Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography ............................................................................i Course Scope .....................................................................................1

LECTURE GUIDES

LECTURE 1

Introducing the Secret World .............................................................4

LECTURE 2

Ancient Espionage............................................................................13

LECTURE 3

Medieval and Renaissance Spying .................................................22

LECTURE 4

Spies of the Elizabethan Age............................................................30

LECTURE 5

Spies in the Age of Discovery ...........................................................38

LECTURE 6

Espionage in the American Revolution .............................................45

LECTURE 7

Spying of the European Great Powers .............................................53

LECTURE 8

U.S. Civil War Spies in Blue and Gray .............................................61

LECTURE 9

The Great Game of Empires ............................................................68

iii 

Table of Contents

LECTURE 10

Spy Phobia before World War I ........................................................75

LECTURE 11

Mata Hari and Company in World War I ...........................................82

LECTURE 12

Subversion—Lawrence of Arabia and Lenin ....................................88

LECTURE 13

Radical Challenge—The Interwar Years...........................................95

LECTURE 14

Soviets and Nazis—Surveillance and Terror ..................................103

LECTURE 15

Converts to Espionage ...................................................................110

LECTURE 16

Launching World War II ..................................................................117

LECTURE 17

Covert Operations and Codes in World War II ...............................125

LECTURE 18

Atomic Spies and Spy Hunts ..........................................................133

LECTURE 19

Cold War Chill .................................................................................143

LECTURE 20

World Crises ...................................................................................152

LECTURE 21

Spies in Fiction and Film ................................................................161

LECTURE 22

End of the Cold War .......................................................................168

iv 

Table of Contents

LECTURE 23

Post–Cold War Spying ...................................................................175

LECTURE 24

The Future of Espionage ................................................................183

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Glossary .........................................................................................191 Biographical Notes .........................................................................204 Bibliography ....................................................................................219

v 

vi 

Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History

Scope:

o really understand all the forces at work in international politics, we must also understand the intriguing, secret role of espionage and the shadowy world of covert operations. As long as there has been politics

in human affairs, there have also been attempts to work in the shadows to gain secret information or subvert enemies behind the scenes. This course examines spies, spymasters, and clandestine operations from ancient times to the present day, to reveal the secret world behind public policy.

Our ¿rst lecture introduces key terms in the secret world of espionage, terms like agent, double agent, sleeper, mole, handler, human intelligence, signals intelligence, and disinformation. We also sketch the major debates in the history of espionage, especially the argument about how important espionage has been in reality, as opposed to the myths that have evolved around spying. Another theme to be pursued in the course concerns spy panics—periodic mass anxieties about the threat of spying—and what these can tell us about the societies that have such fears.

Our next three lectures (Lectures 2–5) examine espionage and covert operations before the modern age. We begin with the ancient Egyptians, Chinese (especially the classic writings of the philosopher Sun Tzu), Indians, Greeks, and Romans. We examine spy stories in the Bible and what they tell us about how that society regarded espionage. Turning to the Middle Ages, we examine spies in the age of chivalry and the Crusades, merchant spying, scandalous relic thefts, Mongol spying, and the Middle Eastern Assassin sect. Next we turn to the age of Queen Elizabeth I of England, pro¿ling her great spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and his clandestine role in reinforcing Elizabeth’s power, condemning Mary, Queen of Scots, and repelling the Spanish Armada. Our examination of the competition between Europe’s great powers from the 16th to the 18th centuries focuses on the dreaded secret servants of Ivan the Terrible of Russia; the adventures of Jesuit missionaries in America and Asia; and the astonishing stories of spies in Europe’s royal courts, including the famed Italian lover Giovanni Giacomo Casanova and

1 

the curious case of the French transvestite spy Charles, chevalier d’Éon de Beaumont.

The following group of ¿ve lectures (Lectures 6–10) shows the evolution of the modern espionage organization, from the age of the American and French revolutions to the beginning of the 20th century. We reveal the role of espionage in the American struggle for independence and highlight General George Washington’s surprising role as spymaster. We consider the imprint that spying left on early American culture, from idealized heroes (Nathan Hale) and infamous traitors (Benedict Arnold), to literature in novels like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy. Next we turn to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and the real cases of espionage and rescue that inspired Baroness Emusska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. We examine how states developed intelligence agencies, both for spying abroad and internal spying, to quell dissent. We delve into the U.S. Civil War, with a special emphasis on women spies who came into their own in this conÀ ict; the unique role of African Americans; and the conspiracies that ¿nally led to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

We next turn to espionage in the age of imperialism, in what was called “The Great Game.” Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, about a boy spy in India, receives special attention because of its inÀuential afterlife. Likewise, Japan’s amazing modernization was reÀected in a distinctive espionage tradition. As the new century dawned, great spy panics broke out, especially the notorious false conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish of¿cer. We probe closely why such panics broke out and how they shaped international politics.

The next cluster (Lectures 11–15) investigates espionage in the First World War and the interwar world. We follow a new generation of women spies—Mata Hari and her sisters—and amazing feats of decoding enemy ciphers. We also examine special operations like the wild rampage of T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, and the German spreading of revolution in Russia. The end of the First World War produced more fears of radicals and spies in the United States and Europe, sponsored by the new revolutionary state, the Soviet Union. Such fears led to the rise of America’s FBI under the powerful J. Edgar Hoover. Totalitarian states—Josef Stalin’s

2 

Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany—pursued the ideal of a totally policed population, and we evaluate how effective the NKVD (the early Soviet secret police, forerunner of the KGB) and the Gestapo were. The troubled 1930s were a golden age of ideological spies, and we look closely at cases of converts to spying for communism, Nazism, and other causes.

Our next set of lectures (Lectures 16–18) zero in on espionage in the Second World War. We examine covert operations in Japan’s war on China, Japanese spying on Pearl Harbor in the lead-up to the attack, spies in the Spanish Civil War, and spies in Nazi rearmament and aggression. We follow the founding of the British Special Operations Executive and the American Of¿ ce of Strategic Services, their plans and subterfuges, as well as Allied breaking of the German Enigma and Japanese Purple code machines. We also follow how the Second World War shaded into the cold war, as demonstrated by the atomic spies for the Soviets in the United States.

Lectures 19–22 examine both the cold war shadow struggle (among the CIA, KGB, and other intelligence services, like the notorious Stasi of communist East Germany), as well as espionage in the postwar, non-Western world, especially the Chinese intelligence services and Israel’s famed Mossad. Our analysis also includes literary spies, from Ian Fleming’s James Bond to the disillusioned spies of Graham Greene and John le Carré.

Our last two lectures examine post–cold war spying, including economic espionage, and speculate on the future of spying as a permanent feature of human politics, but now supercharged with new technologies. Ŷ

3 

Introducing the Secret World Lecture 1

his course on espionage and covert operations opens a door to the shadowy world of spying and secret actions, a world of desperate and daring characters, devious plans, great successes, and resounding

failures. Some key examples from the history of espionage will introduce the main themes for the course: The motivations for spying, the kinds of spying, the professionalization of the undertaking, and how the spy is regarded in society at large. This course also addresses the most controversial debate in the history of espionage: How important is it?

 This is not a how-to course on spying. Rather, it looks at the historical record to see what espionage really is, what it is capable of, and what place it has occupied in society and human consciousness from ancient times to the present day.

 We will look at not only individual spies but also at how society has thought about spying. Is a spy a traitorous and ¿lthy creature or a hero? We will examine the myth of the spy in different cultures around the world and throughout history.

 We will investigate periodic spy panics—when a society is seized by the fear that spies are among us. You can tell a lot about a society by what it fears.

 Our course looks at both espionage and covert operations. Covert operations (like the raid that took down Osama bin Laden in 2011), even when they are not conducted by spies but by military units, are also part of the world of clandestine government policy that we want to investigate.

4 

 Here are some scenes from the history of the secret world we will focus on in the coming lectures:

o In Alexandria, Egypt, in A.D. 827, a small band of Venetian merchants planned a daring mission to steal the earthly remains of Saint Mark, their city’s patron, and smuggle them back to Venice to put the stamp of spiritual greatness on their trading empire and to attract pilgrims—and their money—to their home port.

o The culture of the American Confederacy taught its generals and leaders to regard slaves as not fully human. A woman named Mary Elizabeth Bowser, enslaved in Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s household, was able to use this convention to her advantage to spy against the Confederacy.

o The most famous of all women spies, Mata Hari, was a legend in the First World War, but her life was far from glamorous. Was she truly guilty or a convenient scapegoat for the failures of French generals? We will follow her tragic life to its end and beyond, into the realm of mythic immortality.

o In early 2011, the suspected Mossad spy R65 was captured in the hinterlands of Saudi Arabia. The spy carried a global positioning system transmitter and had beady eyes, sharp claws, and feathers. R65 was a vulture. Israeli authorities explained that the bird was part of a multiyear study of migratory patterns. However, the spy rumor went viral on the Internet, a further example of how spy panic can speak volumes about politics and society.

 Before we can plunge into these and other stories, we need to de¿ ne some terms we will encounter over and over in these lectures. The term “espionage” simply refers to the activity of a spy—someone who observes to gain secret information by equally secret, often illegal means.

5 

 Covert operations, in contrast, is not collecting of information but secret action intended to bring about some result. It may involve plausible deniability—that is, keeping the identity of the actor hidden. Covert operations may include acts as varied as assassination attempts and computer hacking.

 

 Intelligence gathering comes in bureaucratic jargon as HUMINT, SIGINT, “signals intelligence.”

 

two varieties, known in “human intelligence,” and

 

 HUMINT uses human agents to collect information. It has been with us from the beginning of time, since the ¿rst band of humans observed another band in the distance. In HUMINT, cunning, subtlety, subterfuge, improvisation, quick thinking, and dissimulation (that is, lying) are at the fore.

 SIGINT is a newer form of intelligence gathering that relies on technical means to crack the communications stream of the targeted group. It involves the interception of secret messages, breaking codes, or even cyber warfare. SIGINT has recently acquired a new subcategory—ELINT, electronic intelligence.

 Counterintelligence signi¿es efforts to frustrate the intelligence of the opposing side, from the capturing of an enemy spy, to the in¿ltration of the enemy intelligence service with a spy of one’s own, to the deliberate spreading of false information (disinformation) to provocation—that is, luring the enemy into doing something revealing or compromising.

 The only way to effectively guard against disinformation or provocation is to have multiple con¿rmations of a report. Built-in redundancy is a key, because it will give more certainty in this uncertain world.

 An agent is a spy for one’s own side. Notice how “agent” sounds of¿cial and respectable, while “spy” carries a questionable connotation.

6 

 A double agent is one who pretends to be an agent for one side but is secretly spying for the enemy or is passing along disinformation. Triple agents pretend to be agents for one side, while also pretending to be secretly spying for the enemy, when in fact they are loyal to side they worked for from the outset.

 Moles are agents who burrow into the structures of the targeted power over a long period of time, working their way up to astonishingly high positions. Sleepers are agents who are sent to in¿ltrate a targeted enemy, whose task it is to wait, or sleep, until in some decisive hour they are activated for a mission.

 Agents of all kinds have superiors who direct their actions, telling them what intelligence to seek, setting up meetings, and rewarding them for their services. These superiors are called handlers or (especially in American convention) case of¿ cers.

 All these de¿nitions are helpful, but they leave the bigger questions untouched. What kind of person would become a spy? What is the psychology behind a spy? What are the motives of spies or intelligence professionals?

 Because human beings are complex, so too are the motives behind espionage. The motive could be money. It could be ego, believing oneself unappreciated. Spies betraying their own country may be motivated by resentment of one’s class, schooling, parents, or society.

 A spy’s motives may also include somewhat deluded desires for adventure or a plain misunderstanding of what espionage is really like. As we shall see repeatedly, the reality of spying differs markedly from the fantasy world of ¿ lm and ¿ction. Some spies are motivated by blackmail, but these are often unpredictable agents, prone to turn against those threatening them.

7 

 Another, quite volatile motive for spies is ideology. An ideology is not just a set of theories; it is a system of thought that explains how the world does and should work, from liberalism and democracy to communism, fascism, and Nazism.

 We will see these ideologies at work and explore a paradox: Ideologically motivated agents are both the most reliable and the most undependable.

 An ideologically motivated agent might volunteer for espionage, with no pressure or inducement necessary. But such an agent might also act independently, refuse orders if they seem to violate the true faith, or might be inÀexible and fanatic when what is needed is Àexibility and pragmatism.

 Over time, the business of espionage has become more elaborate and professionalized. But in the realm of HUMINT, attempts to turn espionage into a science, with rigid rules and drills, have ended in disaster. This is because some of the human traits so key to espionage cannot easily be taught.

 On the other hand, tradecraft often involves simple rules taken from hard-won experience: Information must be veri¿ ed from multiple information streams. It is best to keep spies separate from one another—interacting with their handler but in contact with as few other members of the spy ring as possible.

 One of the most dangerous and vulnerable moments for an agent in place is the moment of communication with the handler. This has led to tradecraft techniques for safer communication, like the brush pass and the dead drop.

 The tradecraft used by a handler is also tremendously complicated, just in terms of personnel management and recruitment. Very often, however, the most important spies volunteer themselves.

8 

 More importantly, productive agents need to be cultivated, encouraged, and motivated, and spies need to be reassured that measures are being taken to help them escape if their cover is blown.

 Keep in mind, when the spy has delivered the needed information, that does not ensure that the operation was a success. Information is but one component of policy making. Will the leadership believe the information? Will they interpret it correctly, or will they disregard it?

 This course will also speak to signi¿cant debates about espionage and covert operations, including their real importance. Is espionage really the secret history behind history, as is sometimes claimed? By the end of this course, I hope you will have your own considered opinion in this debate and a wealth of details to support your argument.

 Another theme we will pursue is how the practice of espionage has evolved and become professionalized. This is not to put down amateurs but to note that over time, espionage has been turned into a business involving training, regular procedure, centralized control, and standardized methods.

 A third debate we will follow concerns a question of tremendous importance for our own times: What, if any, is the appropriate role of spying or secrecy in an open society? Is perfect transparency possible or desirable?

 Finally, the overall theme of this course might best be described as the “myth of the spy”—that is, the place of the spy, espionage, and covert operations in society and culture. We will track how spies have been understood in different ways in different societies over the centuries.

9 

 Spy stories seem to offer us a hint of the fuller, bigger picture of how world politics works. That is the launching premise of this course: For a full comprehension of the forces at work in international politics, we must understand the intriguing, secret role of espionage and the shadowy world of covert operations.

Important Terms

agent: A gatherer of intelligence or someone sent on a covert operation.

brush pass: In tradecraft, a meeting between an agent and a handler that appears random or accidental but allows a message to be secretly passed between them.

case of¿ cer: The superior of an agent; also called a handler.

counterintelligence: Any activity meant to frustrate intelligence gathering.

cover: A pretended identity to conceal an agent.

covert operations: Secret activity to achieve a speci¿c end, without the author being detected.

dead drop: In tradecraft, a prearranged place where a message can be left for a handler by an agent without the two ever meeting in person.

disinformation: False information deliberately passed to the enemy.

double agent: An agent who pretends to work for the opposing side.

ELINT: Electronic intelligence, intercepting communications of the opposing side.

espionage: The gathering of information by secret, often illegal, means.

handler: The superior of an agent, also called a case of¿ cer.

10 

HUMINT: Human intelligence; the use of a human agent to gather intelligence.

intelligence: Information that can be used to shape policy.

mole: An agent in¿ltrated into the structures of the opposing side who burrows in and works as a double agent.

open society: A social system with a public sphere independent of the state.

plausible deniability: The quality of realistically being able to deny involvement in a covert action.

provocation: A deliberate misleading of the opposing side to incite action that compromises or damages their reputation.

redundancy: A deliberate duplication, whether of channels of information or of chains of responsibility, to maximize the chances for success.

SIGINT: Signals intelligence, the use of interceptions of enemy communication by technical means, as opposed to human intelligence.

sleeper: An agent sent to in¿ltrate the structures of the opposing side with the long-term goal of being ready to be activated at some crucial future time.

spy panic: Mass social hysteria based on fears of in¿ ltration by enemy agents.

tradecraft: The set of maxims and rules distilled from past experience of espionage or covert actions.

transparency: The extent to which a society or institution is marked by openness of access and information.

triple agent: An agent who pretends to be a double agent but actually is still loyal to his or her original employer.

11 

Name to Know

Agent R65 (dates unknown): The vulture arrested as a spy in Saudi Arabia in 2011.

Suggested Reading

Allen, Declassi¿ed.

Crowdy, The Enemy Within.

Haswell, Spies and Spymasters.

Hitz, The Great Game.

Keegan, Intelligence in War.

Questions to Consider

1. Why do you think the subject of espionage and covert operations exerts such a fascination for so many people?

2. How do you view a spy: as an object of suspicion or as a daring adventurer? Why?

12 

Ancient Espionage Lecture 2

n prehistoric times as well as ancient Egypt, India, China, Greece, and Rome, covert operations were a tool of politics and war, their power symbolized by the legend of the Trojan Horse. Our earliest evidence of intelligence work comes from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, and we know from the Bible that spies were used not only by political rivals but also by religious ones in ancient Israel. Even in espionage’s earliest days, we will

see that different civilizations had very different views of spying.

 Espionage and covert action have been tools of politics and war from prehistoric times. Rich myth, legend, and historical fact have surrounded these activities from the start. These earliest experiences enlighten us with patterns and strategies that recur into our own day.

 While the earliest espionage is lost in the mists of time, we can discern that it had ties to religion. In a way, this makes perfect sense. Religious teaching seeks to provide explanations for the unknown.

 In later ages, priests were often the ones who guarded knowledge and knew how to read and write. They thus were keepers of crucial, and often secret, information, whether religious or secular. We will see a link between espionage and religion again and again.

 Espionage ¿rst appears in the written historical record around 2000 B.C. on a clay tablet found on the banks of the Euphrates River. It contains a letter from a commander named Bannum to his warlord, informing him that villages of foreigners along the border were exchanging ¿re signals and he would seek to ¿nd out what they meant.

13 

 Some of the earliest surviving diplomatic correspondence details interactions between Egypt and the Hittite Empire, around 1320 B.C. The widow of Pharaoh Tutankhamun wrote to the Hittites asking for a new husband from their elite now that her husband the boy-king had died.

 The Bible is full of spy stories, showing a conÀicted and ambivalent evaluation of intelligence work. Moses sent spies to scout out the land of Canaan as the Hebrews prepared to enter. The spies reported that the lands were very fertile and came carrying proof in the form of fruit, but the people doubted and thus continued to wander in the desert.

 Around 1200 B.C., Joshua sent spies into Jericho. These are the men who used the prostitute Rahab’s home as a safe house, in exchange for the safety of her family. Rahab hid them from the king’s forces under bundles of Àax in a room along the city’s wall, so they were able to escape over the wall when the searchers departed. When the Israelites captured the city, she and her relatives were indeed spared.

 Samson, an Israelite champion and strongman, was betrayed and brought low by one of the prototypes of the femme fatale, Delilah. When Samson fell in love with her, the Philistine kings bribed her into seeking the secret of his power. After three times deceiving her, Samson ¿nally admitted his secret.

 The ultimate trope of betrayal comes in the Christian New Testament, when Judas Iscariot handed Jesus over to the Roman authorities for silver. This scene became a classic reference for the spy as both traitor and as doomed, for later Judas repented and hanged himself.

 We get a very different view of spying from the traditions of other civilizations, particularly in Asian contexts.

14 

 Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a guide to royal rule, is a Hindu text dating to around 300 B.C. It is exhaustive, covering topics such as how to hire good ministers, how forts should be built, how to train elephants, and so forth. Prominent among these tips is the role of spying.

 Kautilya includes a long list of spy types: spies on the spot, merchant spies, wandering agents, poisoners, begging women, and spies disguised as holy men or holy women.

 A good candidate for a spy would be “a skillful person capable of guessing the mind of others” and “possessed of foresight and pure character.” Such spies are to be recruited with honor and gold, sent out to observe the king’s of¿cials and to uncover abuses.

 Kautilya also said that spying should be effectively organized, not just ad hoc—there should be an “institute of espionage” to collect and verify information. Information should be veri¿ed from three independent streams of intelligence.

 Spies should be set to hunt down enemy spies—to perform counterintelligence. Spying in times of war encompassed poison, sabotage, and psychological warfare. Spies in¿ ltrated the enemy state to spread dissension and suspicion through rumors, disinformation, bribes, and sabotage.

 Another legendary ¿gure in Indian folklore was the poison damsel, who was supposed to be fed poisons from childhood so that she herself gradually became immune but would be toxic to any man lured into becoming her lover. As with Delilah in the Bible, the notion of the fatal female was a prominent theme.

 In the vast Persian Empire of around 500 B.C., internal intelligence gathering was a function within the administrative setup known as a satrapy system. Individual satraps, or governors, ruled over smaller administrative units within the empire.

15 

 A satrap could be tremendously powerful. Therefore, the Greek historian Xenophon noted, they were subject to inspection, either open or secret, by of¿cials called the king’s brother or the king’s eye, starting with the reign of King Cyrus the Great.

 Sometimes news of inspectors on their way would reach the satraps, but then no inspector would arrive—the implication being that mere awareness of being under observation might bring the satraps in line.

 Such inspectors traveled along specially constructed royal roads covering over 8,000 miles of Persian territory. Xenophon describes how Cyrus the Great also set up a network of horse relays, resembling the Pony Express, with relay stations with fresh horses for messengers, each a day’s ride apart.

 Here is one of the great differences between the espionage of the premodern age and the 20th century: the speed of communications. Only with the advent of radio would so-called real-time intelligence ¿nally be possible.

 Human and psychological insights were also at work in the Persian approach to intelligence. The Greek historian Herodotus tells us how the Persian king Xerxes treated three Greek spies sent to Sardis to observe his army. They were caught and sentenced to death, but Xerxes suspended the sentence and had them brought before him.

 He asked the spies about their orders. They told him they were to observe the military power of the Persians. Xerxes then had them escorted all around the camps, shown the infantry regiments, the cavalry, everything, and then sent them home, where they were sure to report all they had seen.

16 

 Xerxes reasoned that killing the three men would not much affect the war effort of his Greek enemies, but sp`reading the word about the greatness of his army might just make the Greeks surrender. Xerxes was ¿ghting using psychological warfare and that most potent of weapons, the truth.

 Special mention must be made of the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War around 490 B.C. This short set of maxims and insights is still studied avidly today.

 The ¿nal chapter of this work was devoted entirely to espionage, and its importance was underlined from the beginning with the maxim that “All warfare is based on deception.”

 Sun Tzu urged that one should always deceive the enemy, offering bait for his destruction. There is no place where espionage should not be used. The key is to achieve foreknowledge.

 To use spies effectively, one must oneself be subtle, wise, and delicate. Self-knowledge is thus key. Sun Tzu urges generous payment for spies because of their importance. This points also to a fascinating motive for the emphasis on spying: economics.

 Turning westward again, classical Greece and Rome give us a paradigmatic story of a covert operations: the legend of the Trojan Horse. After the Greeks’ 10-year siege of Troy, the city was captured by a ruse. The Greeks built a huge wooden horse outside the city walls and then sailed away—or pretended to, as inside the hollow horse was a unit of top Greek warriors, waiting for their chance.

 One Greek was left behind to convince the Trojans the horse was an offering to Athena for safe travel home. The Trojans rejoiced at the lifting of the siege and dragged the victory trophy into the city.

17 

 When night fell, the concealed warriors poured out of the horse, opened the city gates to the returning Greek forces, and the city was captured. Today, computer viruses and malware downloaded by an unsuspected user are sometimes called Trojans, speaking to the enduring lessons of this myth.

 Spartan society developed a form of internal surveillance remarkable for its brutality. To keep its slave population under control, the state appointed young military trainees to act as secret police, to ferret out attempts

at slave revolt.

 Every year, the Spartan state ritually declared war on its slaves. This chilling      practice      eerily points     forward     to the practices of     20th-century totalitarian states.

 Later, Alexander the Great used postal censorship to check morale among his troops. Tradition relates that when Alexander was besieging Persian forces at Halicarnassus, he became aware of grumbling and resentment in his army.

So he made an exception Espionage is not a modern invention. Alexander the Great spied on his

letting soldiers write home. own troops. When they had written

their letters, they were collected by a messenger, then intercepted by Alexander. Those writers who seemed at the heart of the disaffection were removed.

18 

 The Greeks also practiced early and primitive forms of coded messaging. In our own times, a page of text can be miniaturized to a dot the size of a period in a sentence in a newspaper. The Greek version was an animal bladder that was blown up like a balloon, a message written on it, then the bladder was deÀated and slipped into an oil Àask. The recipient extracted the bladder and reinÀ ated it to read the message.

 More painful was the anecdote in Herodotus of a ruler who shaved the head of a slave and had his message tattooed on the slave’s scalp. After the slave’s hair had grown back, he was sent on his mission and reshaved on arrival.

 The Romans were also keenly appreciative of the importance of intelligence. Each of Julius Caesar’s legions had 10 speculators, or scouts, whose task was gathering information. Caesar used intelligence in his invasion of Britain in 55 B.C.—or tried to, but could not gather much information. As a result, his two invasions of Britain were repulsed, and Roman conquest did not come until later.

 Scipio Africanus, famous for his defeat of Hannibal of Carthage, greatly valued information and sent envoys to negotiate with the enemy but assigned to them centurions pretending to be slaves. They could stage a diversion, like chasing a runaway horse, while actually noting information on the enemy camp.

 A crisis came when one disguised centurion was recognized by an enemy of¿cer as a classmate from Greece. The envoy in charge had to react fast, and had the “slave” beaten for the crime of acting proud like a Roman to keep the cover.And it worked; the Numidian of¿cer apologized for his mistake.

19 

Important Terms

Arthashastra: The classic text by Indian statesman Kautilya on the use of spies in statecraft, written c. 300 B.C.

Art of War: The classic text by Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, written c. 490 B.C., proclaiming that deception is always a part of war.

Trojan Horse: The classic legend of the use of subterfuge (in the form of troops inside a wooden horse) to defeat Troy.

Names to Know

Cyrus the Great (c. 600 B.C.): Famed Persian ruler and supposed builder of the Persian road system who used spies, or the threat of spies, to keep his own administrators in line.

Delilah (dates unknown): Biblical archetype of the femme fatale, the betrayer of Samson the Israelite strongman.

Iscariot, Judas (À . 1st century A.D.): Biblical archetype of the traitor, who handed Jesus Christ over to the authorities for silver and, according to one biblical account, afterward hanged himself in despair.

Kautilya (4th century B.C.): Ancient Indian statesman and author of the Arthashastra text on statecraft, which included advice on espionage.

Rahab (dates unknown): in the Bible’s book of Joshua, a prostitute living in Jericho who hid Israelite spies and in return was spared when the city fell.

Sun Tzu (À . 5th century B.C.): Chinese philosopher and author of The Art of War.

20 

Suggested Reading

Crowdy, The Enemy Within.

Haswell, Spies and Spymasters.

Huang, Sun Tzu: The New Translation.

Questions to Consider

1. What accounts for the linkage between espionage and religious practice and faith?

2. Is Sun Tzu’s teaching uniquely Chinese, or does it have close equivalents in other ancient cultures?

21 

Medieval and Renaissance Spying Lecture 3

n the premodern period, international politics and diplomacy evolved in close association with the tradecraft of espionage. We will look in particular detail at the intelligencers of the European Middle Ages and

their ties to commerce, heraldry, and chivalry; the myth-shrouded ninjas of medieval Japan; the Mongol’s outsourcing of espionage, as witnessed by Marco Polo; and Marco Polo’s other great encounter with professional agents, the Assassin religious sect in the Middle East.

 The year is A.D. 827, and the place is the port city of Alexandria, Egypt. Two merchants from Venice, Bonus and Rusticus, are here on a potentially dangerous mission. They are here to steal a saint. The art of relic theft, once common in the Middle Ages, is largely unknown today.

 With the decline of the classical world and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476, the world’s political map underwent great changes. The Roman Catholic Church was in many ways the sole institution of imperial administration in Europe. Its international scope meant that its intelligence gathering could be far-reaching.

 Over the course of the Middle Ages, new states were established that sought to regain some of the scope of the Roman Empire. Charlemagne cooperated with the church, which crowned him “king of the Romans” in the year 800. Out of his Carolingian Empire would emerge the kingdoms of France and Germany.

 In the East, Rome endured in the form of the Byzantine Empire. At ¿rst, its socially dominant group were men of war, and there were wars aplenty for them to ¿ght—against each other, against Viking marauders, against invaders from Asia like the Huns and Mongols, and against a dynamic and militant new faith called Islam that emerged in Arabia in the early 7th century.

22 

 After the death of Muhammad, the Arab Muslim society was united under a caliph, giving political form to the religious community. In the decades afterwards, Muslim society expanded its territory with great rapidity, defeating the Persians, Byzantine Syria, and Egypt, and in about 710 invading Spain.

 Under such pressures and in mutual competition, European states grew and developed. In this context, information became even more crucial. At ¿rst, no state had an organized bureaucracy for

intelligence gathering. Espionage was carried out by amateur

“intelligencers”—church of¿cials, experts in chivalry and heraldry, and merchants.

 Church of¿cials were plugged in to intricate networks of communication and administration. Simply by being literate, they had greater access to information than the masses. Chivalry experts, particularly troubadours and heralds, moved from court to court, collecting and as passing on intelligence.

 Businessmen and merchants have always been active gatherers of intelligence. Their livelihood could depend on knowledge of economic conditions, trade routes, and political realities. Moreover, merchants also needed to make use of practices we associate with espionage, such as cryptography, given the con¿dential nature of some of their undertakings.

 The experience of medieval merchants points to a theme in our course: the way in which intelligence gathering is of importance not just in times of war but in times of peace and commerce.

 An unsurpassed example of the merchant in search of intelligence is the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who during the late 13th century journeyed from Italy through the Middle East, then along the Silk Road to China and the Mongol court of Emperor Kublai Khan. Much of what Polo saw and learned was so fantastic that he was often not believed.

23 

 One of the great covert operations of the age involved religion and commerce—the Venetian theft of the relics of Saint Mark from Alexandria. The merchants would later claim they were saving the relics from destruction by the city’sArab governor.

 As the story goes, they replaced the body of Saint Mark with that of another saint and carried the relics onto their ship in baskets, covered with pork. The merchants were allowed to carry the baskets onto their ship past Muslim guards unwilling to touch the pork, which they judged unclean. After a voyage across the Mediterranean, the relics found their home in the basilica of his name, where they rest to this day.

 In a real sense, this covert operation was also an act of economic espionage because cities with famous relics also attracted pilgrims. The economic gain to Venice also sealed its reputation as the great trading hub of its day.

 Intelligence was crucial in the Crusades. While the campaigns in the Middle East are well known, fewer people know about the Baltic Crusade in northeastern Europe, where German knights of the Teutonic Order—military monks—fought the Prussians, Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians in the 14th century.

 Between the castles of the Teutonic Knights and the Lithuanian settlements lay a hundred miles of wilderness, across which the Crusaders launched regular campaigns, aided by local scouts.

 So regular were these campaigns that they produced the Lithuanian Road Reports (Litauische Wegberichte), a kind of travel guide for Crusaders along the Baltic. Compiled from 1384 to 1402, these speci¿ed routes into this hostile territory.

