The World Intelligence Review

Review of “Spycatcher” NIGEL WEST Spycatcher By: Matthew Dunn William Morrow,...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:59:00 -0400

Review of “Spycatcher”

NIGEL WEST

Spycatcher

By: Matthew Dunn

William Morrow, 2011.

$16.88.

Why would Spycatcher (published as Spartan in London by Weidenfeld & Nicolson) be of interest to a non-fiction reader? Most likely because the author claims to have served in the British Secret Intelligence Service for ‘nearly six years’ between 1995 and 2001, a period during which he completed ‘approximately seventy missions, all successfully’. It is also asserted that he is the first SIS officer to have written a novel under his own name, apparently having forgotten Compton Mackenzie and Willie Somerset Maugham and a dozen others, including, more recently, Kenneth Benton. He also says that ‘medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers’ which will come as a surprise to, for example, Sir Gerry Warner, Sir Mark Allen and more than a hundred members of the Order of St Michael and St George who are entitled to carry the letters CMG after their surname in recognition of their decoration.

These are not the only statements made by the author’s publishers, either in publicity material or on the dustjacket itself that raise doubts, and another example is his insistence that if caught on any of his deep cover missions into highly hostile environments, he would have been executed. Of course, no SIS officer has ever been executed in the more than one hundred years of the Service, so that boast seems a little hollow. However, in conversation the author, who is a graduate of the University of East Anglia and the recipient of a commendation from the late Foreign Secretary Robin Cook for his work in an anti-terrorism case, distances himself from the publicity material circulated on his behalf. But according to the dustjacket, the author has drawn on his ‘fascinating experience’ to craft an ‘authentic picture of today’s secret world.’

Hyperbole or not, the obvious objective of such a marketing strategy is to give the impression to a potential readership that Spycatcher offers a degree of verisimilitude. If not, why promote the author as a former real-life spook? His declared aim is that he ‘wanted my readers to know how it can feel being an intelligence field operative.’

As Dunn’s central theme is that his material is based on his own experiences, naturally one is tempted to take a professional view of his plot and the tradecraft he describes. At the heart of the novel is a thirty-five year-old SIS super-spy, codenamed SPARTAN, whose identity is known only to the Chief and one other senior officer. Allegedly this role is only ever fulfilled by one specially-trained SIS officer who is entrusted with deniable tasks approved by the prime minister of the day. Naturally, each prime minister is sworn to secrecy about SPARTAN’s existence whose true name, William Cochrane, is protected, even within SIS itself.

Spycatcher opens with an account of an Iranian intelligence defector who attends a dawn rendezvous with representatives of his old organisation in New York’s Central Park under SIS’s supervision. We are told that the Iranian defected from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) eight years earlier, having been persuaded to remain in place for awhile when he first approached SIS. When it was suspected that his ‘cover could be compromised’ he was exfiltrated to Europe to become an entrepreneur, but nevertheless continued to spy. Soroush Abtahi, protected by three armed SIS bodyguards and his case officer, Will Cochrane, has been persuaded to re-establish contact with the MOIS for the sole purpose of finding out why the organization wants to see him.

Thus on the book’s first couple of pages, we are told that Abtahi, who has only now come under suspicion from his MOIS colleagues, with whom he has apparently worked for the past eight years, remains SIS’s most valuable source, and is curious to know why they want to meet him in a large open space in Manhattan. Furthermore, neither Cochrane nor his three colleagues have been declared to the local authorities or to the CIA, so no official back-up is available at the encounter. The scene ends in a bloodbath which left at least fourteen men shot dead and Cochrane with three bullets in his stomach. Later in the book Cochrane is hit in his shoulder and head, but again miraculously suffers no lasting ill-effects. Among the casualties are three British Special Forces soldiers and a further eight Iranian gunmen shot by the New York Police Department.

Thus the reader is asked to accept that a professional British intelligence officer would (a) regard an eight year-old source as currently highly valuable; would be willing (b) to put that source at risk for no discernable advantage; (c) to mount an operation in New York without the prior consent and participation of the American authorities; (d) shoot to kill without any clear rules of engagement and without having been fired on first and (e) be allowed to leave the jurisdiction after such a mass slaughter. Perhaps more damaging for SIS is the proposition that because Abtahi was shot dead by Cochrane and not an enemy, his family had been refused any financial compensation from what is described as SIS’s ‘Benevolence Department’!

Bizarrely, we are also told that although Cochrane used a false passport to enter the United States, he was removed from the NYPD’s custody by a senior CIA officer (who, for reasons unexplained pretends initially to be an FBI special agent) and treated in a safe-house in Manhattan that is not on CIA premises. Although the gun battle in the park was ‘given national significance’, Cochrane is patched up by a compliant doctor and, within a couple of days, returned to London, ready for his next assignment, to trace a terrorist mastermind who, coincidentally, turns out to have been responsible for murdering his father in 1979 during the Islamic revolution in Tehran.

This particular incident is worth looking at in some detail because, we must be reminded, Dunn asserts that his book is based on his own experiences as an SIS officer, and that although Spycatcher is fiction, it has a definite authenticity. Obviously, as a novelist, Dunn could have chosen any historical foundation upon which to build his plot, but he has chosen a period that, in intelligence terms, is quite well documented. We know, for instance, that the CIA station in Tehran was taken entirely by surprise by the collapse of the Shah’s regime, and that there were only three men working under diplomatic cover at the embassy when it was seized. Similarly, there was a single SIS officer at the British embassy, and no western intelligence agency predicted the Shah’s fall. Indeed, this particular event is often cited by diplomats such as the late Tony Parsons, as a classic example of an intelligence failure. Not so, according to Dunn who insists that the Ayatollah’s victorious return from France had been anticipated three months earlier, and that ‘approximately four hundred’ SIS and CIA officers had run a joint operation of unprecedented scale to extract every ounce of intelligence from two thousand SAVAK and other Iranians before it was too late.

This rewriting of history is, of course, complete bunk, and it is hard to imagine there were even two Iranians of interest to either the CIA or SIS in 1979, let alone two thousand. To compound the travesty, the author has a revolutionary defector, to be escorted out of the country via, of all routes, Bandar Abbas, a distance of 1,500 kilometres away. Thus, instead of simply flying the man from Tehran, or driving him over the frontier into Turkey or Pakistan, Dunn has the CIA and SIS engaged in a wholly implausible set of circumstances, bundling the man into the trunk of a car for the long journey to the Gulf port where SIS supposedly ran a local trawler. Of course, it can be argued that the author’s scenario is simply a plot mechanism to tie his central character, Cochrane, to the events of 1979 and the death of his father.

At the core of the plot is a National Security Agency (NSA) analytical paper which draws on a super-secret electronic source codenamed HUBBLE and has been distributed to all America’s European allies. The report contains the splendid contradiction

The location and timing of this attack are unknown, but it is assessed that the attack is imminent.

Since the NSA supposedly is reluctant to share any further details of its source, Cochrane simply goes to the home of the relevant NSA officer in Baltimore and assaults him, threatening to kill his family too, in an effort to learn more. Apparently HUBBLE offers access to sensitive Iranian emails, telephone calls and text messages, and has proved so successful that it has earned the NSA an extra budget appropriation of $200 million. Incredibly, the NSA also suspects that the source has been compromised and manipulated, but has issued no warnings to its clients… because to do so might jeopardize the project’s funding.

A moment of reflection about HUBBLE reveals some problems. For example, why is it so sup-secret if it simply provides the NSA’s standard product, being intercepted electronic communications? And why should an established collection channel cost so much to maintain? And would any NSA manager remain silent about suspicions that a conduit was compromised and being used to peddle disinformation because continued financial support was at stake?

Suffice to say that the content of the facsimile NSA paper is so risible that it is clear Dunn has never seen any such product from that agency. Since he also has a character working at CIA headquarters at Langley who does not answer to nobody in the building, has only a vague budget and ‘no specific remit or function’, he seems to know nothing of how the CIA bureaucracy works. Similarly, he is unaware of Public Law 110, the U.S. statute which allows the Director of Central Intelligence to grant up to five American passports a year to his nominees, thus obviating the need for Cochrane to prevail upon the president for the same purpose.

In terms of accuracy concerning the international intelligence community, Dunn is woefully misinformed, for example claiming that the DGSE is the only French intelligence agency conducting operations abroad. So what about the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire and the Group de Controlle Radio-electonique, to name but two?

Cochrane’s mission, a term never used in SIS, is to flush out an Iranian terrorist mastermind by having his former sweetheart, a street-wise war correspondent, attempt to reestablish contact with him. However, Cochrane’s initial approach to her is so ludicrously implausible that it breaks every rule of suspended disbelief. As any case officer will confirm, the first step in cultivating a source is the most critical moment which could make, or wreck, an operation. Accordingly, much preparatory work is undertaken before the critical pitch is made. Yet Cochrane propositions his target at nearly eight o’clock in the morning, in Lana Beseisu’s Paris home, pretending to be an embassy official. Using an alias, Cochrane tells Lana that a computer glitch has sent him on a series of house-calls to update his database. According to his records, so he informs her, she is half Saudi and half Jordanian, has held a British passport for nearly twenty years, and has ‘regularly checked in with our embassy’. With such a preposterous tale any self-respecting savvy journalist would throw her visitor out and call the embassy or the police. Yet within moments he reveals “I work for MI6” and threatens her with prosecution for some unspecified crime unless she agrees to cooperate with him. Only as a textbook of how not to gain someone’s assistance, do Cochrane’s tactics have any validity.

SIS is Britain’s principal human intelligence organization, and the recruitment and management of human sources is its business, so this episode, perhaps above all others, is important because it is the only time in Spycatcher in which Cochrane pitches and runs someone. But in doing so he uses a ludicrous cover that could be exposed in a nanosecond, without any backstop, makes an absurdly improbable approach based on an obvious falsehood, and then issues an empty threat as if coercion is a useful methodology to gain cooperation. Finally, having apparently made a successful pitch, Cochrane becomes emotionally involved with his attractive agent who, within moments of meeting him, has stripped off to reveal the disfiguring scars on her torso. One does not have to be a student of human behaviour to recognize this as an absurdity.

Almost every aspect of this episode is phony, from the way in which Lana is alleged to have acquired her British citizenship, through her mother nearly two decades earlier, to Cochrane’s conduct of the interview. In any such encounter the individual intending to make a pitch is well-informed, yet on this occasion he needs to see her passport to confirm her identity, although he does not make this request until halfway through the meeting. He is also unaware whether she has been in telephone contact with Tehran in recent months, noting that this information could be made available to him by the ‘French security services’ upon his request. Why had he not found this out from the appropriate British agency before knocking on her door? Having suggested, completely erroneously, that ‘British residents living in France’ suffer unspecified ‘bureaucratic problems’ if they have not registered with the British embassy, he insists her past association with an Iranian intelligence organization amounts to a criminal offence. “We call people like that traitors’, and insists that not only would the French ‘not stand in our way”, but that the United Nations would ‘fairly or otherwise pin any number of atrocities on you’. In other words, Cochrane sets out a series of patent falsehoods as the basis on which the hapless woman would be encouraged to cooperate.

Much worse is to come. The wretched Lana is installed, much like a tethered goat, in a hotel in Zagreb, assigned the task of dropping tempting letters into the local Iranian embassy addressed to her old lover. Although she instantly attracts the attention of a group of Iranian surveillance experts who trail her every movement, it never occurs to Cochrane that her hotel room might have been bugged. So we are expected to believe that while the hotel and its staff supposedly are riddled with hostile agents, Cochrane can easily slip in and out of her room undetected, and never even bothers to take the most elementary precautions to detect any electronic surveillance. Once again, credibility is lost.

Plausability, of course, depends in part on an author’s skill in carrying a reader through some unlikely scenarios, but the limit is reached when Cochrane tells his CIA subordinates that, for no apparent reason, they are to kill four DGSE officers. None raises any objection, and the SIS man cheerfully proceeds to break the neck of an old friend, a Frenchman he has failed to recognize. Paradoxically, Cochrane’s adversary, the mysterious Iranian known as Megiddo, is described as a ‘mass murderer’ without any supporting evidence that he has ever killed anyone, whereas the Briton’s personal body-count is well into double figures by the middle of the book.

Apart from the fundamental flaws running through the entire plot, there are so many amateurish mistakes that each chapter becomes an irritant. In the first few pages Cochrane is shot in the stomach and finds a large exit wound. Then he is shot twice more, making three wounds altogether, and presumably two bullets, yet despite the exit wound, three bullets are dug out of him. There is no ‘Congressional Medal of Honor’, nor ‘Red Label whiskey’, nor any likelihood that a CIA Special Operations Group paramilitary would have operated inside North Korea, China, Zimbabwe or Syria. There is, of course, a Medal of Honor, and Johnnie Walker Red Label is Scotch whisky, not Irish. No SIS controller could be aged fifty-seven (two years over the mandatory retirement age); SIS station commanders are not referred to as a ‘station chief’; and no SIS station in Sarajevo or anywhere in the world has ever run ‘up to fifty agents and as many operations’ simultaneously.

Why does any of this matter? Because the author has associated himself very deliberately with what is widely regarded as an elite body, a service that prides itself on being somewhat cerebral in its attitude to intelligence issues. Not even James Bond killed as many of his opponents in all Fleming’s fourteen books as compared to the first dozen pages of Cochrane’s adventure. Whereas Bond’s parents died in a climbing accident in the Swiss Alps, Cochrane’s father was tortured and ceremoniously disemboweled in a Tehran prison in 1986, and his mother was killed in 1991 by a pair of sadistic burglars who were then stabbed to death by her vengeful teenage son. No wonder Cochrane might be considered mildly dysfunctional, if not formally diagnosed a homicidal maniac. By the end of Spycatcher, Cochrane has killed a grand total of thirty-three people, as well as having seriously assaulted an NSA officer and two American policemen.

Certainly Cochrane’s plan to seize Megiddo seems a trifle eccentric, given that his operation apparently has been approved at the highest levels in London and Washington, DC. Instead of simply handing him over to the appropriate authorities, as in any rendition, he instead decides to smuggle his captive aboard a private yacht, skippered by a heroin trafficker, and sail from the Adriatic across the length of the Mediterranean and up the English Channel. No rational explanation is offered for the need to adopt this bizarre and unnecessary route.

