Spycraft Secrets: An Espionage A-Z

‘Good intelligence is the best protection against terrorism. Reliable intelligence depends on good tradecraft.’

– Oleg Gordievsky, KGB defector

Wisdom begins with the definition of terms.

– Socrates

First published in 2016

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2016

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© Nigel West, 2016

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CONTENTS

Foreword by David Petraeus, Former Director of the CIA

Acknowledgements

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction

Chronology

The A to Z of Spycraft

FOREWORD

Good intelligence is rarely stumbled upon by accident. More typically, it is the result of what Nigel West describes in this book as great spycraft.

As West explains, good intelligence is, in fact, the product of operations by dedicated, highly trained intelligence professionals with extensive experience, employing solid tradecraft, with exceptional technical support and reliable, secure communications, all after having undertaken thorough planning and after carefully weighed the potential risks and rewards. The overall effort is typically overseen by the station chiefs in respective countries, together with their individual operators and chiefs of operations, in consultation with leaders above them, depending on the sensitivity of the operation. They develop and ‘wargame’ specific plans, striving to ensure preparation for every possible contingency – all while recognising that even the best of plans may not survive contact with an adversary.

Such operations can yield extraordinary insights on the thinking, activities, capabilities, and limitations of a country’s adversaries. To be sure, that is not always the case. And some observers of intelligence organisations, unaware of many extraordinary but never revealed achievements, tend to characterise the intelligence agencies’ performance by compiling a catalogue of incidents that have gone awry. In part, this is because the most significant intelligence successes are typically not made public for at least a number of decades, as it is important to protect sensitive sources and methods. By contrast, intelligence failures are often immediately evident and remain in newspaper archives forever, ready for use by commentators recalling such failures, often without full appreciation of what may have been accomplished even in those endeavors deemed missteps, much less in those that have gone well.

At the forefront of the intelligence collection architecture is the case officer, the so-called ‘core collector’ or HUMINT (human intelligence) collector – a highly trained individual who identifies, cultivates, recruits and then handles a human source or carries out a sensitive technical operation in the quest for information that will support pursuit of the foreign policy goals of one’s government. Each of the stages of recruitment and handling of human sources entails an element of risk; but, however hazardous, the rewards, in terms of insights and information for policy-makers, can be considerable.

Case officers rarely act on their own and they seldom operate as portrayed in the movies. The lone, intuitive, multi-lingual, Ironman triathlete maverick with bulging muscles is a rarity. More typically, painstaking research, careful relationship building, imaginative initiatives and ingenious choreography – employed by individuals who look like average citizens (though they are not) working together as a team – are the components of a project that, upon fruition, will be so carefully protected that the sources recruited and the methods employed are highly restricted even within the overall organisation, not to mention the rest of government.

The men and women who carry out such operations may, again, seem to be typical citizens, but they are not. And the teams they comprise are nothing short of exceptional. I was privileged to be sworn in as the director of the CIA in early September 2011 after some thirty-seven years in uniform. Based on considerable interaction as a military commander with many Agency officers, particularly in the decade after 9/11, I knew the men and women of the Agency were extraordinary. But, on taking the reins as D/CIA, I was struck by just how extraordinary the talented, quiet professionals of the Agency really were. Indeed, the skills, commitment, patriotism, expertise, creativity and spirit of camaraderie of the men and women who inhabit that sub rosa world were often truly breathtaking as they planned and carried out complex missions in some of the most challenging environments in the world.

Of course, human intelligence involves much more than persuading individuals to act against their natural instincts – or to act on other motivations. In any case, there is a very important human dimension in the conduct of source recruitment, as the case officer builds a bond of mutual trust with a potential high-value asset. Throughout that process, good tradecraft is absolutely essential, as it is what the case officer employs to minimise the danger of compromise while performing particularly sensitive tasks.