24 

 A Crusades-era legend, unsupported by evidence, involves a troubadour and the British king Richard I, better known as Richard the Lionheart. It starts with a basis in fact: Richard, on his way to join the Third Crusade, was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria, who imprisoned him at Dürnstein Castle on the Danube River.

 In the story, Richard had disappeared and no one knew where he was, so the brave French troubadour Blondel went in search of his friend the king. Blondel went from castle to castle across Europe, singing a song that only he and King Richard knew, until at Dürnstein, a voice from a tower sang the second verse back to him.

 This story seems perfect, but in fact there was no secret about where Richard was being held. One scholar suggests that the Blondel story was a cover story, meant to hide the fact that the English court had other intelligence sources that allowed them to track Richard’s fate.

 By the time of the Hundred Years’War between England and France (1337–1453), the use of spies was becoming open and accepted. In 1418, when the British were rampaging in Normandy, Henry V of England ordered that French priests were not to be harmed.

 One chronicler records that Henry’s army camps were visited by numbers of tonsured men dressed in priestly robes. Meanwhile, Henry had expelled all French monks from England. Were these spies dressed as priests or priests who were also spies? At least one canon at Notre Dame in Paris, Jean Fusoris, was known to have spied for the English.

 But at the same time that espionage was becoming a matter-of-fact part of warfare, there were limits on how acceptable covert action would be. The famous Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of the man who became Pope Alexander VI and a member of the important Borgia family, acquired notoriety as a poisoner of her dinner guests. Important though her family was, this was beyond the pale.

25 

 Elsewhere in the world, the use of spies was perfected in different ways. The Mongol Empire, united by Genghis Khan in the 10th and early 11th centuries, embraced not only Mongolia but China, Korea, and Persia, and in the 1230s they attacked Europe. Their great asset was speed of advance

and surprise, made possible by a cavalry of fast ponies and expert horsemen.

 Marco Polo reported on the pony relays established by the Mongol state, by which a message could be moved 150 miles a day. In a raid on Hungary in 1241, the Mongols were able to move 180 miles in three days.

 A problem for the intelligence-

gathering efforts of the Marco Polo’s tales of the Mongol court were not just entertaining;

noticeably ethnically different they were valuable intelligence. from Europeans. If they were

seen, the element of surprise would be lost. Thus, the Mongols practiced what we would call the outsourcing of intelligence gathering—using non-Mongols to scout European territory.

 The Mongols were not able to conquer Japan, which had developed its own tradition of espionage and covert action. Its experts at secret action were the ninjas. What people today think they know about the ninjas is actually myth. The reality is actually more interesting.

The homeland of the ninja was the province of Iga, which had some measure of independence and autonomy. From 1494, local peasants

and warriors had what historians have called a microrepublic. Their

warriors were called jizamurai—that is, “samurai of the soil”— and they created leagues for cooperation against outside warlords.

26 

 The independent microrepublic was successful for about a century, but by the 1580s the area was devastated by warlords. The ninja tradition grew out of the Iga locals’ resistance to these occupiers. Iga peasant ¿ghters needed stealth and hit-and-run tactics. They thus developed ninjutsu, the art of being invisible. There was a class element at work here; irregular warfare was a way of striking back at those of a higher status that was denied to the Iga warriors.

 Their fame spread in Japan, and warlords would hire ninjas from Iga as castle guards, intelligence agents, and scouts against enemy forces and castles. One historian has called them “a sort of early modern SWAT team.” From these origins, stories of the almost magical powers of the ninja proliferated. The Iga people moreover started inventing stories (and documents) that suggested that the ninja had been active for centuries.

 Another fusion of religious faith and covert action is seen in the Assassins, a small group of Shia Muslims active from around the time of the First Crusade of 1095 until 1256. Their base was the mountain fortress of Alamut in northern Syria. Marco Polo tells us their leader was called the Old Man of the Mountains, or Aloadin.

 The Old Man drugged his followers—young men from 12 to 20 years old—with hashish and transported them to his fortress paradise; hence the sect was called the Hasishin, or hashish-eaters.

 After having experienced what they thought was paradise, so determined were the young men to regain this blessed state that they would follow any and all orders of the Old Man, including orders to kill. Thus we derive our modern word for a hired killer, “assassin,” from this sect. Marco Polo explains that the local princes were so afraid of these trained killers that they lavished the Old Man with tribute to be spared.

27 

 The sect was ¿ nally destroyed when the Mongols starved them out in their mountain fortress and leveled the arti¿cial paradise in 1256. This story has eerie echoes into our own time, with religiously motivated terrorism and violence a continuing threat and suicide bombers promised paradise by their superiors.

 With the Renaissance came new strategies of state organization, which would affect practices of espionage as well. Among the political developments of the age were the beginnings of modern diplomacy. Diplomacy has always included the potential for espionage, given that so much of diplomacy is about secrets.

 Diplomats often could be, and were assumed to function as, spies but usually enjoyed diplomatic immunity. It was assumed that the diplomat worked both openly and secretly for the advantage of his state. This led a British ambassador to Venice to joke that “an ambassador is an honest man [who is] sent to lie abroad for his country.”

 The person most associated with this new, realistic, and openly competitive political thinking was Niccolò Machiavelli, who thought about statecraft in new, some say more cynical, ways.

Important Terms

heraldry: Chivalric discipline concerning the etiquette of noble warfare and coats of arms.

intelligencers: Early spies in the Middle Ages.

Lithuanian Road Reports: Crusader guides to raiding routes into the Baltic, produced from 1384 to 1402.

28 

Names to Know

Blondel (À. late 12th century A.D.): Legendary medieval troubadour who was supposed to have located the imprisoned King Richard I of England by covert means.

Borgia, Lucrezia (1480–1519): Italian noblewoman who was rumored to be a talented poisoner with political motivations.

Fusoris, Jean (c. 1365–1436): French canon of Notre Dame Cathedral tried for spying for the English during the Hundred Years’War.

Polo, Marco (1254–1324): Famed Venetian explorer and merchant who gathered intelligence from the Near East to China.

Suggested Reading

Geary, Furta Sacra.

Souyri, “Autonomy and War in the Sixteenth-Century Iga Region.”

Wright, God’s Soldiers.

Questions to Consider

1. Who would make the better spy, a merchant or a troubadour? Why?

2. What was the key to the success of the Assassins?

29 

Spies of the Elizabethan Age Lecture 4

s religious wars wracked Europe, Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, built the institutional basis for an intelligence service in England, defeating both internal plots and Spain’s

plans for invasion. Walsingham is a perfect study in the personality of the intelligence worker, and the system he built is an excellent example of a nascent intelligence organization.

 Imagine you are an able government of¿cial in Europe around 1573. You know spies are abroad in the kingdom, sent by foreign powers to prepare for invasion or assassinate your monarch, but your kingdom has no intelligence agency or counterintelligence service. How would you set about creating one?

 The Protestant Reformation, which was launched in 1517 by the German monk Martin Luther, quickly descended into vast violence—Christians

killing Christians over points of doctrine. The religious wars have been compared to the cold war, with different ideologies facing off against one another.

 

 The Jesuit order, formally the Society of Jesus, founded in 1534 by former Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola, was not created to oppose Protestantism,        but        this quickly became one of their major charges.

 

Elizabeth I had the world’s ¿ rst modern espionage organization.

 

30 

 Jesuits acquired political inÀuence by becoming confessors and spiritual advisors to important Catholic kings, queens, and princes. Jesuit schools were known for their high quality and the imprint they left on those who had attended them. In their extensive missionary activity, the Jesuits formed a global network of contacts, from Europe to the New World to Asia.

 In Protestant communities, the Jesuits were feared and suspected of conspiracy and hypocrisy. Jesuits, they claimed, were masters of religious deception, leading people astray with sophisticated arguments, twisting logic and truth for their goals. Hence, even today the term “Jesuitical” is not a compliment.

 Politically, Spain and France were the leading Catholic powers; England, Protestants hoped, might prove their champion after Henry VIII broke with the pope and his subjects moved toward Protestantism. The Tudor consolidation of political and religious authority would continue under the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I. (r. 1558–1603).

 Elizabeth would have preferred to avoid religious controversy, but in 1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated her and ordered her deposition by faithful Catholics. A few months after this decree, a copy of it was nailed to the door of the Bishop of London during the night. The English Catholic who did this was hunted down, tortured, and executed.

 English Catholic priests trained abroad were smuggled back into England to celebrate Mass and spread the message of revolt. Soon more than 100 priests were secretly active in England, sheltering in priest holes—hiding places in the houses of English Catholics.

 Priest takers hunted these clerics from town to town and subjected captured priests to torture and death. Among the most famous of these priests was a Jesuit named Edmund Campion, who was later canonized as a Catholic saint.

31 

 This period saw the growth of espionage as a professional service. Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth from 1573 to 1590, has been called the father of modern intelligence.

 A Protestant gentleman and Cambridge-educated lawyer who had lived in exile in Italy during the reign of Elizabeth’s Catholic sister, Mary Tudor, Walsingham was Àuent in French and Italian. When the queen’s ministers noticed his talents, he was hired to seek out foreign spies in London.

 From 1570 to 1573, he was English ambassador to the French court. On his return, he became a member of the Privy Council and was principal secretary (secretary of state) from 1573 to his death in 1590.

 Walsingham had two mottoes: “I think it less danger to fear too much than too little” and “knowledge is never too dear.” Walsingham wore black clothes, a stark white collar, and a black skullcap, which emphasized his shadowy features, especially at a court where splendid dress was the rule. It was said he had the gift of silence, the ability to watch and listen. He was a man of strong, stern beliefs, a determined Puritan.

 Walsingham organized a cohort of agents, informers, and spies, blending domestic and foreign observation. They included merchants, seamen, fugitives, foreign exiles, renegade English Catholics, cryptologists, and noted writers—perhaps including the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 29.

 It was not yet a professional bureaucracy, however, and most agents were in it for the money, sometimes paid out of Walsingham’s own pocket. He did not use his role to enrich himself, yet it was a network built around Walsingham, not the state.

32 

 Walsingham saw two main dangers to England: First, the external danger of Catholic Spain, its King Philip II, and its potential alliance with Catholic France; second, the internal threat from Mary Stuart, the Catholic Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s heir.

 Mary had Àed an uprising in Scotland in 1568, seeking refuge in England. She was not classically beautiful but had charisma, and Elizabeth and Walsingham felt her presence was a risk. Walsingham watched and waited, ¿nally getting a tip about a man named Francis Throckmorton who acted as a courier between Mary and the French.

 Walsingham did not order his men to swoop in and seize Throckmorton and the other plotters but bided his time, hoping to unravel the whole network. Walsingham had his agents burst into Throckmorton’s London home in 1583, just as he was encoding a list of English Catholic nobles and gentlemen loyal to Mary.

 Under torture, Throckmorton revealed plans for a French and Spanish invasion and named his fellow conspirators, including the French and Spanish ambassadors to London. The Spanish ambassador was expelled, but the French ambassador, whose servant had tipped Walsingham off about Throckmorton in the ¿ rst place, was allowed to remain to protect the servant.

 Throckmorton was hung, drawn, and quartered. Queen Mary had been subtle in writing and had never overtly supported the plotters, so she escaped prosecution. In response, Walsingham concocted the Babington Plot to trap her.

 Walsingham acquired a double agent among Mary’s supporters, an ex-seminarian named Gilbert Gifford. He volunteered as the courier between the French Embassy in London and Mary, who was under house arrest. Gifford snuck coded messages into Mary’s home in stoppered tubes hidden in beer barrels—all, unbeknownst to Mary and the French, arranged by Walsingham.

33 

 Among Mary’s supporters in London were 13 young and disorganized men organizing a rebellion around a 25-year-old law student named Anthony Babington, to be launched with the assassination of Elizabeth. They met frequently, planning constantly, rather than taking action. Gifford and other double agents became part of the group.

 Babington wrote out the details of the plot and sent the plan to Mary for her approval. In July 1586, Mary replied, implicating herself and sealing her fate. Before Babington read the note, Walsingham’s code breakers read it and added a postscript asking for the names of all the plotters. At this point, Babington discovered that one of his friends was an agent for Walsingham.

 The plotters tried to Àee, mostly without success. One reason is that they had posed for a group portrait with Babington at the center and thus could be readily identi¿ed. All the plotters were captured and, in September 1586, drawn and quartered.

 After having been held under house arrest for 18 years, Queen Mary was put on trial in 1586. She denied everything and accused Walsingham of forgery but was ultimately convicted. Mary was executed on February 8, 1587.

 The next year, King Philip of Spain attempted to invade England by sea. The attack of the Spanish Armada has been called the worst-kept secret of the Elizabethan age. Philip II even complained to the pope that his plans spread so quickly, it must have been done by black magic.

 Walsingham used these leaks to get advance warning of the Armada, but Philip’s planning was so irresolute that the intelligence did not determine the outcome. Rather, the Spanish À eet was weakened by superior British seamanship and a “Protestant wind”—a storm that savaged the Àeet. Still, Walsingham was congratulated for winning the war with his pen.

34 

 Despite Walsingham’s triumphs, he died poor and miserable in 1590, having bankrupted himself in the service of Elizabeth, who would not repay his loyalty. Many of his tradecraft secrets would be lost, and his organization dissolved.

 The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was a plot directed against the son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James I of England, who succeeded Elizabeth. Led by Guy Fawkes, this group of English Catholics intended to kill James and the Protestant nobility by blowing up Parliament on its State Opening Day.

 One of the conspirators rented a chamber under Parliament. Gunpowder barrels were to be assembled there secretly, and Fawkes would light a slow fuse, then slip away by boat and head for Europe. The plot was exposed when one of the plotters warned the Catholic leader Lord Monteagle to stay away from the opening ceremonies.

 Monteagle informed the secretary of state, Robert Cecil. A midnight search of Parliament uncovered Fawkes attending to 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement. The conspirators were captured and executed. Among their number was a Jesuit priest who was implicated for having heard the plotters’ confessions.

 Some scholars have argued that this plot was so poorly managed that it must have been a provocation meant to discredit the Catholic minority. Some speculate it was Cecil’s work, but the evidence does not seem to bear this out.

 The memory of the plot left deep marks. Its foiling was seen as a sign of divine favor. A national holiday, Guy Fawkes Day, grew up around this event, which is also remembered in a nursery rhyme: “Remember, remember the ¿fth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”

35 

Important Terms

Babington Plot: An English conspiracy in 1585–1586, uncovered by Sir Francis Walsingham, to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and incite a national revolt to restore Catholicism. In¿ltration of the plot led to the execution of the participants and of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Gunpowder Plot: A conspiracy in England in 1605 to blow up King James I and Parliament. Discovery of the conspiracy led to the execution of its planners, including Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes Day: An English national holiday every November 5, harkening back to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, with Guy Fawkes burnt in ef¿ gy.

Names to Know

Babington, Anthony (1561–1586): English Catholic gentleman at the center of conspiracy to kill Queen Elizabeth I and restore Catholicism to England.

Campion, Edmund (1540–1581): English Jesuit captured on mission to England; tried, executed, and canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.

Fawkes, Guy (1570–1606): English mercenary with a leading role in the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

Gifford, Gilbert (1560–1590): Walsingham’s double agent inside the Babington Plot.

Throckmorton, Francis (1554–1584): English Catholic gentleman at the center of a plot, exposed in 1583, for a French invasion of England that would depose Elizabeth I and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne.

Walsingham, Sir Francis (c. 1532–1590): Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster and principal secretary of the Privy Council.

36 

Suggested Reading

Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster.

Parker, “The Worst-Kept Secret in Europe?”

Questions to Consider

1. What motivated Sir Francis Walsingham to bankrupt himself in the service of his queen?

2. Do you see Walsingham as admirable or disturbing? Why?

37 

Spies in the Age of Discovery Lecture 5

uring the Enlightenment, court intrigue reached new heights, now extending worldwide through great empires in which diplomacy and espionage were intertwined. While the Spanish explored the

New World with the help of the intelligence work performed by the Jesuits, Cardinal Richelieu masterminded France’s espionage network. In this remarkable age, two truly remarkable characters stand out: the infamous Italian lover Casanova and the mysterious Chevalier d’Eon, a French master spy who passed as both a man and woman in an international career of espionage.

 The centuries after Europeans arrived in the New World were an exciting and dangerous period of discovery and competition. Trade, missionary activity, and military expansion began to encompass the globe. The European powers competed with one another in an intense rivalry to possess both new lands and new ideas.

 Much of the work of exploration was undertaken not by centralized governments but by merchants, traders, and trappers, who lived and thrived on information about new lands. So-called voyageurs trekked across the huge expanses of North America far in advance of European political presence.

 In an outgrowth of the religious conÀicts of the Reformation, a special role was played by the Jesuits, who energetically expanded into Asia and the Americas. The Jesuit Relations contain the vast collection of the letters and reports sent from Jesuits working abroad to their superiors during these 200 years.

 As missionaries, the Jesuits aimed to “be all things to all men.” This meant learning local languages, gaining intelligence on the lands and societies they were encountering, and ¿nding ways to accommodate Christian beliefs to local contexts.

38 

 In China, Jesuits cultivated the Confucian scholars and shared their scienti¿c and literary knowledge. But this kind of intelligence gathering would lead some to suspect the Jesuits of being spies. Father Samuel Fritz, who worked as a missionary in the upper Amazon in the 1680s, was imprisoned by the Portuguese, who were convinced he was a Spanish spy.

 Meanwhile, Western Europeans were learning more about their mysterious neighbor, Russia. Tsar Ivan IV (r. 1547–1584), known as Ivan the Terrible, began reaching out to his fellow monarchs— sometimes peacefully,

sometimes violently. He established peaceful diplomatic      and trade relations     with     England but sought access to the Baltic Sea by making war in Livonia (what is today     Estonia     and Latvia) against     Poland and Sweden.

 Internally, Ivan was also constructing a new kind of secret service. He

had come to the throne

Ivan the Terrible established a tradition of terrorizing his own citizens that,

unfortunately, lasted for centuries. wracked with plotting

and violence, which made him ever-after distrustful of his nobility. The result was the oprichnina, a territory under the tsar’s direct, unmediated control.

 Ivan formed a bodyguard of 6,000 men, the oprichniki, “men set apart.” Ivan openly set them on the nobles he distrusted. They dressed all in black, rode black horses, and tied to their saddles the symbol of their organization: a broom topped with a dog’s head.

39 

They worked on the basis of denunciations and became famous for their horrible acts. Their greatest atrocity was a mass execution of about 60,000 citizens of Novgorod in the year 1570.

 The rule of this secret service lasted seven years, until Ivan became disappointed even with his henchmen and dissolved the regime, making sure to have the former agents killed too. Now it became a capital crime to even mention the oprichniki. Ivan became increasingly unhinged, eventually killing his own son and heir. Nonetheless, he had established a tradition of inner policing and terror in Russia.

 By this juncture, it was generally understood that intelligence gathering was an important function of a modern state. France was now the world’s superpower, and King Louis XIII’s main advisor was Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, who served as chief minister from 1624 to 1642. In Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Richelieu is a villain, but the real man was far more interesting.

 Richelieu established an elaborate spy network, and other nations followed his example. Richelieu preferred to hire British spies, ¿nding them especially professional. Yet his corps’s methods could be shockingly primitive.

 Enlightenment thinkers believed that most, if not all, human problems and social challenges could be met by the application of reason and science. Rationality, not revealed religion or faith, should rule. Immanuel Kant de¿ned this movement as man’s self-emancipation.

 This mode of thought could be especially appealing to government of¿cials. Many of them subscribed to a school of thought called cameralism, which stressed that good government was a science, and good science required clear information about the area being administered.

40 

 Such close intelligence was called Polizei, and thus the ideal of cameralist administrators was the well-ordered police state. What an irony that what we today call the epitome of an unfree society, a police state, was then held up as an ideal.

 Today, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova is remembered not for his writing or social glamour but as a compulsive womanizer—or, less kindly, a sex addict. In his own day, he was famous as an adventurer and social high À ier.

 Born in a declining Venice in 1725, Casanova studied law in Padua, then traveled around Europe trailing scandal wherever he went. He was, in essence, a con man. His escape from Venetian prison made him famous in France, and he was hired by the French foreign minister to spy on the British Àeet during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).

 Casanova traveled incognito to Dunkirk, France, where the British Àeet was docked. He had been warned by his French patron that this was a dangerous task and, were he caught, the French “should be obliged to know nothing about [him].”

 In Dunkirk, Casanova gained acceptance into polite society, meeting British naval of¿cers in social gatherings, who even invited him to dine on their ships. He did on occasion have a hard time making himself inconspicuous, as he always seemed to create a stir wherever he went. But he was ultimately successful in his task and was richly rewarded for his venture.

 Later, Casanova tried to engage in industrial espionage in London in 1763, offering to sell to the Venetian ambassador a lucrative new trade secret, a process for dying cotton cloth bright red but was refused.

 His memoirs do not dwell his role late in life as an informer for the Venetian State Inquisitors, who were responsible for internal tranquility. They apparently did little in terms of active repression;

41 

their acts were often limited to stern warnings or threats of banishment, but their reach was impressive. In fact, years earlier this network had reported on Casanova himself.

 Consider also the almost unbelievable story of the Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont, or simply the Chevalier d’Éon. This French master spy passed as both a man and woman during an international career of espionage. Born in 1728 to a family of lesser nobility with a long line of eccentric ancestors, he became one of the foremost spies of the period.

 People speculated on his gender, and indeed there were bets placed on the question and traded in London’s mercantile coffeehouses. Medical exams were contradictory: one had declared d’Éon female, but a postmortem in 1810 declared him to be a male.

 A child prodigy at academics, music, and athletics, as well as a master swordsman, d’Éon studied law in Paris and was noticed at court, not least because of his elegant appearance. He was recruited into the King’s Secret, and Louis XV asked him to go on a mission to Russia, which was nearing Britain diplomatically, to ¿nd out and frustrate this emerging relationship.

 Chevalier Douglas, a Scottish émigré, posed as a geologist and visited Russia with his niece, “Lia de Beaumont”—d’Éon in disguise. What happened next is hard to prove, as d’Éon told different versions of the story at different times.

 In one version, d’Éon was presented to the Russian empress Elizabeth, who liked her immediately and appointed her a maid of honor. When d’Eon revealed his real sex, Elizabeth was not angry but amused, and the path was cleared to a French and Russian alliance; d’Éon was offered a Russian army command and many gifts.

42 

 When the Seven Years’ War broke out between France and Britain in 1756, d’Éon won fame on the battle¿eld and one of the highest decorations in the French army. Louis XV then sent d’Éon to England as a temporary ambassador, but also with a secret mission as an advance scout for an invasion of Britain.

 Shortly thereafter, d’Éon seemed to become unhinged. When a permanent French ambassador was sent to London, d’Éon refused to step down. This turned into a potential crisis because d’Éon possessed documents from the king about the planned invasion and could use these to blackmail the French.

 Finally, in 1775, a bargain was struck, and d’Éon agreed to return the documents in exchange for a pension, on the condition he dress in women’s clothing—to make clear he was a woman. d’Éon was received back in France as a sensation and was dressed by Queen Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker.

 Later in life, d’Eon returned to London and opened a fencing school, fencing in public until the age of 70. Few if any careers in the secret world of espionage resemble the incredible trajectory of Chevalier d’Éon’s.

Important Terms

Jesuit Relations: Reports of Jesuit missionary activity from the 17th to the 19th century, exemplifying the information-gathering capacities of the Jesuit order.

Jesuits: The Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Catholic Church, founded in 1534 and noted for its engagement in missionary work and Counter-Reformation efforts.

oprichniki: Members of the feared secret police of Tsar Ivan IV “the Terrible” of Russia—“men set apart”—from 1565 to 1572.

43 

oprichnina: “That which is set apart”; the regime of the feared secret police of Tsar Ivan IV, as well as territory under the direct central control of the tsar.

Names to Know

Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo (1725–1798): Famed Venetian lover and spy.

d’Eon, Chevalier (1728–1810): French spy who dressed as both a man and a woman and whose true sex was a matter of famous dispute; d’Eon was sent on secret missions to Russia and Britain, then ended life in British exile while threatening to blackmail the king of France.

Fritz, Samuel (1654–1728): Bohemian-born German Jesuit who explored the Amazon and was mistaken for a spy.

Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547–1584): Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, brutal and paranoid ruler who established the oprichnina regime of early modern secret police.

Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal and duc de (1585–1642): French cardinal and chief minister to King Louis XIII, practitioner of power politics and constructor of the French secret services.

Suggested Reading

Paul, Unlikely Allies.

Wright, God’s Soldiers.

Questions to Consider

1. Were the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible effective because of terror or in spite of it?

2. Who was the better spy, Casanova or the Chevalier d’Éon?

44 

Espionage in the American Revolution Lecture 6

s colonial society in North America split between independence-minded “patriots” and British-rule-favoring “loyalists,” the people who held important information could hold victory in the balance. In

this lecture, we will see how hero spies like Nathan Hale and traitor spies like Benedict Arnold were made and are remembered. We will examine General George Washington’s role as a spymaster, and we come to understand how a divided society, caught in what was essentially a civil war, is the perfect context for spying.

 Espionage Àourished in the American Revolution because of the context: a once-united society being torn apart. The catalyst for the growing movement for American self-rule came from fears of conspiracies—in particular, the anxiety that the British monarchy and Parliament were determined to take away colonists’ constitutional liberties.

 When the British crown sought to recoup the expenses of the Seven Years’War (known as the French and Indian War in America) with new taxes, this antagonized the colonists. Activists organized into a secret society, the Sons of Liberty. They spread propaganda for the patriot cause that would form a crucial network for intelligence gathering in the early stages of the American Revolution.

 Similarly, committees of correspondence were organized to link like-minded patriots across the colonies, and the Boston Tea Party in December 1773 combined covert action with propaganda. When the patriots learned of the British troop movements to seize colonists’ arms, Paul Revere made his legendary ride to warn Boston’s citizens.

45 

 Now that a war was on, a colonial government had to be organized to lead the struggle. George Washington, a Virginia planter who had distinguished himself in

the French and Indian War, was made commander of the Continental Army. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) went to Paris to seek assistance from Britain’s old enemy, France.

 Franklin proved a very effective diplomat, but he was also observed by a British agent,      a      fellow      scientist from America, Dr. Edward Bancroft from 1776 to 1781. His clandestine efforts appear not to have had much affect on

the war’s outcome, however. George Washington was not only

America’s ¿rst spymaster, he was  Some scholars have suggested one of the nation’s ¿ rst spies.

that Franklin knew Bancroft

was a spy but found it useful to have the British know about his progress, as this would put pressure on them to negotiate a settlement.

 Soon after taking military command, Washington also took on the role of spymaster. We think of Washington as the man who could not tell a lie, but in his own intelligence apparatus, Washington was Agent 711.

 The activities of the spies included message relays, often written in a new and improved kind of two-bottle invisible ink and elaborate ciphers; producing fake dispatches as disinformation; foiling assassination and kidnapping plots against Washington; propaganda spreading; and unmasking sleeper agents.

46 

 It was a bitter moment when Washington discovered that Dr. Benjamin Church, the chief medical of¿cer of the Continental Army, had been a British spy since long before the war. Convicted of criminal correspondence with the enemy, Church was jailed but later sent to the West Indies in one of the ¿rst spy swaps in modern history, although his ship was lost at sea.

 Washington was a quick learner in subterfuge and was glad to lie and spread disinformation for a greater purpose. Washington also instituted a special operations branch in his military. In 1776, he ordered Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton, a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, to set up the Knowlton’s Rangers reconnaissance force, the ancestor of today’s Special Forces, Army Rangers, and Delta Force.

 Nathan Hale was a graduate of Yale University and school teacher who became a member of Knowlton’s Rangers. When the British were capturing New York City (at that point, just the southern tip of Manhattan, around Wall St.), Hale was sent out in disguise as a Dutch schoolmaster.

 A British counterintelligence of¿cer tricked Hale into thinking he was among friends, and then Hale was captured and found to be carrying documents in his shoes. Hale was sentenced to hang in 1776, at the age of 21. Just before his death is said to have declared, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

 Washington personally supervised some spying at ¿rst, but a key to leadership is delegation. The ¿rst formal American intelligence organization was set up under the direction of Major Benjamin Tallmadge of the Connecticut cavalry. Washington dealt directly with Tallmadge, rather than micromanaging the agents.

 Tallmadge’s spies included a lady living across the street from the British commander General Sir William Howe in Philadelphia; the Culper Ring, who posed as loyalist printers in New York; and New York shopkeeper Robert Townsend, whose shop was frequented by British of¿ cers.

47 

 Women agents played an important role in Revolutionary spying. Anna Smith Strong helped the Culper Ring by sending them coded messages with her washing line. “Old Mom” Rinker in Germantown, Pennsylvania, now part of Philadelphia, dropped balls of yarn that contained messages, which would be retrieved by watching agents. Lydia Darragh, whose son was a soldier with Washington, passed on what she heard from British of¿ cers quartered in her home.

 The best-known story of espionage in the American Revolution concerns Benedict Arnold, a name that is synonymous with treachery and treason. Yet Arnold started out as a patriot hero. He had led a crucial attack at the Battle of Saratoga, a turning point in the war that convinced the French that the American cause was viable.

 After the British pulled out of Philadelphia in June 1778, Arnold was put in charge of the city. He fell in love with and married Peggy Shippen, daughter of a Tory family. Arnold was disappointed with what he felt was the lack of recognition for his achievements, and he also felt ¿nancial pressure from his new wife’s glamorous lifestyle.

 Arnold volunteered his services to the British and began coded correspondence with his wife’s ex-paramour, Major John André. Arnold was put then in charge of West Point, the strategic American fort overlooking the Hudson River, and offered to give it up to the British for what today would be over 1 million dollars. This would allow the British to cut New England off from the rest of the colonies and perhaps win the war.

 On September 23, Arnold and André met and Arnold gave his contact sketches of West Point’s defenses. André was disguised as a civilian; this would later prove fatal. Captured, he was taken to the American command post. When Arnold learned this, he À ed to the British.

48 

 Washington offered to trade André to the British for Arnold, but they refused. André was hanged on October 2, 1780. If André had not taken off his uniform, by the rules of war, he would have sat out the hostilities as a prisoner of war and been released after the treaty was signed.

 Arnold’s career on the British side was not a happy one, as he was not trusted by them nor entrusted with the higher of¿ ce he would have wanted, and now his name stands for betrayal in American memory.

 The British intelligence record was not as good as the American not due to talent but likely due to the challenges of unfamiliar territory. It was harder for the British to know which Americans to trust. Information from Tories sometimes could prove to be disinformation, and therefore good information was often distrusted.

 One notorious example of disregarded intelligence happened at the Battle of Trenton. Recall that on Christmas night, 1776, Washington and his men crossed the Delaware River and surprised and captured the garrison of Hessian mercenaries. The Hessian commander was killed, and in his pocket was found an unopened letter from a loyalist giving advance warning of the attack.

 It is only fair to mention a ¿asco involving the American cause— one not engineered by the Americans but in their name. James Aitken (alias James Boswell, James Hind, James Hill, and John the Painter), a British walk-in, or volunteer, offered to commit acts of sabotage on British soil—more speci¿cally, on British ships in British ports.

 Aitken was a house painter from Edinburgh—and a robber, pyromaniac, and drifter with dreams of being a military of¿ cer. With very limited support from American of¿cials he had contacted in France, he tried to burn down the harbor of Portsmouth, England, with incendiary devices of his own design, but he used cheap

49 

matches, so he only was able to set a ¿re in one shipyard. He was arrested and hanged in March 1777. This strange and sad ¿ gure has been called the ¿rst modern terrorist.