The novel’s denoumont is set on a lake in rural Massachusetts where a large group of heavily-armed Iranian terrorists, led by Megiddo, is holed up in anticipation of yet another bloody shoot-out. Quite why they were not surrounded by local law enforcement goes unexplained, but instead Cochrane and his four paramilitary pals take them on, hopelessly outnumbered, with predictably catastrophic results. Curiously, the appearance of a total of thirty-two Iranian terrorists, including Megiddo and three known bombers, is facilitated by the CIA, apparently in an effort to uncover details of a larger atrocity being planned. The thought that perhaps their arrest and interrogation might lead to the same result, without any risk, does not seem to have occurred to anyone. On the contrary, with definite evidence ‘derived from multiple entry- and exit-port database systems, as well as aircraft rostas’, the U.S. federal authorities learn of the imminent arrival from Iran of twenty-five current members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who seem to have had no difficulty in obtaining the necessary visas, and do not even arrange for them to be searched at customs or placed under surveillance. This expedient allows the gunmen to transform a tourist lodge in the Adirondacks into a veritable fortress.

Setting aside the hideous fault-lines running through Spycatcher’s plot, the question to be answered is whether the author’s narrative is in the same tradition of le Carré, Greene or even Benton. Does the book, whatever its shortcomings, offer the claimed insight into the mind of an SIS case officer, albeit one who operates in isolation from his colleagues? While it is true that SIS personnel undergoing training are encouraged to think laterally and use their initiative, working independently when necessary, their craft is largely one of teamwork. Despite being the survivor of five bullets and three grenades, there would not be any room in Vauxhall Cross for anyone like Will Cochrane.

MI6’s superspy, far from slipping in and out of the shadows to make a subtle intervention, leaves behind him a trail of mayhem and destruction, including the bodies of five British and American Special Forces soldiers, with a further two seriously injured due to his recklessness. In contrast, Dunn’s arch-villain Megiddo appears to be a harmless fantasist who dreams of destroying Israel and making Iran a world super-power. Delusional, certainly, but hardly a competitor when compared to the psychopathic Cochrane who demonstrates no intellectual skills and whose principal talent appears to be mass murder. But is he, nonetheless, a true British hero in the 007 tradition, or even Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer? Is he a character, albeit one of fiction, for whom the denizens of Legoland might be proud? He routinely disobeys instructions, shows rudeness and aggression towards his colleagues, kills his own star asset, and seeks to pay off his victim’s family with his own life savings. This is a formula for detention under the Mental Health Acts, not the rational instrument of Whitehall’s secret corridors.

What else do we know about Cochrane? One thing he has in common with James Bond is their creator’s inability to construct a consistent chronology. The reader can deduce that Cochrane was born in 1974 as he waves goodbye to his father in 1979 at the age of five, and we know (because we are told twice) that at the age of thirty-five he has been in SIS for seventeen years, which suggests he joined the organization in 1992 at the age of eighteen. However, by then he has served as a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion for five years and afterwards gained a degree from Cambridge. This means that in the two years since he was at school, and stabbed two burglars to death at the age of seventeen, he had crammed eight years of military experience and a degree course in politics, philosophy and economics. Accordingly, Dunn’s arithmetic is rather worse than Fleming’s when building his hero’s curriculum vitae, not to mention that no PPE course has ever been offered at his chosen university.

If there is not much that makes any sense in Cochrane’s own contradictory background, what about his father’s? It too, upon scrutiny, turns out to be rather unusual, for he was a senior CIA officer working under diplomatic cover in Tehran in 1979 whose wife and children lived in a large home owned by the U.S. government in a wealthy district somewhere in America where the young Will attended a day-school to achieve exam results, presumably in the summer of 1991, that qualified him to go up to Cambridge. What seems odd is that Cochrane’s mother did not know her husband had been anything other than an American diplomat who had died in a tragic accident.

Although we are not told much about Cochrane’s father, we do know that he was seized in 1979 by the Revolutionary Guards, twenty-one days after entering the country, in the act of smuggling a defector into Bandar Abbas, incarcerated and tortured in Ervin prison for seven years before being stabbed in the stomach and his body dumped in the Persian Gulf. In those circumstances one might ask why his wife had not queried his disappearance when the American diplomats taken hostage at the Tehran embassy had been released so very publicly in January 1981. Or why his captors took his mutilated corpse all the way to the Gulf, or how its recovery could have been reconciled with ‘a tragic accident’.

A closer look at Soroush Abtahi also reveals him to be quite unusual too. Allegedly he was found by Cochrane while working at his post in the MOIS and recruited as a source, but eight years earlier, presumably in 2001, he had been exfiltrated to England because it had seemed that his ‘cover could be compromised’. Perhaps, on that occasion he had been accompanied by his wife and at least one of his children, their daughter who would then have been aged two. However, as his ‘cover’ had remained intact, Abtahi had continued to spy on his organization while he became an entrepreneur and had purchased a terraced house in Paddington for his wife and children with a mortgage of just £100,000. Then, more recently, an assiduous MOIS security officer had traced a leak to Abtahi and he had then agreed to meet two of his colleagues, not at his home in London, but at dawn in New York’s Central Park. Such a rendezvous had struck the perceptive Abtahi as unusual, but he had consented to the arrangement nonetheless, as had Cochrane who, for the past eight years, had supervised his safety. Actually, we learn that Cochrane had also concluded that his agent had been compromised, but had allowed the meeting to proceed ‘in order to be sure’, and had set up a debriefing session afterwards at Abtahi’s hotel. Astonishingly, Cochrane had not wanted to give his agent the protection of the additional three British bodyguards, preferring to undertake the task himself, alone. Furthermore, he would later blame the three British bodyguards for the debacle, saying “They let me down. I should have been there alone” and insist that his original plan had been overruled “against my wishes” by some unidentified superior.

Oddly, Abtahi manifested no resentment of Cochrane’s exploitation of his information that had endangered him. The logic of all this, of course, is hard to fathom. If, eight years earlier, Cochrane had been willing to exfiltrate his agent to London in the mistaken belief that he was in danger, why put him in jeopardy again in New York? Why indeed had he taken action on Abtahi’s information in a way that had incriminated him? One might imagine that even if the MOIS had not suspected Abtahi of being a mole prior to 2001, his sudden departure to London might have been regarded as something of a clue. And if Cochrane truly suspected that Abtahi was in peril in Central Park, why did he not fit him with a radio link or some other emergency communication device, instead of simply waiting to meet him afterwards at his hotel? Bizarrely, Cochrane gives the impression that he expected Abtahi to be sufficiently free after his meeting.. to confirm that indeed he had been compromised!

Abtahi’s value as an agent was evidently immense, for he had access to the regime’s plans, nuclear research, military strategy and support for international terrorism. He was ‘MI6’s best-placed Iranian agent,’ yet he was able to achieve all of this from Paddington, or so one might deduce from MOIS’s choice of meeting-place, which implies that Tehran was not on his immediate travel itinerary. Unanswered is quite how Abtahi had accomplished his elevated status as the west’s star spy if he did not occasionally visit Iran.

The novelist would answer such nitpicking with the defence that the speed of the narrative and the excitement of the action is intended to sweep the reader through any doubts, but again the recurring problem is that in this case the author is peddling his wares on the basis that he is a true professional who knows what he is writing about. That too is a line that is unsustainable.

The carnage wrought by Cochrane is so totally alien to the way SIS conducts its business that the reader might be forgiven for thinking the book is about a sequence of Special Forces engagements perhaps gleaned from the activities of the Increment, the organisation’s SF support team, but nothing in their past would come even close to the deployments described by Dunn. The Increment’s principal role is one of close quarter protection, assisting unarmed SIS personnel and their communications equipment. Like other SF, the Increment is well–trained and kept at a high state of readiness, but their small membership does not place lives in jeopardy unnecessarily, and undertake the most careful preparations and assessments with detailed rules of engagement before any plan is adopted. While Dunn’s account of weapons and tactics may be more appropriate in an Andy McNabb fantasy, they are strangely out of place in the urban environments of New York, Boston and even Zagreb.

In his description of U.S. Special Forces Dunn makes some passing references to, for example, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as SEAL Team Six, and his use of the (unexplained) acronym DEVGRU suggests some knowledge of his subject, but in what circumstances could the CIA have sent personnel to Zimbabwe, China or North Korea. Perhaps they had fulfilled training or close protection duties for diplomats, which is hardly indicative of their supposed covert abilities, but why would SF soldiers be deployed to North Korea? This is an unnecessary and jarring detail that presumably has been inserted into the text to be intentionally provocative, perhaps carrying the message that the author knows about such clandestine operations, but does he really? He refers to the CIA’s Special Operations Group when actually the correct name of the unit was Special Activities Division, so perhaps the author is not so well informed as one might think.

Any reality-check will have weighed the possible advantages of such an undertaking with the likely risks and diplomatic blowback. The repercussions of the capture of an SF operator would be immense, so what would be the task or the advantage gained? One implication is that Dunn has a grasp of issues that are far beyond the average reader’s understanding. The other explanation is that the author is blundering in the dark, completely insensitive to the high-level deliberations that take place before any risky plan is submitted for ministerial approval. Yet in Cochrane’s world, firefights with dozens of fatalities and casualties are the routine, with nary a word of dissent from SF personnel taking on adversaries who numerically are vastly superior. To put the loss of Cochrane’s three British SF soldiers in central Park into perspective, this would have represented more casualties than the Special Air Service’s deployment over thirty-two years in Northern Ireland, or three times the fatalities suffered by all British SF during combat in the Falklands War. At the very least, British SF have a high sense of self-preservation and emphatically are not mindless killing machines, as portrayed in Spartan.

Of course, it could be argued that to take Spartan too seriously is to misunderstand the genre, and neither the author not his publishers make any claims about great literature of following in any literary tradition, and perhaps if no link had been made with SIS this tale might not have attracted the kind of close attention that it has. However, given Dunn’s trumpeted background, comparisons are bound to be made, and they are not very favourable.

To buy a copy of this book by Matthew Dunn, Spycatcher, click here

Air Platforms Over China NIGEL WEST Chris Pocock with Clarence Fu The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights...

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:42:00 -0400

Air Platforms Over China

NIGEL WEST

Chris Pocock with Clarence Fu The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights over China from Taiwan 1951 -1969

Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA 2010. 144pp. £32.50.

Chris Pocock will be familiar intelligence aficionados as the author of Fifty Years of the U-2, a book published in 2005 that competes with Norman Polmar’s Spyplane: The U-2 Declassified, released in 2001. Now Pocock has turned his attention to the clandestine missions flown from Taiwan over the mainland, and the tale is indeed a fascinating one, beginning at the height of the Korean War when the CIA employed Civil Air Transport, the successors to General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, to fly supplies in support of the Nationalist forces still engaged in combat operations against Mao Zedong. The task, of course, was doomed, but the redoubtable Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek offered Taiwan as a strategic outpost from which to harry the Communists and then monitor the development of China’s atomic weapons program.

For nearly two decades Nationalist pilots flew signals intelligence collection platforms, aerial reconnaissance missions, leaflet drops and agent insertions. The cost to the elite 34^th Squadron, which was equipped with the Douglas A-26C/B-26C, P2V-7/RB-69As, C-54s, C-123, C-130, the P-3A armed with Sidewinder air-to-ar missiles and the unarmed B-17G, was considerable. Their mission was to fly at low altitude to evade hostile radar and air interception while the P-3A was restricted to international airspace, at least 40 miles off the coast, to monitor signals traffic. Most flights took place at night from Hsinchu in northern Taiwan, earning the squadron its black bat symbol. Initially, the aircrews had enjoyed several advantages, with fighter pilots heavily committed to the Korean conflict, and poor radar coverage of the coastline, but by 1955 the situation had deteriorated and become much more dangerous. Following the ceasefire more interceptors could be deployed south, and the quality of the air defense radars improved to the point that virtually every take-off was watched electronically by operators on the mainland.

The squadron flew 838 missions with a loss of 148 crew, or two-thirds of the original squadron’s strength, and 15 aircraft. Some crewmen were captured in the People’s Republic of China and eventually returned to Taiwan, and the unit’s last overflight took place on 25 January 1967.

Despite being stood down officially in 1971, as President Richard Nixon prepared to make his historic visit to Mao in Beijing, the Black Bats remained operational and conducted missions over Vietnam, participating between 1971 and 1972 in the CIA’s MAIN STREET project which monitored North Vietnamese communications.

In March 2010 the ashes of five missing aircrew were interred at the Martyr’s Shrine near Taipei, a ceremony that further enhanced the mystique surrounding the Black Bats. Now their story is told, in compelling detail, and the author offers a comprehensive, technical account of the clandestine flights and their aircrew. Although the CIA is in the book’s title, there is little new about the organisation which operated through a commercial cover, Western Enterprises Inc., a company registered in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the energetic Frank Wisner, the architect of the Agency’s Cold War covert action project. Nevertheless, despite this disadvantage, The Black Bats remains a fascinating read.

The Best World War II Spy Movies Based on Fact The Man Who Never Was A deception scheme...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Best World War II Spy Movies Based on Fact

The Man Who Never Was

A deception scheme involving a dead body codenamed MINCEMEAT conducted in 1943 to draw the enemy’s attention away from Sicily.

Operation Crossbow

A star-studded version of the Allied investigation of Nazi secret weapons.

I Was Monty’s Double

A hapless Pay Corps officer is persuaded to participate in Operation COPPERHEAD, a deception plan intended to suggest General Montgomery would be leading an invasion of France from the Mediterranean in 1944.

Operation Amsterdam

A tense MI6 operation undertaken during the Nazi invasion of Holland to prevent stocks of Dutch diamonds falling into enemy hands.

The Heroes of Telemark

Kirk Douglas leads a Norwegian resistance attempt to sabotage the Nazi atomic research project at Vermork by destroying stocks of heavy water.

Five Fingers

James Mason plays the role of Elyesa Bazna, a valet who sold secrets from the British ambassador’s safe to the Nazis in Ankara.

Carve Her Name With Pride

A harrowing, semi-fictionalised account of Violette Szabo’s SOE mission to Nazi-occupied France, and her capture, starring Virginia McKenna.

Triple Cross

Christopher Plummer plays Eddie Chapman, an MI5 double agent who duped the Abwehr into sending him to England as a German spy.

Blowing My Cover book review A Harvard graduate with Irish and Jewish parentage, Lindsay Moran...