The CIA has a proud record, dating back to 1947, of initiating and running to a successful conclusion some truly remarkable enterprises. Occasionally news of such a venture, such as the salvage of a Soviet submarine from the ocean floor, the capture of a notorious terrorist in international waters off Cyprus, the establishment of a backchannel to a pariah, the resettlement of a defector or the rescue of US diplomats from a hostile regime, will seize the headlines and maybe attract the attention of Hollywood. The common denominator in those well-known endeavours, and in many more tightly held operations, is the tradecraft that enabled such operations to be executed while minimising the potential for harm to the participants and political blowback for the governments involved.

The continuing development of the tradecraft employed by intelligence operatives is essential to the conduct of their operations. The reservoir of tradecraft comprises the knowledge and techniques accumulated over many years, in many different territories and cultures, that have been required for professionals in the field to carry out potentially perilous assignments with confidence. And that is spycraft, the focus of this book – each episode of which is publicly known, but the compilation of which makes for an enthralling, thrilling read!

General (Ret.) David Petraeus

Former director of the CIA

Arlington, Virginia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful for the generosity of numerous intelligence professionals, among them Gervase Cowell, Brian Latell, Ray Batvinis, Michael Fox, Keith Melton, Tony and Jonna Mendez, Patrick Magee, Martin McGartland, Oleg Kalugin, Oleg Gordievsky, Dan Mulvenna, Hayden Peake, Mark Williams, Brian Stewart and the late Harry Williamson, Juan Pujol, Tommy Robertson, Ed Wilson, Harry Verlander, Oleg Tsarev and Arthur Martin.

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Like most other professions, the espionage business has developed its own lexicon. For example, a ‘rolling car meet’ refers to a very specific method for a case officer to hold a rendezvous with an agent while on the move in a vehicle. It should not be confused with a Treff, the German word for a planned encounter that has been adopted by the intelligence community to mean a clandestine rendezvous with a sensitive source.

The public’s interest in this alternative argot was captured most memorably by the novelist John le Carré, who began to write spy thrillers while still serving as a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service station in Hamburg. Fully aware of the tendency for his organisation’s staff to speak in something approaching a private patois he invented an entirely new glossary that included ‘lamp-lighters’ (for the Watcher Service), ‘scalphunters’, ‘pavement artists’, ‘wranglers’ and ‘janitors’, many of whom were alleged to inhabit the dingy headquarters building, known as ‘the Circus’.

All these terms were fictional, and SIS was never based in Cambridge Circus, although each had its own authentic equivalent, which the author, perhaps for reasons of discretion, had not disclosed. In the real, sub rosa world of intelligence-gathering, each of these epithets acts as a veil of secrecy over particular types of activity, and the purpose of this book is to explain, and give examples of, how these operations happened, drawing on the first-hand experience of defectors to and from the Soviet Union; surveillance ‘operators’ who kept terrorist suspects under observation in Northern Ireland; case officers who have put their lives at risk by ‘pitching’ a target in a ‘denied territory’; and the NOCs who lived under alias, carrying ‘black documentation’ to spy abroad.

It was not until the successful decryption of the VENONA intercepts that Western analysts fully understood the extent to which the Soviets had created for themselves their own private intelligence language, a code within a sophisticated cipher system, that added an extra layer of secrecy, so that even if an adversary succeeded in decrypting a message and transforming it into plain-text, much of the content would remain opaque because commonly used words, such as New York, Washington and Britain were known as TYRE, CARTHAGE and the ISLAND, respectively. The United States was the COUNTRY and SIDON was London.

The true identities of individual agents were concealed behind semi-transparent cryptonyms, with Julius Rosenberg referred to as ANTENNA, for example. To insiders who knew that he had served in the US Army’s Signal Corps as a radio technician, the connection was obvious. Any local, hostile security apparatus was called the GREENS, with members of the Communist Party being COMPATRIOTS, members of the Young Communist League GYMNASTS, and agents PROBATIONERS. Whereas analysts found the repetition in this code increasingly easy to understand, the cipher, based on supposedly randomly generated five-figure groups, was intended to be absolutely unbreakable through the application of conventional cryptanalysis.