 With French intervention on the side of the Americans and the surrender of the British forces at Yorktown in 1781, American independence was won. Secret actions had played their part; the British spymaster in America, Major Beckwith, later declared that “Washington did not really out¿ght the British, he simply outspied us!”

 After the war, the United States was concerned with intelligence about the vast areas that lay beyond the Mississippi River. President Thomas Jefferson secretly requested from Congress ¿ nancing for a reconnaissance trip into territories claimed by other European empires. Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the expedition in 1804.

 To protect their relatives in Britain, many former Revolutionary spies hid their history, which was only passed down as family lore. Women in particular hushed up their contributions. Yet this era also produced a literary monument to spying, one of the ¿ rst American novels, James Fenimore Cooper’s 1821 The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground.

Important Term

Knowlton’s Rangers: The American special operations branch set up in 1776 on the orders of George Washington, seen as the ancestor of today’s Special Forces.

Names to Know

Aitken, James (1752–1777): British criminal who volunteered to help the American cause in 1776 by setting ¿re to the British Àeet in Portsmouth, England; captured and hanged.

50 

André, John (1750–1780): British intelligence of¿cer and handler of Benedict Arnold, captured out of uniform as spy in Tarrytown, New York; hanged in America and buried with honor in Great Britain.

Arnold, Benedict (1741–1801): American Revolutionary War hero whose bitterness led him to offer to betray West Point to the British; when his betrayal was detected, he Àed to the British and ended his life in exile.

Bancroft, Edward (1744–1821): American scientist who spied on Benjamin Franklin in Paris for the British.

Church, Benjamin (1734–1778): Early American patriot, activist, and chief medical of¿cer of the Continental Army who was in fact spying for the British. Caught by George Washington but released and allowed to go into exile.

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851): Author of The Spy (1821), a novel of espionage in the American Revolution.

Darragh, Lydia (1729–1789): Philadelphian who passed Americans information overheard from British of¿cers quartered in her house.

Hale, Nathan (1755–1776): American spy captured and hanged by the British in New York, whose last words were reported to be “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Knowlton, Thomas (1740–1776): American founder of Knowlton’s Rangers, the precursors to later American Special Forces.

Strong, Anna Smith (1740–1812): American patriot who sent coded messages to the Culper Ring of spies via her washing line.

Tallmadge, Benjamin (1754–1835): First director of American intelligence during the War for Independence, serving directly under George Washington.

Washington, George (1732–1799): Father of his country and American spymaster (also Agent 711) who organized intelligence gathering and disinformation in the War for Independence.

51 

Suggested Reading

Allen, George Washington, Spymaster.

Cooper, The Spy.

Paul, Unlikely Allies.

Questions to Consider

1. What made George Washington an effective spymaster?

2. Was Major André a heroic ¿gure or a dishonorable one? Why?

52 

Spying of the European Great Powers Lecture 7

ust as Napoleon’s great empire required a clandestine intelligence service, so too after his defeat the restored monarchies of Europe sought security against revolutionary movements through secret policing and spies. In the restoration of monarchy after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, secret police networks censored the press and spied on universities. Meanwhile the

Russian empire appointed itself the policeman of Europe.

 The early 19th century was the dawn of the age of ideology, when the fervor earlier given to religion was transferred to the struggle for political order. The revolutionary French regime envisioned a radically different society, and secret services grew up to enforce these far-reaching demands.

 Napoleon’s empire required a clandestine intelligence service. So, too, after his defeat the restored monarchies of Europe sought security against internal revolutionary movements through secret policing and spies.

 Secret police and censorship were not new to Europe— think of ancient Sparta, Persia, or Ivan the Terrible. What was new was a far more organized and      ambitious effort to engineer society, keep it under surveillance, and direct its very thoughts and ideas.

 

 The French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, was a very different affair from

 

Unlike Washington, Napoleon did not try to run his own spy network.

 

53 

the American struggle: more violent, more radical, and in many ways tragic. But France’s intervention in the American war in part precipitated the revolution in Paris. The slogan of liberty, fraternity, and equality indicated a new way of thinking about politics and legitimate rule. Power was to be placed in the hands of the people, but the state could likewise make radical new demands on citizens. The revolutionary ideology commanded obedience and enthusiastic participation; indeed, ideological faith could resemble the intensity of religious belief in an earlier age.

 The French uprising became steadily more radical, and produced the Reign of Terror in 1793–1794. A regime that was to be more democratic and humane instead produced spasms of revolutionary violence and repression. Many people elsewhere in Europe looked on with horror, especially aristocrats who sympathized with their fellow nobles in France.

 Networks were developed to smuggle endangered aristocrats out. Among the smugglers was a man called Richebourg, called the shortest adult spy in history, at only 23 inches tall, who could pose as a child, passing through the barricades of French revolutionaries by being carried by a nurse.

 Another spy, William Wickham, was sent as an assistant to the British ambassador to Switzerland in 1794, and from there constructed a spy network in France. He also plotted an invasion of France. This historical episode forms the backdrop a novel that has been called the greatest adventure story ever published, Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel.

 After the turmoil of the Reign of Terror, many people were ready for a restoration of order, and that is what was promised by a self-made military hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, who became ruler of France as First Consul in 1799 and then crowned himself emperor in 1804.

54 

 Bonaparte conquered much of Europe. To rule this empire, Napoleon needed an intelligence network. Its key ¿ gures were Joseph Fouché and Karl Schulmeister.

 Fouché had studied for the priesthood, but when the Revolution came, he embarked on a political career that took him all over the ideological landscape, demonstrating his fabulous À exibility and opportunism. Napoleon made him Minister of Police.

 In his time in of¿ce, Fouché built up France’s police state. His exhaustive daily reports to Napoleon included society gossip and popular response to news.

Paradoxically, Napoleon both needed and distrusted Fouché, ¿ring him in 1802, bringing him back in 1804, and ¿ nally dismissing him in 1810.

 Schulmeister was Napoleon’s crucial military spy. An Alsacian born smuggler and popular hero, in 1804, he was recruited in the unsuccessful effort to kidnap Louis de

Bourbon, Duke d’Enghien. Joseph Fouché was Napoleon’s In 1805 he was introduced ¿rst, most infamous spymaster. to Napoleon, who had him

in¿ltrate Austrian headquarters as a Hungarian nobleman in exile, helping Napoleon defeat the Austrians at Ulm and Austerlitz. He fell out of Napoleon’s favor and retired to a huge estate in Alsace, which was destroyed by the Austrians in 1814.

 Even good intelligence was ¿nally trumped by Napoleon’s outsize ambition. He overreached in two ways, invading Spain in 1807 and Russia in 1812. In both cases, irregular, guerilla warfare erupted. Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, landed in Spain and fought

55 

running battles with the French, using “exploring of¿ cers” who mapped and gathered intelligence as ¿ eld sketchers.

 The secret police forces of the Napoleonic age were the inspiration for one of the greatest and most popular operas, Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini, which premiered in 1900. The villain, Baron Scarpia, is the chief of police in Rome and has spies at work on in¿ ltrating revolutionary societies. This is further evidence of the cultural imprint of espionage.

 Even Central America was affected by fears of Napoleonic espionage and subversion, especially in Guatemala. In 1812, a panic arose over rumors that Guatemala was about to be attacked by 500 French soldiers dressed as priests. The cry went up to defend “religion, country, and crown” against French revolutionary ideas and that upstart emperor, Napoleon.

 This spy panic had been building for years and involved the suspicion that French soldiers had insinuated themselves into colonial society and locals sympathized with the French revolution and Napoleon. In one example, in 1809, Agustin Vilches, a barber in Guatemala City, was arrested for “political blasphemies,” saying that the Spanish should be sent back to Spain and that the area should be under French control. For his pains, he got sent to Spain to be imprisoned there.

 Fears grew among colonial of¿cials of a large network of French spies based in New Orleans just waiting for orders to fan out across the Spanish colonial empire. Rumors spread of a French Àeet prowling the Caribbean, waiting to strike. On Sundays, pastors read out descriptions of suspected spies and threatened to excommunicate those who did not turn over to the authorities any radical publications.

 The colonial administration inadvertently antagonized the Creole locals by setting up special courts to deal with the crisis, sidelining local authorities. The unplanned result was to provoke

56 

local unrest, without any French agents or provocateurs. The eventual result was a full break with Spain and independence for the Central American lands.

 The second case of a French spy scare, if true, is a sad story. In Hartlepool, on the coast of northeast England, around the time of the Napoleonic wars, a local ¿sherman saw a French battleship wrecked on the coast during a storm. All hands were drowned in the wreck except for one lone survivor, the ship’s pet monkey. As the story goes, the locals had never seen a Frenchman before, but had been told that the French were demonic and subhuman and assumed the monkey was a Frenchman. They concluded he was a spy and sentenced him to death by hanging.

 After the fall of Napoleon, the challenge was to set Europe back on an even keel. The Congress of Vienna, under the leadership of Prince Klemens von Metternich, prescribed a Concert of Europe that would stamp out revolutionary ideas wherever they were to be found. Metternich’s special loathing was for revolutionary nationalist secret societies like the Carbonari in Italy or the Burschenschaften in the German lands.

 Among the younger generation, especially university students, Romanticism rebelled against the idea of restoration. Reacting against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, it frequently coincided with a new nationalism and a striving for liberation from older empires. Metternich thus insisted on banning student organizations, imposing close censorship on pamphlets and periodical press, and setting up an Investigation Of¿ ce.

 Spies and spymasters can have vastly À exible loyalties. When Napoleon was ¿rst defeated in 1814 and sent into exile, Fouché went over the monarchist side while keeping in touch with Napoleon. When Napoleon returned to France for the Hundred Days, Fouché changed sides yet again. After Napoleon was ¿ nally defeated at Waterloo, Fouché changed sides again and tried to curry favor with the new regime by promising to hunt down Napoleon’s

57 

followers. This was ¿nally too much for the French elite, and he was instead exiled from France, dying in Trieste.

 The Russian empire came to be the ultimate conservative authoritarian power, the policeman of Europe, especially after the 1825 Decembrist revolt terri¿ed the new Tsar Nicholas I, transforming him into the Iron Autocrat. He reverted to the tradition of Russian secret police for internal control. He formed the Third Section in 1826 to combat subversive ideas and to map Russian society’s soul.

 The Third Section grew from 16 people to 40 by the time Nicholas died in 1855. When the rest of Europe saw revolts in 1848, Russia did not. But the very harshness of repression was breeding radical revolutionaries in Russia. In 1874, Russian populists announced a Pilgrimage to the People. Student radicals tried to rally the peasants with revolutionary ideas, but the peasants tended to turn the students over to the police. The populists then turned to terrorism, forming the People’s Will. They committed political murders, crowned with the assassination of the Tsar Alexander in 1881.

 In 1848, Europe’s monarchies teetered on the brink of collapse. Kings had to promise constitutions and bow to liberal demands for the rule of law. In the end, power slipped away from the revolutionaries, and in Germany and Italy especially, national uni¿cation had been missed. Conservatives were able to regain control, co-opting nationalism.

 Otto von Bismarck, as chancellor of Prussia, fought a series of wars with Denmark, Austria, and France, and in 1871 fused a united Germany around the hard core of Prussia. This was called the “German revolution” (on a par with the French Revolution of 1789), and remade the European political map.

 An important and disturbing role in this was played by Bismarck’s spymaster, Wilhelm Stieber, the Prussian director of police. He apparently smoothed his career by denouncing his wife’s uncle to

58 

the police, proving his ruthlessness. He was always assiduous in self-promotion.

 When King Wilhelm I of Prussia came to throne, Stieber’s fortunes declined. Wilhelm I disliked him, and he was out of favor and out of his earlier job in 1858–1863. Most of this time Stieber spent in Russia, working with the Third Section. When he met Bismarck, he was invited back to Prussia.

 Stieber traveled in Austria, collecting information, that helped in Prussia’s crushing defeat of Austria in 1866. In 1868, be launched a similar investigation of France, including military and nonmilitary facts. He established a network of sleeper agents. As a result, in 1871, in a war lasting six weeks, France was defeated, and a brand new powerful German empire was announced in Versailles.

 Although Bismarck appreciated Stieber and called him “my king of sleuthhounds,” others hated him. Stieber was in it for personal gain, achieved through blackmail. However, he left behind a well-organized, incredibly detailed, systematic, and effective espionage apparatus that others would seek to imitate.

Names to Know

Fouché, Joseph (1758?–1820): Napoleon’s chief of police, alternately needed and distrusted.

Metternich, Klemens von (1773–1859): Prince and chief minister of the Habsburg Austrian Empire; chief counterrevolutionary of the Concert of Europe after Napoleon’s defeat.

Orczy, Emmuska (1865–1947): Author of the inÀuential adventure novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905).

Richebourg (1768–1858): Shortest spy in recorded history, able to disguise himself as a child to evade French revolutionaries.

59 

Schulmeister, Karl (1770–1853): One of Napoleon’s master spies, who in¿ltrated the Austrian military.

Stieber, Wilhelm (1818–1882): Bismarck’s German spymaster, who set a new standard for methodical collection of intelligence and a new low in personal use of his post.

Wickham, William (1761–1840): British agent who established a spy network from Switzerland to spy on France during the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rule.

Suggested Reading

Hawkins, “Napoleonic Subversion and Imperial Defense.”

Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Questions to Consider

1. Did Russia’s internal spying do more to prevent internal revolution or to provoke it?

2. What factors made people fear the French Revolution and Napoleon so much?

60 

U.S. Civil War Spies in Blue and Gray Lecture 8

ivil wars offer unique opportunities for mutual espionage as societies are torn apart, and the American “war between brothers” showed the importance of institutions of espionage like the Pinkerton detectives,

women spies like Belle Boyd, and the role of African Americans as agents. Yet this spying did not develop neatly or in a linear fashion from the experiences of the Revolution. In a phenomenon we will see again and again in this course, a great many of those lessons had been forgotten and had to be relearned.

 There was no national intelligence network nor federal police in the United States between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. When the latter came, it would make new demands and present unprecedented challenges. The entire American experiment was at stake.

 The war would be one of tremendous ferocity, all the more bitter for being fought between brothers. It would take on aspects of “total war,” involving civilians as well as troops and using the period’s most advanced weaponry. This ramped up through the course of the war, with the blockade of the South and the requisitioning of supplies in the war zones.

 When war broke out, a secret spying war also commenced. Both sides scrambled to set up intelligence operations, a dif¿ cult task. The North called on Allan Pinkerton, a Scot who had established a Chicago private detective agency.

 Pinkerton warned Lincoln about an assassination plot that aimed to kill him while he passed through Baltimore in February 1861 while he was travelling to his inauguration. There remains some doubt as to whether there really had been a plan or whether Pinkerton had made himself indispensable with a phantom conspiracy.

61 

 In Scotland, Pinkerton had been a part of the Chartist movement but had to Àee the country. Once in the United States, he became involved in law enforcement and in 1847 became deputy sheriff of Cook County, Illinois. In 1850, he established a private detective agency. Its motto was “The Eye That Never Sleeps”; hence, we today talk of detectives

as “private eyes.”Among his employees was the ¿ rst woman detective, Kate Warne. Pinkerton was hired in particular to work security for the railroads.

 His work on behalf of the Union, however, turned out to be a mixed record, as civilian work did not always mesh with military intelligence requirements. He, like other spies on both sides, had

to learn on the job. Pinkerton’s Confedrate president Jefferson inexperience with military Davis was spied on by slaves in reconnaissance also encouraged

a peculiar dynamic. He had his

own formulas for how to estimate enemy troops in the ¿ eld, leading to huge overestimates—sometimes double the true number.

 When Pinkerton’s overestimates were passed to General George McClellan, the Union commander, they encouraged the already hesitant and hypercautious McClellan to avoid decisive action even more.

 The Confederacy organized the Secret Service Bureau. President Jefferson Davis’s government allocated 5 million dollars to secret service efforts; of that, 2 million was slated for the task of special operations in Canada. One unlikely plan involved hijacking the U.S.S. Michigan in Lake Erie and using it to free Rebel prisoners of war in camps near Sandusky, Ohio and Fort Douglas, Illinois, and then dominate the North with these forces.

62 

 In another plan, a Kentucky doctor named Luke Pryor Blackburn was charged with collecting clothing and bedclothes of yellow fever patients from Bermuda to use to start an epidemic in the north. Yet another plan aimed to terrorize New York City by setting of ¿ res in hotel rooms and in P.T. Barnum’s museum.

 The Civil War turned out to be a golden age for female spies. This was not the ¿rst time that women had been employed as spies, but now they became more prominent, thanks to Romanticism, the 19th-century artistic, literary, and philosophical movement that celebrated the heroic, the extreme, and adventure. Women spies could now contribute to their country’s cause, while the conventions of the day also meant that neither side executed women spies. Let us consider some famous cases.

 Elizabeth Van Lew, known as Crazy Bet, was an abolitionist and a Northern sympathizer living in Richmond, Virginia. Wealthy, unmarried, and in her 40s, she disguised her activities by cultivating the image of being mad. In fact, she ran escape lines for Union soldiers, collected information from Union prisoners of war, and—in her ultimate coup—insinuated an ex-slave her family had once owned, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, into the household of Jefferson Davis.

 Bowser pretended to be illiterate but actually read documents that were left on desks. It is claimed she also served at table when General Robert E. Lee and other commanders discussed military affairs with Davis. Her photographic memory allowed her to carry crucial information in her mind.

 On the Confederate side, Rose Greenhow was a lively widow of 44 and a famed Washington hostess, with many admirers and lovers, from Union of¿cers to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. She used her charms and favors to get information, which she then sent in ciphered messages south.

63 

 Greenhow’s contributions were crucial for the ¿rst great engagement of the Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run, or Manassas, on July 21, 1861. She tipped off Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard that the Union troops were moving forward.

 During the ¿ghting, however, a Confederate command post was captured, along with documents that pointed to Greenhow as a spy. From then on, Pinkerton kept her house under surveillance, to identify other spies in her network. Later, he had her home searched and found copies of her reports. She was arrested on August 23, 1861, but even under house arrest continued to smuggle out secret messages.

 Greenhow was imprisoned in the Old Capitol Prison, where the Supreme Court building stands today. In June 1862, she was sent south across enemy lines to Richmond. The Confederate government gave her a public relations mission, sending her to Europe to gain allies as a celebrity spy. Her memoir became a best seller, and she was presented at royal courts and lectured to audiences in Britain and France.

 Greenhow was to return to the South in triumph, but on her voyage back to America in a blockade-runner ship in 1864, she drowned off the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina. She was buried with full military honors in Wilmington.

 Another legendary ¿ gure was Belle Boyd, nicknamed the Siren of the Shenandoah or the Siren of the South. This young woman had been from the ¿rst a very open partisan of the South, even wearing a Confederate sash to announce her sympathies. At 17 years old, she shot a Federal soldier involved in an altercation with her mother in front of their house.

 During the war, Boyd spied on Union of¿cers quartered in her house. She passed information to General Stonewall Jackson that may have turned the battle of Front Royal. She was arrested after her messages were intercepted, but then, like Greenhow, she was

64 

exchanged to Richmond. Again, like Greenhow, she was sent to Europe on a mission of public diplomacy. On her return to America, she was intercepted and arrested, but fell in love with and married the Union of¿cer who captured her. Later she toured onstage and died in Wisconsin in 1900.

 While ¿gures like these spies were celebrated at the time, little recognition was given to the crucial role played by African Americans in the secret war. Intelligence volunteered by slaves in the South was called the Black Dispatches by the Union leadership. According to one historical study, this was the single most proli¿ c and productive category of intelligence used by the Union forces in the war.

 In the south, the institution of slavery had created a culture that viewed slaves as insigni¿cant, not capable of the subtlety required for spying or collection of information, and most often passive. Often, slaves were ignored, not noticed. In fact, great numbers of slaves passed valuable tactical information to the Union forces as the battle¿elds of the war moved south.

 This kind of daring activity predated the war in the Underground Railroad. During the 1850s and 1860s, abolitionists set up escape routes for slaves to make their way north. Harriet Tubman made many trips south in disguise and helped great numbers of slaves to escape. During the war, Tubman accompanied Union troops in the Carolinas and served as a liaison with liberated slaves, but after the war, she did not receive much recognition from the government.

 During the war, African Americans also spied behind Confederate lines, engaged in tremendously dangerous scouting. Pinkerton was especially proud of one of his agents, John Scobell. He had been a slave in Mississippi but had been freed by his master, who had also given him an education. He was a master of disguise, playing the roles of cook or manual laborer, all the while counting Confederate troop strength, the position of particular units, and movement of forces.

65 

 In Norfolk, Virginia, Mary Touvestre, a free woman of color, was employed in the house of an engineer working on the ironclad ship the U.S.S. Merrimack. She stole plans for the ship and escaped to the North, passing the documents to the Union command. These agents were not professionals but amateurs motivated by self-liberation, playing a role that after the war was not fully appreciated.

 This war also revealed something else: the impact technology could have on modern warfare. The importance of railroads was key, for instance, in the overall war. The use of telegraph communications also changed the pace of the war, providing communication at speeds that would have been unthinkable before. This in turn opened up a new possibility, that of real-time intelligence that could be acted on with a minimum of time between report and reaction. This was the advent of a new stage in SIGINT.

 The wartime intrigues we have discussed did have a disasterous ¿nale after the conÀict was of¿cially over. During the war, the circles of Confederate agents in Canada were visited by John Wilkes Booth. They discussed a plan to kidnap Lincoln, holding him hostage. The end of the war changed the plan into a revenge killing, and on April 14, 1865, Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater.

Important Terms

Black Dispatches: A term used during the U.S. Civil War for intelligence provided by escaped slaves in the South.

Underground Railroad: In the 1850s and 1860s, secret escape routes set up by abolitionists to assist slaves Àeeing the American South.

Names to Know

Booth, John Wilkes (1838–1865): Southern agent and assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

66 

Bowser, Mary Elizabeth (1839–?): African American servant in the White House of the Confederacy, passing secrets to Union side.

Boyd, Belle (1844–1900): The Siren of the Confederacy, a celebrity spy for the South who later took her story to the stage.

Greenhow, Rose (1813–1864): Washington hostess and socialite who passed military secrets to the Confederacy; she was arrested, released, and sent by the South to Europe on a public relations tour, but she perished on her return to America.

Pinkerton, Allan (1819–1884): Founder of the private detective agency bearing his name, he served as Lincoln’s Union spymaster in the Civil War but was sidelined due to problems with his tradecraft.

Tubman, Harriet (1822–1913): African American organizer of the Underground Railroad and agent during the Civil War.

Van Lew, Elizabeth (1818–1900): Northern sympathizer living in Richmond, Virginia, who directed intelligence to the Union while posing as a madwoman.

Suggested Reading

Fishel, The Secret War for the Union.

Questions to Consider

1. Who was more successful in spying, the Union or the Confederacy?

2. What factors made women spies so prominent in this conÀ ict?

67 

The Great Game of Empires Lecture 9

n the late 19th century, as competition between the European empires grew and wars Àared up between them, spying was both institutionalized and celebrated in ¿ction as the Great Game. Espionage was crucial to such diverse pursuits as the building of the new German empire, the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, and the United States’ acquisition of its ¿rst overseas territories. Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim celebrates

imperialism and the competition that went on within the shadows.

 In 1902, Japanese military attaché Captain Tanaka Giichi took a leisurely two months to travel from his old posting at St. Petersburg, Russia, to Tokyo. He traveled the strategically vital Trans-Siberian Railroad, sailed the Sungari and Amur rivers, visited Vladivostok and Port Arthur on the Paci¿c, and only then headed across the sea for Japan.

 Rather than be angry at his dawdling, his superiors were pleased with his behavior and promoted him to the general staff. All along the way, Tanaka had been observing, asking questions in his À uent Russian, and committing strategic and military details to memory for the day when the Russian and Japanese empires would collide. Sometimes the most effective intelligence gathering involves simply seeing what is obvious and out in the open, if you know what to look for.

 The late 19th century saw an intense scramble for empire, as the European powers—especially Great Britain, France, Russia, and Germany—sought to carve out realms for themselves in Asia, Africa, and the Paci¿c. It was a brutal contest, exacting a huge cost in suffering from colonized peoples. In this intensely competitive and tense environment, spying was both institutionalized and celebrated in ¿ction as the Great Game.

68 

 There was in particular one empire on which “the sun never set”— the British Empire. Global in reach and fueled by the Industrial Revolution, it was the largest empire the world had ever witnessed. By 1913, it would encompass 458 million subjects—comprising a quarter of the world’s population and habitable land.

 The jewel in this was India, encompassing what is today India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. From 1757, when the British won a preeminent position on the subcontinent, until 1947, when the British withdrew, India was a linchpin of British imperialism. Commensurately, fear of losing India was intense.

 There was a growing sense in Europe that there would sooner or later be a great war again. The British were concerned about Russian expansion in Central Asia. In 1898, France and Britain almost clashed over rival African claims. Germany, was also building up a navy and built the Kiel Canal across the base of the Danish peninsula, connecting the Baltic and North seas. Arms races and growing tension followed.

 New intelligence-gathering tasks were given to military attachés, who were assigned to embassies as part of the diplomatic staff. On the British side, this role attracted gentlemen with a love of adventure. Agents included Robert Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scout movement. Baden-Powell posed as a harmless butterÀy hobbyist in the Balkans and used sketches of butterÀy wings to disguise his notes.

 Another attaché was Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall, who led the British code-breaking team in World War I. In 1908, Hall spied in the German naval base of Kiel in the Baltic Sea by borrowing a British duke’s motorboat and pretending to break down opposite new naval construction, with two of his of¿cers taking pictures from hiding.

69 

 The need for good intelligence to face new menaces was especially clear to Britain because of a recent cautionary experience. Seized by worry about a Russian threat to India, in 1839–1842, a British army invaded Afghanistan to prevent the Russians from intervening ¿rst. The campaign was a disaster, caused by bad intelligence.

 This deadly rivalry was given a cheerful name, popularized by the British writer Rudyard Kipling, “the Great Game.” Born in 1865 in India and schooled in Britain, Kipling went on to become a journalist and writer who celebrated empire and imperialism.

 Today, Kipling is controversial because he was clearly an enthusiast for empire and gave expression to racist ideas. What complicates any easy condemnation of Kipling is that he was capable of unusual (for his day) sympathy for

the subjects of imperialism.

 

 Kipling’s novel Kim (1901) is set in India, probably in the 1890s. The main character is an orphan of an Irish soldier, Kimball O’Hara, but he passes as an Indian boy. Once he is identi¿ed as a European, the British authorities try to take him in hand, but he rebels. Instead, he is taken into the activities of Colonel Creighton, an intelligence of¿cer, and is trained as a spy.

 

British author Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase “the Great Game.”

 

 Befriending a Tibetan priest, a lama, on a mystic quest, he journeys through India, experiencing its diversity, and helps foil Russian agents who are planning the subversion of British control of India. As the novel closes, there is every promise that Kim will continue

70 

in this intelligence activity as a master player of the Great Game, which the novel describes as a game that the agent must play alone and for the ultimate stakes—his life.

 Meanwhile, on the Russian side, the secret services were playing a different dangerous game that would eventually explode in the face of the very regime they were trying to protect. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the newly organized secret police, the Okhrana, went into action on an international scale. With a staff of 20,000 and a huge budget, it acted outside the law, making it unique among contemporary major agencies. Yet it was to seem mild by the standards of later secret police.

 Internally, the Okhrana had to deal with a spate of political murders, including two of their own leaders. The Okhrana succeeded in in¿ltrating revolutionary secret societies, but at the cost of confusion. They successfully in¿ltrated the Bolshevik Party as well, the smaller and more radical faction of the Social Democrats led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

 The leader of the Bolsheviks in the parliament was Roman Malinovsky, admired by Lenin for being one of the few Bolshevik leaders who had a genuine working-class background. Malinovsky was also an Okhrana agent. At one point, the St. Petersburg Bolshevik leadership of ¿ve had four Okhrana agents.

 Another disastrous example of attempts to in¿ltrate and manipulate was called police socialism, the attempt to organize Russian trade unions that would actually be steered and managed by the police authorities as a way of defusing radicalism. The leader of one of these unions was a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Georgi Gapon.

 In January 1905, Gapon led crowds of loyal workers in a demonstration of devotion to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, where they were gunned down by imperial troops. This event, called Bloody Sunday, had disastrous effects, turning many Russians against the tsar.

71 

 Many Russian radicals, including Lenin, lived and agitated in exile. The Okhrana set up a branch of¿ce in Paris around 1882 and there cooperated with the French Sureté. It was managed by Pyotr Rachkovsky, a fat, jolly, amorous bureaucrat. Spies in Britain, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany were run from this of¿ ce.

 In 1890, Rachkovsky revealed a bomb plot among Russian exiles in Paris. He was in a great position to have information on it, as he had organized it. This was one example of provocation—an act intended to discredit its alleged authors.

 In 1903, there appeared in Russia a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed a global conspiracy of Jews to take over the world. It has long been suspected that Okhrana agents, perhaps Rachkovsky himself, authored it to scapegoat the Jewish minority.

 After World War I, the Protocols circulated worldwide in translation. It was reprinted by Henry Ford, admired by the Nazis, and cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Even today it circulates in Arab countries in the Middle East, and in Egypt it was produced as a miniseries for television. It is a classic example of conspiracy thinking.

 Even as the competition among empires was playing out, three wars made it clear that the world was changing and shifting.

o In 1898, the United States decisively defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War, announcing American emergence into world politics. The war was sparked by a suspected covert operation, the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor on the night of February 15, 1898. The war left the United States in possession of overseas territory.

o The Boer War (1899–1902) broke out as the British sought to subdue Dutch settlers in South Africa. The war went badly for the British, who lacked military intelligence to prevail. Even more, the British were shocked by world criticism of British

72 

conduct of the war against guerrillas and the creation of civilian concentration camps.

o The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) clearly proclaimed the rise of Japan as a world power. Japan’s planned modernization of the previous decades had produced a non-European great power by sheer will and determination, in what was a breath-taking inspiration to “submerged peoples” around the world. In a sense, decolonization began here.

 Japan had pursued a deliberate program of learning and adapting from European sources, and a key way of doing this was by sending of¿cers and military attaches on study trips abroad (called ryugaku), to learn all that they could. Japanese naval of¿ cers were sent to Britain, army of¿cers to Germany.

 Japanese of¿cers were sent to Russia as well to observe the transportation networks and military practice. Secret agents sent to Manchuria and China to observe the Russians were also helped by Russian underestimation of the Japanese and ethnic condescension. When war broke out, the Japanese sank two Russian À eets, and Russia collapsed into revolution. This was deeply shocking, and perhaps in the long run most important, as a sign that non-Westerners could defeat Europeans.

Important Terms

Great Game: A 19th-century term popularized by writer Rudyard Kipling that refers to the imperialist competition for dominance, especially in Central Asia.

Okhrana: Russian secret police force, founded in 1880, which in¿ ltrated many Russian revolutionary secret societies.

73 

Names to Know

Baden-Powell, Robert (1857–1941): British military attaché and founder of the Boy Scouts movement.

Gapon, Georgi (1870–1906): Russian Orthodox priest and organizer of the demonstration in 1905 that led to the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg; afterwards killed by revolutionaries.