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Blowing My Cover book review

A Harvard graduate with Irish and Jewish parentage, Lindsay Moran should have been a natural for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. With an obvious talent for languages and plenty of initiative, she underwent training as a case officer and much of her book describes the adventures she and her intake experienced while undergoing courses at Camp Peary, the Agency’s huge facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia. Having successfully completed training she was posted under diplomatic cover to the Balkans, a region she knew from an earlier period when she had lived in Sofia with a Bulgarian boyfriend.

Moran’s candor about her various boyfriends, of varying suitability, is quite disarming, but clearly she was never very comfortable in her cover role as an American diplomat in Skopje, even if she clearly was adept at blending into the local community to the point where her stand-by diplomatic passport was more of an embarrassment than an aid in crossing the Bulgarian frontier. As well as running some low-level sources for the Skopje station, her principal task had been the cultivation and recruitment of targets who, like so many Eastern European men, had more carnal interests in her. Thus Moran, never entirely persuaded that she was ever cut out for being a case officer, and at one time attempted to switch career paths to being a reports officer, found herself dealing with heavily-armed paramilitaries, unimpressive fabricators and high-maintenance potential prospects who consumed large quantities of tax dollars for apparently minimal return.

Disillusioned, she was pole-axed by 9/11 and dismayed when her proposals to terminate unproductive sources in an effort to concentrate on terrorist targets were rejected by headquarters. Certainly she had an opportunity to employ her tradecraft and hold clandestine meetings under alias, but Moran was underwhelmed by the utility of her chosen profession when the World Trade Center came under attack. Worse, when she returned to Langley to work with the team supporting the 2003 Gulf War, she found that the analysts were unconvinced Saddam posed any serious threat, or possessed any weapons of mass destruction, and her line managers seemed willing to acquiesce in providing the politicians with a fig-leaf of an excuse for an invasion that Moran regarded as a hideous mistake. While in the field, she regarded headquarters as a distant bureaucracy, with the Office of Security as an unnecessary invasive irritant, but back in Washington she was appalled by the Agency’s willingness to provide George Tenet’s masters with what they wanted to hear.

Moran’s wry sense of humour, which pervades her all too human account, gives her continuing doubts a very sympathetic context and the dismal Balkan scenery of almost universal hostility to the administration’s foreign policy, particularly in relation to its perceived support for the hated Albanian Muslims in Macedonia. Her neighbours poisoned her cats, local psychotics scream abuse at her and roaming militias in Kosovar posed a threat to anybody on the streets after dusk, even if she was attempting to rendezvous with an agent of doubtful value who, if challenged, was instructed to claim he was her lover. This was not espionage on the cocktail party circuit, cosying up to a well-heeled Russian military attaché, but back-alley legwork to develop the kind of contacts that might give an advance warning of an assault on a US embassy. Unglamorous, definitely, but Moran has few complaints about the necessity of the mission. She is more preoccupied by the flimsy nature of her cover at home, supposedly working for some unspecified federal agency.

Clearly the author never fitted into the Agency family and the final straw was a yet another Office of Security questionnaire demanding details of the antecedents of her latest beau, this one with impeccable American antecedents. She resigned, disappointed by the CIA’s culture and evidently disinterested in finding a niche for herself and developing her talents.

Whereas many CIA memoirs are tales of top-level recruitments, high technology wizardry and ingenious counter-intelligence schemes, Moran’s short career in the field filled her with a sense of futility. The names she recalled from her Clandestine Service 101 lectures were Nicholson, Ames and Hanssen, and her sketches of colleagues are uniformly of overweight bureaucrats with skills that had minimal application or relevance in the outside world. Her mentors proved uninspiring, and even if she had been posted to London or Paris, and not Macedonia, it is unlikely that she would have fared any better. So should this autobiography be on the reading list for any aspiring DO case officer? The professionals will recognise her frustration about the seemingly petty rules, and some of the personalities that enforced them, but her perspective is limited, coloured by the grim realities of the bleak front-line in the former Yugoslavia. Being a case officer is a vocation, and Moran’s is in writing, not spying.

To buy a copy of this book by Lindsay Moran, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, click here

Defective Defectors

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The question of whether or not the Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri defected to the US is interesting but not unique.

Shahram Amiri the Iranian nuclear scientist “defector” has been welcomed back to Tehran from the US like a returning hero. He claims he had been abducted by the CIA while on a pilgrimage to Medina in Saudi Arabia. Not so, say the Americans: he had defected to the US in return for a $5m bounty and had subsequently changed his mind.

His case is an interesting one. But not unique. It’s a tale of “did he defect?” or “didn’t he?” Others in the past have changed their minds. Some, like Amiri, claimed that they were abducted, while others found that the way they were treated or rewarded was less than they expected and returned to the country they had “betrayed”.

For while defectors can be feted and honoured by the host country, they are at the same time loathed and despised as traitors and turncoats by their fellow countrymen.

During the cold war years – and immediately afterwards – there was a steady flow of people fleeing their home country to what, they hoped, would be a better life in the country of their choice. Many fled from the old Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact countries to the west – mainly the US or UK. Not all were spies or bearing military secrets. High-profile ballet dancers, chess and tennis players were among those who defected.

But the real value to the west was those who had access to real information: intelligence or military and technical secrets of our main adversaries. Particularly prized were those pilots who stole their aircraft and flew them to the west.

In 1953, when little was known of the MiG-15, the mainstay fighter of the Soviet bloc, three pilots absconded with aircraft. Two Polish air force pilots flew their MiGs to Denmark and later that year another MiG-15 was flown by a North Korean pilot, No Kum Sok, to an American base in South Korea.

A major prize for the west was obtained in 1976 when a Soviet pilot, Viktor Belenko defected with the latest MiG-25 “Foxbat” jet fighter to Hakodate, in Japan. The aircraft revealed many secrets to US military specialists. And even as recently as 1989 the west welcomed Alexander Zuyev who defected with his MiG-29 “Fulcrum” to Trabzon, Turkey.

In each case, the pilots were granted asylum. Then after being interrogated and debriefed for many months after their defection, they were paid bounties and found employment with the military complex. Usually as consultants and advisers.

Possibly the most valuable defector to come across to the west in the cold war years was the former KGB colonel, Oleg Gordievsky, one-time deputy rezident at the Soviet embassy in London. After many years working as an agent for Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, he defected in 1985 (in an extraordinary exfiltration organised by Sir John Scarlett, former chief of MI6). In years of debriefing he was able to provide much important intelligence about the order-of-battle of the KGB and the Soviet plans and concerns over a possible surprise nuclear attack by the United States. President Ronald Reagan subsequently said this was one of the most significant influences on his decisions to seek détente with President Mikhail Gorbachev – a move that some believe helped prevent a nuclear holocaust.

The flow, however, was not just one way. MI5 officer Guy Burgess and senior diplomat Donald McLean’s infamous defection to Moscow was followed in 1963 by the treacherous Kim Philby, a very senior MI6 officer responsible for liaison with CIA. They, and their fellow spies Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross (neither of whom defected) were of immense value to the Russians. In 1966 fellow, former MI6 officer George Blake escaped from prison and defected to the USSR.

They were joined in Russia by the CIA defector, Edward Lee Howard; US navy intelligence analyst Glenn Michael Souther; William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, two National Security Agency (NSA) cryptologists and even the infamous former US marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, who returned to the United States and became the assassin of President John F Kennedy.

There are those defectors who undoubtedly have proved their worth – and those who were planted bait.

Prior to Gordievsky’s defection one of the most valuable to the west was Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Learning that he was to be sent home to the Soviet Union and dissatisfied with the quality of life and the politics of his homeland, he defected in 1945 with top-secret Soviet codes and deciphering keys.

The KGB colonel, Vladimer Petrov, and his wife (an MVD officer) defected to Australia in 1954, fearing that if he returned to the Soviet Union he would have been killed in one of the current “purges”. He was subsequently granted asylum after providing the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) with detailed information about KGB operations, identifying a number of their officers and agents that were being run by KGB case officers.

Despite these successes, in 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a top-echelon official of the KGB, defected to the west and was debriefed by the CIA. Three months later he “redefected” and returned to Moscow. At a press conference, Yurchenko said he had been kidnapped and drugged by the Americans. It is believed that his original “defection” was part of a KGB plan to deflect attention away from the CIA officer Aldrich Ames, at that time one of the USSR’s most important agents.

What triggered these defections? Most defectors seem persuaded by one or more of the classic motivators that cause people to spy. Known by the mnemonic “mice”.

For many, M for “money” is the key. In the case of someone like Gordievsky it is I for “ideology” that motivated him. C for “compromise” or “coercion” was the case of the Petrovs and E for “ego” has influenced others.

What was it for Amiri? Depending on whom you believe it was either money, coercion or he was planted bait. All are plausible and perfectly possible in the smoke and mirrors of espionage.

A Spy’s Journey book review When he retired from the CIA in 2001 after thirty-four years, all...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:25:51 -0400

A Spy’s Journey book review

When he retired from the CIA in 2001 after thirty-four years, all apart from the last three in the Directorate of Operations, Floyd Paseman had spent two decades serving overseas, and at the time held the record in the Agency for the longest assignment abroad in the Clandestine Service. Accordingly, with this experience, having been Chief of Station in Beijing and Bonn, he has some interesting and often amusing observations on the life of an intelligence profession working in the field under diplomatic cover, and in addition he has some shrewd comments to make about his colleagues and the eleven DCIs he served. This memoir is not intended to be rant about the organization’s many shortcomings, nor an excuse for the perceived failures of 9/11, Iraqi WMD and the Indian-Pakistani atomic tests, but it is a practitioner’s thoughtful, retrospective view of a career that took him from case officer, to division chief for East Asia, and finally as Station Chief in Germany.

How do you cope with crass instructions from headquarters? What do you do with a fellow-recruiter who is an idiot? Is it possible to survive a bureaucracy run by the mediocre? Can ambassadors keep confidences? Are foreign politicians to be trusted? Clearly Paseman does not suffer fools gladly and his career reads like a snakes-and-ladders game in which his opinions and occasional intransigence, as well as his reluctance to serve in Vietnam occasionally held him back, but ultimately propelled him into the Senior Intelligence Service.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable stroll through the Cold War fought in the third world, although in many of his battles the author engaged uncooperative compatriots rather than the KGB. It is not a forensic account of the struggle for world domination or, in the case of Milt Beaden’s The Main Enemy (Random House, 2003), a detailed analysis of a lifetime undermining the Soviet bloc, but it does give an authentic flavour of life on the front line of espionage, even if the CIA’s Publication Review Board has prevented the author from identifying any of his postings, apart from his time at Langley and his four years in Germany. This unnecessary irritation, combined with the lack of an index, reduces the book’s value, as does the apparent afterthought of an essay on the various DCIs the many encountered, and another on issues arising from 9/11. Nevertheless, there is a very useful bibliography and glossary, making A Spy’s Journey very attractive to the aficionados, if not a wider readership.

To purchase a copy of Floyd L. Paseman’s book, A Spy’s Journal: A CIA Memoir, click here

Recent Books on the CIA Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (Random House, 2007). A journalist’s history...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Recent Books on the CIA

Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (Random House, 2007). A journalist’s history of the CIA. Comprehensive, but too reliant on newspaper reports of the Agency’s well-publicised failures and so reads as a one-sided critique.

The Way of the World by Ron Susskind (Simon & Schuster, 2008). A journalist’s rather disorganised account of the intelligence community’s internal debate on Iraqi WMD prior to the 2003 invasion with plenty of indiscreet insider gossip.

CURVEBALL by Bob Drogin (Random House, 2007). A detailed account of how a single Iraqi chemical engineer in Munich misled the DIA, the CIA and Colin Powell.

On the Brink by Tyler Drumheller (Carrol & Graf, 2006). A controversial insider’s view of the WMD debate by the former CIA operations chief for western Europe who says he warned George Tenet not to rely on CURVEBALL.

Comrade J by Pete Earley (Putnam’s, 2007). The former Russian SVR deputy rezident in New York, Sergei Tretyakov, defected in October 2000 and recalls his KGB career, offering a fascinating insight into Putin-era corruption in the Kremlin.

Fair Play by Jim Olson (Potomac,2006). A thoughtful review of the ethics of intelligence operations written by an experienced CIA station chief who served in Mexico City, Moscow and Vienna

At the Center of the Storm by George Tenet (HarperCollins, 2007). The angry memoirs of the former Director of Central Intelligence who recalls 9/11 and reveals rather too many of his own inadequacies.

See No Evil by Robert Baer (Crown Books, 2002). A CIA officer’s experiences in the Middle East with the Clandestine Service during the Clinton era.

Imperial Hubris by Anonymous (Potomac Books, 2004). A highly critical analysis of the CIA’s campaign against Al-Qaeda written by Michael Scheuer, a respected senior CIA counter-terrorism analyst and expert on Osama bin Laden

Fair Game by Valerie Plame (Simon & Schuster, 2007). A self-serving, not entirely accurate memoir by the CIA analyst married to Joe Wilson who became controversial when he challenged publicly the White House view of Iraqi WMD.

The Worst Books Written on Intelligence Secret Wars by: Gordon Thomas (St Martin’s Press,...

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Worst Books Written on Intelligence

Secret Wars by: Gordon Thomas (St Martin’s Press, 2009).

Supposedly a centenary history of MI5 and MI6, this book is filled with errors, invented quotations and incidents that simply never happened, such as Allen Dulles and Stewart Menzies meeting at the 1945 Yalta conference. Neither attended it!

A Man Called Intrepid by: William Stevenson (Macmillan, 1976).

The fabricated biography of Sir William Stephenson by a Canadian journalist. Even the photographs, supposedly recovered from a secret wartime archive, are faked, and are stills from a movie made after the war! And Stephenson was never codenamed INTREPID.

James Jesus Angleton by: Michael Holzman (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

Yet another biography of the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, but poorly researched and full of supposition masquerading as fact. The content mainly drawn from three other books, none of them any good.

British Intelligence by: Michael Twigge (National Archives, 2008).

Presented as a guide to declassified documents from the British Intelligence services, this is riddled with very basic mistakes and has no value whatever.

Himmler’s Secret War by: Martin Allen (Robson Books, 2005).

One of three books written by an author with a talent for forgery. Most of his ‘authentic archival documents’ are rather poor modern forgeries.

Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and their Secrets by: Richard Bennett (Virgin Books, 2002).