The delicate business of handling what are sometimes termed Covert Human Intelligence Sources became especially fraught during the thirty-two years of ‘the Troubles’ in Ulster. Several different British security agencies ran competing and overlapping intelligence organisations across the province in an environment that was particularly challenging. External penetration of the target paramilitary groups was almost impossible as the Republicans came from the same families, schools and neighbourhoods, and had been known to each other for generations. This mitigated against the deployment of an imposter or someone from outside the closely knit largely (but not exclusively) Roman Catholic community. Physical surveillance was next to impossible in streets where strangers and their vehicles were likely to come under close scrutiny by gangs of youths engaged on look-out duties to give early warning of raids, and the establishment of static observation posts was problematic in the extreme.

In these circumstances the authorities came up with ingenious solutions, such as recruiting military personnel with family backgrounds in the six counties to ‘retire’ and return to their homes to make themselves available to the local paramilitaries. This strategy, adopted by the British Army’s Force Research Unit, produced around a dozen good inside informants. There was considerable investment in long-distance observation from sites on top of tower blocks, and overhead reconnaissance from helicopters. Technology was also adapted to assist in the task of monitoring telephone conversations, disrupt the signals from remote-controlled devices employed to detonate explosives, and rescue agents in jeopardy.

Agents considered especially vulnerable were sometimes issued with ostensibly ordinary household items, such as domestic radios, that had been converted to transmit an emergency signal in the event of imminent compromise. Some agents also carried ‘sick-pills’, which when ingested would trigger violent retching and vomiting, thus providing a good excuse not to participate in some planned crime.

As in so many fields, a shooting war will create a climate in which many technological and other developments will be accelerated because of immediate necessity, and the same is true for espionage. It was the requirement to collect accurate information about enemy troop movements that in the First World War led to the creation of the train-watchers, a network of Allied agents taught to recognise particular types of railway rolling stock and associate them with the deployment of German infantry, cavalry and artillery.

In the Second World War the Axis occupation of much of central and western Europe provoked resistance movements and German responses with their own particular vocabulary, with passeurs, mouse-traps, reseaux and Funkspeil. This was a concentrated period of technical research which produced sabotage equipment, concealment devices, miniaturised transmitters and mobile direction-finding apparatus in support of what amounted to the first truly global espionage conflict.

Many of the lessons learned in the Second World War, ranging from strategic deception through the management of double agents to the exploitation of signals intelligence, were applied, often by the very same participants, during the Cold War. Ideological commitments made during the fascist era formed the foundation for post-war espionage, and the molehunters of the 1960s often found themselves delving into the university politics of the depression to track changed allegiances.

Forty-five years of superpower confrontation gave plenty of scope for the exponents of covert action, special political action and active measures to engage in a life-and-death struggle to promote their own interests. These manifested themselves in proxy wars fought in the developing world, sometimes colonial brush fires fuelled by Soviet or Chinese-sponsored nationalists, full-scale counter-insurgency emergencies, or minor police actions.

The conflicts, of varying scale, in Aden, Algeria, Borneo, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Indo-China, Kenya, Malaya, Oman, Palestine and Vietnam have all been accompanied by their own intelligence problems, and experience gained in one theatre has often found a useful application in another. Nowhere was this more true than in Northern Ireland where, for the longest period, four intelligence agencies took on an unprecedented challenge and ultimately prevailed. No wonder then that many of the personalities in today’s efforts to isolate Islamic terrorism cut their teeth during a lengthy commitment against rather different political extremists.

The purpose of Spycraft Secrets is to assemble the nomenclature from as many sources as practicable to present a reasonably comprehensive window into a fascinating, arcane world that, for most outsiders, is as intriguing as it is forbidden.

Nigel West

CHRONOLOGY