Hall, Reginald “Blinker” (1870–1943): British military attaché and later director of British code breaking in Room 40 of the Admiralty during World War I.

Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936): Writer from British India, imperialist, Nobel Prize winner for literature, and creator of the boy spy hero in his novel Kim (1901).

Tanaka Giichi (1864–1929): Japanese military attaché in Russia and capable observer of the Trans-Siberian railway.

Suggested Reading

Kipling, Kim.

Questions to Consider

1. How did imperialism change the tasks and challenges of espionage?

2. What was distinctive about Japanese espionage at the turn of the century?

74 

Spy Phobia before World War I Lecture 10

he turn of the century saw waves of fear concerning espionage, invasion, and internal subversion, as exempli¿ed by the Dreyfus Affair in France. The Dreyfus Affair revealed the depths of European

anti-Semitism, and the outbreak of general war in 1914 would see absurd heights of “spy-it is.” These anxieties were harnessed by writers for the invention of the spy novel, which charts changing views of spies, and the emergence of the spy as a culture hero.

 You can tell a lot about a society by what it fears. This is what makes periodic outbreaks of spy phobia so interesting. Whether the phobia is justi¿ed or not is an entirely distinct question.

 The turn of the century saw waves of fear concerning espionage, invasion, and internal subversion. There were fears of internal disorder and of the mysterious actions of violent anarchists. Not all anarchists were violent, but many believed in “propaganda of the deed.”

 These political murders attributable to anarchists included the president of France in 1894, the Spanish prime minister in 1897, the empress of Austria-Hungary in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900, U.S. president in 1901, and scores of Russian of¿cials over the years.

 In the lead-up to the First World War, anxieties grew about spying, which seemed to take on greater signi¿cance as the world political balance of power changed. Britain was especially worried by the fast growth of German naval might.

 In 1909, to keep tabs on foreign spies in Britain, a Special Intelligence Bureau was created as part of Military Operations 5 (MO5), later renamed Military Intelligence 5 (MI5). It had a tiny of¿ce, two tables, two chairs, a cupboard, and one clerk. A Special

75 

Branch, originally created in the 1880s to track down Irish terrorists, now also turned to counterintelligence. A key task was keeping tabs on German spies.

 In 1912, a Special Intelligence Section formed to coordinate overseas intelligence, formed by Commander Mans¿ eld Cumming (codename C). Later, this bureau was renamed MI6.

 It was at this point that the British also engaged a spy who would turn out to be one of the ¿rst international superspies. This was Sidney Reilly, often called the Ace of Spies. His birth and death dates are unknown. His shadowy career spanned the pre–World War I period, the war, and the interwar era.

 Born in Russia to either a noble Catholic or prominent Jewish family, as a youth, he was said to be deeply religious and very able with languages. He went to Vienna to study medicine and got involved in socialist politics. Carrying a letter for the League of Enlightenment to Russia, he was arrested by the Okhrana. At that point, his uncle denounced him as illegitimate. Reilly faked suicide and journeyed to South America. There he claimed to have saved some British of¿cers, who helped him come to Britain, where he reinvented himself as Sidney Reilly.

 Reilly established himself in great style, collected historical artifacts of his hero Napoleon, and moved in the best circles. He was also employed by the British Secret Service in Russia, Persia, and China. He was sent to Germany’s Krupp shipyards, posing as a welder (after a crash course in the trade in Shef¿eld, England). He negotiated a deal with the Rothschilds for joint exploitation of oil in Persia (a venture today known as BP).

 The founding of the Boy Scouts was also a response to growing international tensions. Robert Baden-Powell was inspired by his experiences with military scouts in the Boer War in South Africa and envisioned an outdoor movement for boys to cultivate strength, preparedness, resourcefulness, and good citizenship.

76 

 In the movement’s 1908 handbook, Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell recalls the siege of Mafeking as a lesson in preparedness: As the Boers prepared to attack the town of Mafeking, the boys in the town were organized

into a cadet corps, and “a jolly smart and useful lot they were.” Baden-Powell stressed that even in peace time, scouts could be useful, following in the footsteps of British adventurers and explorers.

 Next, Baden-Powell gives an example of good scouting: the boy spy Kim, from Rudyard Kipling’s novel. Kim pays attention to details, is always

in training, is subtle in Today, Robert Baden-Powell is remembered as the founder of the

knowledge. Baden-Powell Boy Scouts, not as a talented spy. concluded by saying that the

“adventures of Kim are well worth reading, because they show what valuable work a boy scout could do for his country if he were suf¿ciently trained and suf¿ ciently intelligent.”

 Anxieties about spying seemed con¿rmed by a series of famous spy scandals. One such reached high into the espionage apparatus of Austria-Hungary. Its chief of counterintelligence, Alfred Redl, was blackmailed by the Russians for his homosexuality—threatened with exposure and offered bribes in exchange for information. When war broke out, the Austrian fortunes of war were devastated. Redl was caught in 1913 and allowed to commit suicide.

 The most infamous spy scandal of the period actually involved a miscarriage of justice. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted in 1894 of passing military plans to the Germans in what became known as the Dreyfus Affair. The story began in 1894 when a

77 

French cleaning lady in the German embassy in Paris pulled an unsigned document about receiving French war plans out of a wastebasket and passed it to her real employer, French military counterintelligence.

 The document set the counterintelligence into an uproar. Their suspicions settled on a 35-year-old talented staff of¿ cer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French patriot of Jewish heritage. Dreyfus proclaimed his innocence and rejected urgings to confess. French anti-Semites found out about the affair and clamored for his conviction. The army obliged with a court martial closed to the public.

 Dreyfus was convicted on the basis of a secret dossier that was shown to the judges but not to Dreyfus or his lawyer. Dreyfus was condemned to life on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, in the southern Atlantic. Evidence appeared soon after that the real culprit was someone else, a Christian of¿cer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, but this was covered up and Esterhazy was acquitted in a court martial.

 The case became notorious, dividing society and families. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus ¿nally exonerated and reinstated. The outbursts of anti-Semitism unleashed in the affair were an ominous foreshadowing of the storm of hatreds that would culminate in the Nazi genocide.

 In this period, the new genre of spy literature intersected with the genre of ¿ction about the next great war and invasion and was heavily dosed with panic. French and German authors wrote speculative ¿ction (today we would say science ¿ction) about future war. Books like this also anticipated the roles of new technologies, especially air war.

 At ¿rst, British invasion literature focused on the threat from Russia or France. Many scenarios included a tunnel across the Channel that allowed a French invasion. But after 1871, anxiety focused increasingly on Germany. After the German victory over France in

78 

1871, a potboiler best seller called The Battle of Dorking provoked months of panic.

 This and similar stories were advertised with marketing ploys including “German soldiers” in sandwich boards and spiked helmets marching about in London. Stunts like this produced rumors of mass in¿ltrations of German spies dressed as waiters and hairdressers.

 Espionage had already left its imprint on art and literature, but this was a genre that put the ¿gure of the spy at the center. The ¿ rst true spy novel was The Riddle of the Sands, published by Erskine Childers in 1903. In it, two amateur British yachtsmen track a mysterious and malevolent ¿gure, apparently a German, in the North Sea waters between Britain and the German coast. What is tremendously instructive is how the heroes still feel anxieties over the moral status of spying.

 Other stories proliferated with espionage plots. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes had adventures similarly involving German espionage and invasion threats. Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent focused on anarchist themes by tracing the skullduggery of a Mr. Verloc, a double agent in Britain who in¿ltrated into radical circles but also worked for a foreign state’s (implied to be Russia’s) secret services.

 Another popular genre author was the Scottish writer John Buchan. During the First World War, he worked in military intelligence and the Ministry of Information. In the 1930s, he was governor-general of Canada and Lord Tweedsmuir. Buchan wrote more than 100 books in his lifetime. His 26th book, entitled The Thirty-Nine Steps, was written just before the outbreak of the war and published in 1915.

 Buchan’s hero was Richard Hannay, from Rhodesia. The hero ¿ nds himself dragged into a plan to assassinate the Greek prime minister when he visits London and discovers a German plot to invade

79 

Britain along the way. This has been called a classic “man on the run” thriller, where an ordinary person has to improvise and rise to the challenge.

 What these stories had in common was a new theme: However distasteful, intelligence gathering was a necessary evil in this new, more dangerous world. The result was a neat formula, as historian David Stafford has pointed out: British gentlemen were not spies, they were agents. The enemy had spies, while “our” side had dashing, often amateur and hence untainted adventurers and heroes.

 The outbreak of general war would see absurd heights of spy panic. Arms races, militarism, and nationalism formed a combustible mix, needing only the spark of terrorism to set them ablaze. The war provoked hysterical reactions. In London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Berlin, the people rioted against foreign businesses. Rumors of treason focused on immigrant communities.

 In eastern parts of Germany, newspapers carried reports of spies poisoning civic water supplies, poisoning fruit. A hysterical and hilarious search ensued for a reported Geldwagen—“money car” racing wartime ¿nancial aid from France to Russia across German territory. In Berlin, on one day at one train station, 64 alleged spies were turned in, all innocent. These anecdotes have some humor to them, but we should ask ourselves, could our society succumb to a spy panic?

Important Terms

MI5: The British counterintelligence service, founded 1909 as the Special Intelligence Bureau.

MI6: The British overseas intelligence bureau, founded in 1912.

spy phobia: Mass social panic fearing in¿ltration by spies as in Europe from the 1890s through 1914.

80 

Names to Know

Buchan, John (1875–1940): Turn of the century thriller writer, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916).

Childers, Erskine (1870–1922): Author of what is considered the ¿ rst true spy thriller, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and later a secret agent and partisan of the Irish cause, for which he was executed.

Dreyfus, Captain Alfred (1859–1935): French Jewish of¿ cer falsely convicted in 1894 of spying for Germany; only acquitted years later after the protracted Dreyfus Affair.

Reilly, Sidney (1874–1925): British master spy, born in Russia, who may have been one of the models for James Bond; nemesis of the Bolsheviks who likely lured him back to Russia and his death.

Suggested Reading

Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Childers, The Riddle of the Sands.

Lockhart, Reilly: Ace of Spies.

Questions to Consider

1. What are the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair?

2. What accounts for the sudden popularity of spy ¿ction around 1900?

81 

Mata Hari and Company in World War I Lecture 11

he eruption of the Great War opened up new possibilities for women spies, whose roles could be both tragic and strategically vital, and for code breakers. Even neutral countries such as Switzerland, Holland,

and Spain played a part in wartime espionage. Other lessons learned from the First World War included the rising importance of SIGINT in modern espionage and the role of chance in cryptography.

 In the opening days of the First World War, German radio operators started picking up radio signals from the advancing Russian armies. The messages were not encoded. Were the messages legitimate, or were they disinformation designed to lead the Germans into a trap? If you were a military commander, what would you do?

 The First World War broke out in 1914 and would last for four blood-soaked years, ending with Germany’s defeat and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish empires. Shortly, the world would be grappling with the challenge presented by the Soviet Union and its worldwide revolutionary ambition. In this sense, the war was the advent of the modern era.

 The war confronted contemporaries with a constant barrage of shocks and frustrated their expectations. It began with expectations of quick victory. Instead, by the fall of 1914, ¿ghting had bogged down into trench warfare. All combatants sought ways to break the deadlock through diplomacy, technology, and espionage.

 The most famous woman spy of all time was Mata Hari. She is the archetype of the femme fatale, personifying the link between espionage and sex. But her well-known story is mostly myth, which is what makes her real story both so interesting and so tragic. It allows us to follow how the myth of the female spy was constructed and repeated.

82 

 Mata Hari was born with the decidedly unexotic name of Margarethe Geertruida Zelle in 1876 in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. In 1895 she married a Scot, Colonel Rudolph MacLeod, and moved to the Dutch East Indies. They had two children, but their family life was not a happy one; MacLeod was jealous, alcoholic, and abusive.

 After the loss of a child and a return to Europe, the pair divorced, and Zelle moved to Paris in 1904. She took the name Mata Hari and performed what one might call anthropological striptease, combining her dancing with telling folktales. She also became a much sought-after courtesan by important men in government, diplomacy, and business.

 By the time the war broke out, Mata Hari was nearing 40, and her popularity had begun to fade. She turned to espionage as a way of bolstering her Àagging fortunes. She offered to work for both the French and German intelligence services. To this day it remains unclear what, if any, important information she might have collected.

 Her end came when a German military attaché mentioned her in a code that had already been broken by the French. The French authorities arrested her in February 1917. When she was arrested by French authorities, she admitted to the German connection but insisted she never made good on her promises.

 In the closed trial in July 1917, the prosecution may have used forged evidence claiming Mata Hari was responsible for the death of 50,000 French soldiers without explaining how. On October 15, 1917, she was executed by ¿ring squad. More cynical observers suspect Mata Hari was a scapegoat for larger problems in the French war effort.

 The execution of women was a shift in protocol from the days of the American Civil War. Social values were shifting, and this was a brutal kind of tribute, in a sense, to how effective society thought women spies could be.

83 

 Other women spies had careers that both resembled and differed from that of Mata Hari. Marthe Richer, also known as “l’Alouette,” (the lark), was born in Lorraine in 1889 and was already an airplane pilot before the war. Widowed by the war, she spied on German spies in Spain in part by becoming mistress to the German naval attaché there.

 Dr. Elisabeth Schrägmueller was a German philosopher and spy trainer. Originally involved in mail censorship, she soon became part of a new, formal school for spies in Antwerp, Belgium. Schrägmueller aimed to systematize the job of spying. Described as “uninspired, unpractical, and humorless,” Schrägmueller created drills and exercises to make deception second nature. She seemed to miss entirely how espionage can demand spontaneity, improvisation, and subtlety.

 A number of Schrägmueller’s spies were big failures, but Schrägmueller herself became the focus of an Allied legend. After the war, the sensational press in Allied countries related stories of “the Doctor,” and “the Baroness,” crediting her with unusual allure and psychological dominance over men. It was claimed that she was as irresistibly beautiful as she was sadistic. In fact, Schrägmueller was nothing like the fantastic image developed around her.

 British nurse and nursing instructor Edith Cavell was less a spy than the leader of an underground railroad for Allied prisoners in occupied Belgium. She paid for her heroism with her life. In November 1914, she helped hide two lost British soldiers. Over the next four months, Cavell helped more and more people to neutral Holland with the help of more than 30 comrades (among them a princess and a countess).

 Some 200 Allied soldiers were smuggled out via this network. When some members were caught by the Germans, the network was exposed and arrested, Cavell among them. They were put on trial in October 1915. While some of the other network members had their sentences commuted, Cavell was executed on October

84 

12, 1915 in part because the German occupation authorities wanted to make an example of her.

 The rising importance in SIGINT was a marked shift in espionage in this period. The uncoded messages overheard by German radio operators that

were mentioned at the start of the lecture were in fact authentic troop movements—a calculated risk by the Russians, who thought clarity was more important than secrecy. However, the messages allowed the Germans to beat back two armies in succession and score the only major battle¿ eld victory of the war.

 By contrast, things did

not go well for the

Not all spies smuggled information.

Edith Cavell smuggled people out of the recently reorganized fGoer rhmear nh-eorcociucps iwedithBehlegriulimfe.and paid British intelligence service

went into action, arresting all 24 German spies in Britain. As a result, the Germans lacked information about British forces sent to the Continent.

 British ships also located the German submarine cables running along the Àoor of the English Channel, raised them, and cut them twice, with each cut at some distance from the other so that repair would be impossible. German communications across the Atlantic were cut off, and Germany was at a disadvantage in trying to affect world opinion.

85 

 As the war set in, the British intelligence service set about breaking German codes. A crucial role was played by the Royal Navy’s director of intelligence, Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall. He ran the center nicknamed Room 40 of the Old Admiralty Building in London.

 Several breakthroughs for Room 40 involved sheer luck. On August 26, 1914, the German warship Magdeburg ran aground on the island of Odensholm, off Estonia. The Russians seized its codebook and passed it to the British by October 13. A North Sea ¿ shing boat caught a chest containing a book of German consular codes. An Australian ship captured the German merchant marine codes off a German steamer. There is an instructive and humbling lesson here: Knowing how to exploit chance is key.

 Blinker Hall had a dif¿cult time convincing his superiors to trust his information. A week before the Battle of Jutland between the German and British navies, Hall’s decoders had news of the German navy’s movement, but the data did not reach the commander of the British Àeet in time to make a difference.

 Blinker Hall’s of¿ce was also involved in producing disinformation. In the fall of 1916, they spread rumors of a British landing in northern Belgium using a secret code they had planted with German intelligence, then sent the message to Rotterdam with an agent already known to the Germans. To top it all off, fake copies of a British newspaper were printed in an exclusive edition just for the German readership that gave news suggesting preparations for this landing.

 Disinformation has its dangers, however. As German troops started massing on the coast in response to Blinker Hall’s fake invasion, the British military noticed the buildup and feared a German invasion, and rushed troops there. They had not been told of Blinker Hall’s plan.

86 

Important Term

Room 40: An of¿ce in the London Old Admiralty Building, run by Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall, where enemy codes were deciphered.

Names to Know

Cavell, Edith (1865–1915): British nurse executed by the German army in occupied Belgium during World War I for helping people escape.

Mata Hari (1876–1917): Dutch-born exotic dancer and courtesan-turned-spy in World War I, executed by the French.

Richer, Marthe (1889–1982): Female airplane pilot who spied on German of¿cials in neutral Spain during World War I.

Schragmüller, Elisabeth (1887–1940): German professor-spy who aimed to teach spy methods methodically; inspiration for the legend of the Beautiful Blond of Antwerp.

Suggested Reading

Proctor, Female Intelligence.

Questions to Consider

1. Was Mata Hari guilty as charged, or an innocent scapegoat (innocent of those charges, at least)?

2. Can brilliant espionage skills be taught, as Dr. Schrägmueller tried to do, or are they inborn?

87 

Subversion—Lawrence of Arabia and Lenin Lecture 12

overt operations in the Great War aimed to subvert states from within, such as the Arab Revolt encouraged by Lawrence of Arabia, Lenin’s Russian Revolution, and the Zimmermann Telegram that brought the

United States into the war. These efforts met with varying degrees of success and often had long-term consequences that even their authors could not have forseen.

 While the First World War was raging, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his Bolshevik colleagues, who had been living in neutral Switzerland, took an unusual train trip. In late March 1917, the German military gave permission for them to cross German territory in a train that had extraterritorial status, as if it were an independent country. This one secret train trip changed the world.

 Covert operations during the Great War aimed to subvert states from within. The logic of such behavior seemed absolutely airtight, and thus all sides attempted it as a way around the stalemate of the trenches.

 The Germans immediately saw the potential in trying to sow unrest in Britain’s oldest colonial conÀict—Ireland. Before the war, Irish demand for home rule was the main emergency on the minds of politicians in Britain. Leaders of the Protestant community in Ulster were already arming themselves against home rule in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland.

 The English creator of the modern spy novel genre, Erskine Childers, had increasingly become devoted to the Irish nationalist cause and was critical of British policy towards Ireland. He resigned his clerkship in Parliament and in 1911 published a manifesto for home rule. In 1914, he became a covert agent for the nationalist cause.

88 

 With money donated for the Irish nationalist cause, Childers set sail from Britain on his yacht, Asgard. Pretending to be Mexican, he landed in Hamburg, Germany,

and there bought 1,500 old Mauser riÀes, which were snuck back to Ireland. When the war broke out, Childers volunteered for the British Royal Navy, closing ranks in the time of war.

 At the same time, the Germans were encouraging the Irish radicals to rise up, which they

did in the Dublin Easter Rising

The German government assisted very little German assistance. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s return to Ironically, the British reacted war effort.

with such severity that the

nationalists won the Irish popular sympathy they did not have before. This would lead to civil war (in which Childers lost his life) and, ultimately, Irish independence.

 When the war broke out in 1914, German policy makers, with help from their Ottoman Turkish allies, hoped to spur Muslims in British India, French North Africa, and Russian Central Asia to revolution, but few Muslims rallied to the cause.

 A real life agitator against the British among Muslim North Africans was Wilhelm Wassmuss, or Wassmuss of Persia. He was a German consul stationed in what is today Iran, in the territory that the British moved into during the war to secure oil resources. Wassmuss took to the hills to rally local tribes against the British, to no avail. The British, in turn, kept raising the reward money for Wassmuss, also without success. (Some say the tribesmen were convinced the reward was a joke, others that the tradition of hospitality in Persian culture was too strong.)

89 

 The man who was unsurpassed in the Romantic role of rallying and revolutionizing was Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. A British archaeologist from Oxford with a remarkable mind and a charismatic personality, he stirred an Arab revolt within the Ottoman Empire by the emir of Mecca in 1916.

 Lawrence disappeared into the desert in the spring of 1917 and then reemerged to overrun the Ottoman garrison at Aqaba, a strategically located base on the Red Sea. Lawrence personally took the news of this success to Suez, mysteriously appearing alone out of the desert sands to report.

 The Arab forces then took part in the British invasion of Palestine. Lawrence had stirred the Arabs with promises for the future, the idea of a united Arab state in the region. A cruel disappointment awaited them, however, because of secret diplomacy at cross-purposes with Lawrence’s vision—the Sykes-Picot treaty, which divided the Ottoman Empire between France and Britain. This disappointment has echoes in the region’s troubles today.

 An American journalist from Ohio named Lowell Thomas had been fascinated by Lawrence and came to photograph him in the Middle East; his multimedia, The Last Crusade, made Lawrence a legend, to Lawrence’s delight and disgust. Lawrence wrote his own memoirs, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in 1922.

 Another concern for German policy was whether the United States would enter the war. In 1914, most Americans were glad to be far from the Old World’s conÀ ict and favored neutrality. Yet American trade ties with Germany were cut off by the British naval blockade, and thus the bulk of American trade in food and then in military supplies went to the Allies. German leaders sought to undermine this trade without provoking America into the conÀict.

 Germany sent just the wrong person to accomplish this delicate task: Captain Franz von Rintelen. Rintelen came to United States with a Swiss passport in 1915 bent on sabotage. In late July 1916,

90 

he blew up a munitions site on Black Tom Island, across from the Statue of Liberty on the New Jersey coast. Rintelen was ordered to return to Germany, but British naval intelligence got news of this, intercepted him, and sent him back to the United States to be imprisoned.

 This ¿asco was topped by the Zimmermann Telegram incident. The German foreign of¿ce, under Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, sent a message to the German Ambassador to the United States, Count von Bernstorff, on January 16, 1917. Von Bernstorff was ordered to contact the German ambassador to Mexico to negotiate a deal: If Mexico joined the war on Germany’s side, it could regain Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

 Room 40 of the British Admiralty uncovered this plan in a coded message, but they did not want to reveal that they had broken the code. Thus, the British secret service found the telegram sent from Washington to Mexico City and claimed it had broken that lesser code.

 The impact of this telegram on American public opinion, which had been divided, was terrible. The United States entered the war in April 6, 1917. President Woodrow Wilson declared that this was a war to make the world safe for democracy.

 It was in this context that Congress passed the 1917 Espionage Act. This act outlawed efforts to aid the enemy and interfere with war mobilization. It allowed the postmaster general to monitor the mails and seize materials urging treason or illegal activities that would harm the war effort. It also outlawed speech intended to cause insubordination, mutiny, or urging resistance to the draft.

 In 1918, Congress also passed the Sedition Act, making it illegal to make statements that were “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive … about the form of government of the United States.”

91 

 Some 1,500 arrests were made under this legislation, and many socialists and paci¿sts were prosecuted. The most famous case involved the American socialist leader Eugene Debs, sentenced to 10 years in jail for a speech against the draft. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. asserted his belief that “clear and present danger” justi¿ed curbs on speech.

 The biggest seeming success—then in the long run biggest disaster—in espionage history was Germany’s efforts to encourage revolution in the Russian Empire. In March 1917, the tsar’s regime was toppled by an internal revolution, which seemed to be moving Russia in the direction of being a democracy and kept the nation in the war on the side of the Allies. The Germans thus gave the Bolsheviks clear passage back to Russia to get Russia out of the war effort.

 As soon as Lenin arrived in Petrograd, he preached Russian defeat and the overthrow of the government. To be clear, Lenin was almost certainly not a German spy, as many of his critics and rivals claimed at the time and after. He just cheerfully accepted German assistance while pursuing his own plans.

 As the power of the democratically-oriented Provisional Government in Russia declined, the Bolsheviks made their move. They seized power in November 1917 in a quick coup. Among the ¿rst actions of the new regime was to sign a cease ¿ re with the Germans.

 The German command was initially pleased with this outcome, but as revolution spread back toward Germany, the consequences of this covert operation became clear. Consider the chain reaction: Hitler’s rise to power was based in part on his claim that only the Nazis could stand against communism. The long-term effects of this one covert operation were astonishing.

92 

 The Bolsheviks set about establishing a new society, and a Soviet government. “Soviets” were grassroots councils, but the real power lay with People’s Commissars like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

 To enforce their policy, the Bolsheviks instituted a new secret police force, the Cheka, an acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Its leader was Feliks Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat. He was nicknamed Iron Feliks for his ruthlessness and inÀ exible discipline.

 The Cheka were charged with the Red Terror against counterrevolutionaries and class enemies. They considered themselves the “sword and the shield of the party.” Its headquarters was known as the Lubyanka, a feared place of long corridors, secret cells, and torture chambers.

 Around the country, the beginnings of a concentration camp system were established. Rival parties were shut down, and newspapers were banned. State control of internal trade, factories, and land was established. The nationwide constituent assembly was shut down in January 1918, and in July the imprisoned tsar and his family were executed.

 Meanwhile, the Soviets expected a world revolution to break out any minute, convinced that the working classes of the world would rise up in communist revolution worldwide, creating a new age of history.

Important Terms

Cheka: The feared Bolshevik secret police, established in December 1917 under the leadership of Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

Zimmerman Telegram: German secret message sent in January 1917 to the German ambassador in Washington DC, suggesting Mexico enter the First World War against United States; its revelation by the British prompted American entry into the war.

93 

Names to Know

Dzerzhinshky, Feliks (1877–1926): Known as “Iron Felix,” this Polish aristocrat led the Cheka secret police of the Bolsheviks.

Lawrence, Thomas Edward (1888–1935): Mythologized as “Lawrence of Arabia,” a British archaeologist who helped inspire Arab revolt in World War I and suffered from his legendary status after the war.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924): Leader of the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia, to which he returned in 1917 by a train through Germany.

von Rintelen, Franz (1877–1949): German agent sent to the United States to sabotage American aid for the Allies in World War I; arrested by the British and jailed in the United States.

Suggested Reading

Lockhart, Reilly: Ace of Spies.

Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram.

Questions to Consider

1. What made Lawrence of Arabia successful in his revolutionizing?

2. Was the American 1917 Espionage Act a valid measure? Why or why not?

94 

Radical Challenge—The Interwar Years Lecture 13

etween the wars, the new communist government in Russia and its espionage institutions presented a challenge to established regimes worldwide. This challenge appeared in the form of espionage, including a secret war between the British and the Bolsheviks, an amazing conspiracy which the Soviet secret intelligence organized against itself, the establishment of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a

mysterious letter that upset domestic politics in Britain.

 On November 15, 1919, U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer sent to the Senate an of¿cial letter reporting on the steps taken by the Department of Justice to deal with radical organizations in America. The letter proposed a law that would speed the deportation of radicals and a list of 60,000 “radically inclined individuals” who were “identi¿ed with anti-American and disloyal activities.” Palmer was convinced that the United States was threatened from within.

 The years between the wars presented an extreme challenge. Some contemporaries called it the choice between Wilson and Lenin: American president Woodrow Wilson had declared the Great War a war to make the world safe for democracy. He hoped that a worldwide democratic wave would soon produce governments that would spurn secrecy and usher in a harmonious age of “open covenants, openly arrived at.”

 Lenin, by contrast, hoped communism would sweep the world, abolishing all the rotten structures that had brought on the war, including states, religions, private property, classes, and kings. The Bolshevik regime was in a state of war with the status quo. A choice between Wilson and Lenin would, in the course of the 1920s and 1930s, expand to other options—the Fascists in Italy, the Nazis in

95 

Germany, and other movements that claimed that they offered a third way, anti-democratic and anti-communist.

 While the First World War raged, the Bolsheviks expected an imminent outbreak of revolution in other countries. Their task was to turn the world war into a civil war of the workers against the ruling classes. The instrument for this was the Communist International, or Comintern, which encouraged the founding of communist parties around the world.

 In the immediate postwar years, Communist revolts took place in Germany and Hungary; there was agitation in Poland as well as strikes elsewhere. The Comintern sent agitators abroad, using cover organizations to cultivate spies.

 Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were experiencing dif¿culties closer to home. The territories of the former Russian empire disintegrated, with new independent states emerging on the Baltic and peoples like the Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians seeking independence. Russia descended into a civil war that lasted until the late 1920s. This war pitted the “Red” Bolsheviks against the anti-Bolshevik “Whites,” who received assistance from Great Britain, France, and the United States.

 The Bolsheviks crafted a powerful propaganda message that they were defending Russia against outside forces and foreign spies. In fact, even before the First World War ended, there was a secret war going on between the British intelligence and Soviet intelligence. Britain’s goal was to dislodge the Bolsheviks and to replace them with a regime that would support the Western allies in the war.

 A key ¿gure in this twilight struggle was none other than the super spy Sidney Reilly. His mission was to change the Russian government by whatever means necessary—the assassination of Lenin. Reilly met up with Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British representative in communication with the Bolsheviks.

96 

 Reilly tried to set up a plot involving Lenin’s Latvian bodyguards, but he was beaten to the punch by an assassination attempt by socialist Fanya Kaplan, who was outraged at the way the Bolsheviks had arrested non-Bolshevik socialists. Lenin was badly wounded, but survived, and the Cheka arrested tens of thousands, executing about 10,000 of them.

 The Cheka arrested Lockhart, but Reilly escaped the country. He was condemned to death in absentia. The Bolsheviks made propaganda of the Lockhart Plot, rallying Russians against foreign spies and intriguers. Later, Lockhart was released in exchange for a Soviet diplomat in Britain.

 The Russian Civil War petered out in late 1920, yet it was clear to Lenin and his comrades that the international revolution was not imminent. They were now organizing for the long haul, establishing more regular state structures and bureaucracies. Among the changes was the rebranding of the Cheka as the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (GPU), or State Political Administration. Somewhat later, it was renamed the Obedinyonnoye Gosudarstvenoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (OGPU), the Uni¿ed State Political Administration.

 The attention of the Bolsheviks turned to internal opposition. Probably inspired by how the Okhrana had in¿ ltrated the opposition, the Soviet of¿cials went one better: They created an opposition network, which they sponsored, kept tabs on, and— when the moment was right—swept up into jail.

 To trap enemies in exile, Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s of¿ cials set up their own anti-Bolshevik group called the Trust. They established ties with the large Russian exile community throughout Europe, playing on their wishful thinking, and lured some of them back to Russia. One of the leaders of the exile community and a friend of Sidney Reilly, Boris Viktorovich Savinkov, was lured back in this way, arrested, and executed.

97 

 Trust agents then contacted Sidney Reilly and told him Savinkov was still alive, being protected by the Trust. Reilly was invited to come back into Russia to meet the Trust and to help the Trust overthrow the Reds. Reilly crossed the Finnish border in September 1925 and then disappeared. The British intelligence service eventually concluded he had been arrested and executed in 1925, but for decades afterward rumors circulated that he had escaped and made a new life.