Virtually every date in this encyclopedia is inaccurate. Most of the entries are a mixture of error and falsification.

Operation Broken Reed by: Colonel Arthur Boyd (DaCapo Books, 2007).

A delusional account of a clandestine operation in Korea which never happened.

The Spy Who Seduced America book review The case of Judith Coplon, the American spy convicted ...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Spy Who Seduced America book review

The case of Judith Coplon, the American spy convicted twice for espionage following her arrest in 1949 is something of a puzzle because it is so full of contradictions. She underwent two criminal trials, in Washington DC and New York, yet her convictions were set aside because the evidence against her was tainted. However, the Appeals Court also ruled she was ‘plainly guilty’ of spying for the Soviets, and refused to dismiss the indictments, so she faced a further, third trial imminently for the next seventeen years, until 1967 when the attorney-general abandoned the case once and for all.

So was Judy really guilty? Tom Mitchell, a former FBI special agent who worked on several espionage cases, never had any doubts about why she was found in possession of dozens of classified FBI data slips when she was detained as she met a Soviet official Valentin Gubitchev on a Manhattan sidewalk. Mitchell’s wife and co-author, Marcia, on the other hand, was convinced of her innocence. Both know and like Coplon’s husband, but have never met his wife who avoids writers and journalists.

Judy’s excuses for meeting Gubitchev were splendidly improbable. She had collected the information from her post in the Department of Justice so she could include it in a novel she was planning. She was meeting Gubitchev because she was in love with him (although, as the prosecution demonstrated, to her dismay, she was actually sleeping with some else entirely). The classic counter-surveillance tradecraft both had employed before their rendezvous was because Gubitchev suspected his wife had hired a private detective to follow him.

The reality, of course, was that Coplon had been recruited as a spy in December 1944 but the FBI did not learn of her activities for a further four years. They promptly placed her under surveillance, installed a microphone in her office and intercepted all her telephone calls, but then tried to conceal their action during her trial. Wiretaps were illegal and the act of monitoring a conversation between a defendant and her attorney was bound, as it did, to provoke the ire of the Appeals Court. Worse, the FBI destroyed the recordings and then claimed the practice was entirely routine.

If the FBI’s case had not been doomed by the illicit surveillance, it would have fallen at two further fences. Nobody ever saw Judt pass anything to Gubitchev, and anyway one of the top secret documents found in her handbag actually had been an ingenious fabrication, manufactured debiberately for the purpose of following its progress to the Soviets. It was a mischievous invention, a memorandum claiming that the FBI had succeeded in recruiting a useful source inside the Amtorg trade organization offices in New York. Such an item would be bound to attract the attention of the NKVD, and so it did. However, the FBI intervened before it left Coplon’s possession, thus jeopardizing the charge that she had conveyed it to the Russian. And anyway, even if she had, her lawyer argued, it was not truly a secret under the terms of the Espionage Act because, as the prosecution acknowledged, it was completely bogus.

The Mitchells usefully document the two trials, the tainted evidence, the perjured testimony and the impact of the ruling that the government would have to disclose the content of anything it claimed was secret, thereby setting a precedent that to some extent remains relevant today and inhibits prosecutors from pursuing traitors who had compromised really vital American secrets. Finally they reveal that the FBI was tipped off to Coplon’s espionage by a series of VENONA texts which identified her as a spy codenamed SIMA.

SIMA had been talent-spotted by ZORA, who turned out to be Flora Wovschin, a Communist activist (like her step-father Enos Wicher, and her mother) and one of Judy’s friends at Barnard College. ZORA also recruited LOU, another friend, Marion Berdecio, who joined the State Department and was sent to work at the US embassy in Mexico City. Alas, the Mitchells tell us little about these other two important women, so there is room for more research on this topic. In fact Wicher, then a scientist working in the Wave Propagation Group at Columbia University’s Division of War Research appears in the VENONA traffic as a spy codenamed KIN, and his wife appears as DAShA.

In answering the issue of Coplon’s guilt, the authors conclude that it is really a matter of degree. The prosecutors failed to make their convictions stick, and failed to bring a third case, so although not exactly innocent, her position remains a legal limbo. We are told that while VENONA supplied the crucial tip that enabled the CIA to identify SIMA and place her under surveillance, there was never any compelling proof that Judy had ever betrayed any secrets. But does this interpretation really stand up to scrutiny?

The authors have referred in The Spy Who Seduced America to no less than eight VENONA texts, but in fact this is less than the full total, as the list in the appendix show. While they quote a mildly incriminating message, urging the New York rezidentura not to let Judy meet with Flora for fear of attracting the attention of the FBI, they omit a vital message, dated 28 March 1945, which describes how ZORA has been acquiring information from ‘SIMA’s department’. This particular, long and relatively unfragmented text is of critical significance because it discloses that the Americans have somehow become aware of NKVD internal codenames for various American institutions, including CLUB, HOUSE, BANK and CABARET, as used in the NKVD’s most secret communications. In other words, it looks as though Judy Coplon had discovered that somehow the FBI had obtained access to the NKVD’s most secret messages and had worked out the meaning of certain regularly used codewords. This news would have had the profoundest impact in Moscow, and although Coplon would not know for a further half century that the FBI’s source was VENONA, her revelation could have compromised the entire operation. As it is, we know that a White House aide, Laughlin Currie, probably alerted the Soviets to the fact that the President had been informed that cryptographers had achieved some success against some Soviet codes, and it is certain too that an Army Signal Security Agency linguist, William Weisband, penetrated Arlington Hall and delivered a similar warning. However, Coplon’s very specific information, as relayed by Flora Wovschin, must have been of the greatest import, especially as there was no other way an individual agent could have learned the meaning and use of such codewords.

It could be argued that ZORA herself had been responsible for ferreting out the cryptographic information, but that seems highly unlikely. Her original job, in the Office of War Information, provided little of interest to the Soviets, and there is no indication from the VENONA texts that when in 1944 Flora switched to the State Department, that she had been granted access to material of this sensitivity. The clear implication of the VENONA text of 28 March 1945 is that Coplon was extremely active on Flora’s behalf, and as a highly praised, exceptionally bright analyst, not only saw some of the FBI’s most prized secrets, but knew what to look for.

The fact that Coplon was highly regarded by the Soviets can be deduced from the quality of the NKVD case officer assigned to handle her. The Mitchells identify him merely as Vladimir Pravdin, ‘a senior level operative of the New York residency’ but actually he was rather more important than that, and certainly a more experienced chekist than even his young rezident, Stepan Apresyan. Pravdin’s real name was Roland Abbiate who previously had worked in Paris under the alias Francois Rossi, ostensibly a journalist from Monaco, having traveled to Switzerland in 1937 to carry out the murder of Ignace Reiss, the legendary illegal who had been sentenced to death in the purges, but had disappeared instead of answering a summons to return to Moscow. The Swiss police issued an arrest warrant for Francois Rossi, alias Py, only to discover he was already wanted in the United States, but when he turned up in New York two years later as Vladimir Pravdin, a correspondent for TASS, accompanied by his wife Olga, who worked for Amtorg, his past went undiscovered. She, incidentally, was identified by Elizabeth Bentley as a substitute Soviet contact whom she met ‘about five or six times over a four month period’ in early 1942 and knew as MARGARET.

Abbiate was an impressive, sophisticated operator and handled some high level sources, among them Isadore Stone of the Nation, who was also the Washington correspondent for PM. Abbiate ran his own network, and the FBI spent considerable resources identifying his agent codenamed IDE, who turned out to be a Boston-born journalist, Samuel Krafsur, the deputy TASS bureau chief in Washington DC who had fought with the Lincoln Battalion in Spain. Another of Abbiate’s recruits, before he returned to Moscow in March 1946, was Josef Berger, an extraordinarily well-connected journalist employed by the Department of Justice as a speech-writer for the Attorney-General, Francis Biddle, and later was also secretary to the chairman of the Democratic National Convention. Thus Pravdin was a key figure, entrusted to run the most sensitive sources. The fact that he had been assigned to Coplon speaks volumes, or should do.

Unless the relevant former Soviet archives are opened up, which would be contrary to Russian policy where an agent is still alive, we are unlikely to learn the extent of Coplon’s espionage, from the end of 1944 to her arrest with Gubitchev five years later, but it seems likely that she was one of the most important spies of the postwar period, and one who escaped almost unscathed.

To buy The Spy Who Seduced America: Lies and Betrayal in the Heat of the Cold War: The Judith Coplon Story by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell click here

Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets book review If it is agreed that an...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets book review

If it is agreed that an encyclopedia should be a compendium of knowledge available at the time of publication, and the author is someone of experience with a detailed understanding of his field, then such books should not only be an essential reference work, but also provide a contemporaneous snapshot of what was known on particular topics at a specific time. Previous titles include Richard Deacon (1975) and Norman Polmar (1997) and have both useful functions.

Naturally the espionage business, probably more than most, is an area where there is a handicapping dynamic, and to that extent Espionage is the first post 9-11 book to document the many changes that have been forced upon the international intelligence community. Those events transformed the security environment forever, a quantum development far more significant than the arrest of a Robert Hanssen and the more recent dismantling of the Greek terrorist organization November 17.

Bennett himself has been an intelligence analyst since 1966 and his book is especially noteworthy because it boasts a foreword by James Bamford, author of two studies of the NSA, Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, and a preface by the MI5 renegade David Shayler, and therefore expectations will be high.

Bennett has organized Espionage into a glossary of terms used by the intelligence community, definitions of commonly used words and phrases, a relatively limited number of individual cases (including Hanssen, whose name does not appear in a very inadequate index) ranging from Cardinal Richelieu to the Walker family and Aldrich Ames, and fifty-one separate countries. The book’s strength lies in these summaries, listing the organization of a country’s security and intelligence apparatus, with a further account of their special forces. France merits four pages while the US achieves twenty-eight, with a further large entry of five pages under ‘Dirty Tricks’.

As the choice of Bamford and Shayler as contributors suggests, Bennett has strong views on his profession, so Espionage is not a straightforward factual document, but contains plenty of his personal opinions. For example, his harsh verdict on the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence is that “the CIA does not seem to have an efficient, centralized analytic apparatus, one that can distinguish credible intelligence from fantasy”. Likewise, Bennett takes MI5 former Director-General, Dame Stella Rimington, to task for supervising the monitoring of subversive groups in the UK. MI5 has a clearly defined mission to keep an eye on organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the Parliamentary system, rather than unions exercising their legitimate powers, but Bennett comments that it “is slightly difficult to see how MI5’s ‘clear thinkers’ were able to tell these categories apart until they had all been thoroughly burgled, infiltrated and bugged.” He is equally critical of SIS, insisting “there still appears to be no effective internal or external political oversight of SIS”.

Bennett is entitled to his comments, but readers will be bound to take them as a gauge of his personal, political standpoint. Certainly it is true that some of the measures introduced since 9-11 have considerable implications for liberty, human rights and freedom under the law in several democracies where these values hitherto have been nurtured and protected, and there is a debate underway about over-reaction and what hard-won rights must be sacrificed in the ostensibly laudable cause of protecting the public from suicide bombers. Do Bennett’s often controversial asides enhance the book’s value or serve to undermine it?

The acid test of whether Espionage stands or falls as a helpful contribution to the literature is accuracy. Whereas there are bound to be differing views on Bennett’s definition or words and phrases, there are two areas of concern about matters of verifiable fact. Firstly, there is the grotesque quality of the editing. Dozens of surnames are mis-spelt, sometimes in several different ways, and the list of such errors is too tedious to enumerate, but I calculate there is at least one every three pages. The poor editing extends beyond the simplest of mistakes (‘the Federal Bureau of Investigations’) to textual contradiction. For example, in the passage dealing with the United States, it is authoratively stated as fact that “as late as July 2001, despite being a hunted man with a US price on his head, Osama bin Laden was able to travel safely to an American hospital in a Gulf State to receive treatment for a serious kidney problem.” However, this identical story had been told earlier, in a passage devoted to “Medical Intelligence’ about bin Laden’s kidneys, describing “rumours, unsubstantiated, that he received treatment in an American hospital in a Gulf State”. In reality, the story surfaced in a French newspaper which subsequently withdrew it when the hospital concerned issued a categoric denial. So is the story fact, unsubstantiated rumour or an invention later refuted? Such dilemmas pervade Espionage.

Let us take, as an illustration, the entry for an individual where almost everything there is to know about the case is in the public domain, such as the GRU defector Igor Gouzenko. According to Bennett, Gouzenko “was given the cover of a cipher clerk” in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, and in the entry for cover defines it as “Protective guise assumed by an individual or activity to conceal its true identity and affiliation”. The problem here is that Gouzenko really was a cipher clerk at the embassy and worked there under his own name. Accordingly, by any standard, he was not operating under any ‘cover’. This is a relatively trivial irritation, but what of the assertion that Gouzenko only “stole a large number of files and documents” after he had made “contact with the RCMP Security Service” In this short extract there is a chronological and factual problem. Firstly, Gouzenko only came into contact with the RCMP after he had purloined his mealticket of 109 documents, and secondly, in September 1945 there was no RCMP Security Service, which did not come into existence until 1970. Then there are the statistics of those arrested and prosecuted. Bennett says “at least 18 Soviet agents were exposed and nine were prosecuted in Canada alone”. Even giving some latitude for the definition of what amounts to ‘exposure’, and the correct figure should be several times the number cited, the number of people prosecuted in Canada is beyond dispute at eleven, being Fred Rose, Sam Carr, Kathleen Willsher, Edward Mazerall, Israel Halperin, Raymond Boyer, Durnford Smith, David Shugar, Gordon Lunan, Agatha Chapman and Squadron-Leader Poland.

Having correctly pointed out that the arrest of Alan [sic] Nunn May had been brought about by Gouzenko, he goes on to assert that “Nunn May’s and Klaus Fuchs’s related arrest led to the exposure of a number of American communists who were then accused of providing the Soviet Union with atom bomb secrets, including Gold, Greenglass and the Rosenbergs.” Now this is an extraordinary statement that deserves close attention. How was the arrest of Allan Nunn May in 1946 related to the arrest more than three years later of Klaus Fuchs? May was identified from documents provided by Gouzenko, but Fuchs was caught in 1949 as a direct consequence of references to him in VENONA texts. Accordingly, there was absolutely no link between the two cases. Certainly the arrest of Fuchs led eventually to his identification of Harry Gold, and the latter was able to finger Greenglass, who in turn provided evidence against the Rosenbergs. That sequence is well documented, but what has any of this to do with Dr May? In short, Bennett’s claim that the two cases of May and Fuchs were related is completely unfounded.

