which means it works closely with GCHQ.
”GCHQ should be shut down, what it provides is so banal and obvious,” said the former agent.
”It is obsessive about government communications in Russia. Its eavesdroppers loved telling us where the briefcase containing the nuclear button was located. ”Then they give these double-sealed envelopes into the Joint Intelligence Committee that are completely useless. They once handed in one that ”revealed” Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin had gone to China.
This was the fruit of extensive monitoring and decoding of information captured via spy satellites. I just yawned since I had seen his arrival in Beijing on Russian television that morning.”
The Russians are little better. Their equivalent of GCHQ is called Fatsi and they, too, snoop on their own nationals from listening posts. Imagine the embarrassment, therefore, when it was discovered that a ”top secret” Fatsi report to the Russian Security Council had been copied from local newspapers.