 When Lenin died in 1924, a struggle took place for Soviet leadership. In the end, the charismatic leader Leon Trotsky was sidelined and expelled, and the winner of the struggle was Josef Stalin. To a generation of Americans around the time of World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies, he was known as “Uncle Joe.” In fact, he was one of the greatest mass murderers in history. We will talk about his reign of terror in the next lecture.

 After the end of the First World War, in the general demobilization, intelligence bureaucracies were reduced or shut down in the United States, Britain, and France. Espionage, especially in peacetime, was still seen as unsavory and just not done. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson ringingly declared in 1929, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail!”

 In the interest of economizing, American military forces were also scaled back, including military intelligence. The military intelligence branch had been reduced to about 90 personnel in 1922. In 1929, the number was reduced to 74, and in 1936, as war loomed in Asia and Europe, the number had dropped to 66.

 One intelligence-gathering operation continued, however: Herbert Yardley’s Black Chamber (named for the cabinet noir of European royal courts) in the State Department used intercepts of Japanese telegram communications to track the Japanese naval buildup. They broke Japan’s diplomatic code and read the Japanese negotiation positions at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. Then it was shut down in 1929 at the behest of the outraged, gentlemanly Secretary Stimson.

98 

 In 1931, Yardley published The American Black Chamber, which became worldwide best seller and sold particularly well in Japan. The Japanese government was henceforth determined to create unbreakable ciphers. Many of Yardley’s colleagues condemned him for his book. Debates about whistleblowers and transparency are not unique to our time.

 As American military preparedness was being reduced, domestic concerns took on new urgency. The so-called Red Scare of the summer of 1919 began with an anarchist letter-bomb campaign. The result was the Palmer Raids of November 1919 to January 1920—massive police sweeps coordinated by Attorney General Palmer. These raids rounded up hundreds of foreign radicals and deported them.

 Among Palmer’s subordinates was J. Edgar Hoover. Son of a civil servant, deeply religious, shy, and retiring, Hoover was driven to succeed. Among other tasks, Hoover worked on tracking enemy aliens in the country and

compiled a card index of nearly half a million people he considered suspicious.

 In 1924, Hoover was placed in charge of the Bureau of     Investigation in the Justice Department. This became the Federal Bureau of     Investigation

In many ways, J. Edgar Hoover was the father of the FBI and American

death in 1972. In the 1920s domestic intelligence gathering.

and 1930s, Hoover, with help from Hollywood, built a legend around himself and the incorruptible G-men, ¿ghting gangsters and the Ku Klux Klan.

99 

 Hoover was a public relations genius, but he was also a controversial ¿gure. He had amassed power through investigations, including surveillance of Americans. Many of the more salacious rumors about his personal life, however, are unsubstantiated.

 When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to Hoover to coordinate American counterintelligence, to ferret out spies on American territory, and changed the law on wiretapping to accomplish this task. In the 1934 Communications Act, nonconsensual wiretapping had been outlawed. Roosevelt’s executive order in May 1940 allowed wiretapping of “persons suspected of subversive activities against the Government of the United States, including suspected spies. You are requested furthermore to limit these investigations so conducted to a minimum and to limit them insofar as possible to aliens.”

 The mysterious Zinovev Letter puts a spotlight on interwar politics in Britain. Published by a conservative newspaper in Britain in 1924, it was supposedly signed by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, and ordered British communists to support the Labour Party. The previous year, Labour had formed its ¿ rst-ever government and had ¿nally recognized the Soviet Union.

 The Zinoviev Letter was published four days before the general election, and helped produce a Conservative win. Was it real? Was it a forgery, and if so by whom? A British Foreign Of¿ ce investigation in 1999 suggested that it was probably produced in Riga, Latvia, by forgers with contacts to MI6 or MI5 of¿ cers in Britain. This is still debated today, but it is clear that politics could shift over issues of espionage and covert action.

100 

Important Terms

cabinet noir: A “black chamber” in premodern European royal courts where mail would be secretly opened and read.

Comintern: The Communist International, organized 1919, to encourage the founding of communist parties loyal to Moscow.

FBI: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, charged with both federal internal policing and counterintelligence in the United States, established in 1935.

GPU: The Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, or State Political Administration, the secret police of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1934.

Lockhart Plot: Alleged British plot to assassinate Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1918, which led to the Àight of Sidney Reilly from Moscow and the arrest of his colleague, Bruce Lockhart; used to great propaganda effect by the Bolsheviks.

OGPU: The Obedinyonnoye Gosudarstvenoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, or United State Political Administration, another name for the Soviet secret police from 1922 to 1934.

Red Scare: From 1919 to 1920, anxieties about foreign radicalism in the United States, marked by the Palmer Raids.

Trust: A fake opposition group set up by the Soviet Cheka in the 1920s for counterintelligence and to lure Russian exiles back to their homeland.

Zinoviev Letter: A letter published in 1924 in Britain, purporting to be from a Soviet of¿cial encouraging revolution, that shifted British domestic politics.

101 

Names to Know

Hoover, J. Edgar (1895–1972): Director of the American FBI for decades, cultivator of his own legend, and controversial ¿ gure.

Lockhart, Robert Bruce (1887–1970): British diplomat sent to Bolshevik Russia and colleague of Sidney Reilly. Arrested by the Bolsheviks for a conspiracy to assassinate Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Palmer, Alexander Mitchell (1872–1936): U.S. attorney general who led the Palmer Raids against radicals in 1919 and 1920, promoted J. Edgar Hoover.

Stalin, Josef (1879–1953): Soviet dictator, successor to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and one of the greatest mass murderers in history. Unleashed spy panics in the Soviet Union to justify purges and terror.

Stimson, Henry (1867–1950): American secretary of state who in 1929 famously declared that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail, condemning espionage.

Yardley, Herbert (1889–1958): American code breaker who ran the Black Chamber of the State Department in the interwar period, breaking Japanese codes and provoking Henry Stimson.

Suggested Reading

Lockhart, Reilly: Ace of Spies.

Stove, The Unsleeping Eye.

Questions to Consider

1. Why were anti-Bolsheviks so easily and thoroughly fooled by the Trust?

2. Compare Feliks Dzerzhinsky as spymaster with the record of Sir Francis Walsingham. Who was more effective and why?

102 

Soviets and Nazis—Surveillance and Terror Lecture 14

n their different ways, the Soviets and Nazis built the ¿ rst modern surveillance societies, taking internal espionage to new levels of intensity. For all their differences in ideology, both the Soviets and the Nazis relied heavily on denunciation and propaganda to make these systems work. The key aim of the terror wielded by these states was to get people to

police themselves.

 Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany brought spying on one’s own subject population to unprecedented new levels. They justi¿ed their actions by claiming they were defending their nations against foreign spies.

 Soviet of¿cials argued that there was an international capitalist conspiracy in¿ltrating the model new state and worker’s paradise. The Nazis played on racist paranoia, making claims of an international Jewish conspiracy with Germany the intended victim.

 We have seen many instances of internal espionage: ancient Sparta, ancient Persia, the Oprichnina, and France during the Revolution and under Napoleon. But the regimes of the 1930s took this to an entirely new level. Today, we ¿nd ourselves under new kinds of surveillance all the time. A history of surveillance and the potential for its abuse is probably more needed than ever.

 As the world toward a new world war, Stalin was waging a war on his own country. By his logic, it was imperative to transform old Russia by a revolution from above to be ready for a war against the capitalists. By 1929, Stalin had made the supreme leader, the Vozhd’, complete with a cult of personality.

103 

 Stalin aimed to bring agriculture under total state control. A deliberate outcome of this campaign was the Terror Famine of 1932–1933 in which some 5–7 million people starved to death. Stalin also ordered a crash industrialization program, which caused tremendous dislocations among the population.

 Since Stalin and the party could not possibly be in error for these failures, the logic went, then they must be due to internal opposition or foreign spies. Enemies of the state were sent to Gulag camps to perform forced labor, often fatal.

 As under Lenin, the secret police were part of the campaign to remake the Soviet Union. After Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s death, the OGPU was renamed the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1934 under the command of Genrikh Yagoda. Stalin gave them the leading role in the Great Purge of 1936–1938, in which 600,000 people were executed. Mass graves from this purge are still being discovered today.

 The purge was launched as the result of the mysterious murder of Stalin’s potential rival, Sergei Kirov, in December 1934. Many believe Stalin himself ordered the murder, then used it as a pretext to cleanse party and country.

 These massive arrests of party of¿cials, old Bolsheviks, and ordinary citizens were followed by the Moscow Show Trials. Prominent Communists were accused of plotting against Stalin. After improbable (some falsi¿ed) confessions, they were convicted and executed. Among them was Zinoviev, the putative author of the Zinoviev Letter. Many in death became nonpersons, expunged from the historical record.

 It was a short step from creating one’s own internal opposition, like the Trust, to deploying imaginary spies as scapegoats. This began in 1933, then was employed in earnest from 1937 under the new NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. Now NKVD of¿cials were arrested and executed as foreign agents, because only that could explain the

104 

continuing problems. Among them was Genrikh Yagoda, former head of the NKVD.

Stalin had tens of thousands of army of¿cers purged. The military was ravaged, leaving the Soviet Union ill-prepared for World War II.

 Arrest quotas were issued to the police, who would compete to exceed their quotas. Family members of suspects were arrested as enemies of the people. No one seemed exempt. Denunciations could also be deployed by jealous coworkers as a form of upward mobility. The chronic housing shortage also motivated denunciations.

 In this pressure cooker of fear, a kind of coping mechanism evolved in the form of humor, called anekdoti. George Orwell wrote that “every joke is a tiny revolution,” an act of resistance.

 Stalin called off the purge, temporarily, in November 1938 and replaced NKVD chief Yezhov with Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. Later, perhaps for symmetry’s sake, Stalin had Yezhov shot. Surveillance continued and in fact was institutionalized in the ¿ gure of the dezhurnaya: an older woman assigned to a hotel, dormitory, or other building to keep watch.

 Meanwhile, the Nazis were building their own surveillance state in Germany. The Nazis claimed they were creating a true people’s community that would regain Germany’s rightful position in the world—but only if it could be cleansed of racial enemies. The Nazis claimed that their project was endangered by a global Jewish conspiracy.

 Among the many chilling things the Nazis said was that the era of personal happiness was over; everything would be done together. It was the duty of German “racial comrades” to keep an eye on each other.

105 

 A secret police was constructed to keep watch on society, part of a state within a state built by one of Hitler’s closest associates, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler was a failed chicken farmer who joined the Nazi party early on and believed that he was the reincarnation of a German medieval king. But he did have uncanny skills of organization and bureaucratic in¿ ghting.

 Before the Nazis came to power, Himmler was put in charge of the SS, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and formed the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the party’s internal security agency. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Himmler began the process of gathering to himself control of all German governmental police forces, especially the Gestapo, the Secret State Police.

 In 1937, Himmler and his forces were crucial in the purge of Hitler’s own storm troopers on the Night of the Long Knives. In 1939, Himmler capped his long acquisition of agency after agency with the founding of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the Reich Security Central Of¿ce, which was run by his protégé, Reinhard Heydrich. The RSHA was in charge of all the police forces and intelligence tasks.

 The Nazis always used police power to clamp down on opposition. Arrested people were taken to concentration camps, whose existence was made common knowledge to make the threat explicit. Idle chatter or jokes could get one in trouble, but it is signi¿ cant that very few jokes have been recorded about Himmler or the Gestapo.

 The Gestapo pursued distinctive tactics. Those condemned to concentration camps before 1939 often received not sentences of years, but rather weeks or months. The real threat was not the length of the sentence but the swift return to the camp should one step out of line again.

 The secret police liked to project an image of being a huge, monolithic, omnipresent force, but the reality was different, as records testify. There were only some 7,000 of¿cials in the Gestapo

106 

and 5,000 in the SD before the war.The Nazi security apparatus also relied more on denunciations than active investigation. At times the Gestapo of¿ces were overwhelmed by more denunciations than they could deal with.

 Himmler instructed his Gestapo that the German people must see them as trustworthy, even as they feared them; in this way, arrests would be

seen as frightening but      deserved. Recent research stresses the way in which the Gestapo relied on informants and the cooperation of the population, as well as the way in which terror was selective, targeting mostly those who had already been de¿ ned as outsiders while leaving the majority safe and available for complicity in self-policing.

The 1930s in Europe were      Adolf Hitler’s regime was supported by an extraordinarily ef¿cient and ruthless

wielded by secret police. secret police. Stalin’s Soviet Union and

Hitler’s Germany had radically opposed ideologies and saw each other as mortal enemies in a worldwide historical struggle, but in fact they had features in common.

 In August 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which showed they could have a common cause. In this case, the outcome was the Second World War, as they divided Poland and the Baltic States among themselves.

107 

 The Soviets and Nazis both envisioned society not as a realm of free individuals but saw societies in collectivist terms, as anthills of different kinds. These two cases are part of a trend we have seen before and will see again later: societies put under surveillance. What made the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany distinctive was the use of surveillance, terror, and intense violence to remake society and to shape people’s minds to the desires of the state.

Important Terms

dezhurnaya: In the Soviet Union, a woman whose task was to watch and be on duty (hence the name) in public buildings.

Gestapo: The secret internal political police in Nazi Germany, under the control of Heinrich Himmler.

Gulag camps: The extensive Soviet prison camp system, established under Lenin and at its largest under Stalin.

NKVD: The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, replacing the OGPU in 1934 as the Soviet secret police.

RSHA: The German Reich Security Main Of¿ce from 1939, run by Heinrich Himmler’s protégé Reinhard Heydrich as the main coordinating body of the police and intelligence services.

Sicherheitsdienst (SD): The Nazi Party’s internal Security Service.

surveillance: Constant observation of an opposed party to gain intelligence.

Names to Know

Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich (1899–1953): Josef Stalin’s fellow Georgian and chief of his secret police, feared and ambushed by his own comrades in the Soviet leadership after Stalin’s death.

108 

Heydrich, Reinhard (1904–1942): Model Nazi, protégé of Heinrich Himmler, in charge of the RSHA, and organizer of the Final Solution. He was assassinated by Czech agents.

Himmler, Heinrich (1900–1945): Failed chicken farmer and master of bureaucracy who built the SS and Gestapo empire within the German empire.

Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945): German dictator, one of the greatest mass murderers in history, who inaugurated genocide by claiming a world conspiracy against Germany.

Yagoda, Genrikh (1891–1938): One of a succession of Stalin’s secret police chiefs, used as an instrument of terror and then executed, like his successor Nikolai Yezhov.

Yezhov, Nikolai (1895–1940): One of a succession of Stalin’s secret police chiefs, used as an instrument of terror and then executed; his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, would follow an identical trajectory and fate.

Suggested Reading

Stove, The Unsleeping Eye.

Questions to Consider

1. Did contemporaries believe Stalin’s show trials and confessions of the accused? Why or why not?

2. How could the internal policing and repression of these regimes best be resisted?

109 

Converts to Espionage Lecture 15

n the interwar period, individuals, like the Cambridge Five in Britain or Soviet spies in the United States chose to commit themselves to espionage, showing the power of ideology and personal factors.

Motivations for spying included ideology, ¿nancial reward, blackmail, fear for oneself or one’s family, rebellion, and the desire to be part of a chosen elite. In their varied motivations, we see all the drama of human character and values.

 Should spies be given Christmas presents? In late 1936, a Soviet agent named Colonel Boris Bykov and an American communist courier known as “Carl” had just this argument. Bykov insisted that Carl’s best agents be rewarded for their hard work. Carl insisted this was insulting to those of the true faith.

 Despite Carl’s protests, Bykov decided on the purchase of a number of expensive Oriental rugs, which were given to the American agents as gifts from the grateful Soviet people. Afterwards, Carl admitted he had been wrong—almost all of the agents were impressed, not revolted.

 The Cambridge spy ring was a group of ¿ve British undergraduates recruited into Soviet spying in the 1930s. They would play signi¿cant roles up into the cold war, when they were ¿ nally unmasked. The ring included Harold “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross. Of these, Kim Philby has been called the greatest spy of modern times.

 What makes Philby’s case particularly interesting is that decades after he Àed to Moscow in 1963 to avoid arrest, he wrote and was allowed to publish a memoir of his activities, My Silent War, which seems to reveal aspects of what drove him to this work.

110 

 Most of the Cambridge Five came from wealthy, socially prominent British families (Cairncross was the exception). Cambridge was an elite university where the future leaders of Britain and its empire were educated. The young men were bound together by several aspects of the culture of British universities at the time, from heavy drinking to leftist politics to, in some of their cases homosexuality or bisexuality and membership in the same secret societies.

 The disillusionment felt by the Cambridge spy ring was not unique. Similar sentiments were revealed in the famous Oxford Union debate of February 9, 1933, in which a large majority of students voted for the resolution: “That this House will in no circumstances ¿ght for its King and Country.” Many undergraduates later volunteered for World War II, however.

 The Cambridge spy ring’s members were turned towards Communism and the Soviet Union by two talent spotters on campus: Arnold Deutsch, a communist from Austria, and Theodore Maly, a Hungarian former Catholic priest.

 The ring’s members apparently refused to accept money for their services. In addition to ideology, they were bound together by friendship and sex, in a violation of tradecraft, which usually urges that a spy ring’s members be remote from one another so that the ring cannot be easily broken. Graham Greene, the British spy and spy novelist, compared the Cambridge Five to Jesuits, holding fast to their faith.

 Kim Philby was born to a distinguished family. His father was a civil servant in India, a noted explorer, and a convert to Islam. Philby came to be known as “Kim” after the hero of Kipling’s novel. Like his father, Philby had many affairs with women and married four times. He had charm, lots of energy, intelligence, and a yearning for adventure.

In 1929, Philby entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and there was recruited by the Soviets and given the assignment of in¿ ltrating

111 

British intelligence. In his memoir, he speaks of having made a “total commitment to the Soviet Union which I regarded then, as I do now, the inner fortress of the world movement.

 Philby’s decision was “not the result of a sudden conversion.” but a slower process. He saw the defeat of the Labour Party in 1931 as an indictment of democracy. He was also entranced at being offered “enrolment in an elite force.”

 Armed with con¿dence, Philby went on a mission to Spain, which was then embroiled in a civil war, under cover of being a newspaper reporter. His memoir skims over an apparent crisis of con¿ dence brought on by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. At this point, Philby dropped out of sight, not contacting his Soviet handlers again until 1941. We will resume Philby’s story in a later lecture.

 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, “Carl” was being recruited for Soviet service. His real name was Jay Vivian “Whittaker” Chambers, and his compelling memoir is called Witness, written after his political conversion away from communism and published in 1952.

 Born in Philadelphia in 1901, Chambers attended Columbia University in New York but did not ¿nish, forced to leave when he wrote a play that outraged university authorities. In 1925, he joined the Communist Party of the U.S.A. About 1931 he went underground to become a courier for the Soviets, operated out of Baltimore and passing U.S. government documents.

 Recruitment of agents into a Soviet network had begun in earnest in 1934. This network centered on Washington DC, with strong points in New York and San Francisco. Important tasks were given to so-called illegals, agents without diplomatic cover. If caught, the Soviet government would disavow any knowledge of them. The network’s priorities included economic and military espionage.

112 

 The most effective and committed of the spies were those who had ideological faith, but not all kept the faith. For instance, news of the Stalinist purges left Chambers shaken; moreover, he began to turn toward religion. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was announced, Chambers went to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to reveal all. In particular, he told Berle that one of his subordinates, Alger Hiss, was a spy.

 Chambers was an ideological spy. He was “drawn to Communism by the problem of the war,” the intense damage and suffering caused by World War I. In 1923, he had traveled to Europe and seen the dislocation and turmoil ¿rsthand. Communism seemed to him the answer to a dying world. He was also exhilarated (like Philby) at the thought of being chosen for an elite.

 Chambers was disturbed that money was thrust at him. A superior told him later that one should always give money to a man, because it would obligate him.

 Chambers emphasized in his memoir that the work of the spy was not thrilling; excitement meant something was going wrong. And there was no escape from the spying life. As one of his comrades put it, “You can only leave if they shoot you or if we shoot you.”

 When Chambers did leave, he said, “I know I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under communism.” In the motivations of both Chambers and Philby, History with a capital “H” loomed over their decisions.

 In this same period of growing international crisis, others made different choices. Tyler G. Kent was born in Manchuria, where his father was the American consul at the time. He graduated from Princeton and studied at the Sorbonne, but he was unreliable, neurotic, and a rabid anti-Semite, which limited his own career in the U.S. State Department.

113 

 After the Soviet Union and the U.S. began diplomatic relations in 1933, Kent became a code clerk in the new American embassy in Moscow. He may have been blackmailed by Soviet intelligence in a honeypot trap. In 1939, Kent was transferred to the American embassy in London under Joseph Kennedy. Kennedy was a strict isolationist, as was Kent.

 Kent seemed a devoted code clerk, but in fact he had started holding back copies of telegrams between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (at that point First Lord of the Admiralty), which prevented the British blockade of Germany from inciting incidents with American shipping.

 Meanwhile, Kent was keeping strange company: Scotland Yard observed him meeting with a suspected German spy; members of the anti-Semitic, pro-German Right Club; some Russian émigrés whom the British suspected were spying for the Soviets; and Anna Wolkoff, daughter of a tsarist admiral who had ties with Nazi Germany.

 MI5 of¿cers arrested Kent on May 20, 1940, ¿nding over 1,500 embassy papers in his apartment. Kennedy waived Kent’s diplomatic immunity, and Kent was put on trial, found guilty, and imprisoned for the rest of the Second World War.

 A German-American named William Sebold who fought for Germany in the First World War had quite the opposite story. He emigrated to the United States in 1921 and became an American citizen in 1936. Then in February 1939, he returned to Germany to see relatives. There he was approached by German military intelligence agents. Fearing his relatives would be harmed if he did not agree to spy, Sebold assented—or seemed to.

 Sebold then visited the American consulate in Cologne, allegedly to get a replacement for his lost passport, and told them everything. He was told to play along, and he did so. Returning to America, Sebold set up (with the help of the FBI) a spy ring in New York

114 

City and became the clearing house for radio transmissions from Nazi spies in the United States. When the FBI decided to shut the operation down in 1941, they netted 37 Nazi spies.

Important Terms

Cambridge spy ring: A spy ring recruited by the Soviets from undergraduates at the British university in the 1930s, including Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and John Cairncross.

honeypot trap: In tradecraft, the use of sex as a lure or occasion for blackmail to recruit an agent.

spy ring: An intelligence organization, which in good tradecraft should not have all the agents known to each other but is rather compartmentalized.

Names to Know

Chambers, Whittaker (1901–1961): Former American Soviet courier for espionage, who broke with his earlier faith and authored Witness (1952); accused Alger Hiss of spying.

Kent, Tyler G. (1911–1988): American embassy code clerk convicted by the British of spying during World War II.

Philby, Harold “Kim” (1912–1988): Considered the most important spy of the cold war, Philby joined the Cambridge spy ring and went on to a high career in British intelligence while spying for the Soviets until his escape to the Soviet Union in 1963. There he authored My Silent War (1968) and was honored on a postage stamp.

Sebold, William (1899–1970?): German American who was pressured into becoming a spy for Germany but then became a double agent, helping the FBI round up Nazi spies in the United States from 1939 to 1941.

115 

Suggested Reading

Chambers, Witness.

Philby, My Silent War.

Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood.

Questions to Consider

1. How did news of the internal purges under Josef Stalin affect espionage?

2. How did the concept of “History” motivate ideologically convinced spies?

116 

Launching World War II Lecture 16

s the world lurched towards World War II, espionage activity escalated, with Japanese spies in Manchuria and Hawaii, fascist and communists spies in the Spain, and a Àurry of activity in other

hotspots. Unfortunately, good intelligence and serious warnings often went ignored or misunderstood, leading to disasters like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This was also the dawn of the great era of code making and code breaking, when the Enigma and Purple codes were ¿rst created and deciphered.

 Shortly after 10 p.m. on September 18, 1931, an explosion occurred on the South Manchurian Railway in China’s Kwantung, near a Japanese army base. The results of the explosion were not huge—a gap of 31 inches blown in the rails—but it would do.

 The Japanese army announced that they had been attacked by the Chinese, and would have to respond to this terrorist outrage. In fact, the Japanese had staged the attack as a pretext to attack China. In retrospect, this would be seen as the outbreak of World War II in Asia. In fact, scenes like this would become common all over the world in the lead-up to World War II.

 One imperative for intelligence agencies in Europe was to take the measure of the Nazi regime that had come to power in 1933. The Nazis were clearly militaristic; Adolf Hitler recited the wrongs of the Versailles Treaty and demanded that Germany receive its due in world politics. Yet he masked his aggressive intentions in peace campaigns, insisting that as a veteran he knew the terrible reality of war.

 British intelligence wrestled with this problem and used both clandestine sources and public information. What they saw was troubling. Germany was rearming, as secretly as they could, and in de¿ance of the severe restrictions on German armaments set down in the Versailles Treaty.

117 

 By 1935, German rearmament was no secret; Hitler announced it publicly, including the expansion of Germany’s army through the draft and the building of a massive new air force, the Luftwaffe. British intelligence was especially worried about air war. Flight was in its infancy in the First World War, and few could imagine effective defense against death from the air.

 With the help of French Intelligence, the British estimated that German bombing of Britain would produce daily casualties on the ground of 50,000. When British and French political leaders sought to appease Hitler, it was this prospect that drove them, even so far as the Munich Conference of September 1938, when Czechoslovakia’s fate was turned over to Hitler. Happily for Britain, these estimates also drove rearmament.

 At the same time, Poland was likewise urgently concerned with taking the measure of the Nazis. Polish cryptographers had helped to break the German military code, Enigma, which would be of tremendous value to the western Allies when World War II came.

 Enigma was actually an encryption machine, invented and patented by a German engineer during the 1920s. The German army and navy had adopted the machine soon after, well before the Nazis came to power. What was so appealing was that the machine’s workings promised to produce an almost unbreakable encryption.

 The machine was about the size of a typewriter. Message were both mechanically and electronically encrypted. Plus, every time the operator pressed a key, the settings would all move and change for the next letter. Only the receiver, who had advance knowledge of the initial settings, could work the process in reverse and decode the message. This kind of encryption resulted in 400 quadrillion possible combinations.

 Poland had the help of the French cryptological department, which in late 1932 passed them Enigma operators’ manuals they had gotten from a German code clerk. The Polish experts were able to

118 

reverse engineer an Enigma machine and decrypt about 75 percent of German military communication by 1938.

 At that point, a change in the German procedure cut them off again, but the Poles gave all they knew and copies of their Enigma machines to the French and British mere weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland, giving Allied cryptographers a head start on breaking the improved Enigma code.

 Half a world away, Japan was continuing its remarkable transition to modernity, determined not be one of the victims of European imperialism but an imperialist power itself. Japanese nationalist societies had been agitating and planning for decades for a Japanese-controlled empire in East Asia, starting with Manchuria in northeastern China and Siberia.

Japan’s successful attack on Pearl Harbor was due, in hindsight, to fragmented intelligence. The information was available, but no one pieced it together.

119 

 Japan had launched its imperialist expansion by going to war with China in 1894 and with Russia in 1904. After both wars ended in victory, Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Then Japan staged the 1931 Mukden Incident, blowing up a railway and claiming a Chinese terrorist attack. They took over Manchuria, an area larger than Texas, and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The truth behind the Mukden Incident only came to light after World War II.

 After the League of Nations criticized the occupation, Japan simply left the league and continued attacking China. In 1937, ¿ ghting broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops in Beijing, leading to eight years of war and Japanese control of northern China and the coasts.

 Japanese intelligence now prepared to campaign westward into the Paci¿c Ocean. The Versailles Treaty had assigned Japan Germany’s former possessions in the Paci¿c, including the Marshalls, the Carolines, and the Mariana islands. The Japanese now planned to build these up with air¿elds and forti¿ cations. American agents were sent to investigate, and some never returned alive. There is speculation that Amelia Earhart was one of them.

 The United States lacked agents in Japan. Thus it became imperative to cracking Japanese codes. The U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service was established in April 1930, led by William F. Friedman and comprising four subordinates and one clerk in a small of¿ce. During the First World War, Friedman had worked under Herbert Yardley.

 The great challenge was an innovation the Japanese introduced in 1939, in part because of Yardley’s book about the American Black Chamber: a cipher machine, the 97-shiki ǀbun inji-ki, or Alphabetical Typewriter 97, which was based on the German Enigma machine but improved on it by double encryption and the use of multiple electrical switches with a plugboard.

120 

 From February 1939, Friedman ordered his staff to drop everything else and work on the Japanese code. One break came because of the formality of diplomatic language, which allowed code breakers to look for formulaic greetings and closings.

 The Americans were able to build a replica of the Japanese machine, which they called Purple. Friedman fondly called his small talented staff magicians, and thus their decrypts were called Operation MAGIC.

 At the same time, Japan was ramping up its spying efforts in the United States. Most intelligence gathering was done by the staff of the Japanese embassy. A special target was the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The fact that the base and installations were visible from surrounding heights made observation easier than it might have otherwise been.

 The Japanese consulate in Honolulu was a good base of operations. The consulate’s treasurer got a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships, ordered a taxi, and acted like a tourist while examining warships. Takeo Yoshikawa, a young naval of¿cer, posed as a lazy partier but was also spying from taxis and from parties at Wheeler Airbase.

 Takeo Yoshikawa was troubled at having to work with a German spy, Dr. Bernard Kühn, a former German navy of¿ cer in World War I, now a Nazi and a terrible spy. American intelligence suspected Kühn from the ¿ rst.

 During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese consulate burned documents. Meanwhile, Dr. Kühn, who was supposed to lie low as a sleeper agent, tried to send messages from his roof while the attack was on, was spotted by the FBI, and was arrested.

 The attack on Pearl Harbor represented an American intelligence failure, and from then on American intelligence services would describe their task as “preventing another Pearl Harbor.” The failure was largely due to the decrypted Japanese communications

121 

being highly restricted; and often, without other information, the information seemed incomplete to analysts. No one message announced an attack on Pearl Harbor. Also, there was dif¿ culty getting HUMINT to verify the SIGINT.

 In Europe in 1936, a war broke out that has been called a dress rehearsal for World War II: the Spanish Civil War. Spanish nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco staged a military revolt against the Spanish Republic. The Popular Front of democrats, socialists, anarchists, and communists supported the republic.

 The war that followed was brutal and devastating, ¿ lled with atrocities and costing about a half million lives as it drew in outside powers. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sent “volunteers” to help Franco. Brigades of international volunteers from Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere trekked to Spain to aid the Republic. Stalin sent advisors and supplies, but on his orders the Spanish communist forces set about purging their own. Franco was ¿nally the winner in 1939.

 At this time, Kim Philby was active behind the lines of Franco’s forces. At one point, he was interrogated by Franco’s police while a dangerous piece of rice paper in his pocket. This paper contained instructions on how to encode communications to his Soviet superiors. While being searched, Philby “accidentally” threw his wallet across a table. As his interrogators scrambled for it and turned away from him, he was able to swallow the paper. Seemingly innocent, he was released. Philby had gotten what he called “a whiff of the ¿ ring squad.”