Bennett then goes on to make a truly astonishing claim: “Gouzenko later condemned British intelligence for not acting sooner on his information in the case of Klaus Fuchs, pointing out that Fuchs’s name was prominent in the documents”. If true, Gouzenko might have had a point, but neither Fuchs’s name nor codename appeared anywhere in Gouzenko’s 109 documents, and furthermore he never complained that “MI5 waited almost five years before finally organizing his arrest.” The fact is that Fuchs was interviewed by MI5 as soon as he was identified as the VENONA spy codenamed CHARLES and REST, and was arrested as soon as he confessed.

There are several other matters one could take issue with in Bennett’s treatment of Gouzenko, but the point is that on verifiable facts his text is replete with error and assertions that are not just doubtful, but plain wrong. It would be unfair to take a single, exceptional problem and exaggerate its significance in the context of a much larger book, but Gouzenko’s entry is symptomatic of the rest. These are not matters of debate or speculation, but completely mistaken accounts of cases where virtually everyone involved, on both sides of the cold War, have given their version of events.

In the example of George Blake, the author’s sheer determination to peddle fiction borders on the bizarre. Leaving aside the cliam that his true first name if ‘Georg’ and the earlier reference (p. 21) to him as ‘a deep penetration GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent”, Blake is said to have been “accepted by SOE” and that “after the war he was accepted into the Foreign Office”. He was the victim of “painstakingly and successfully conducted brainwashing techniques” while a prisoner in Korea and “upon his release, he requested that the FO transfer him permanently to SIS”. He “became an SIS field officer in 1953” and until he was “exposed by a German double agent” he worked for the KGB which, having been altered to the existence of the Berlin tunnel, “began feeding false information through the system”. Once he had been “finally compromised by German double agent Horst Eitner, was recalled to London, “arrested at Heathrow Airport” and “admitted that he had been a triple agent”. Eventually, after his escape from Wormwood Scrubs, Blake “was eventually given a post with the KGB”.

Virtually every statement purporting to fact in Blake’s entry is incorrect. He never served with SOE nor the Foreign Office. He was a career SIS officer from the moment he transferred from the Royal Naval Reserve, and later volunteered to spy for the Soviets. No coercion or persuasion was required in Korea, as Blake proudly acknowledges in his autobiography No Other Choice, which also contains the correct details of his arrest at the Surrey home of his SIS interrogator. We now know from documents declassified in both Moscow and Washington DC that the Soviets deliberately avoided using the Berlin tunnel as a conduit for disinformation, and after his escape he was never granted a post in the KGB.

Having got so wrong every detail of Blake’s service with SIS, his recruitment by the Soviets, his arrest and his role as a ‘triple agent’ (defined absurdly elsewhere as “an agent who serves three separate intelligence services simultaneously”) one is bound to wonder what has been the cause of this perversely mistaken version. Has the author relied on hopeless books, or failed to spot a new, authorative publication? The answer is hard to fathom because although the canard concerning Blake’s fictional service with SOE can be traced back to an inaccurate biography, the suggestion that he succumbed to brainwashing is entirely novel, as is Bennett’s account of his arrest in England.

Of course, it is true that few books on the notoriously difficult subject of intelligence operations are ever wholly accurate. Some crucial facts do not emerge for years and other actions are open to interpretation and an individual’s motives are always likely to be the subject of endless speculation. But Espionage is in a wholly different, almost unique category. Take, for instance, Jim Bamford’s perfectly apposite observation in his foreword that ‘even experienced journalists often fail to understand the key difference between an intelligence case officer… and an ‘agent” and then turn to the entry on David Shayler and see that “Shayler’s partner, former MI5 agent Annie Machon” is described not as Shayler’s professional colleague, which she was, but rather as an ‘agent’, thereby establishing the truth of Bamford’s warning. So who’s fault is this? Is Bamford culpable for not spotting the blunder, or Shayler for failing to read the manuscript before he endorsed it as “a wealth of facts about the fields of espionage and counter-terrorism past and present which have nver been made available in one publication before” or is Bennett or maybe his editor? Inevitably the author as to carry the can but such incidents, far from isolated in this book, make the reader wonder.

The issue of ‘cover’ is critical to many intelligence operations and careers, and Bennett’s slip over Gouzenko and Machon might suggest he does not completely understand the concept of intelligence professionals adopting journalistic, commercial or diplomatic covers to assist their missions overseas. It is indeed odd, when describing the SIS careers of Dickie Franks and Christopher Curwen he fails to realize that their ostensible foreigh service postings were merely cover for their SIS assignments.

If Espionage is, as Shayler claims, a vehicle for new disclosures, can we be sure of the veracity of them? Usually a book boasting new revelations will highlight them and give the reader a good opportunity to decide on their significance. The independent observer will also be informed about the long-standing theory that is about to be debunked, or will be warned that the next passage amounts to a stunning revelation, but what are we to make of such claims as “much of Andropov’s modern espionage ideas were culled, it was reported, from the British traitor and SIS spy, Kim Philby who worked closely with the Officer training Directorate of the KGB”; “Angleton was the only senior CIA officer who really took Goltsin [sic] seriously”; “whether Barnett was detected by accident, good counter-intelligence or ‘blown’ to protect another more important soviet source remains open to question”; “Ironically, it was the KGB itself that informed MI5 of Bettany’s [sic] treachery”; “When Blunt was shown the testimony of his American friend, he promptly confessed”; Guy Burgess “got his old friend [Maclean] drunk and photographed him nude and in a sexual embrace with a young man”; John Cairncross was “coverted to Communism by Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess who turned him over to their NKVD controller Samuel Cahan”; Wilhelm Canaris “almost certainly quietly co-operated with the British SIS and perhaps the OSS”; The PHOENIX program in Vietnam resulted in the deaths of “over 20,000 civilians and “the nightmare of this slaughter haunted Colby throughout his intelligence career”; GARBO was “captured and ‘turned’” as an agent of the “MI5 misinformation department” named “Luis” Calvo”; Alexander Korda sent “SIS officers as movie cameramen wanting to film sensitive locations” to Germany where “the Nazi party were [sic] only too pleased for a British film company to want to film the beautiful fatherland and extended help on a number of occasions”; When “one of the Soviet spies admitted to FBI [sic] that he had been passed secret material by a British physicist working at Los Alamos. Fuchs was the immediate suspect but neither the FBI nor MI5 could obtain sufficient hard evidence to arrest him”; Roger Hollis “worked on the Russian desk” for six years; Dick “Helms was found guilty of perjury”; Harry Houghton was caught when his extravagance was spotted by ‘a naval security officer”; “Edward lee Howard was “the first CIA agent to sell secrets to the Russians”; The anti-Nazi plotter Otto john “worked with the British SOE, SIS (MI6) and the US OSS keeping these allied intelligence services [sic] abreast of these group’s [sic] activities when visiting neutral Lisbon and Madrid” prior to his defection in 1944; Max “Knight’s close friend in NID was Ian Fleming” and Fleming used him “as the model” for ‘M’; “Warned that the Rosenbergs were about to be arrested by the FBI in 1950, the Cohens hurriedly fled to London’; Sir Vernon Kell “was sacked by Churchill in May 1941”; Guy “Liddell was already under investigation” by the time Burgess and Blunt defected and “escaped probable exposure sa a major Soviet spy by dying’; The London Cage was where “MI5 and SIS (MI6) interrogators handled important German prisoners”; “The CIA was suspicious of Maclean long before the penny dropped in Britain’; Theodore Maly talent-spotted Philby in Vienna “and encouraged him to return to Britain in May 1934”; “Menzies and Canaris were in communication on occasions, even after war broke out”; “Sometimes, Penkovsky would meet Wynne and simply hand him dozens of rolls of film”; Gordon “Lonsdale had managed to recruit two reasonably low-level agents” inside the Portland naval base; Morris and Lona Cohen were “long-term deep-cover KGB aofficers”; Jack “Profumo “achieved cabinet rank”; Stephen “Ward was prosecuted on trumped-up charges”; By December 1940 Tar Robertson “had some 12 Nazi spies under his control, including two in Sweden”; The Russian submarine Kursk was sunk “on 12 August 2001”; Gordon Welchman and Dillwyn Knox “built a duplicate (Enigma] machine that allowed them to crack the German codes”; Alan Turing was “threatened with exposure as a homosexual by police officers investigating a complaint about his personal behaviour”; Dick “Brooman-White” was a Soviet spy suspect; Mi5’s watchers conduct “surveillance on foreign targets within Britain”; “SMERSH” agents attacked Vladimir Kostov and Georgi Markov in 1978; “Leslie Howard worked for SIS”; Anthony Blunt “represented MI5 at meetings of the JIC”; “as early as 1946, [Dick] White was warning his superiors about the SIS Officer Kim Philby”; Sir Steward Menzies “admitted to sending a copy of the Zinoviev letter to the Daily Mail”; “Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, has long been considered to have been an important CIA’asset’”, etc., etc.

The treatment given to the famous Cambridge Five of Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross is indicative of Espionage’s content. The account of each case is wildly eccentric and far removed from reality: Did Guy Burgess use “homosexual blackmail to win over and then retain agents? Quite obviously not, because apart from anything else he was guilty of what was then the same criminal offence. Was the CIA “suspicious of Maclean long before the penny dropped in Britain? Of course not, for the Anglo-American molehunters working on VENONA collaborated with each other to identify the spy codenamed HOMER. Was Philby really recruited by John Cornford and did he become “a close colleague of both William J Donovan and Allen Dulles during the war? Certainly not! “When Blunt was shown the testimony of his American friend [Michael Straight], he promptly confessed”. This is new because Straight never gave any ‘testimony against Blunt or anyone else, and it is well documented that Blunt’s confession in April 1964 followed an offer of immunity from Arthur Martin. Was John Cairncross confronted in 1964 “with insurmountable evidence of his involvement with the Soviet intelligence services [sic] provided by Blunt? This was a chronological impossibility because the principal interrogation of Cairncross took place in the US months before Blunt’s confession in London. In short, Richard Bennett has reinvented the Cambridge spies.

Some of the single extracts listed above are somewhat mundane or esoteric, but others if true should merit newspaper headlines. Take, as another example, the proposition that Rudolf “Roessler was a witting or unwitting British double-agent and that the Lucy Ring was used by SIS and probably later the OSS to feed ULTRA material through to the Soviet Government in a form they [sic] would accept”. In addition, there was another Swiss network ”run by Captain Thomas [sic] Sedlacek whose information was supplied to the British and US intelligence’. Thus there were two Swiss organizations, headed by Rado and Sedlacek, who were in contact with the British, although in a second version of Roessler’s espionage (for the ‘Switzerland’ entry) Bennett moderates his claims to suggest “he was probably used to pass ULTRA information to the Soviet Union” but that he also “provided good intelligence from within occupied Europe for both the Swiss and the British SIS”. While reducing a previous certainty to a probability, Bennett appears to be extending Roessler’s reach into Germany to the occupied territories, itself an interesting, novel, but unsubstantiated idea.

This is an explanation for the apparently extraordinary sources that kept the Swiss spy Rudolf Roessler so inexplicably well informed during the Second World War. Bennett adds that “Philby, with the approval of his NKVD controller, had put SIS officers in touch with the Soviet network operated by Sandor Rado in Switzerland which resulted in the SIS receiving valuable information on the German military. This must be counted as one of Philby’s major contributions to SIS and the British war effort”. This episode can be dated quite precisely as Bennett explains that “Philby would later join SOE” an event that occurred in September 1940. Thus, according to Bennett, Philby arranged for Rado to help the British with valuable information from Germany, and SIS later reversed the flow to give the Soviets ULTRA. In short, Bennett is not only making an authorative judgment on an old chestnut, that SIS was behind the mystery of how Roessler was accessing such priceless intelligence, but Philby had been personally responsible for opening the channel to Swiss apparat in the first place!

Could Philby really have accomplished such a feat? Alas, no evidence is presented for such an astonishing coup. Nor is any offered for Bennett’s other remarkable claim about Philby (who apparently defected in both 1963 and 1964), that he “one of the detailed reports he provided for SIS was the complete background on a NKVD spy named Boris Krotov, who had operated in England for much of the 1930s, thereby chronicling the career of a very senior Soviet officer who had been the control for Philby, Burgess and Maclean, among many others”. Once again, close examination of this claim tends to undermine it. According to MI5’s records, Krotov had arrived in London in August 1941 and had remained until March 1947, under Third Secretary cover at the Consulate. He was a relatively junior newcomer who was quite inexperienced with only a limited grasp of English, evidently a cause for some concern within the local rezidentura, as disclosed by VENONA, if he was to run Anthony Blunt, as Moscow had intended. Like much of his other data, Bennett’s information about the Cambridge five is startlingly new, but cannot be verified easily. In any event, it seems unlikely that Krotov is the man the author is describing, if indeed he ever existed, for no such person appears in any of the other literature.

As a British analyst, allegedly with nearly forty years of experience, one would expect some of the author’s expertise to extend to the British intelligence apparatus in Northern Ireland. Curiously, Bennett is deficient in the province’s troubled history, and its recent past. In terms of what has occurred over the previous thirty years, he alleges that there was a “battle for control between SIS and MI5” for Ulster and, in mentioning Maurice Oldfield, says “MI5 decided to expose his latent homosexuality anonymously to the media”. Both assertions are entirely untrue, as is his statement that “the Continuity IRA” is “Republican Sinn Fien’s military wing”. On the contrary, Sinn Fein is the political branch of the Provisional IRA, in total opposition to Continuity IRA, which is a break-away group. Similarly, Bennett’s list of loyalist paramilitaries and their affiliations is hopelessly muddled, as is his reference to a single British Army intelligence group, ‘the Field Research Unit (or Forward Reconnaisssance Units)” when both names offered for the Force Research Unit are incorrect.

Undoubtedly the terrorist campaign that has ravaged Ireland has had a profound impact on the British security and intelligence units deployed in that benighted country, but there is an added responsibility on non-sectarian commentators to present the facts as accurately as possible. The circumstances surrounding the appointment and subsequent resignation of Sir Maurice Oldfield as the intelligence director are now well-documented, but the idea that MI5 and SIS was locked in combat to control the province is as much a travesty as the assertion that the Special Air Service “has killed around 50 people, including 30 IRA volunteers, since 1969”.