 The Spanish Civil War gave us a linguistic legacy in the expression “¿ fth column,” which describes an organized internal conspiracy that cooperates with the enemy of a country. In 1936, one of Franco’s generals made a threatening radio broadcast as he

122 

advanced on Madrid. He announced that his army had four columns marching on the city and a ¿fth column already inside. This was a new expression for the old idea of the Trojan Horse.

 World War II in Europe began with a covert operation of deception that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mukden Incident in Manchuria. The Nazis claimed that Poles had attacked a German radio station on the border. The ¿rst victim of the war was Francis Honiok, a Polish farmer.

 Honiok had been singled out by the Nazi intelligence planners of the SD. After he was ambushed in his home, he was drugged, driven to the radio station, dressed in a Polish uniform, shot, and left, along with the bodies of several convicts. The next morning, Hitler announced to the world that the German army was “¿ ring back.”

Important Terms

97-shiki ǀbun inji-ki: The Japanese version of the Enigma encryption machine used during World War II, called “Purple” by the Americans.

Enigma: The German encryption machine ¿rst developed in the interwar years that produced code at ¿rst considered unbreakable, but the Allied Operation ULTRA was able to decode it (after Polish intelligence had decoded it ¿rst, before the war broke out).

¿ fth column: A term originating in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War to indicate a group of internal saboteurs.

Mukden Incident: An act of sabotage staged by Japanese forces in Manchuria in 1931 to offer a pretext for attacking China.

Operation MAGIC: American decoding operation focused on Japanese codes, run by William Friedman.

123 

Names to Know

Friedman, William F. (1891–1969): Talented American code breaker who had worked under Herbert Yardley breaking German codes during World War I; he was put in charge of the new Signal Intelligence Service, established in 1930, and led the team that broke the Japanese codes during World War II, in Operation MAGIC.

Yoshikawa, Takeo (1914–1993): Japanese naval intelligence of¿cer sent to the Honolulu consulate under diplomatic cover, observed Pearl Harbor in the lead-up to the attack in 1941.

Suggested Reading

Philby, My Silent War.

Questions to Consider

1. Why did the Germans assume that their Enigma coding could not be broken?

2. Why was it dif¿cult for opponents of the Nazis to learn what was going on in Germany?

124 

Covert Operations and Codes in World War II Lecture 17

ritish and American intelligence and special operations forces (the SOE and OSS) sought to “set Europe ablaze,” on Churchill’s orders, fostering resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, while all sides worked

feverishly to decipher each others’ secret codes. None of these actions was without risk, nor without ethical quandaries, and historians still debate how important espionage was to the Allied victory in World War II when compared with military strategy and leadership.

 One of the most famous secret agents in World War II was a man who never existed. In the early morning hours of April 30, 1943, a British submarine set the body of “Major Martin of the Royal Marines” into the water, where currents would bring it to the Spanish beaches. No such person existed.

 The body of a homeless man had been picked for the purpose, provided with carefully manufactured uniform, dog tags, money, old theater tickets, and personal letters. In a briefcase handcuffed to the body were military plans about a coming Allied invasion.

 British radio news announced that a plane with British of¿ cers had been lost at sea. Later that day, a Spanish ¿sherman found the body. Nazi spies in neutral Spain also got word of the body, got there ¿ rst, and photographed the contents of the briefcase. Would they believe this seeming coup of theirs? Many lives of Allied soldiers depended on it.

 As World War II progressed, the hope was that special operations, carried out in covert ways, could tip the balance of the conÀ ict. The balance seemed especially endangered early in the war, when France fell with unexpected speed in June 1940. As Britain stood alone against the Nazis, Winston Churchill looked to the strategy that had worked against Napoleon: fomenting local revolts.

125 

 Churchill ordered his military to “set Europe ablaze” with sabotage and British encouragement for underground resistance movements The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was founded for just this purpose. The new organization would exist in a latent rivalry with MI6, which was in charge of espionage networks. Here is another constant that we see in intelligence activities: even branches working on the same side can suspect one another.

 The SOE operated far and wide—in France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Asia. At its maximum size it had about 13,000 men and women. Its daring activities were said to be especially irksome to Hitler.

 The SOE also experienced some keen disappointments. On March 6, 1942 the German Abwehr captured an SOE agent, the Dutchman Hubert Lauwers, whom the British had in¿ltrated back into occupied Holland. He was carrying a transmitter, and the Germans forced him to send disinformation back to SOE. Each radio operator has unique signs and style, yet the SOE radio operators back in Britain did not notice a change, and further drops led to the capture of more than 50 SOE agents by the Nazis.

 Another problem also dogged the SOE: Strikes against the Nazi occupiers would provoke terrible revenge. When sabotage took place, the Nazis shot hostages from the local civilian population. Armed attacks could mean reprisals against entire towns and villages. Morally, of course, the ultimate choice lay with the Nazis, but the calculus of cost and bene¿t was a dif¿ cult one.

 When the United States joined the Second World War, the SOE soon had a counterpart: the American Of¿ce of Strategic Services (OSS). It was led by William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, a lawyer and decorated First World War veteran. In July 1941, Donovan was made the Coordinator of Information, reporting intelligence to President Roosevelt. This of¿ce became the OSS in June 1942. As this organization was built up, it encountered opposition from J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted the FBI in charge of counterintelligence abroad.

126 

 The OSS had some 10,000 operatives. Among them was an entire run of future CIA directors. Another member of the OSS ranks deserves special mention: Julia McWilliams, better known by her married name, Julia Child. This future celebrity chef was involved in projects like concocting shark repellent and managing personnel. She served in Washington, then in British India and China. She met her husband, Paul Child, through her work; he also was an OSS agent.

 Along with the serious missions of the OSS were some ideas that were simply crazy. Some of these were labeled Operation CORNFLAKES. (Good tradecraft stipulates that the cover name of an operation should be as random as possible.) One operation tried to undermine German homefront morale by creating parody versions of German stamps. Another plan involved sending incendiary bats to Japan.

 President Harry S. Truman shut down the OSS on September 20, 1945, a month after Japan was defeated. Two years later, a new organization had to be established, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with many OSS veterans staf¿ ng it.

 A key task of these intelligence agencies was deception, to cloak in falsehood the real facts of Allied operations. Winston Churchill put it best, saying, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” This echoes Sun Tzu’s maxim that “all warfare is based on deception.”

 Among the British intelligence agents working full time on misleading the enemy was a man who would later become famous for other reasons: Ian Fleming, later known as the creator of James Bond.

 Another British agency concocted one of the most elaborate, long-running, and successful deceptions in history: the Twenty Committee, set up in January 1941. The name was a pun on the Roman numeral XX, a double cross.

127 

 This program deceived the German intelligence by capturing, turning, or mimicking all German spies in England. Before 1940, the Germans had in¿ltrated about 70 agents into Britain. Another 100 arrived during the war. Almost every one of these agents working for Germany was captured and made part of a disinformation campaign.

 A further powerful weapon in the war was the Allied cracking of German and Japanese codes. Recall that just before Poland was invaded and occupied, the Poles gave the British and French their replicas of the German Enigma machines. The British program to break the codes was called Operation ULTRA.

 ULTRA’s brain center was a mansion 50 miles north of London called Bletchley Park, which housed the Government Communications Headquarters. The staff (eventually numbering 10,000) was the most amazing collection of mathematicians, linguists, chess champions, and eccentric university professors.

 Many women were among Bletchley’s staff. They had been recruited by informal networks, tested by being told to do crossword puzzles at fast speed, and did a tremendous job of maintaining secrecy, in a self-regulating way. In many cases, they kept the secrets, long after the war was over, even from their own husbands.

 Among the experts was the brilliant Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing, a visionary who designed binary computing machines, precursors to our computers.

 For ¿ve years, Bletchley Park decoded German diplomatic and military communications. The operation was able to continue because the German experts remained convinced that the Enigma coding could not be broken. The intelligence was vital in the Battle of the Atlantic and to Allied victory in North Africa.

In a similar fashion, Operation MAGIC delivered crucial information in the Paci¿c war, particularly in advance of the Battle

128 

of Midway. In April 1942, decrypts indicated Japanese planning referring to a particular place, codenamed AF, but where was it? It could be Alaska, Hawaii, California, Seattle … or the little coral atoll of Midway.

 Suspecting that AF was Midway but needing to be absolutely sure, American intelligence devised a trick. Radio operators at the naval base at Midway were instructed to send a message in a code the Japanese could easily breach complaining that their fresh water supply was running low. In short order, MAGIC decrypts showed the Japanese reporting that AF was running low on water. On June 4, 1942, when the Japanese navy attacked Midway, the American navy was waiting.

 Why did the Japanese not realize their communications were compromised? Just as the Germans believed their Enigma code could not be broken, the Japanese held to similar beliefs, reinforced by an example of ethnic hubris: They were convinced that Americans could not master the complexity of the Japanese language.

 Many historians argue that intelligence did not win World War II but shortened the war. The eminent British military historian John Keegan, however, goes further. In his book Intelligence in War, he argues that intelligence was only “one factor among many” and victory is won through hard ¿ghting and leadership. He says, “Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Even real-time intelligence is never real enough. Only force ¿ nally counts.”

 As the war turned against Germany, a covert operation was planned which might have changed the course of the war: the 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler. Some German of¿cers who had initially supported Hitler were dismayed by the future before them, among them Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr. The assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 almost succeeded. But the revenge that Hitler took was ruthless.

129 

 In spite of such brutalities, the noose was beginning to close on Hitler and Nazi Germany. As the British and Americans prepared for an invasion of Sicily and the Italian peninsula, British naval intelligence worked up a plan to deceive the Germans into believing the real aim of the landings would be in the Balkans: Operation MINCEMEAT, involving the nonexistent Major Martin of the Royal Marines. When ULTRA decrypts showed that the Germans believed that disinformation, Churchill got a telegram that tersely said: “Mincemeat swallowed whole.”

 That success was repeated for the far larger invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1944. The Germans knew that the Allies had to aim for either Pas de Calais or the Normandy coast. The British mounted a massive deception campaign, creating a fake army, the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) stationed in East Anglia, to suggest the Allied attack was headed to Pas de Calais. When the landings in Normandy began, German reserves numbering nearly 300,000 men had been kept at the Pas de Calais.

 From this point, the Allies closed on Nazi Germany, and Hitler from his bunker in Berlin could only place his hope in the V1 and V2 missiles. They came too late to change the outcome of the war but were portents of a new age of warfare, potentially far more destructive than any before.

Important Terms

Battle of Midway: The turning point of World War II in the Paci¿ c, which took place in June 1942, wherein American decoding of Japanese communications played a key role.

Bletchley Park: The British decoding headquarters during World War II, where Operation ULTRA decrypted German Enigma messages.

FUSAG: A fake American army, the First U.S. Army Group, allegedly stationed in East Anglia in Britain in an operation to mislead the German military concerning the route of the amphibious invasion.

130 

Operation CORNFLAKES: American OSS operation to undermine German home front morale, including fake postage stamps and propaganda sent by mail.

Operation MINCEMEAT: Launched April 1943, the British planting of a dead body—allegedly that of a British of¿cer—off the coast of Spain to mislead Germany concerning the route of the Mediterranean invasion.

Operation ULTRA: British operation headquartered at Bletchley Park and including many women staff to decode German Enigma messages, which played a key role in World War II and yet remained secret until the 1970s.

OSS: American Of¿ce of Strategic Services, founded 1942 under William “Wild Bill” Donovan, for worldwide intelligence and covert operations during World War II.

SOE: The British Special Operations Executive, founded in 1940 on Churchill’s orders to enÀame revolt in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Twenty Committee: The British double cross (XX) operation that successfully subverted Nazi espionage in Britain and spread disinformation back to Germany.

Names to Know

Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm (1887–1945): Chief of the German Abwehr military intelligence, opposing some aspects of the Nazi regime; the Abwehr was dissolved in 1944, and Canaris was arrested on suspicion of plotting the assassination of Hitler. He was hanged in the last days of the war by the Nazis.

Child, Julia (1912–2004): Later a noted television chef, she was a member of the OSS and worked on recipes for shark repellent.

Churchill, Winston (1874–1965): Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1940 to 1945, in its most dif¿cult hour, standing alone against Nazi Germany, who ordered that occupied Europe be “set ablaze” by SOE operations.

131 

Donovan, William “Wild Bill” (1883–1959): Decorated American hero of the First World War; director of the wartime OSS.

Keegan, John (1934– ): Most notable military historian; British author of the thoughtful and skeptical work Intelligence in War (2003).

Turing, Alan (1912–1954): Brilliant Cambridge mathematician and visionary who proposed the computer and led the efforts at decoding German Enigma machine messages at Bletchley Park during World War II; he committed suicide after the war.

Suggested Reading

Keegan, Intelligence in War.

Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only.

———, Operation Mincemeat.

Waller, Wild Bill Donovan.

Questions to Consider

1. Do you think the cost of sabotage operations in Nazi-occupied Europe (that is, harsh reprisals against civilians by the Nazis) was worthwhile?

2. What are the lessons of the SOE ¿asco of Lauwers and the captured transmitter that the Nazis used to lure British agents to their deaths?

132 

Atomic Spies and Spy Hunts Lecture 18

s the cold war began, the United States established the CIA and sought to track down Soviet agents. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, Stalin engaged in one last hunt for spies at home. The CIA had to

improvise in its early years, with a mixed record of failure and success. The VENONA decrypts reveal that extensive Soviet spying was going on in the United States; ironically, most of this was over long before Senator Joseph McCarthy began his investigations in the 1950s.

 Among the great adventures of the 20th century, and among its human tragedies, are the stories of escaping across the Iron Curtain to the West. Hundreds died in attempts to get out, but a few brave souls also sought to break in. One of these brave people was a Lithuanian resistance leader, known by the code name Daumantas.

 In 1949, Daumantas had been given messages to take to the West, in search of support for Lithuanian independence. In 1950, after training in covert operations in the West, he was returning. The next year, however, in 1951, Daumantas was killed, betrayed by a double agent in the ranks of the resistance ¿ ghters.

 Even while the Second World War was going on, the often uneasy alliance between the United States and Britain on the one hand and Stalin’s Soviet Union on the other experienced friction and tension. These were omens of the coming cold war.

 In the last stages of the war, Hitler had placed his hopes on terrible new weapons. Fortunately, the Nazis had not made as much progress as their foes had feared in terms of atomic weapons, but they were able to roll out frightening new kinds of aerial weapons.

The V-1 (Vergeltungswaffe, meaning revenge weapon) was a bomb that Àew at speeds of over 400 mph. The V-2 was a ballistic missile,

133 

precursor of the moon rocket. Traveling at four times the speed of sound, it was so fast that it allowed no warning before impact. These missiles, launched against Britain in the last stages of the war caused tremendous damage and fear.

 The Americans and Soviets were impressed with the potential of these new weapons, and teams were sent out to search for the German scientists who had constructed them. The American operation was called Operation PAPERCLIP. It secured Werner von Braun, who worked for the U.S. Army and then NASA on rocket construction.

 Nazi Germany’s chief of military intelligence on the Eastern Front, Reinhard Gehlen, also surrendered to the Americans, informing them that they had secreted their data on the Soviets. Gehlen was allowed to set up a new organization outside Munich. They worked under the U.S. Army’s control, then the CIA’s, until in 1956 Gehlen’s organization became the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany.

 Even more important to the new age of warfare was the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Much of the development took place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—an entire secret city devoted to uranium and plutonium processing. The city was enclosed and self-suf¿cient and home to a staff of 70,000 men and women.

 At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the ¿rst atomic bomb was detonated in a test at Los Alamos, New Mexico. In August 1945, the U.S. dropped two bombs on Japan, leading to Japan’s surrender. Mankind had entered a new historical period and, because the stakes were so high, a new era of espionage.

 Stalin’s intelligence services were tipped off about Allied plans for an atomic bomb by late 1941 by one of the Cambridge spies, Cairncross. Lavrenti Berlia, head of the NKVD, gave highest priority to penetrating the atomic project.

134 

 Soviet spies on the Manhattan Project included Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass at Los Alamos and Donald Maclean, who was ¿rst secretary at the British embassy in Washington and became in the summer of 1945 the main coordinator of American-British cooperation on the atomic bomb effort.

 Klaus Fuchs was a German-born British scientist who became a committed communist before Àeeing Germany when Hitler came to power. In Britain, he was recruited for the Tube Alloy project, the codename for the British atomic development program, and passed secrets to the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Harry Gold was his courier.

 Gold was also in touch with David Greenglass, a U.S. soldier who was a technical assistant at Los Alamos lab. Greenglass was brother-in-law to Julius Rosenberg. Rosenberg was an electrical engineer in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, involved in communist politics.

The end of World War II and the start of the cold war marked the start of the era of missile warfare.

135 

 As the war was coming to a close, the alliance of the Soviet Union and the Western allies was starting to disintegrate. In February 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met at Yalta in the Crimea. There they planned the postwar world. Roosevelt hoped to cajole Stalin into cooperation on the United Nations and brought along a State Department of¿ cial named Alger Hiss to help in the negotiations.

 The next summit meeting took place under very different conditions. Roosevelt had died, succeeded by Harry Truman. The leaders met in Potsdam, outside Berlin in July 1945. Truman also mentioned to Stalin some news: The Americans had detonated a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin shrugged it off; he had long known of the atomic bomb project from his spies.

 Over the next two years, a chill settled on the earlier alliance. Stalin reasserted his personal control in the Soviet Union. In his paranoia, Stalin feared any who had come into contact with the West. Even Soviet soldiers released from prison camps in Germany were shipped straight to the Gulag.

 Meanwhile, in Soviet-administered Europe, Stalin sponsored regimes that were bound to the Soviet Union and administered by his followers, violating promises that he made to Roosevelt about holding free elections after the war.

 In 1947, Truman reestablished a worldwide intelligence institution for the United States. The National Security Act of September 1947 created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and a major intelligence agency without police powersȄ the CIA.

 The CIA was headed by the Director of Central Intelligence, who would also be in charge of all intelligence collection by other agencies, an overall coordinating ¿gure. The early stages of the CIA were necessarily improvisational. Finally, document NSC Directive 68 in April 1950 gave the CIA a wide role: espionage, psychological warfare, covert operations, and paramilitary activity.

136 

 The early CIA experienced some embarrassing setbacks. Agents sent into Eastern Europe to revolutionize behind the Iron Curtain were frequently betrayed, arrested, and executed. Kim Philby was key in betraying these missions to the Soviets. Using a method reminiscent of the Trust, the Russian intelligence agencies set up a fake resistance movement in Poland, in an elaborate setup which fooled the CIA into supporting it.

 The CIA also failed to give warning of important events. They failed to predict Soviet development of the atomic bomb in 1949, Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea in 1950, and China’s entry into the Korean War. Intelligence services often argue that their failures are widely known, while their successes remain unknown. Perhaps this is true.

 A vital and secret American success came with the VENONA decrypts. This program began in August 1943 with the Army Signals Intelligence Service, the precursor to the National Security Agency, with FBI cooperation. It was the effort to decrypt the wartime telegrams of the Soviet Embassy. When the war ended, the program concentrated on the large backlog of wartime messages.

 A breakthrough came in 1946 due to a mistake in tradecraft by Soviets, who reused one-time pads for encrypting, allowing patterns to be discerned. VENONA remained a secret until the 1990s (although Philby and other Soviet spies told Moscow about it).

 The atmosphere of crisis in the early cold war was heightened by spy hunts in the opposing blocs. In the United States, this was not only a case of panic; there really were spies penetrating the U.S. government and especially the Manhattan Project.

 In 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, a Vassar graduate and courier for a Soviet spy ring in Washington, defected and told the FBI what she knew. In 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee called her to their hearings to testify, along with the former courier Whittaker Chambers. Chambers repeated his accusations against Alger Hiss.

137 

 Alger Hiss was the quintessential establishment ¿gure: a graduate of Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, a member of the New Deal administration, starting at the State Department in 1936. He was with FDR at Yalta and advised on the founding of the United Nations. Hiss denied being an agent and sued Chambers for libel. In response, Chambers produced the Pumpkin Papers, ¿lms he had held back from his courier days and hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

 Because the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, Hiss was then put on trial for perjury. The ¿rst trial was a hung jury, but the second convicted Hiss in 1950 and sentenced him to ¿ ve years in jail. Hiss was released in 1954, but until his death in 1996, he always maintained his innocence. VENONA materials released referred to an American agent called “Ales,” and the National Security Agency concluded that this could only be Hiss.

 The Hiss trial was but prelude to another round of spy trials as the Soviet atomic spies were caught. Klaus Fuchs was pinpointed by VENONA transcripts. He confessed in January 1950 and betrayed Harry Gold. Gold admitted having met with David Greenglass, who in turn was linked to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Greenglass’s sister).

 To protect their secrecy, the VENONA decrypts were not presented as evidence in these trials. Of those charged with atomic espionage, the Rosenbergs were the only ones executed. Controversy continues about the sentencing of the Rosenbergs, especially Ethel.

 In 1951, the Cambridge spies Maclean and Burgess escaped to the Soviet Union, warned by Kim Philby that the authorities were closing in, again due to VENONA decrypts. Philby also came under suspicion as a Soviet spy but remained free, although he was forced to resign.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the fear of subversion took on a dynamic of its own. From 1950, the Republican senator from

138 

Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, became a famous ¿ gure, charging that the U.S. government and armed forces were shot through with communist agents and spies.

 Government committees called people to testify and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI investigated those suspected of disloyalty. McCarthy’s charges got ever wider and wilder, until in 1954 he was censured by the Senate and his stature swiftly collapsed. Ironically, there had been extensive Soviet spying, but after World War II, the Soviets had pulled back considerably.

 Just before his death in 1953, Stalin seemed on the verge of organizing a new campaign of internal terror. Did Stalin believe his own spy scare, or this just a reassertion of personal control? In March 1946, the NKVD was renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), still under Stalin’s henchman Lavrenti Beria, and Stalin ordered the arrest of a number of Jewish doctors in Moscow, claiming they were part of an international conspiracy against the Soviet leadership.

 Before the purge accelerated, Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Ironically, he had suffered a stroke but his own guards were too frightened of him to help. The dynamic of the cold war, however, would not slow down.

Important Terms

CIA: The American Central Intelligence Agency, created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 from the ranks of many former OSS agents.

Manhattan Project: The American project, with British and Canadian help, to build an atomic bomb during World War II, staring in 1942.

Oak Ridge: The “secret city” in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where uranium was enriched for the Manhattan Project.

139 

Operation PAPERCLIP: The American project, as World War II was ending, to capture and recruit German scientists.

Pumpkin Papers: Materials related to Soviet espionage, produced by former Soviet courier Whittaker Chambers, in connection with accusations of spying against Alger Hiss; the materials had been hidden in a hollowed pumpkin on Chambers’ farm.

V-1 and V-2: Nazi secret weapons used toward the end of World War II; these were terrifying but came too late to change the war’s outcome.

VENONA: American decrypts of Soviet communications of the 1940s, which only became public in the 1990s, changing our understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States.

Names to Know

Daumantas (1921–1951): Pseudonym of Lithuanian resistance ¿ ghter Juozas Lukša, ¿ghting against Soviet occupation after World War II, trained by Western intelligence services, returned to Lithuania in 1950, then betrayed and killed by Soviets the next year.

Fuchs, Klaus (1911–1988): German-born British scientist, committed communist, and the most important asset of the Soviets in the Western atomic bomb project. Worked in the United States and passed secrets to the Soviets. Identi¿ed in the VENONA transcripts, confessed, and on release from prison moved to East Germany to work at a nuclear research institute there.

Gehlen, Reinhard (1902–1979): Chief of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front, who at World War II’s end surrendered to the Americans with his information on the Soviets, set up a new intelligence organization (including many former comrades from Nazi Germany), which in 1956 became the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst—the Federal Intelligence Service.

140 

Gold, Harry (1910–1972): American chemist who served as courier between the atomic spies and their Soviet handlers; identi¿ed by Klaus Fuchs on his arrest, he was arrested and jailed until 1965.

Greenglass, David (1922– ): Brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg who served as an agent inside the Los Alamos laboratory; arrested in 1950 and released in 1960.

Hiss, Alger (1904–1996): American civil servant accused of spying for the Soviets who always maintained his innocence.

Maclean, Donald (1913–1983): Member of the Cambridge spy ring who in 1944 was ¿rst secretary at the British embassy in Washington and became the main coordinator of American-British cooperation on atomic weapons. Warned of his upcoming arrest by Kim Philby, Maclean and Guy Burgess Àed to the Soviet Union in 1951.

McCarthy, Joseph (1908–1957): Republican senator from Wisconsin who became famous and controversial for his charges of communist in¿ ltration of American government and the military, until the wildness of his charges discredited him and led to his censure in 1954.

Rosenberg, Ethel (1915–1953): Wife of Julius Rosenberg, sister of David Greenglass, member of the Communist Party, convicted of spying in 1951, and executed in 1953—a sentence that is still controversial.

Rosenberg, Julius (1918–1953): Electrical engineer, member of the Communist Party, and key member of the Soviet atomic spy ring in the United States, identi¿ed by the VENONA transcripts, convicted of spying in 1951 and executed in 1953.

von Braun, Werner (1912–1977): German rocket engineer instrumental in the development of the V-2 rocket at the end of the war, controversial for the use of slave labor, and recruited for scienti¿c work in the United States and eventually with NASA.

141 

Suggested Reading

Chambers, Witness.

Philby, My Silent War.

Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood.

Questions to Consider

1. What were the keys to Soviet penetration of the American atomic bomb project?

2. In the aftermath of World War II, as the cold war began, was HUMINT or SIGINT more important?

142 

Cold War Chill Lecture 19

he cold war chill deepened after Josef Stalin’s death, and espionage and covert actions took on new intensity, accelerated by advances in SIGINT, spy planes like the U-2, and the building of covert

installations. Espionage played a pivotal role in cold war events like the Bay of Pigs ¿asco, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the standoff at the Berlin Wall. Indeed, not only could spies incite conÀict; they could help avert greater crises.

 On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. A series of cringe-inducing public-relations embarrassments followed. The CIA told the American press that a weather research plane had been lost over Turkey. The Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev denounced American lies and revealed that Powers was alive and in custody. Powers was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage.

 In 1962, Powers was released in exchange for a Soviet spy caught in the United States. In later years, the development of spy satellites meant that the need for such risk-¿ lled Àights was reduced. But the U-2 Affair demonstrates that the cold war did not ¿zzle out with Josef Stalin’s death; the political dynamics were larger than any one individual.

 When Stalin died, NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria and Khrushchev struggled for power, and Khruschchev came out on top. Beria was tried for treason and espionage and executed in December 1953. Over the next few years, purges eliminated the last of Beria’s allies among the secret police.

The Soviet secret services were reorganized in March 1954 and were renamed the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB),

143 

the Committee for State Security, a name that would stick until 1991. The KGB was effective in clamping down on internal dissent and closing off the country to Western intelligence.

 A changing of the guard was also taking place in the CIA. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to of¿ce in January 1953, he chose a new Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, who remained in that post until 1961.

 The CIA had also grown in size; by 1953, it was six times bigger than when it was founded in 1947. Its original role of intelligence coordination was being crowded out by covert operations and political interventions. The CIA operated with remarkable autonomy, justifying its intervention in foreign elections and toppling foreign governments on the grounds of foiling communist subversion.

 There were also cases where the CIA did not intervene. The most important was during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, when the Hungarian communist leaders attempted to steer a course more independent from Moscow. When the Soviet tanks rolled in, hinted-at Western support did not arrive. Some 20,000 Hungarians were killed, and about 200,000 À ed the country—nearly 2 percent of the entire population.

 

 One of the great covert operations of this era was the Berlin Tunnel. Berlin was in a sense always ground zero of the cold war. Postwar Germany              was divided into zones of occupation, with Americans, British, and French zones in

 

East Germany knew about the Berlin Tunnel—and let the Allies build it.

 

144 

the West and the Soviet zone in the East. Berlin lay a hundred miles into the Eastern zone, but the city was itself divided into American, British, French, and Soviet zones.

 In 1953, MI6 and the CIA cooperated on Operation GOLD to construct a 400-yard tunnel from the Western to the Eastern zone of Berlin. Its purpose was to tap the telephone cables between the Soviet high command in Berlin and the foreign of¿ce in Moscow.

 The tunnel was a marvel of engineering and cunning. Its metal braces were sprayed with a rubberizing chemical so that they would not clang under impact from above, and it was air conditioned so that the heat from the electronics would not melt the winter snows above and reveal its existence.

 Interestingly, the KGB knew about the tunnel even as it was being built, as a British double agent had betrayed its existence, but they did not shut down the project. They may have seen it as conduit for disinformation, or they may have been protecting their mole. Operation GOLD only ended when the tunnel was “discovered” in April 1956.

 Several years later, in August 1961, another construction project in Berlin took the West by surprise: the Berlin Wall. Called “the anti-fascist protective barrier,” it was allegedly meant to keep Western spies out, but in fact its purpose was to keep people in. Behind this wall, the East German Stasi secret police set up intense surveillance on its own citizens.

 Another covert construction project spoke volumes about the threat of nuclear war: Project Greek Island, which between 1959 and 1962 created an extensive secret bunker under the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It was equipped with 30-ton blast doors, ventilation systems, bunk beds, a cafeteria, and television studios with backdrops of Washington DC from which representatives could broadcast reassuring messages to a postapocalypse America. Today this historical site is open to the public.

145 

 The cold war nearly turned hot over Cuba. In January 1959, Fidel Castro and his guerrilla forces overthrew the Batista regime. As Castro avowed communism, moved closer to the Soviet Union, and con¿scated U.S. property in Cuba, the American government came to view him as a threat.

 A plan was developed under the Eisenhower administration for an invasion of Cuba by several hundred Cuban exiles with American support. The Kennedy administration inherited the ongoing project in 1961. The invasion was launched in April, aiming at the Bay of Pigs. What followed was a perfect storm of failure. The exiles faced a heavy counterattack and pleaded for American air cover or Marine intervention, but neither came, as the operation was supposed to allow plausible deniability. Over a thousand exiles were captured, and no revolt materialized.

 In the operation’s aftermath, the CIA was subjected to closer control, and Allen Dulles was removed as director. But the CIA also plunged into further covert operations. Operation MONGOOSE proposed sabotage and fomenting unrest in Cuba. Other plans called for the assassination of Castro.

 These projects were hindered by the fact that from 1961 onward, every single agent the CIA had recruited in Cuba had been turned and manipulated by the Cuban Direccion General de Intelligencia. There is a historical echo here of Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s Trust, which may have been a direct inspiration.

 The Bay of Pigs ¿asco was soon followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October and November 1962. Nikita Khrushchev engineered the confrontation stationing a nuclear missile base in Cuba. Soviet merchant ships secretly brought in the equipment, which was discovered by American U-2 overÀ ights.

 America established a naval quarantine of Cuba. Khrushchev and Kennedy exchanged con¿dential communications that did calm the crisis and ended with both sides backing off. American intelligence

146 

had underestimated how close we had come to disaster, concluding that no nuclear weapons had been stationed (they had) and radically undercounting how many Soviet military staff were already on the island.

 Kennedy also had received some secret information from a spy for the Americans high up in the Soviet military, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky was a walk in who had volunteered his services, rather than being targeted for recruitment. A GRU of¿ cer of upper-class origins, he chafed at the limits his background placed on his career. Thus in 1960, he approached two American tourists and asked them to contact the American embassy for him.