So does Bennett know what he is talking about? One litmus test is to take some samples where cases (such as Blake, Philby and Abel) are well documented and make a comparative analysis. Another is to take a general view of the way particular topics are handled. Clearly the book has considerable shortcomings in respect of the human cases, but what of the technical sources? Two, ULTRA and VENONA give some cause for concern.

Since 1974 much has been written about the cryptographic success achieved at Bletchley Park, and dozens of participants and historians have given their version of what was accomplished. Bennett includes separate short entries for GCCS, GCHQ, Enigma, Bletchley Park and ULTRA, longer ones for Alan Turing, Sir Edward Travis, Alistair [sic] Denniston, and a four page summary under ‘United Kingdom’. Evidently the author rightly considers Britain’s cryptographic effort to be of some significance, yet his very confused account seriously misdefines some common terms, and consistently refers to the Enigma machine in capitals, as though Enigma is itself a codename.

Much the same can be said for Bennett’s treatment of VENONA, which is seriously flawed. Suffice to say that his assertion that the Army Security Agency began work on the Soviet intercepts in 1943 is somewhat wide of the mark, as is much the rest of his account in which the NKVD’s William Weisband is identified as “a GRU agent” variously named Weissman and Weissband.

Some of these endemic slips can be shrugged off as the fault of the publisher, and what non-fiction author can claim to have written a book entirely free of error? However, one does wonder about Bennett’s sources. On whom is he relying when he tells us that Lord Rothschild was a Soviet mole, and that in 1946 the SAS despatched three-man assassination squads to murder “German Gestapo and SS personnel responsible for the torture and murder of SAS or SOE officers”. The tale about Rothschild comes from Roland Perry’s The Fifth Man, and the SAS myth was created by ‘Captain’ [sic] Peter Mason in Official Assassin. Neither, equally unreliable book is taken seriously by any historian, and Bennett’s reliance on these authors in particular suggests a lack of discimination.

The challenge of sorting the wheat from the chaff in Espionage is not to be under-estimated as it is hard to distinguish between what material is simply mistaken, and what is the result of poor research. The entry on Colonel Rudolf Abel, the very first of the book, is an object lesson. We have known for some years that the illegal rezident in the US who was arrested in the US using the alias Emil Goldfus, who subsequently identified himself to the US authorities as ‘Colonel Rudolf Abel’, was in fact the British-born William Fisher. Abel was never his true name, nor even a cover-name, but actually that of a friend of Fisher who was unwilling to disclose his true identity to the FBI but did want to alert Moscow to his detention. The problem with Bennett’s account is that the reader is left with the impression that Abel was the spy’s authentic name, for there is absolutely no mention of Fisher at all. Was he really a ‘master-spy’ who supervised “a vast network of Soviet spies” in the US? Not according to the FBI, nor even the KGB’s official history.

So did Philby really prepare a dossier on Krotov for SIS? The tale is entirely new, so what is its provenance? If he did, what was his motive? And why would Philby, an expert on Spain, be consulted about the credentials of a Soviet intelligence officer? Bennett is silent on the questions.

In terms of structure, Bennett has been let down by some disappointing editorial supervision. Why is it alleged there is a British intelligence organisation called “Central Intelligence Machinery”? Why are there two entries for a “JIC”, identified as the “Joint Intelligenc Centre” [sic], which gives no explanation of the country in which the JIC operates? Certainly it could not be Britain where ‘JIC’ is an abbreviation for the Joint Intelligence Committee. Embarrassingly, someone has not realized that Central intelligence Machinery is merely the title of a booklet published in England by the Cabinet Office to explain the structure of the country’s security and intelligence establishment.

Is Espionage a worthwhile addition to the literature? David Shayler avers that he wished such a book had been available to him when he was a journalist on the Sunday Times. Let it be hoped that he did not have an opportunity to read the book before he gave his endorsement as his endorsement reflects poorly on both himself and his former newspaper.

To purchase a copy of Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets by: Richard M. Bennett click here

Into Tibet book review On the wall of the entrance hall at the CIA headquarters in Langley ...

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Into Tibet book review

On the wall of the entrance hall at the CIA headquarters in Langley there is a memorial to its personnel who have fallen in the line of duty. Until the Washington DC journalist Ted Gupp decided to take up the challenge and research the stories of the seventy-one anonymous heroes, no outsiders had been allowed to learn about the circumstances in which they perished. He identified in The Book of Honour (Doubleday, 2000) the very first casualty as an MIT graduate, Douglas Mackiernan, who had lost his life under mysterious circumstances in 1950.

Gupp revealed that Mackiernan, an OSS veteran, had died on a secret assignment to Tibet, and Thomas Laird, who has lived in Nepal for the past thirty years, has now traced his journey and learned of how he was shot, and then beheaded, by Tibetan soldiers who had not received a warning from Lhasa that a pair of American consular officials had been granted permission to enter the country. The mission’s survivor was Frank Bessac, now a retired academic who insists he left the CIA in 1947, but accompanied Mackiernan and was a witness to the shooting incident on the frontier which also resulted in the deaths of two other members of the group which had made an epic, two months journey across the desert from Sinkiang Province to establish contact with the Dalai Lama.

The mission ended in double disaster because, as well as the perhaps avoidable loss of life, the Chinese Communists invaded soon afterwards, using the presence of American spies as a pretext. The Dalai Lama fled into exile and Tibet has been under uneasy Chinese occupation ever since. There is a further historical significance to Mackiernan’s role, if Laird is to be believed. The author asserts that Mackiernan’s consular cover in Tihwa, subordinate to the US embassy in Nanking, was to conceal his principal task which had been to monitor and maybe sabotage Soviet extraction of uranium ore from Koktogai in neighbouring Turkestan, and to report on activity at the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk.

Whereas Laird has made a convincing case for the authenticity of his account of Mackiernan’s violent death, tracing and interviewing two of his companions, there is some doubt about why Mackiernan came to be posted to Tihwa in the first place. Certainly it must have been the nearest CIA base from which the fledgling organisation could keep an eye on Soviet atomic tests, but hitherto it has always been believed that the detonation in August 1949, initially unannounced in Moscow, came as a complete shock to the West, and was only confirmed from the analysis of air samples captured by US aircraft based in Alaska the following month. Did Mackiernan send saboteurs to disrupt the Soviet mines before the test, and was he responsible for alerting Washington DC to an imminent test a few days in advance of that historic event? The answer to these questions is uncertain, although Laird speculates that the CIA did send a team of White Russian guerrillas to the U-2 mine, and only one returned to Tihwa. So what about the proposition that Mackiernan’s main objective was to watch the atomic tests?

Even half a century later, apparently no documentation survives to support any theory about the CIA’s operations in the area, so Laird has had to rely on a single witness, Vasili Zvansov, a White Russian émigré who worked his passage to US citizenship and retirement in Hawaii. Zvansov recalls helping to bury some electrical equipment when the rest of the consulate was evacuated, and Laird suggests this was no ordinary radio transmitter, but a remote sensor designed to detect atomic tests more than a thousand miles away. Furthermore, this technology was acoustic, designed to record the sound of an explosion, and not a seismograph responding to a change in pressure. But was this kind of hardware available in 1949? Was it possible for a ‘sonic detector’ to operate remotely, buried underground, with only a surface antenna lying on the ground? If so, bearing in mind the limitations of batteries, how was it powered?

If Laird is correct, and Mackiernan was deployed in mid-1949 to send spies into Semipalatinsk and pick up the noise of an atomic test, then it suggests that the Russian breakthough was not quite such a surprise to President Truman and Prime Minister Attlee as history has recorded. Thus there is some significance to the author’s revisonism, that the CIA knew where and when Beria’s bomb was likely to detonate.

The difficulty for Laird is that there is really nothing to show that Mackiernan had anything to do with the Soviet bomb, and the tenuous evidence of his possession of Geiger counters and other electronic equipment is hardly proof that he was engaged on a nuclear project. So is Laird correct when he claims that Tihwa was a crucial component of what he terms the Murray Hill secret? Murray Hill, of course, is a neighbourhood in New York City, but during the war it was the location of a Manhattan project office that supposedly decided to deny the Soviets access to uranium, and thereby handicap their ability to develop a bomb on their own.

This latter assertion is odd, not least because General Groves, who headed the Manhattan project, personally approved the export of uranium ore to Russia during the war, justifying his action (which was the subject of severe criticism years afterwards when a Lend-Lease administrator, Major Jordan, drew attention to it) by claiming that to have banned the shipments would have alerted the Soviets to its potential value.

Thomas Laird has enhanced the importance of Mackiernan’s abortive mission by speculating about the nature it, but can we be sure any of the hypotheses are valid? His technique is to suggest, without much evidence, that the CIA had deployed Mackiernan to sabotage the Soviet uranium mines. This in itself, if true, should be headline news. He then says that if Makiernan had been directed to monitor Semipalatinsk, then the CIA must have known a test was imminent. This too, if it is a deduction based on fact, would be quite a scoop, but the assertion is undermined by the conditions attached. The same goes for Mackiernan’s real objectives in Lhasa. Unfortunately, none of the relevant files have been released, neither of the two survivors seem any the wiser, and if it was not for the certainty that Mackiernan’s family have been feted at Langley there might even to be some doubt about whether he had ever enjoyed any relationship with the Agency. So was his mission a diplomatic blunder exploited by the Communists? Maybe so, but the evidence is not to be found in Into Tibet, which searches for the truth, but has yet to achieve it convincingly.

To purchase Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa by: Thomas Laird click here

The Sixth Man book review The original five of the notorious Cambridge spies, Guy Burgess,...

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Sixth Man book review

The original five of the notorious Cambridge spies, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross are now fairly familiar, but the name of the New Zealander Paddy Costello is probably not. He was a Russian-speaking, Trinity College, Cambridge-educated soldier, diplomat and academic on the political left whose son Mick became a leading figure in the ill-fated, Kremlin-backed Communist Party of Great Britain. However, in 1981, seventeen years after his death in Manchester, Paddy Costello was linked to espionage by an assertion in Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery, that MI5 had believed Costello had been a fully-fledged Soviet mole. According to Pincher, who had received his information from his covert co-author, the renegade self-styled MI5 spycatcher Peter Wright, Costello had been spotted communicating with a Soviet intelligence officer while under surveillance, had acted as a letter-box for the wife of a Swedish spy and, most significantly, in May 1954 had issued authentic New Zealand passports to Morris and Lona Cohen, a pair of KGB illegals who were subsequently arrested in London and sentenced in March 1961 to long terms of imprisonment for breaches of the Official Secrets Acts. At the time he had issued them, according to Wright who failed to repeat his allegation in SpyCatcher in 1987, Costello had been working at the tiny New Zealand legation in Paris, staffed by just three people, and he had broken the rules to mail the two passports to the Cohens who were then masquerading as Peter and Helen Kroger, and claiming to be in poor health in an Austrian spa.

In The Sixth Man, which is a curious title considering the content, James McNeish, a New Zealand academic, seeks to debunk the charges against Costello. The author omits to mention the first two claims made about Costello and instead concentrates on the circumstances in which the Cohens received their passports, asserting that there was nothing mysterious about the procedure, and that anyway the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) has investigated the matter and exonerated Costello. But is this really true?

In fact an investigation had been conducted immediately after the Cohens had been arrested, but it proved inconclusive, until April 1964 when Anthony Blunt implicated Costello in a confession coaxed from him in return for a formal immunity from prosecution, That admission took place two months after Costello’s death, and three years after the conviction of the Cohens. As for Costello, he had been told in 1953 that his Communist activism precluded a career in his country’s diplomatic service and, two months after the Cohens had received their passports, he had resigned to seek a future at the United Nations or in academia, and had gained a post at Manchester University.

According to McNiesh, Costello has been traduced by the groundless accusations made by unscrupulous journalists, but he fails to fully reveal his own long interest in the passports incident. When he first described this event, in Dance of the Peacocks in 2003, he claimed that the Krogers had visited the legation in person, and had been handed the passports by the minister, Jean McKenzie. However, this erroneous version was dropped from subsequent editions, and McNiesh would later conclude that “the case has about it the air of a fable”. Now, in The Sixth Man, McNeish admits that the transaction took place entirely by post, but says there is no evidence that Costello played any part in issuing the passports, and therefore the NZSIS “removed blame from Costello”.

This is a curious verdict, considering that in The Sixth Man the author includes a reproduction of Morris Cohen’s false passport, and must surely have noticed that it is written in Paddy Costello’s handwriting! If this oversight was not enough, McNeish could have mentioned a covering letter from Costello, dated 5 May 1956 and released last year by the NZSIS, addressed to Cohen, alias P.J. Kroger, at his address in Semmering, Austria, which accompanied the two passports. This, in the intelligence business, is known as a”smoking gun” or “a clue” but McNeish never even refers to this crucial, damning proof.

McNeish is obviously sympathetic to Costello and seems to believe that Pincher and others have conspired on the flimsiest of evidence to cast the academic as a traitor. Certainly Costello was an accomplished linguist who led a fascinating life but any objective asssessment of the facts suggests he was collaborating with the KGB in 1954, even if he was not the sixth member of the Cambridge ring.

To purchase James McNeish’s The Sixth Man: The Extraordinary Life Of Paddy Costello click here

Books regarding Elizabethan era espionage with reference to Sir Francis Walsingham Read, Conyers. Mr...

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

Books regarding Elizabethan era espionage with reference to Sir Francis Walsingham

Read, Conyers. Mr SECRETARY WALSINGHAM, and the policy of Queen Elizabeth - Vol. I of III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Printed by Oxford, 1925), pp. 443

Hutchinson, Robert. ELIZABETH’S MASTER: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), pp. 399

Haynes, Alan. WALSINGHAM: Elizabethan Spymaster & Statesman (Phoenix Mill Thrupp, UK: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2004), pp. 274

BUDIANSKY, Stephen. HER MAJESTY’S SPYMASTER: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Viking, 2005), pp. 235

ANDREW, Christopher. SECRET SERVICE: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1985), pp. 616

DEACON, Richard. A HISTORY OF BRITISH SERCRET SERVICE (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 440

WEST, Nigel. Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2004)

How We Squandered the Reich book review How many books have been written by insiders about the ...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

How We Squandered the Reich book review

How many books have been written by insiders about the Abwehr? The vanquished understandably are generally reluctant to relive lost battles, and apart from a couple of memoirs published soon after the war, by the sabotage expert Erwin Lahousen and the mastermind behind the Englandspiel in Holland, Herman Giskes, very little has been disclosed about the organization headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris that was staffed by anti-Nazi plotters. Accordingly, Reinhard Spitzy’s autobiography represents a remarkable document, in which the author recalls his service at the German Embassy in prewar London, his experiences in the Abwehr and the operations he participated in while based in Spain.