 In a short period, Penkosvky passed more than 10,000 pages of documents and plans. He was most important for reassuring the Americans that the much-discussed missile gap was actually in the West’s favor. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he indicated that Khrushchev was engaged in a bluff, which helped move the crisis away from the brink.

 In October 1962, Penkovsky was arrested by the KGB. It is still not clear how he was betrayed, but many suspect double agents in the British intelligence services. He was tried, convicted, and executed in 1963. We often think of spies as provocative ¿ gures, but Penkovsky helped to calm a potentially fatal world crisis.

 This same decade saw the climax of Kim Philby’s many years of spectacular betrayal. Philby had been posted to Washington DC in 1949 as liaison between MI6 and the CIA and FBI. It seemed Philby was headed for overall command of MI6. He was privy to the highest secrets, including the VENONA project.

 Philby came under suspicion after Maclean and Burgess’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1951 and forced to resign from MI6, but an investigation afterwards exonerated him. He became a journalist, and suspicion against him revived in 1963, he escaped to the Soviet Union. There he was celebrated—even honored on a postage stamp.

147 

 Philby was quite unrepentant; his memoir takes jabs at his former colleagues in the British secret service and revealed a deep antipathy for Americans. Philby’s last years in Moscow seem to have been unhappy ones, however, and he died in 1988 just as communist regimes were starting to crumble. He is buried in Moscow with the rank of KGB general.

 Philby’s betrayal raised some agonizing questions: How had he gotten away with it? Was he the last of the Soviet spies? In the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, a counterintelligence expert and a close friend of Philby, set out on a panicked and increasingly irrational search for moles within the CIA. Nicknamed “the gray ghost” by his colleagues, he frequently murmured about spying as a “wilderness of mirrors.” In 1974, he was forced to retire after more than 20 years of service as superiors feared his suspicions were destroying the organization.

 As America entered the Vietnam War, the CIA engaged in paramilitary operations. On November 1, 1963, South Vietnam’s increasingly unpopular president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was overthrown and killed. Weeks afterwards, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated by a man who had been a defector to the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was killed two days later while in police custody.

 These events, which have been the object of intense investigation, have spawned many conspiracy theories. Part of the equation is the conviction that huge historical events must have huge historical causes.

 President Richard Nixon made use of the CIA to secure his own power. Some of Nixon’s operatives in the Watergate break-in were ex-CIA staff, and their disguises were provided by active CIA members.

148 

 The results of the Watergate scandal were devastating to the CIA. The revelations blew the cover off many other abuses, including domestic spying, planned assassinations of foreign leaders, subsidies for cover organizations, and bizarre mind-control experiments.

 Investigations into the CIA multiplied, including the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known by the more compact name the Church Committee. More stringent congressional control was imposed. A presidential executive order issued by President Jimmy Carter prohibited the CIA from involving itself in assassinations.

 The hearings and investigations left a badly demoralized organization, in need of reform. In 1976, George H. W. Bush became the CIA’s new director, but many questions still needed answers. Could the CIA be reconstructed? Should it simply be disbanded? Does a democracy need a secret intelligence organization? Can a democracy survive in a hostile world without one?

 In 1978, the KGB used a poisoned umbrella gun to kill the Bulgarian dissident and journalist Georgi Markov at a London bus stop. The tiny pellet it injected into his leg contained ricin toxin. This political murder underlined that the cold war, while short of an all-out conÀict, was not bloodless.

Important Terms

Bay of Pigs invasion: Disastrous 1961 invasion of Cuba planned by the CIA and executed by Cuban exiles; American reinforcement was not allowed due to the government’s desire for “plausible deniability.”

Church Committee: The informal name of the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church, which exposed CIA abuses in 1975.

149 

Cuban Missile Crisis: The 1962 confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was averted peacefully, yet it was the closest that the superpowers came to war.

Greenbrier Hotel: A historical resort in West Virginia that was the site of Project Greek Island, the secret construction of a massive underground bunker between 1959 and 1962 to house Congress in case of nuclear war.

Hungarian Uprising: Uprising against Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks and leading to massive exodus.

KGB: The Committee for State Security, the reorganized form of the Soviet secret police from 1954 until the Soviet collapse of 1991.

Operation GOLD: Codename for the Berlin Tunnel project of 1953–1956, in which the Americans and British dug a tunnel under the Soviet sector of Berlin to tap telephone lines.

Project Greek Island: The secret construction of a massive underground bunker between 1959 and 1962 to house Congress in case of nuclear war. The bunker was located at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

U-2 plane: American spy plane used for overÀights of the Soviet Union from the 1950s; Gary Powers was shot down in one and captured in 1960.

Watergate: A 1970s political scandal over employees of President Richard Nixon, including former CIA agents, breaking into and bugging Democratic Party headquarters in Washington DC, leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

Names to Know

Angleton, James Jesus (1917–1987): Former OSS agent, later the CIA’s expert on counterintelligence, who after being tricked by his friend—the Soviet spy Kim Philby—engaging in a hunt for moles in his own organization that threatened its cohesion, was forced to resign in 1974. His actions earned him the nickname “Gray Ghost.” He called counterintelligence a “wilderness of mirrors.”

150 

Bush, George H. W. (1924– ): Director of the CIA from 1975 to 1977 and 41st president of the United States.

Dulles, Allen (1893–1969): American diplomat, lawyer, and long-serving and very independent director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961; let go after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Markov, Georgi (1929–1978): Bulgarian dissident working for the BBC in London, where he was assassinated with a poisoned umbrella by the KGB in 1978.

Oswald, Lee Harvey (1939–1963): A drifter and former defector to the Soviet Union who assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy and then was himself killed while in custody.

Penkovsky, Oleg (1919–1963): Double agent for the Americans and British inside Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, providing crucial information during the Cuban Missile Crisis and then soon after caught and executed.

Powers, Gary (1929–1977): Pilot of the U-2 spy plane downed over the Soviet Union in 1960 that caused an international crisis.

Suggested Reading

Philby, My Silent War.

Weiner, Legacy of Ashes.

Questions to Consider

1. What was the most important consequence of the shooting down of Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane?

2. Why do you think the Soviets allowed the Berlin Tunnel project to go ahead?

151 

World Crises Lecture 20

s terrorism grew into a global reality, intelligence organizations like Israel’s Mossad and the agencies of Pakistan, India, and China became increasingly prominent on the world stage. Some of these

agencies have accumulated larger-than-life mythologies; others have pulled off feats that simply seem supernatural. Although different nations have different techniques of spying and covert action, allied (and enemy) nations often learned from one another. This fact did not prevent allies from spying on each other as well.

 Apart from the continuing cold war, the major global developments of the 1970s were the growth of terrorism, regional conÀ icts, and security concerns with world implications. Newer intelligence organizations became increasingly prominent, but we know less about these institutions in part because of their more recent activity, which is harder to get a ¿ rm ¿ x on.

 China’s communist government came to power in 1949, after Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese Civil War. Thenceforth it became very dif¿cult for outside powers to get a clear understanding of what was happening in that vast country. American U-2 overÀights of China began in 1964, to track China’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

 In the early years, Chinese intelligence cooperated with the Soviets, but Chinese and Russian relations broke down over doctrinal questions and questions of dominance. When Mao launched the violent Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966, one of its rallying cries was the ¿ght against foreign in¿ ltration.

 Chinese HUMINT was capable of some astonishing coups. In 1964, a French foreign service accountant named Bernard Boursicot was newly posted to the embassy in Beijing, where he met Shi Pei Pu

152 

and fell in love. Shi was a male Chinese opera singer who posed as a woman. Boursicot and Shi began an affair, and Boursicot began passing documents to the Chinese.

 In 1982, Shi and Bouriscot moved to Paris, but the French intelligence service arrested them both. Boursicot and Shi were convicted in 1986. Only after their imprisonment did Boursicot learn that Shi was male.

The story was dramatized in the play M. ButterÀy by David Henry Hwang.

 While the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with communist       China       before 1972, the British colony of Hong Kong was a crucial window into Chinese society. Hong Kong was a station for American intelligence, where refugees leaving China were interviewed and scrutinized

The victory of Mao Zedong’s communist regime did not mean

 In 1972, Nixon established easy relations between the Soviet of¿cial relations with China

as a balance against the Soviet Union. Secret talks had actually been taking place unof¿cially for years before in Poland. Polish intelligence bugged those talks for their Soviet patrons. Oddly, the Americans did not mind. This recalls Benjamin Franklin’s unconcern that his diplomatic negotiations with the French were reported to the British; the information might put pressure on the Soviets.

153 

 In August 1947, Pakistan became an independent nation. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was founded in 1948 by a British army of¿cer. The agency has since been deeply involved in Pakistan’s domestic politics, but its critics have charged it with following its own policies. For example, it has been reported that the ISI has tried to inÀuence public opinion in Western countries over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

 Critics of the ISI have also seen its role as ambivalent in combating terrorism: On the one hand, Pakistan is considered a vital American ally in the conÀict, but on the other hand, critics charge that the ISI is in communication with fundamentalist militant groups in the region.

 Covert operations played a large role in the unsettled history of Iran. After the Second World War, Iran’s monarch was the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and its charismatic prime minster was Mohammad Mossadegh. In 1953, Mossadegh declared his intention of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry and aligned himself with a pro-communist political party.

 The CIA and MI6 launched Operation AJAX to depose Mossadegh. They incited unrest in the streets, which led to a coup, and Mossadegh was ¿rst arrested and then sent into exile. The CIA considered this a triumph, but it was intensely resented by many Iranians and others in the Middle East.

 From that point, the Shah enjoyed U.S. support, and Iran was seen as an “island of stability” (in President Carter’s words) in the Middle East. Iran’s secret police, the Savak, was established in 1956. It clamped down on internal dissent and kept Iranian students overseas under surveillance. Meanwhile, the CIA maintained a presence in Iran to listen to Soviet radio transmissions close to the Iran-Soviet border.

Because the CIA was getting its information about Iran from the Savak, it was unprepared for what happened in January 1979:

154 

Islamic fundamentalist radicals led by Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in a revolution in November 1979. Its supporters took hostages in the American embassy in Teheran, holding them for 444 days. The American covert operation to rescue the hostages, Operation EAGLE CLAW, failed in April 1980.

 The Iranians found reams of shredded documents in the American embassy and laboriously pieced them together by hand to uncover their secrets. This was a compelling testimony to the limits of technology versus the commitment of human actors ¿ red by ideological motivation.

 At just this time, a new episode in the cold war rocked global politics with huge implications for the long term: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The year before, a pro-Soviet regime had taken power in Afghanistan. When it seemed about to fall due to its internal unpopularity, the Soviet Union invaded to prop it back up.

 The war would last 10 years. The Soviet Union paid a large price internationally, as loans and credits from the West ceased, its debt exploded, and détente efforts with the United States were shelved. Soviet forces found themselves locked into major cities, unable to crush the Mujahedeen ¿ghters, who saw themselves as holy warriors.

 The Mujahedeen were provided arms by the United States. Meanwhile, foreign ¿ghters were recruited to help the war effort by impresarios like Osama bin Laden. Texas Democratic Congressman Charles Wilson was the special patron of CIA operations in Afghanistan. Through congressional appropriations, Wilson steered huge sums of money into the project.

 The Soviets ¿nally withdrew by February 1989. Afterward, Afghanistan was not helped to reconstruct in suf¿ cient measure, and radical groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda exploited the chaos, which continues to this day.

155 

 Israel declared itself an independent nation in May 1948 and immediately found itself at war with the surrounding Arab states. The new nation’s several intelligence networks had their roots paramilitary groups that formed years before, when Israel was still a British mandate. These groups had differing aims: Some attacked the British, others worked alongside British authorities.

 During the Second World War, special commando units had been organized in the event that the Nazis would reach Palestine. Among these units, Mossad acquired a legendary, global reputation, and is still viewed in those terms today. Mossad is short for “Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.” It was founded on April 1, 1951 on the model of the CIA.

 In its early days, Mossad tracked down Nazis. Its most spectacular coup was the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and À ew him back to Jerusalem to stand trial. Eichmann, working under Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the architects of the Holocaust.

 Mossad delivered key military intelligence during the 1967 Six Day War but proved less successful in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Mossad also aided Israel’s efforts to build an atom bomb as part of the 1965 Samson Option. To get access to uranium, Mossad agents cultivated a relationship with a West German company, one of whose partners was a remorseful former Luftwaffe pilot.

 The former pilot helped Mossad deceive the International Atomic Energy Agency in an elaborate plot in which 200 tons of uranium— enough material for 10 atomic bombs—simply disappeared from an old German merchant ship. This material became the basis for Israel’s nuclear deterrent, which is not publically acknowledged but is an open secret.

A terrorist act at the 1972 Munich Olympics saw 11 Israeli athletes killed by a Palestinian group calling itself Black September. What

156 

followed was an Israeli operation to seek retribution which was dubbed “Wrath of God” by the media.

 The agents forming the Avner Group were allegedly told to resign from Mossad to give plausible deniability, then were allotted large funds and provided with a list of 11 targets for assassination, including Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat’s cousin.

 A separate team was sent after the alleged mastermind of the Munich massacre, Ali Hassan Salameh, but in this case their careful tracing went awry. They assassinated an innocent man, a Moroccan guest worker living in Norway. The Norwegian police arrested the assassination team and linked them to Mossad. Eventually, the real Salameh was tracked down and killed by car bomb in Beirut in 1979.

 In 1976, Mossad performed a dramatic hostage rescue. Palestinian terrorists had hijacked an Air France passenger plane À ying from Tel Aviv to Paris when it stopped in Athens, then Àew the plane to Entebbe, Uganda. There they announced they would blow up the plane if their demands were not met, released the non-Jewish passengers, and held the Jewish passengers as hostages.

 In Operation THUNDERBOLT, Israeli special forces raided the airport and in the course of ¿ve minutes, 97 passengers and crew were liberated, with all but four hostages saved. Among those killed was an Israeli strike force of¿cer, the older brother of future prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu. The Mossad action at Entebbe helped to build up the aura of Mossad’s effectiveness.

 Given the longstanding relationship between the United States and Israel, revelations of a spy scandal in 1985 came as a blow. Jonathan Jay Pollard, an analyst at the U.S. Naval Intelligence Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, was spotted leaving the of¿ce building with envelopes of classi¿ ed material.

157 

 Pollard was put under surveillance. As he attempted to leave with more documents, he was stopped by FBI agents and brought in for questioning. A few days later, Pollard and his wife drove to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC but were turned away. Pollard was arrested by the FBI. It emerged that he had passed over a million documents to his Israeli handler.

 In 1987, Pollard was convicted of spying and sentenced to life in prison. It turned out that he had sought out Israeli contacts and volunteered to spy. His spying is estimated to have cost the U.S. billions of dollars because his revealing of electronic communications procedures meant that these needed to be entirely overhauled. His story also demonstrates that even close allies may spy on one another.

 Mossad has become shrouded in myth, and many people attribute or misattribute great or superhuman capacities to them. After a series of sporadic shark attacks in the waters off of tourist resorts in Egypt in December 2010, the region’s governor was quoted in the press suggesting that the shark “may have been intentionally released by Israeli agents to sabotage the country’s tourist industry”—perhaps the world’s ¿rst accusations of FISHINT.

Important Terms

al-Qaeda: The radical Islamist terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden that launched the 2001 attacks against the United States.

Avner Group: A team of Israeli agents sent to track down the terrorists from the 1972 Munich Olympics attack; however, they killed an innocent man in Norway in a case of mistaken identity.

Chinese Cultural Revolution: A vast internal convulsion within China from 1966 to 1976 launched by Chairman Mao, with millions victimized.

Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI): Pakistani intelligence organization, founded in 1948 by a British of¿cer for the newly independent state.

158 

Mossad: One of the Israeli intelligence branches, founded in 1951.

Operation AJAX: CIA and British project that deposed Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953; considered a success at the time, but in the longer term embittered the region against the United States.

Operation EAGLE CLAW: American covert operation ordered by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 for the rescue of hostages in Iran, called off due to technical problems.

Operation THUNDERBOLT: Israeli special forces’ liberation of hostages from an airliner hijacking in Uganda in 1976.

Samson Option: The Israeli plan from 1965 to acquire a nuclear deterrent.

Savak: The Shah of Iran’s feared secret police from 1956 until his overthrow.

Taliban: Meaning “students” in Arabic, the name of the fundamentalist movement that took over Afghanistan in the later 1990s and hosted al-Qaeda.

Wrath of God operation: The name the media gave to the Avner Group’s mission from 1972.

Names to Know

Boursicot, Bernard (1944– ): French embassy of¿cial in Beijing who fell in love with the Chinese agent Shi Pei Pu and spied for China until he was arrested in 1983.

Mossadegh, Mohammad (1882–1967): Charismatic prime minister of Iran, deposed by the CIA and British intelligence services in a coup when he threatened to nationalize the Iranian oil industry.

Pollard, Jonathan Jay (1954– ): American naval intelligence analyst who spied for the Israelis, convicted and given a life sentence in 1987.

159 

Shi Pei Pu (1938–2009): Chinese agent who seduced Bernard Boursicot, claiming to be a woman and to have had his son, later arrested in France in 1983.

Wilson, Charles (1933–2010): Democratic Congressman from Texas who championed CIA aid to the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan; subject of the ¿ lm Charlie Wilson’s War.

Suggested Reading

Thomas, Gideon’s Spies.

Questions to Consider

1. Which of the non-Western intelligence services mentioned in this lecture is most different from the Western ones we have studies so far?

2. Was American covert involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War a mistake?

160 

Spies in Fiction and Film Lecture 21

ne of the most recognized global brands—a ¿gure featured in both ¿ ction and ¿lm—is the British super spy James Bond, created by former intelligence operative Ian Fleming. Bond’s exploits contrast

with the famously disillusioned spies of John le Carré’s and Graham Greene’s novels. Yet the professional backgrounds of these authors affect all of their literary creations, as did the social and political contexts in which each author was working.

 Some of the world’s best-known literary spies were the creations of men who had themselves been involved in intelligence work. The man who is considered the ¿rst in this tradition wrote decades before the cold war. He was the British author W. Somerset Maugham, who had been a British spy in the First World War.

 Ineligible to ¿ght because of his club foot, Maugham enrolled in the army ambulance corps then was recruited by the British secret service in 1915. He was Àuent in German and in French and had a good cover as a successful author, his ¿ rst novel, Of Human Bondage, having been published earlier that year.

 Maugham later worked his experiences up into a book entitled Ashenden, or The British Agent, published in 1928. The book emphasized the boring routine nature of most intelligence work but related stirring examples of intrigue anyhow, as well as its morally questionable aspects.

 In one harrowing example of the troubled morality of secret warfare, Ashenden confers with one of his agents, a Pole over whether to blow up munition factories in Austria—an act that will kill many Polish workers. They ¿ nally Àip a coin to decide. To underline the randomness of human suffering in espionage, Maugham does not tell us the outcome.

161 

 A master of the spy thriller just as the World War II was beginning was Eric Ambler. His novel A Cof¿n for Dimitrios (in Britain called The Mask of Dimitrios) was published in 1939 and was credited with introducing a new realism and hardness to the spy thriller, in part by changing the protagonist from a heroic gentleman spy to an ordinary civilian.

 Ambler’s work was very inÀuential, inspiring such authors as the American Alan Furst. Furst began writing in the late 1980s, and his novels are set in the period just before and during World War II. In one of his outstanding works, Dark Star, the protagonist is an agent working for the NKVD during the 1930s purges, torn between identities and the demands made on him by conÀ icting loyalties—an effective rendering of the kinds of choices agents had to make in this period.

 Why does World War II loom so large in the literary imagination? British author Ken Follett has argued that World War II is the single most dramatic event that has ever happened in human history and thus affords the ideal backdrop for spy ¿ ction.

 The most famous spy of all time—¿ctional or otherwise—is Ian Fleming’s James Bond. It was estimated in 2008 that half of world’s population has seen a Bond ¿lm. Bond is one of those characters, like Sherlock Holmes, who can seem vastly more real than real human beings we interact with daily, but is he?

 Fleming came from a privileged upper-class British background, attended school at Eton and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Unable to enter the foreign service as he had planned, Fleming tried his hand at journalism, ¿nally being recruited into British Naval Intelligence in 1939, just months before the war broke out. He was tasked with crafting plans for covert missions, though he chafed at not being able to help in their execution.

162 

 After the war, Fleming went back to journalism, working as a foreign news manager for a group of British newspapers. This job allowed him vacations in Jamaica, where he began to write the ¿ rst Bond novel in 1952. Casino Royale was published in 1953. The ¿gure of Bond was rather different in the novels from the suave super spy of the early ¿lms: “an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a government department.”

 Many people have wondered about who was the model for Bond. Fleming avowed that Bond was not himself, but rather a composite of the intelligence agents and commandos he had known in the Second World War. Other inspirations may have included the mysterious Sidney Reilly.

 By the time Fleming died in 1964, the James Bond books had sold more than 40 million copies. This tremendous popularity was driven in part by the geopolitical context. Through Bond, Great Britain in ¿ctional form was made into a great power once again at a time of imperial retreat. When John F. Kennedy stated that he admired the Bond stories, this gave the books a huge marketing boost as well. Bond was not very popular in the communist countries, for obvious reasons.

 In stark contrast with Bond are the disillusioned spies of the novels of Graham Green and John le Carré. The world of these literary spies was one of moral equivalence between the opposing sides of the cold war, all caught up in the sordid, dehumanizing, unworthy business of betrayal.

 Graham Greene was a British author of many novels and a former MI6 agent. His novels explored moral ambiguity and, after Greene converted to Catholicism, religious issues. He managed to attract both a large popular audience and the praise of literary critics.

During the Second World War, Greene worked in MI6, where Kim Philby was his case of¿cer and friend. When Philby published his

163 

memoir, Greene wrote the preface, calling the book honest, well-written, and “far more gripping than any novel of espionage.”

 Greene’s 1958 novel, Our Man in Havana, presented spying as a senseless but tragic and cruel game. The hero is a washed up, middle-aged expatriate British vacuum salesman named James Wormold. He is recruited via a bureaucratic misunderstanding and invents both an entire spy network and some mysterious military installations in the Cuban hinterland. His successes electrify his MI6 superiors in London, and they send reinforcements, including Beatrice Severn as his assistant.

 Wormold’s stories take on a life of their own; those he had named as spies start turning up dead, and he is targeted for assassination. Wormold confesses all

to Beatrice and disavows “patriotism or the preference for one economic system over another.” Wormold is able to save himself, his daughter, and      Beatrice, but the story has an absurd coda: Back in England, Wormold is given a job as a spy trainer, as revealing the fraud would be too embarrassing for MI6.

 Similar personi¿ cations of disenchantment with traditional      loyalties      and reÀections on the cold war

as a “wilderness of mirrors” How much of what we learn about

tradecraft from books and movies British author John le Carré, reÀects the reality of spying?

the pseudonym of former British military intelligence, MI5, and MI6 agent David Cornwell.

164 

 His novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) features Alec Leamas, the British station chief in Berlin, who becomes involved in an elaborate scheme to undermine an East German intelligence chief. His lover, Liz Gold, becomes ensnared in the plot and is killed as both try to escape East Germany. Leamas allows himself to be killed as well, “coming in from the cold” emotionally and connecting to the human cost of the cold war.

 In le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the unheroic George Smiley, a retired counterintelligence agent, is brought back into service to investigate whether there is a mole in the ranks. The mole turns out to be Bill Haydon, a former colleague and friend of Smiley’s who had an affair with Smiley’s wife years before. The character of Haydon is, according to many scholars, based on Kim Philby.

 In the ¿nal analysis, is ¿ction stranger than fact when it comes to espionage? A former inspector general of the CIA, Frederick P. Hitz, in his brief and elegant book The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage, concludes that “in the technical world of espionage, the real genius of human inventiveness and creativity exceeds the imagination” of writers, “even on a bad day.”

 Spies have been a powerful presence in cinema as well as in books, but ¿lms tend to push the fantastic elements of spy stories over a realistic psychological portrayal of the secret world. Consider the Bond ¿lms, which have often presented an action hero with fantastic gadgetry versus the dark, cold ¿gure of the novels.

Names to Know

Ambler, Eric (1909–1998): British thriller author credited with producing a harder-edged spy thriller, especially the 1939 A Cof¿n for Dimitrios.

Fleming, Ian (1908–1964): Naval intelligence of¿cer in World War II, author of the James Bond spy novels and also author of literature for children, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

165 

Follett, Ken (1949– ): British writer, author of numerous thrillers set during World War II.

Furst, Alan (1941– ): American author of spy novels set in and just before World War II (especially recommended are Dark Star and The Polish Of¿cer).

Greene, Graham (1904–1991): British author and former MI6 intelligence of¿cer whose works also explore morality in spying, especially the novel Our Man in Havana (1958).

le Carré, John (1931– ): Pen name of British author David Cornwell, whose former career was in MI5 and MI6; author of novels featuring disillusioned spies, such as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974).

Maugham, W. Somerset (1874–1965): British author credited with being the ¿rst in a series of authors of spy ¿ction who themselves had worked in intelligence, he had been a British spy in World War I and wrote Ashenden, or The British Agent (1928) based on his experiences.

Suggested Reading

Ambler, A Cof¿n for Dimitrios.

Fleming, Casino Royale.

Furst, Dark Star.

———, The Polish Of¿cer. Greene, Our Man in Havana. Hitz, The Great Game.

le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. ———, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only.

Maugham, Ashenden.

166 

Questions to Consider

1. Are the disillusioned spies of Graham Greene and John le Carré realistic portrayals of espionage?

2. After James Bond, who is the most notable ¿ctional spy in your estimation?

167 

End of the Cold War Lecture 22

he collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc was not predicted by Western intelligence agencies, perhaps in part because intelligence and covert operations was the one area in which these nations excelled. The East German Stasi was an enormous organization that relied heavily on citizens policing citizens and was so effective it was hired for subcontract work by the KGB. But by the late 1980s, even this powerful

organization could not withstand the economic and social winds of change.

 Imagine yourself in the position of a citizen of the former East Germany in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the past several decades, the Stasi—the East German secret police—has engaged in unprecedented levels of surveillance of East German society through the use of informants in the workplace, schools, churches, bars, sports clubs, everywhere.

 The Stasi’s ¿ les survive. Your ¿le survives. New legislation will allow you to see it. Would you choose to read your ¿ le and ¿ nd out just who—a colleague, a friend, a loved one—informed on you? This dilemma was but one example of the devastating legacy of the cold war.

 The end of the cold war was both a cause for celebration and evidence of a massive intelligence failure in the West. The universities of the United States and Western Europe were full of specialists in Sovietology, yet all of them missed the coming collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. Only a handful of Eastern European dissidents predicted that the communism would collapse. How do we explain this intelligence failure?

 In the 1980s, the Soviet Union remained a highly militarized society, with uniforms a constant presence and military training in schools. But other sectors of the economy were underdeveloped.

168 

The command economy was unable to maintain a decent standard of living for its citizens.

 Production was beset by shortages, rationing, and on-the-job drunkenness and industrial accidents. This planned economy relied on statistics, but statistics in the Soviet Union were routinely, and at all levels, distorted and exaggerated.

 There was a loss of ideological fervor as well. A ruling class had emerged, the privileged Nomenklatura, who had special access to stores, elite schools for their children, and visits to the West. Dissidents were no longer liquidated but were marginalized by losing their jobs, harassed by police surveillance, or quelled with psychiatric institutionalization.

 If any regime was completely allied with the Soviet Union, it was the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. East Germany was unique for the intensity with which its secret, the Stasi, monitored its citizens. At the same time, the Stasi also played a key role in international espionage.

 The Stasi called themselves the shield and sword of the party and jokingly called themselves the Firm, just as the CIA called themselves the Company. This may harken back to the role of merchants as gatherers of intelligence in premodern societies.

 Erich Mielke dominated the Stasi as its boss from 1957 until the collapse of the regime in 1989. The foreign spying operation was called the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), run by Markus Wolf for 34 years. Wolf was known as “the man without a face” in the West because no one even knew what he looked like until a photograph of him was obtained in 1978.

 The HVA was responsible for about 80 percent of all non-Soviet Eastern European spying. The KGB even subcontracted tasks to it. Notably, a young Vladimir Putin was once the KGB’s liaison to the HVA.

169 

 The Stasi’s most important task was spying on West Germany. The Stasi in¿ltrated spies into many levels of West German government and industry. The most spectacular case was that of Gunther Guillaume and his wife, Christl. They were blackmailed with Gunther’s Nazi past. Christl became a secretary in the of¿ ce of the West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, and Gunter befriended Brandt as well. But the Guillaumes were unmasked in 1974, Brandt had to resign.

 Other in¿ltrations were Romeo operations—sort of gender-inverted honeypot traps—which became a specialty of the Stasi. Female secretaries in West Germany were targeted by East German male agents. Tragedies ensued here; one secretary in the West German Foreign Ministry killed herself when she learned her husband had only married her for her secrets.

 As to the Stasi’s role in internal spying and repression, it was not an all-powerful organization, but the population’s belief in its watchfulness made it powerful. The Stasi border troops did guard the Berlin Wall with orders to shoot to kill. Dissidents were kept under surveillance. But more importantly, friends reported on friends, spouses informed on spouses, and parents spied on their children.

 The Stasi also perfected tracking dissidents by scent. Dissidents were sometimes made to sit on chairs with removable cloth seats during interrogations. These seats would produce samples of their individual scent, which were kept in bottles at the Stasi headquarters, for future use in tracking who might have put up protest posters, distributed leaÀets, or wrote graf¿ ti.

 In 1989, when the East German regime fell, the Stasi had about 91,000 full-time of¿cers, or one for every 180 citizens. By comparison, the Nazis had 7,000 Gestapo of¿cers total for a much larger population. Similarly, the KGB had one of¿cer for every 595 people.

170 

 In addition to these 91,000 full-time employees, the Stasi listed 173,000 informers in its records. One scholar’s conservative estimate indicates that two percent of the adult population of East Germany had a direct tie to police.

 A powerful impetus for change came from what might be called the Polish Revolution of 1980. This clear challenge to the orthodoxy represented by the communist state took the form of Polish workers in the Gdansk Shipyard founding an independent trade union called Solidarity. They were inspired in part by the 1978 election of a Polish pope, John Paul II. The slogans of the Polish resistance were “Act as if you are free.”

 The year 1985 was pivotal in the collapse of the Soviet system. Four events in particular were signi¿ cant. The ¿rst of these was the rise to power of reform-minded Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. This enabled improved relations between the communist bloc and the West in general.

 The second event was the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair in the United States, which entangled the Reagan administration and the CIA in a covert operation in direct violation of Congressional policy. This further damaged the CIA’s reputation.

 The third event was a series of Soviet spies being unmasked within American intelligence services. The ¿rst was Jonathan Pollard (see Lecture 20). The second was John Anthony Walker, a retired naval of¿cer who recruited several family members into his spy ring. The third was Ronald Pelton, a retired NSA analyst with a photographic memory. All of these spies were motivated not by ideology but by money or ego.

 Two other spies were active in 1985 as well but were not detected until years later: Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence of¿ cer, and Robert P. Hanssen, an FBI agent, both of whom spied for the Soviets and then the for Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

171 

 The fourth big event of 1985 was literary: President Ronald Reagan gave a marketing boost to Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, calling it the “perfect yarn” and saying it could not be put down, turning it almost instantly into a best seller.

 The real hero of the Clancy’s novel was neither the Soviet submarine captain nor the CIA agent but the experimental technology itself, lovingly and painstakingly described. This was eloquent testimony to the way in which technology and computers were moving into a key role in espionage and covert operations.