An Austrian by birth and education, Spitzy was an enthusiastic Nazi until the Munich crisis, which he witnessed at close quarters, convinced him that despite his genius Hitler would embroil the greater Reich in a war it could not win. Although he does not say so explicitly, Spitzy seems to have kept his membership of the Party, but dropped out of the SS. He despised Joachim von Ribbentrop, for whom he worked in London as his private secretary, and was to be shocked when he learned that Hans Oster, his immediate superior in the Abwehr, had deliberately betrayed strategic information to his friend the Dutch military attaché, Gisbertus Sas.

Spitzy fell under suspicion as one of the 20^th July conspirators but declined to return to Berlin for interrogation when he was confronted by the Gestapo in Spain. The author leaves unexplained why, at the end of the war, he felt obliged to seek refuge in a Spanish monastery and then take up residence in Argentina.

Although he is unrepentant about his support for the Nazis, and blames the destruction of Europe on the Allied policy of unconditional surrender, his perspective of self-justification is fascinating, as is his recollection of what life was like for a high-flying Nazi engaged to marry an Englishwoman. Spitzy was never to wed Agnes, the beautiiful teenage daugher of the Lord Lieutenant of Cormwall, but he found himself in love with an enemy alien, a dilemma he shared with several other influential Germans, among them Peter Bielenberg and Döld Stauffenberg. Even more awkward was the fact that while Spitzy worked at the Wilhelmstrasse headquarters of the Abwehr, his fiancé was employed by the War Office in London.

Spitzy pulled off an impressive balancing act by encouraging the anti-Hitler conspirators but keeping a safe distance from the heart of the plot. However, his association with notorious figures as Hans von Dohnanyi, Hans Bernd Gisevius and Hans Oster was enough for him to provide a compelling account of the military vacillated whenever an opportunity presented itself to carry out a putsch. Few, apart from General Beck, were willing to risk challenging the Fuhrer, and none believed a coup was practical while the Wehrmacht enjoyed unexpectedly swift success in Poland and France. Curiously, Admiral Canaris himself appears to have been rather half-hearted about the prospects of replacing Hitler and, according to Spitzy, would have shared his horror if he had ever discovered Oster’s treason of betraying the plan to invade Belgium and the Netherlands. If he had learned of Oster’s action, Spitzy asserts, he would have demanded the colonel kill himself.

Spitzy’s remarkable career falls neatly into three episodes: His posting to London where, as Third Secretary, he watched Ribbentrop negotiate with the British government, accompanied the ambassador to 10 Downing Street and acted as a courier, shuttling to and from Berlin with messages dictated from Hitler. The second segment is Spitzy’s appointment to the Abwehr’s headquarters, and finally there is his mission to Spain, and his visit to Berne to discuss peace terms with an unsympathetic Allen Dulles.

In London Spitzy met Baldwin, Eden, Churchill, Butler, Cadogan and Robert Vansittart (whom he mistakenly believed was the Chief of the British SIS) and, with help from Agnes, became a confirmed Anglophile. His description of life in Carlton House Terrace is almost unique, although he does not mention Wolfgang zu Putlitz, another, more senior diplomat on Ribbertrop’s staff who was supplying information to MI5, and continued to do so until his exfiltration by SIS from Holland in 1940. He makes no mention of any leak from the embassy, but does often refer to the British monitoring of the embassy’s telephone lines. We now know that the Nazis were tipped off to this intercept operation by an SIS officer, Dick Ellis, but Spitzy gives no explanation of his certainty that his calls were being listened to.

To buy Reinhard Spitzy’s book How We Squandered the Reich click here

The Irregulars book review In 1998 the academic Thomas Mahl revealed in Desperate Deception...

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Irregulars book review

In 1998 the academic Thomas Mahl revealed in Desperate Deception that during World War II British Security Coordination had engaged in a series of what might now be termed ‘dirty tricks’ to influence American public opinion and undermine the isolationists. As an analysis of covert operations conducted in Washington and New York by perfidious Albion, Mahl’s account appeared to be the last word, apart of course from the publication of Sir William Stephenson’s own British Security Coordination, his sponsored history of the organization he ran for five years in the Rockefeller Center, which was also released in 1998. However, The Irregulars by the journalist Jennet Conant offers a very different perspective, purporting to describe ‘the British spy ring in wartime Washington’, and the role played in it by the great master of the short story, Roald Dahl, the author who famously gave us Gremlins.

That Dahl worked for BSC for the last two years of the war is not in dispute, and nor is the existence of BSC, an umbrella organization about much nonsense has been written over the years. Because so much misleading information had been propagated about BSC, principally by the Canadian newspaperman William Stevenson, great care should be taken to back up any potentially controversial assertions, and to source quotations on any related topic. Accordingly, a reviewer approaches The Irregulars with some trepidation, especially when on the first page one is told that BSC’s director, William Stephenson, had been despatched to New York by Winston Churchill. This bald statement is, of course, precisely the kind of assertion that is likely to be challenged by historians who have been emphatic that there is no evidence that Churchill ever met Stephenson, nor even knew of his existence. The point is important because this is not some mere trifling slip by Conant, but the very personal relationship between the two men is a recurring theme throughout her book. She insists that ‘Stephenson was dispatched to America by Churchill’ and ‘Stephenson would, in turn, pass on any valuable information to London, and to Churchill’; that ‘President Roosevelt relied on Stephenson’ to act as a ‘back channel for his secret dealings with Churchill’; and again that BSC was a ’black propaganda operation that Churchill had charged him with developing in the United States’. Furthermore, she claims that before the war Stephenson had begun ‘working for Churchill’s so-called Z-network’ and suggests that Churchill had given instructions direct to BSC: ‘Churchill… instructed the BSC to do everything possible “to drag” their reluctant ally into the war against Germany’. To make quite certain of the bond between the two men, she insists Churchill ‘asked Stephenson to undertake a secret mission to Washington D.C.’ and apparently they chatted together for ‘Churchill agreed with Stephenson that the only truly effective form of intelligence was counterintelligence’.

None of this is true, and Churchill’s long-serving private secretary, Sir Jock Colville, denounced the fabrication of the supposed links between Stephenson and the prime minister when it was first circulated in 1974 in the notorious A Man Called Intrepid. So if Conant has been misled regarding Stephenson, what about BSC itself? It is clear that Stephenson was appointed the Passport Control Officer in New York in July 1940 to replace a retired naval officer, Sir James Paget who had held the post since 1935. However, Conant presents BSC, the cover title for the MI6 station, as being ‘conceived of as a black book, or unofficial operation’ so Stephenson could be ‘could be disowned by everyone’. Furthermore, she says ‘no official title had been given to this cloak-and-dagger outfit, and for that matter no prior War Cabinet approval. It was called BSC by default, after the original Baker Street address of the Special Operations Executive in London.’ Indeed, she even asserts that BSC was ‘a title created arbitrarily by t\he American FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’ who ‘did not share the English enthusiasm for codenames.’

It would be tedious to dismantle each part of these entirely erroneous statements, but they are wholly incorrect in every detail. So is Conant’s grasp of exactly when Stephenson was appointed to New York. She says he was ‘dispatched to America by Churchill after the nightmarish winter of 1940 during which Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, German bombs rained down of British cities’ and this implies some unspecified date early in 1941, whereas he actually took up his post on 1 July 1940. Far from being disavowed, he and BSC were registered with the State Department as a branch of the British government.

Having undermined her own credibility, at least in regard to BSC, Conant turns her attention to Dahl, a dashing RAF pilot posted to the British embassy in Washington after he had crashed the plane he was delivering in North Africa, having lost his bearings and run out of fuel. Badly injured, Dahl was given light diplomatic duties as an assistant air attaché and he promptly embroidered a version of his flying accident into a combat incident in which he had been shot down by the enemy. He was soon a hit on the social scene and made plenty of local contacts, including the President’s wife who occasionally invited him to the White House. He also proved a success in Hollywood, and began his literary career by submitting some not entirely accurate autobiographical short stories to American magazines.

Whether Dahl actually engaged in any espionage is hard to tell as the evidence presented is slim to non-existent. Certainly he was active on the cocktail party circuit, but the proposition that Churchill was dependent on BSC for political advice about the atmosphere in Washington, when the embassy accommodated trained, career professionals to carry put precisely that function, seems improbable. So what did Dahl contribute to any ‘British spy ring’?

Interestingly, Conant appears to have gained access to SIS documents, for she occasionally makes what appears to be a direct quotation from Stewart Menzies, the MI6 Chief who is described as having been ‘head of counterespionage in France in his early twenties’. For instance, she quotes him as referring to Vice President Henry Wallace as “that menace”, and says ‘C decided he did not want to risk a major showdown with the BSC chief.’ According to Conant, Menzies had resisted Stephenson’s appointment and had ‘objected to Stephenson’. But where did the author acquire the evidence for these very dubious assertions? If Menzies had objected to Stephenson’s appointment in 1940, it simply would not have been made, unless Conant has some astonishing hitherto undisclosed documentation to back her doubtful claims.

Some of Conant’s claims are plainly ludicrous. She says Kim Philby ‘joined the SIS in 1940’ and then defected to Moscow ‘in 1951’ with Donald Maclean. Churchill ‘had no choice’ but to succumb to pressure from Stalin and Roosevelt and agree to open a second front in Normandy, set for May 1944. ‘The British were increasingly nervous about the close relationship developing between America and Russia’. In 1941, just before the raid on Peal Harbor, Stephenson had ‘sent a coded telegram to the London office that a Japanese attack was imminent’.

For good measure, Conant claims that Stephenson and Ian Fleming were close, and says Fleming participated in a burglary of the Japanese consulate in New York. Stephenson supposedly also sent Fleming on a training course to Oshawa in 1942, and the author says both Fleming brothers Peter and Ian, were ‘too old for frontline commands’, which, insultingly, rather ignores Peter’s very distinguished record as a commando in Norway in 1940. She says they were good ‘agent material’ and claims Ian ‘reported to the Ministry of Defense’ when no such ministry existed! She says Noel Coward ‘had undertaken a mission for the SIS’ in Paris, having been recruited by Stephenson, who had also engaged Leslie Howard as a courier. Neither, of course, had the slightest connection with SIS or BSC.

To list every absurdity in The Irregulars would be try the patience of the reader, but a general picture emerges of a rather inaccurate, superficial book that depends far too heavily on long-discredited sources and laughable myths, such as the preposterous assertion that Stephenson flew over the invasion beaches in June 1944 in a bomber as a rear gunner. Conant has no excuse for peddling this tripe because she lists in her bibliography some of the books that have debunked William Stevenson’s inventions, so she should know better. However, it is clear that she has fallen for the fiction amassed in the University of Regina archives, but we should resist any temptation to do the same.

To buy The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by: Jennet Conant click here

The Ten Best Books on Intelligence (In alphabetical order by author) Bearden, Milton, and Jim Risen....

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Ten Best Books on Intelligence

(In alphabetical order by author)

Bearden, Milton, and Jim Risen. The Main Enemy. (Random House, 2004): Fascinating version of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan by a senior CIA officer.

Benson, Robert Louis and Michael Warner. VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939‑1957 (Washington, DC: NSA/CIA, 1996): The official history of the VENONA cryptographic project declassified in 1996.

Bentley, Elizabeth. Out of Bondage. (New York: Devin‑Adair Company, 1951): The story of the NKVD defector in New York in 1945 who implicated numerous Communist Party agents..

Burrows, William E. Deep Black. (Random House, 1996): Most accurate history of the development of reconnaissance satellites, and an overview of aerial intelligence collection platforms.

Dallin, David. Soviet Espionage. (Yale University Press, 1955): Earliest, most reliable history of early NKVD activities, the first of a genre.

Hinsley, F. H. British Intelligence in the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1979): Comprehensive study of ULTRA and other intelligence sources and their impact on the war, in five volumes, released as an official history series.

Masterman, J.C. The Double Cross System of the War of 1930 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1972): Magisterial analysis of the development and exploitation of double agents and the genesis of strategic deception.

Schecter, Jerrold. The Spy Who Saved The World. (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 2002): Best account of Oleg Penkovsky’s espionage in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis based on CIA transcripts.

Sontag, Sherry, and Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff (New York: Public Affairs, 1998): Detailed account of the U.S. Navy’s deployment of clandestine submarine operations during the Cold War.

Wise, David. Nightmover (New York: HarperCollins, 1995): An accurate account of the investigation in Aldrich Ames’ espionage inside the CIA, with the counter-intelligence background.

The Hunt for Nazi Spies book review Since the publication of Philip Stead’s Second Bureau in...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Hunt for Nazi Spies book review

Since the publication of Philip Stead’s Second Bureau in 1959 there have been plenty of books released on the subject of French wartime intelligence operations, but little has appeared on the somewhat arcane topic of counter-espionage conducted by Vichy. Now Simon Kitson, a University of Birmingham academic, has filled the gap with The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a fascinating glimpse into the activities of the various organizations created after the French collapse which enjoyed a brief existence until the Nazis overran the unoccupied zone in November 1943. He wrote his book in French, and this is now translated into English, but why has it taken so long? The answer is that most of the French intelligence archive was seized by the Germans who in 1943 shipped it back to the Reich, only to have it fall into the hands of the Soviets. Thus it was not until Boris Yeltsin was elected that the records, consisting of 1,400 boxes, were returned to the Chateau de Vincennes and made available to the public.

Kitson’s research reveals a rich seam of documentary material that, overlaid with the more familiar memoirs of Paul Paillole and his pro-Allied friends in the complex intelligence profession, hives a very different view of how the Vichy regime coped with a German espionage offensive, the participants in which were overwhelmingly French collaborators. And of whom up to forty were executed.

The creation of the supposedly neutral administration headed by Marshal Petain was an instant target for the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst which competed against each other to plant their spies in the new ministries, penetrate the secret services, engage in black-marketeering and monitor signs of any clandestine mobilization. Literally thousands of unemployed Frenchmen, many of them sent home by the army, became willing informants as the Nazis looted France’s economic infrastructure. The British attack on the fleet at Oran, followed by combat with the Allies in Senegal, Syria and Madagascar, created an almost institutionalized ambiguity in Vichy’s relations with the Allies, Berlin and its own population, and the result was a unique espionage environment in which loyalty to the state became a very pliable commodity.

This is a story of the notorious Klaus Barbie forcing his way into Lyons prison to free one of his own agents; of a prisoner swap in which the Germans executed a French spy but nevertheless accepted the return of their own man in exchange. Kitson explains the various police and military organizations in Vichy, concentrating on the Bureau des Menées Antinationale (BMA) and its subordinate Surveillance du Territoire, but this is not an account of one single agency’s activities, nor a collection of case histories. There are not many thumbnail portraits of prominent personnel and few details of what the Abwehr achieved, but there are some tantalizing glimpses into French schemes, including a plan to blackmail Theodor Auer, influential, homosexual the head of the Gestapo in Morocco, and his Austrian Jewish lover.

The value of this book is in covering hitherto relatively obscure and unknown counter-espionage services, such as the BMA while enjoyed surprisingly substantial funding and very considerable telephone-tapping resources. While the Milice acquired a ruthless reputation for maltreating prisoners and assisting the Gestapo, the BMA has hardly entered the literature and apparently there is plenty more rich veins waiting to be mined in the Chateau de Vincennes. It is to be hoped that readers inspired to follow the author’s lead will find the files relating to the early American networks based in Algiers and Morocco, and the efforts made by some of the neutral diplomatic community in Vichy on behalf of the British, and of the scarcely-neutral activities of the U.S. mission.

The Vichy era is a shameful chapter in France’s still-painful wartime experience, and there has been a tendency for British and American historians to rely on, for instance, the legendary Gustave Bertrand to demonstrate inter-Allied cooperation in the unoccupied zone and in North Africa, but Kitson illuminates an aspect of post-Armistice intelligence operations that have been neglected since David Kahn’s magisterial Hitler’s Spies which did look at Colonel Oscar Reile’s spy-rings in France, but did not have the benefit of the new files released by Moscow.

To purchase Simon Kitson’s The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France click here

The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op book review When The Mitrokhin Archive was released in...

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op book review

When The Mitrokhin Archive was released in September 1999 much media attention focused on Melita Norwood, an elderly widow living alone in a London suburb who was revealed by the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin to have spent a career as a Soviet agent codenamed HOLA. She readily acknowledged that she had been a long-term spy, and later discussed her clandestine activities to her friend, David Burke who now, three years after her death, has produced The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op. His research, based on conversations with Melita and access to her family photographs, includes study of her MI5 file now declassified at Kew, and her story falls into four parts: Her recruitment in 1934 by a family friend and fellow Communist Party of Great Britain activist, Andrew Rothstein, when she was a secretary working for an engineering company in London; Her involvement in the 1938 Woolwich Arsenal case which disclosed her link to Percy Glading, imprisoned for espionage; Her wartime activities, apparently controlled by the legendary Ursula Kuczynsky, codenamed SONIA, and finally her postwar role for the KGB which continued until 1972.

Burke had the advantage of talking to Melita prior to her exposure in 1999 when he was researching her family’s background. Her father, Alexander Sirnis, of Latvian origin, had been a refugee who had pursued his radicalism in England, and his daughter clearly inherited some of his political commitment. The author has traced many of her connections, and more than a few of them have connections with the fashionable Lawn Flats in Hampstead where the famous NKVD illegal Arnold Deutsch lived, as well as Agatha Christie.

Melita’s involvement with Percy Glading is fascinating, if still unresolved. Her address in Finchley, north London, appeared in a slip of paper found in Glading’s 1937 diary, and MI5 correctly linked it to her, but there is no record of what further action, if any, that MI5 took to make further enquiries. At the time Glading was the CPGB’s National Organiser, and in that capacity he had hundreds of personal contacts, and nobody would have assumed that all of them were espionage suspects. Membership of the CPGB was entirely legal, of course, so although the connection between the two spies has a certain piquancy, it is hardly evidence of MI5’s incompetence, or worse. Here Burke falters momentarily, for he misinterprets an entry in Melita’s declassified MI5 file. By way of background it is worth explaining that MI5 personnel would invariably add against any name the relevant personal file number, and these manuscript annotations, inserted to assist cross-referencing, would not indicate precisely when the addition was made. Often it would occur years after the document had been generated, and Burke has fallen into the trap of assuming that the annotation was contemporaneous, and that it was made not by MI5 but by SIS, which had an entirely different filing system which did not include ‘PFs’. Thus he seizes on this annotation and concludes that it ‘could only mean one thing: that .SIS had a Personal File active on Melita Norwood at the time of the Percy Glading affair, and were aware that Melita Norwood was involved with the Glading network.’ Actually, it meant no such thing. It simply indicated that at some point subsequently an MI5 officer had opened a file on Melita and had inserted the appropriate dossier number by hand.

Fortunately Burke does not go in chase of his canard, and instead turns his attention to Tube Alloys, the British component of the Manhattan project, in which Melita’s company played a role. Exactly what she did, until she left her employers briefly at the end of 1943 to have a baby, is unknown, but a VENONA text dated 16 September 1945 from Moscow describes her espionage as “of interest and a valuable contribution’. This message, referring to her as TINA, was not decrypted until after 1964, but MI5 successfully linked TINA to Melita, even if a decision was taken not to interview her. MI5’s reason was that she was by then known as a hardened Marxist who had been excluded from access to classified information since the war because of her CPGB activism, and it was thought that she would resist any MI5 interview and might even garner a clue to the VENONA source.

It was not until 1992, when Vasili Mitrokhin defected to London, that Melita’s lengthy clandestine career was fully understood by MI5, and her entire story, from Glading to TINA and HOLA could be reconstructed. In particular, Burke asserts that Melita had been run between January 1941 and 1946 by SONIA, but here the evidence is slim and needs close scrutiny. Burke learned that Melita’s sister had been friendly with SONIA’s brother Jürgen, but it seems unlikely that SONIA, then living alone in an Oxfordshire village with her children, could have easily held covert meetings with Melita, who was based at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. Whilst it is known that Klaus Fuchs traveled down by train to Banbury to rendezvous with SONIA, she would simply cycle through the Oxfordshire lanes to meet him.

To buy The Spy Who Came In From the Co-Op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage written by David Burke click here

‘The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War’ book review The arrest of the GCHQ linguist...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:00:00 -0400

‘The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War’ book review

   The arrest of the GCHQ linguist Katharine Gun in March 2003 and the British government’s decision eleven months later not to prosecute her became highly controversial because her offence, which she admitted, was to leak a sensitive NSA email to a London newspaper. The authors who examined the Judith Coplon case in 2002 with The Spy Who Seduced America have turned their pens to Gun, and the question arises whether their analysis is dispassionate and independent. Also, is their account factually accurate, and are the legal arguments presented a true reflection of what happened at the Old Bailey in February 2004 when, at the very last moment, no evidence was offered and the whole matter abandoned.

      Given the contentious political background to the case, and questions over the legality of the Coalition’s invasion of Iraq while this rather less momentous drama was being played out, there were plenty of critics ready to assert that the government had avoided a potentially embarrassing public trial because it feared disclosure of the attorney-general’s apparently shifting legal views on whether Prime Minister Tony Blair might be vulnerable to accusations of war crimes if he joined the White House’s rush to war. Every time Blair was asked to publish his legal advice, he insisted on confidentiality, citing precedents to protect what the government’s top law officer had told him. Despite the pressure, that thirteen-page document remains under wraps.

      Gun, fluent in Mandarin and recently married to a Turkish asylum seeker, had worked at GCHQ for two years when she copied an email from the NSA’s Frank Koza in which the senior Fort Meade official announced that some UN Security Council members would be targeted for electronic surveillance. Gun felt this action was wrong, if not illegal and, covering her tracks through an intermediary, delivered the document to the Observer which published it a month later, still not entirely sure of its authenticity. The authors insist that this event makes Gun a whistleblower, an unusual specie that some believe should be above the law. However, their idea of a whistleblower needs to be examined, for they claim Clive Ponting, David Shayler, Mary McCarthy and Dr David Kelly are all part of that noble breed.

It will be remembered, of course, that none of these individuals resigned their posts on some point of principle and made public statements to protest some iniquity. In fact Clive Ponting clung to his position in the Ministry of Defence, denied his leaks and even suggested another candidate as the guilty party. David Shayler was an MI5 officer who, when told he had no future in the organization, attempted to break his employment contract by adopting an alias in an effort to publish a book. His disclosures, incidentally, did not come within a mile of “whistleblowing” but were voyeuristic and sensationalist newspaper tales. Mary McCarthy, described by the Mitchells as having been fired from the CIA for leaking classified information about the notorious black sites to the media, actually lost her job for failing a polygraph and lying about being the culprit. And as for the tragic figure of the WMD expert David Kelly, he also was caught in a lie before a Parliamentary committee and, stricken by remorse, took his own life. Not one of them was a whistleblower, and neither was Gun.

    Do the authors give a fair view of the legal case? The Mitchells give great weight to the canard that Gun’s prosecution was dropped at the eleventh hour when her brilliant counsel made a formal request for documents he believed would embarrass the government. This is the ancient tactic of greymail, but it that really why the case collapsed? The chronology suggests, and both the authors and House of Commons were told, that the decision had been taken quite some time before the apparent masterstroke had been inflicted, yet the Mitchells seem to prefer the conspiracy version, even when the evidence of an authoritative newspaper story predicting what happened supports the less labyrinthine explanation.

      The authors cannot decide whether Gun had a weak or strong defence, but acknowledge it rested on the concept of “necessity” She would assert that her admitted conduct was driven by a wish to save lives, and in the political climate of the time, with the country largely opposed to the quagmire of the Iraq occupation, it would have been astonishing if the prosecuting counsel did not warn his masters that a jury was likely to acquit Gun. This duty on the independent barrister does not seem to have occurred to the Mitchells who explore all the other more implausible interpretations, each of which was raised, and then answered, in the Commons during a heated post-mortem.

      Alas, the Mitchells cannot be described as unpartisan, with Clare Short being bold and courageous, and her fellow Cabinet minister Robin Cook being described as “prestigious” with “a brilliant career” ahead of him. They overlook that Short took a couple of months to follow Cook’s example, and his career was already over, having been sacked from his former post as Foreign Secretary.

      Also overlooking the legislation, passed by the Clinton administration which declared regime change in Baghdad the official policy of the United States, the authors assert that the NSA’s motive of keeping an electronic eye on the UNSC members was probably “high-stakes blackmail” or “manipulation” when it is rather more likely that the White House needed to accurately anticipate the instructions received by the relevant UN ambassadors. And why not? Is that not precisely the NSA’s role?

      Gun, according to the Mitchells, was a high-minded paragon driven reluctantly by the noblest of motives. They also let slip that she was married to an illegal immigrant who was homesick for his family living in peace, tranquility and poverty in Turkey. She had an option of approaching the GCHQ staff counselor for advice if she encountered an ethical problem in her work, and could also have talked to her constituency MP or a member of the Parliamentary oversight committee, but instead she chose the media. That she had alternatives is not even addressed in The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. The authors ridicule the suggestion made by Gun’s critics that her husband is a muslim, but we never quite hear whether this is actually true. Why not?

      The Mitchells come across as almost absurdly biased in their attitude to British standards of secrecy, and this is illustrated by their account of Clive Ponting’s behaviour. He kept sending anonymous briefings to an Opposition MP about the circumstances of the sinking in 1982 of the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano. This heavily-armed warship, bristling with the very latest lethal Exocet missiles, had been sunk by a torpedo from the Royal Navy submarine HMS Conqueror as it zigzagged towards the highly vulnerable British Task Force heading to liberate the Falkland Islands. Incredibly, the Mitchells only describe the cruiser as “a ship” (and not even a warship) and then question whether it was really “carrying weapons”.

      In terms of factual accuracy, the book contains all too many lapses. Scooter Libby was apparently convicted of having compromised Valerie Plaime, when of course he most certainly was not. His crime was perjury, lying to a grand jury, but not smearing an opponent of the Republicans. It would be tedious to list the other errors, but the authors’ credulity springs from every page. Clearly enamoured of Clare Short, it is suggested that she too leaked secrets by revealing that while a minister she had been given access to GCHQ transcripts of private UN conversations. It does not seem to have occurred to the authors to have questioned the highly erratic Short’s version of events. Why on earth would a development secretary, in charge of distributing Britain’s aid budget, receive highly sensitive intelligence? Apparently they forgot to ask, one of dozens of questions that should have been put to their motley selection of interviewees, all self-serving to the very last.

      There may be a place for whistleblowers, and perhaps some deserve legal protection, but Gun is not one of them, and neither is Shayler, Ponting nor the others. The Mitchells make a case for Gun, but it not a convincing one.

To buy The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion written by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell click here

The Best Spy Novels Written by Intelligence Professionals Ashendenby Somerset Maugham A...

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:00:00 -0400

The Best Spy Novels Written by Intelligence Professionals

Ashendenby Somerset Maugham

A collection of short stories based on the author’s personal experience during the First World War

The Perfect Spy by John le Carré

A semi-autobiographical account of a British intelligence officer’s moral dilemma, written by David Cornwall, a retired MI6 professional

Water on the Brain by Compton Mackenzie

A vicious spoof written by Mackenzie after he had been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in 1932.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

An amusing tale of an MI6 officer in Cuba, tormented by his mischievous, precocious daughter and the head of the local secret police.

The Four Friends from Lisbon by John Masterman

Wartime double agents intrigue in Lisbon, written by the chairman of MI5’s double cross committee.

The Double Agent by Kenneth Benton

A veteran MI6 officer writes about real incidents.

Legacy by Alan Judd

A still-serving MI6 officer describes an authentic double agent case in fictional terms.

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

007’s creator received a classified briefing from a GRU defector before completing the best James Bond thriller.

Knight’s Black Agent by John Bingham

A veteran MI5 officer (actually Le Carre’s mentor and model for George Smiley) reveals a case history.