 Although not predicted by intelligence analysts, the fall of communism and the end of the cold war happened with breathtaking rapidity. This happened under the watch of President George H. W. Bush, who was elected in 1988. This was the ¿rst time a former CIA director had become president, but there was a kind of precedent for a spymaster president in George Washington.

 In Eastern Europe, Gorbachev’s reforms launched a process that soon took on a dynamic of their own, escaping his control, as populations spurned their earlier fear of internal repression to assert themselves. In Germany, the Berlin Wall was toppled in November 1989. The Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. The cold war came to a close.

 But the passing of these repressive regimes left legacies that would take longer to deal with and are still around today. Mielke was never put on trial for the actions of the Stasi or the killings at the Berlin Wall. The old Stasi headquarters is today a museum, as is the feared Hohenschönhausen prison.The most impressive part of a visit there is the tour guides, who are former dissidents who can tell you of their experiences.

172 

Important Terms

Hohenschönhausen: Stasi prison in East Berlin, today a memorial and museum.

Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA): The Main Administration for Intelligence, the East German Stasi’s branch for foreign espionage.

Nomenklatura: The privileged leadership class of the Soviet Union and other communist states.

Stasi: The informal name for the Ministry for State Security of the East German Democratic Republic.

Names to Know

Clancy, Tom (1947– ): American best-selling and proli¿c author of technological thrillers, whose career was launched by President Reagan’s praise for his novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).

Guillaume, Gunther (1927–1995): East German spy who became an advisor to Chancellor Willy Brandt in West Germany and whose exposure led to Brandt’s resignation.

Mielke, Erich (1907–2000): Long-serving Stasi chief (1957–1989). He was convicted, decades previously, of murdering two policemen but was never held to account for the killings at the East German border or the activities of the Stasi.

Pelton, Ronald (1942– ): Former National Security Agency of¿ cer who retired in 1979 but then for ¿nancial gain approached the Soviet Embassy with an offer to pass along information. He was convicted in 1986 and is now serving three life sentences.

Putin, Vladimir (1952– ): Former KGB and FSB of¿cer who became president of Russia after Boris Yeltsin.

173 

Walker, John Anthony (1937– ): A retired U.S. navy radioman who recruited his brother, son, and best friend into a spy ring for the Soviets and continued his activities even after retiring from the navy in 1976. He was arrested by the FBI at a dead-drop after his wife turned him in.

Wolf, Markus (1923–2006): For 34 years, director of the Stasi’s foreign spying through the HVA. He was long known as “the man without a face” as Western intelligence agencies did not have a photograph of him for many years.

Suggested Reading

Clancy, The Hunt for Red October.

Mackaris, Seduced by Secrets.

Weiner, Legacy of Ashes.

Questions to Consider

1. How much impact did intelligence have in the outcome of the cold war?

2. What made the Stasi effective in external espionage?

174 

Post–Cold War Spying Lecture 23

fter the cold war, the new world of espionage and covert operations included new forms of activity like counterterrorism, economic espionage, and cyber warfare. So how much has spying changed

since its ancient beginnings? Several prominent intelligence failures over the past two decades were a warning that intelligence had to think and work in new ways in this new world. Then again, the return of old enemies and old crimes proved that even in the secret world, some things never change.

 Espionage and covert operations did not simply come to a halt with the end of the cold war. In fact, whole new areas of activity opened up: counterterrorism, economic and corporate espionage, and cyber warfare to name a few. Transnational terror networks and nongovernmental organizations took on new, more signi¿ cant roles in the secret world.

 Some surmised that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be a devastating blow to the CIA, now without a clear mission. In fact, the CIA would have its hands full, starting with internal problems.

 In 1994, Aldrich Ames and his wife were arrested as spies. Ames was a counterintelligence of¿cer who had worked for the CIA for 30 years, but had been a double agent for nine, betraying American secrets to the Soviets and the Russian intelligence services. This man did more damage to the CIA than any other double agent we know of.

 Ames’s father had a career with the CIA, and Ames was apparently carried along by inertia rather than a commitment to a calling. Over time Ames grew unhappy in his job, feeling that he had stalled out. So in April 1985, Ames walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington with a stash of secret documents, including the names of CIA agents working in the Soviet Union.

175 

Ultimately, Ames was paid $4 million by his handlers. His trademark was reckless behavior. He drank heavily and spent rashly.

 After a number of executions of American agents in the Soviet Union, the search began for an internal traitor. Ames deÀ ected suspicion by passing polygraph tests. Eventually, suspicion did fall on him and the FBI tapped his phone, bugged his home, and bugged his computer.

 Ames was ¿nally arrested in February 1994. He pleaded guilty and received a life sentence. It is estimated that he exposed more than 100 secret operations and the identities of more than 30 agents, 10 of whom were assassinated.

 Only a few years later, another devastating case came to light showcasing betrayal for money and ego. Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent, used his tradecraft to become a Soviet (and then Russian) agent. His caution and cunning allowed him to spy for more than 20 years.

 Even his Russian handlers did not know who Hanssen was. He never met his KGB paymasters, and he signed his communications “Ramon Garcia.” He handed over nuclear strategy documents, military technology secrets, and the identities of American agents, two of whom were executed as a result.

 As in the case of Ames, in spite of sloppy and incompetent work at his cover job, Hanssen was never disciplined. When the betrayal of agents suggested a crisis, the FBI concentrated on technical problems, such as breached electronic communications or codes, as the culprit.

 At work, Hanssen presented himself as a devout Catholic, while privately living a different kind of life, making sex tapes and patronizing an exotic dancer, whom he showered with expensive gifts. At long last, a tip from a former Soviet agent pinpointed

176 

Hanssen, and in 2001 he was arrested as he was leaving a dead drop in a Virginia park.

 Two of Hanssen’s own comments offer insight into his personality. During his arrest, he asked the FBI agents, “What took you so long?” Later, he explained that he was inspired to become a spy by reading Kim Philby’s My Secret War.

 The decade after the end of the cold war brought American intelligence failures of the agencies own making. For example, in 1999, during NATO intervention in the Balkan genocide, the CIA provided bad targeting information to NATO’s forces, leading them to bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

 A larger intelligence failure occurred in the lead-up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Four hijacked planes, loaded with passengers, embarked on a mission of spectacular destruction. This was the greatest nightmare of the CIA, whose charter mission had been “No more Pearl Harbors.”

 What was markedly different about this attack was that it was not mounted by a state but by a nongovernmental group, a radical terror network called al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. He was the son of a prosperous Saudi family who had been active for decades in Central Asia, ¿ rst recruiting ¿ghters for the Soviet-Afghan War.

 In 1996, bin Laden issued a declaration of holy war against the entire West. From 1998, when al-Qaeda bombed several U.S. embassies in Africa, the CIA had been targeting bin Laden, but several attempts to capture or kill him either failed or were called off.

 The investigative commission that studied the mistakes that led to the 9/11 intelligence failure concluded that one of the main problems was “stove piping” of information, so that the different parts of the American intelligence bureaucracy did not effectively communicate with each other.

177 

 In the aftermath of the attacks, the United States, Britain, and their allies invaded Afghanistan, where bin Laden and al-Qaeda had been hosted by the Taliban radical Islamist regime; bin Laden was not caught for another decade (and in another country), and the ¿ ghting continued for many years. Some commentators have worried the role of Pakistan’s intelligence service in this struggle because of its earlier ties with the Taliban.

 American policy next turned to Iraq, under its ruler Saddam Hussein, which had not been directly linked to the 9/11 attacks. Concern over Iraq instead focused on reports by different Western intelligence agencies that Saddam had an ongoing program to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

 The invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, and within a month, Saddam’s regime was toppled. But massive WMD projects were not found. It is possible that the dictator had wanted his foes, external and internal, to believe he possessed the capability to make such weapons as a kind of deterrent.

 The intelligence on WMD had been partial, contradictory, and unclear. One case apparently involved a forged document that had been passed along by Italian intelligence, purporting to show Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium in Niger. This was a renewed lesson in tradecraft—that intelligence needs to be con¿ rmed by multiple sources.

 More broadly, since the launching of what President George W. Bush called a “war on terror” after 9/11, the CIA and other American intelligence agencies caused considerable controversy over their conduct of counterterrorism activities. There was and continues to be much debate over interrogation techniques and the status and treatment of prisoners, particularly the operation of black sites for imprisonment and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Vigorous criticism and the recommendations of the 9/11 commission led to changes in the CIA and in how American

178 

intelligence is structured. The CIA’s earlier centrality to American intelligence operations has been replaced by the new of¿ce of the Director of National Intelligence, created in 2005.

 In the former Soviet Union, the former KGB was restructured to become the intelligence service of the Russian Federation. The Federal Security Service (FSB) now handles internal security, while the Foreign

Intelligence Service (SVR) handles foreign espionage.

 What has not changed is the important role of the security services in Russian politics. Former of¿cials of “the higher police,” such as Vladimir Putin, have made a potent comeback and occupy leading positions in government.

Putin was elected president of Russia in 2000, in part based

on his promises to crack down for a “war on terror” included an on Chechen terrorism. The overhaul of American intelligence.

year before, there had been

a spate of bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities attributed to Chechen terrorists. Inside Russia and abroad, some observers voiced the suspicion that the bombings were a government pretext for a crackdown.

 Eastern European politics have also seen continuity from the cold war in attacks on political targets. On September 5, 2004, the Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko went to dinner with the deputy head of the Ukrainian intelligence service. Later that evening, he became desperately ill. Medical tests showed dioxin poisoning. In spite of this, Yushchenko was elected president of Ukraine a few months later.

179 

 The victim of the world’s ¿rst nuclear assassination was Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB agent well known for his ¿erce criticism of Putin. At one time, Litvinenko was charged with investigating corruption within the FSB itself. He was dismissed from the FSB in 1998 when he claimed that he had been ordered to kill political opponents of the government. He also claimed that the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings had been the work of the FSB.

 In November 2006, after lunch in a sushi restaurant in London, Litvinenko was suddenly taken ill. He died a lingering death weeks later, on November 23. Tests found he had been poisoned with polonium 210. Speculation as to who was responsible pointed in many directions. Litvinenko himself accused the Kremlin; others pointed to rogue former KGB agents or the Russian ma¿ a.

 This tragic event opened up large questions. Even after the cold war had ended, what continuities in politics and espionage might lie beneath the surface? The crime was a blending of the old and new: an ancient tool, poison, but in a cutting-edge technological form, as a radioactive toxin. Did this point in the direction which espionage and covert action would take in the future?

Important Terms

black sites: CIA secret interrogation sites and prisons in foreign countries after 2001.

Director of National Intelligence: A new of¿ce established in 2004 in the United States for centralized oversight of intelligence efforts, displacing the CIA’s earlier centrality.

FSB: The Russian Federal Security Service, founded after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

180 

SVR: The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

weapons of mass destruction (WMD): A term referring to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons capable of mass casualties.

Names to Know

Ames, Aldrich (1941– ): CIA of¿cer who spied for money for the Soviets and Russians for nine years, from 1985 until his arrest in 1994; sentenced to life in prison. His actions exposed many covert operations and led to the death of about 10 spies.

bin Laden, Osama (1957–2011): Son of a wealthy Saudi family, organizer of religious warfare in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, organizer of al-Qaeda and its September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Finally tracked down and assassinated in Pakistan in 2011.

Hanssen, Robert (1944– ): An FBI agent who used subtle tradecraft to spy for the Soviets for more than 20 years, beginning in 1979. Through his communications to the Soviets, Hanssen never revealed his identity to his handlers. He was arrested in 2001 after a former Soviet agent pinpointed him. His activities did vast damage and cost two American agents their lives.

Litvinenko, Alexander (1962–2006): Former KGB and FSB agent, turned ¿erce critic of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government; assassinated by radioactive poison in London in 2006.

Yushchenko, Viktor (1954– ): Opposition leader of the independent Ukraine who in 2004 was poisoned by dioxin; although dis¿gured and ill, he went on to win the presidential elections.

Suggested Reading

Weiner, Legacy of Ashes.

181 

Questions to Consider

1. Whose actions were more damaging, those of Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen? Why?

2. With the end of the cold war, what were the new chief priorities for Western intelligence agencies?

182 

The Future of Espionage Lecture 24

he myth of the spy in both fact and ¿ction continues to appeal to us, even as the role of the spy has changed. We can detect new trends in the world of espionage and covert operations from current

events, including the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the WikiLeaks scandal. We close the course by examining some of the enduring truths about espionage and considering the role of secrecy in an open, democratic society.

 On May 2, 2011, American helicopters carrying a group of Navy SEALs clattered towards Abbottabad, Pakistan. They touched down at a compound that CIA analysts had pinpointed, over long months of investigation, as the hiding place Osama bin Laden. A ¿ re¿ ght broke out, lasting 40 minutes, and bin Laden was killed.

 This mission was executed by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a grouping of special units tasked with secret missions, estimated to cost the U.S. government more than 1 billion dollars annually.

 bin Laden had disappeared in Afghanistan in 2001, and many surmised he was living in a cave, remote from civilization. In 2007, CIA analysts began to concentrate on a man they thought was a courier for bin Laden. In the summer of 2010, the courier was traced to a compound in Abbottabad, a busy urban setting.

 The compound appeared to have no phone or Internet hookup, so the CIA placed agents in a neighboring house to observe the compound. Overhead, spy satellites peered into the compound and spotted a tall man walking in the grounds, who might be bin Laden. A CIA analyst rated the chance that they had their man at about 80 percent.

183 

 This historical event shows some enduring patterns in our survey of espionage and covert actions.

o These activities are expensive and require tremendous organization. The United States spent $80 billion on intelligence activities in 2010.

o SIGINT and technology continue to grow in importance. Of that 80 billion dollars, it is estimated that 85 percent went to technology, and technology clearly played a role in bin Laden’s defeat.

o However, HUMINT is still indispensable. In this case, the compound lacked phone and Internet connections, so human observation was vital.

o We see again that sometimes allies spy on allies. Secrecy was maintained not only from the enemy but from the ally nation in which bin Laden was hiding, Pakistan.

o Finally, and crucially, we see that success was not certain. Espionage and covert actions retain their element of risk.

 If anything, the relevance of espionage and covert operations in the post–cold war world has grown and continues to grow. It has changed, however, and the scope of spies, spying, and covert operations has expanded.

 In the computer age, the individual who in earlier times would have been under the radar now can be tracked, data-crunched, and observed as never before, not only by governments but by marketers, economic analysts, hackers, reporters, and countless others.

 Economic or industrial espionage involves corporations spying on each other for trade secrets and market advantage. Yet this is nothing new. It has likely been around since those ancient merchants who were among the ¿ rst spies.

184 

 Economic espionage ran in tandem with the shadowy operations of the cold war. In 1965, for example, Sergei Pavlov, a representative for the Soviet airline

AeroÀot, was arrested in France carrying plans of the Concorde transatlantic jet.

 An allied and long-term phenomenon is the increasing use of technology in espionage. Consider the spy satellite. This was an improvement on the U-2 spy planes in terms of both information gathering and reducing risk.

A big part of the 1950s and 1960s space race involved

satellites, starting with the realm of science ¿ction. Threats are ongoing and growing.

1957 and swiftly followed

by the American Corona spy satellite in 1960. New generations of spy satellites had grown even more sophisticated and can deliver even more detailed information,

 In addition to satellites, we now also have unmanned surveillance aircraft. These include the Predator drones Àown remotely by the American military over dangerous locations, able to observe or rain missiles down on targets.

 The advent of the computer age increased the technological stakes still further, as attacks against government computers became a real threat. Viruses and malware can lie quietly in computer systems until they are activated at a moment that causes maximum damage. The idea itself has an ancient antecedent in the legend of the Trojan Horse.

185 

 We no longer need to speak of cyber war as a future scenario. In 2007 and 2008, Russian computers were turned on Estonia and Georgia during international disputes to shut down their government websites. In 2010, an unknown enemy launched the Stuxnet worm against software from the Siemens company that is used to run re¿neries, factories, and nuclear facilities in Iran. In May 2011, Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest aerospace company and the Pentagon’s number one supplier, fought off a large-scale cyber attack.

 The WikiLeaks incident highlighted how technology turbocharged espionage, giving new salience to old forms. In 2010, a young, low-ranking Army intelligence analyst, working in an of¿ce in Baghdad, downloaded more than a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, which he passed to an organization called WikiLeaks. This was one of the largest breakdowns in military security in U.S. history.

 We have seen security leaks before; what was new here was that the organization that received the stolen information was not a foreign government but a nongovernmental organization, run by an antisecrecy activist, Julian Assange. Second, the sheer scale of the leak was enabled by the technology itself; it is reported that the analyst ¿t all of the cables on a single rewritable CD.

 The questions raised this incident are urgent: Should a democracy have any secrets? What is the proper role of a whistle blower? Can traditional diplomacy function without con¿dentiality? How much spying, if any, is appropriate to a democracy? What role, if any, is there for morality in espionage and covert actions? What are the human costs of the secret world of espionage?

 Future issues are already emerging in the world of espionage. We are quickly sliding into a culture of surveillance, without vigorous public conversation about this development. Cameras can be found at schools, supermarkets, in bank lobbies or at ATMs, at traf¿c intersections, and many more places. In Britain, it has been estimated that an ordinary citizen could be captured on ¿ lm 300 times a day. How is privacy affected?

186 

 The term “surveillance society” was ¿rst coined in 1985. Because of the ever-decreasing costs of computer memory, surveillance cameras are able to record and store vast quantities of information. Other advances, such as facial-recognition software, eliminates the high cost of human labor in analyzing all this data. Meanwhile, private corporations and even individuals, through social networking and online searching are getting in on the act of surveillance.

 Note that surveillance can even extend into the past and the future. Electronic records have a longer shelf life and are easier to access than paper ones, so that old joke about “your permanent record” is no longer so funny. Genetic information that indicates likely later developments in your life could be misused in various ways.

 To complicate things yet further, some surveillance yields a social good, as when a crime is solved with this data, so as will all technologies, it is always a question of how humans use these new abilities: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”—Who will watch the watchers? We, as citizens of an open society, need to be aware of potential abuses. The discussion about surveillance and privacy needs to involve everyone.

 Observers of government today point to a growth of the culture of government secrecy that threatens to shroud in unknowing the very facts a self-governing people need to know. The problem is not entirely new. It was diagnosed by U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who retired in 2001. He noted that secrecy shielded the government from accountability, deprived the government of the facts it needed to make policy, and robbed the populace of a well-informed perspective and debate.

 Finally, there is the problem, likely to grow larger in the future, of the expectations placed on intelligence agencies. Intelligence professionals have complained justly about the public’s false image of what spying can really do, similar to the “CSI effect” noted in the

187 

justice system. Television and ¿lm have distorted the popular image of spying as they have police work; real life is more complicated.

 The next time you see a news story about espionage or covert operations, try to apply what you have learned in this course to the story. Does it resemble any of the stories you encountered, or is it something of a new story? What are the motivations at play? Is there legitimate spy activity going on, or is this another spy panic?

 How well, or poorly, do some of the pronouncements about espionage from the start of the course ¿t what you have since heard throughout the course?

o The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu declared, “All warfare is based on deception.” This motto stands up well, but we should add that espionage plays a crucial role in peacetime as well.

o Sir Francis Walsingham said, “Knowledge is never too dear” and that “It is better to fear too much than too little.” We can accept this as well, while adding that one of the challenges of our own time too much, rather than too little data, and the need to interpret it with care.

o Henry Stimson declared, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail!” In the best of all possible worlds, perhaps that is so. Until that best of all possible worlds is achieved, however, such a gentleman would a vulnerable and ineffective leader. Let Stimson’s declaration be an ideal to strive toward.

o Winston Churchill quipped that, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The key, obviously, is to keep the precious truth ¿rmly enthroned, so that the bodyguard of falsehood does not overwhelm the greater true objective.

188 

o The grimmest pronouncement on espionage is John le Carré’s character Alec Leamas: “What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors.” This is too sweeping. In our course, we have seen any number of motivations, both noble and venal.

 Let us add one last motto from U.S. President James Madison about the role of the secret in a democracy, In 1822, Madison declared,

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.

 The gathering of intelligence and acting on it can be the ¿rst line of defense of a self-ruling people or can be the prelude to the loss of liberties. The best defense against tyranny is information.

Important Terms

Corona spy satellite: From 1960–1972, the standard American spy satellite, often replacing spy plane overÀ ights.

cyber war: The conduct of war, disrupting an enemy by computer and the Internet, already a reality from 2007.

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC): An American military and operations command that unites special units tasked with covert actions, including the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.

Stuxnet worm: Computer virus launched in 2010 targeting Iranian nuclear facilities and destroying hardware.

surveillance society: A term coined in 1985 to describe the modern ubiquity of being under observation.

189 

WikiLeaks: A 2010 scandal concerning the release of over a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables by computer activists.

Suggested Reading

Hitz, The Great Game.

Lyon, The Electronic Eye.

Questions to Consider

1. Given the advances in SIGINT in our times, what roles are still important for HUMINT?

2. How can one best resist the abuses of surveillance in a democratic society?

190 

Glossary

97-shiki ǀbun inji-ki: The Japanese version of the Enigma encryption machine used during World War II, called “Purple” by the Americans.

Abwehr: The German military intelligence service during World War II, run by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and disbanded by Hitler as the war’s end neared.

agent: A gatherer of intelligence or someone sent on a covert operation.

Agent R65: The vulture arrested as a spy in Saudi Arabia in 2011.

al-Qaeda: The radical Islamist terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden that launched the 2011 attacks against the United States.

Arthashastra: The classic text by Indian statesman Kautilya on use of spies in statecraft, written c. 300 B.C.

Art of War: The classic text by Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, written c. 490 B.C., proclaiming that deception is always a part of war.

Avner Group: A team of Israeli agents sent to track down the terrorists from the 1972 Munich Olympics attack; however, they killed an innocent man in Norway in a case of mistaken identity.

Babington Plot: An English conspiracy in 1585–1586, uncovered by Sir Francis Walsingham, to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and incite a national revolt to restore Catholicism. In¿ltration of the plot led to the execution of the participants and of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Baltic Forest War: Guerilla warfare in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had been occupied by the Soviet Union, lasting from World War II until the 1960s.

191 

Battle of Midway: The turning point of World War II in the Paci¿ c, which took place in June 1942, wherein American decoding of Japanese communications played a key role.

Bay of Pigs invasion: Disastrous 1961 invasion of Cuba planned by the CIA and executed by Cuban exiles; American reinforcement was not allowed due to the government’s desire for “plausible deniability.”

Black Dispatches: A term used during the U.S. Civil War for intelligence provided by escaped slaves in the South.

black sites: CIA secret interrogation sites and prisons in foreign countries after 2001.

Bletchley Park: The British decoding headquarters during World War II, where Operation ULTRA decrypted German Enigma messages.

brush pass: In tradecraft, a meeting between an agent and a handler that appears random or accidental but allows a message to be secretly passed between them.

cabinet noir: A “black chamber” in premodern European royal courts where mail would be secretly opened and read.

Cambridge spy ring: A spy ring recruited by the Soviets from among undergraduates at the British university in the 1930s, including Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and John Cairncross.

case of¿ cer: The superior of an agent; also called a handler.

Cheka: The feared Bolshevik secret police, established in December 1917 under the leadership of Feliks Dzerzhinsky.

Chinese Cultural Revolution: A vast internal convulsion within China from 1966 to 1976 launched by Chairman Mao, with millions victimized.

192 

Church Committee: The informal name of the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church, which exposed CIA abuses in 1975.

CIA: The American Central Intelligence Agency, created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 from the ranks of many former OSS agents.

closed society: An authoritarian system without a public sphere independent of the state.

cold war: The standoff and global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies, after World War II (although its historical roots went back to 1917), which lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Comintern: The Communist International, organized 1919, to encourage the founding of communist parties loyal to Moscow.

Corona spy satellite: From 1960–1972, the standard American spy satellite, often replacing spy plane overÀ ights.

counterintelligence: Any activity meant to frustrate intelligence gathering.

cover: A pretended identity to conceal an agent.

covert operations: Secret activity to achieve a speci¿c end, without the author being detected.

cryptanalysis: Analysis of encrypted (coded) messages to break the code and decipher information.

Cuban Missile Crisis: The 1962 confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over Soviet stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba. While it was averted peacefully, it was the closest that the superpowers came to war.

193 

cyber war: The conduct of war, disrupting an enemy by computer and the Internet, already a reality from 2007.

dead drop: In tradecraft, a prearranged place where a message can be left for a handler by an agent without the two ever meeting in person.

dezhurnaya: In the Soviet Union, a woman whose task was to watch and be on duty (hence the name) in public buildings.

Director of National Intelligence: A new of¿ce established in 2004 in the United States for centralized oversight of intelligence efforts, displacing the CIA’s earlier centrality.

disinformation: False information deliberately passed to the enemy.

double agent: An agent who pretends to work for the opposing side.

ELINT: Electronic intelligence, intercepting communications of the opposing side.

Enigma machine: The German encryption machine ¿rst developed in the interwar years that produced code at ¿rst considered unbreakable, but the Allied Operation ULTRA was able to decode it (after Polish intelligence had decoded it ¿rst, before the war broke out).

Enormoz: The Soviet codename for the American Manhattan Project to create atomic weapons.

espionage: The gathering of information by secret, often illegal, means.

FBI: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, charged with both federal internal policing and counterintelligence in the United States, established in 1935.

¿ fth column: A term originating in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War to indicate a group of internal saboteurs.

194 

FSB: The Russian Federal Security Service, founded after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

FUSAG: A fake American army, the First U.S. Army Group, allegedly stationed in East Anglia in Britain in an operation to mislead the German military concerning the route of the amphibious invasion.

Gestapo: The secret internal political police in Nazi Germany, under the control of Heinrich Himmler.

GPU: The Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, or State Political Administration, the secret police of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1934.

Great Game: A 19th-century term popularized by writer Rudyard Kipling that refers to the imperialist competition for dominance, especially in Central Asia.

Greenbrier Hotel: A historical resort in West Virginia that was the site of Project Greek Island, the secret construction of a massive underground bunker between 1959 and 1962 to house Congress in case of nuclear war.

GRU: The Soviet military intelligence service from 1918.

Gulag camps: The extensive Soviet prison camp system, established under Lenin and at its largest under Stalin.

Gunpowder Plot: A conspiracy in England in 1605 to blow up King James I and Parliament. Discovery of the conspiracy led to the execution of its planners, including Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes Day: An English national holiday every November 5 harkening back to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, with Guy Fawkes burnt in ef¿ gy.

handler: The superior of an agent, also called a case of¿ cer.

Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA): The Main Administration for Intelligence, the East German Stasi’s branch for foreign espionage.

195 

heraldry: Chivalric discipline concerning the etiquette of noble warfare and coats of arms.

Hohenschönhausen: Stasi prison in East Berlin; today it is a memorial and museum.

honeypot trap: In tradecraft, the use of sex as a lure or occasion for blackmail to recruit an agent.

HUAC: House Un-American Activities Committee, from the 1930s to the 1970s, to investigate dangers internal to the United States.

HUMINT: Human intelligence; the use of a human agent to gather intelligence.

Hungarian Uprising: Uprising against Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks and leading to massive exodus.

intelligence: Information that can be used to shape policy.

intelligencers: Early spies in the Middle Ages.

International Spy Museum: A marvelous museum in Washington DC with large collections of spy technology.

Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI): Pakistani intelligence organization, founded in 1948 by a British of¿cer for the newly independent state.

Jesuit Relations: Reports of Jesuit missionary activity from the 17th to the 19th century, exemplifying the information-gathering capacities of the Jesuit order.

Jesuits: The Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Catholic Church, founded in 1534 and noted for its engagement in missionary work and Counter-Reformation efforts.

196 

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC): An American military and operations command that unites special units tasked with covert actions, including the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.

KGB: The Committee for State Security, the reorganized form of the Soviet secret police from 1954 until the Soviet collapse of 1991.

Knowlton Rangers: The American special operations branch set up in 1776 on the orders of George Washington, seen as the ancestor of today’s Special Forces.

Lithuanian Road Reports: Crusader guides to raiding routes into the Baltic, produced from 1384 to 1402.

Lockhart Plot: Alleged British plot to assassinate Lenin in 1918, which led to the Àight of Sidney Reilly from Moscow and the arrest of his colleague, Bruce Lockhart; used to great propaganda effect by the Bolsheviks.

Manhattan Project: The American project, with British and Canadian help, to build an atomic bomb during World War II, staring in 1942.

MI5: The British counterintelligence service, founded 1909 as the Special Intelligence Bureau.

MI6: The British overseas intelligence bureau, founded in 1912.

mole: An agent in¿ltrated into the structures of the opposing side who burrows in and works as a double agent.

Mossad: One of the Israeli intelligence branches, founded in 1951.

Mukden Incident: An act of sabotage staged by Japanese forces in Manchuria in 1931 to offer a pretext for attacking China.

mule: Someone who is hired to smuggle contraband, especially drugs.

197 

NKVD: The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, replacing the OGPU in 1934 as the Soviet secret police.

Nomenklatura: the privileged leadership class of the Soviet Union and other communist states.

NSA: The U.S. National Security Agency, established by Harry S. Truman in 1952, the main American SIGINT agency, intercepting communications worldwide.

Oak Ridge: The “secret city” in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where uranium was enriched for the Manhattan Project.

OGPU: The United State Political Administration, another name for the Soviet secret police from 1922 to 1934.

Okhrana: Russian secret police force, founded in 1880, which in¿ ltrated many Russian revolutionary secret societies.

open society: A social system with a public sphere independent of the state.

Operation AJAX: CIA and British project that deposed Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953; considered a success at the time, but in the longer term embittered the region against the United States.

Operation CORNFLAKES: American OSS operation to undermine German home front morale, including fake postage stamps and propaganda sent by mail.

Operation EAGLE CLAW: American covert operation ordered by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 for the rescue of hostages in Iran, called off due to technical problems.

Operation GOLD: Codename for the Berlin Tunnel project of 1953–1956, in which the Americans and British dug a tunnel under the Soviet sector of Berlin to tap telephone lines.

198 

Operation MAGIC: American decoding operation focused on Japanese codes, run by William Friedman.

Operation MINCEMEAT: Launched April 1943, the British planting of a dead body—allegedly that of a British of¿cer—off the coast of Spain to mislead Germany concerning the route of the Mediterranean invasion.

Operation PAPERCLIP: The American project, as World War II was ending, to capture and recruit German scientists.

Operation THUNDERBOLT: Israeli special forces’ liberation of hostages from an airliner hijacking in Uganda in 1976.

Operation ULTRA: British operation headquartered at Bletchley Park and including many women staff to decode German Enigma messages, which played a key role in World War II and yet remained secret until the 1970s.

oprichniki: Members of the feared secret police of Tsar Ivan IV “the Terrible” of Russia—“men set apart”—from 1565 to 1572.

oprichnina: “That which is set apart”; the regime of the feared secret police of Tsar Ivan IV, as well as territory under the direct central control of the tsar.

OSS: American Of¿ce of Strategic Services, founded 1942 under William “Wild Bill” Donovan, for worldwide intelligence and covert operations during World War II.

Planter: A ship that secretly sailed out of Charleston Harbor by an African American crew during the U.S. Civil War in May 1862.

plausible deniability: The quality of realistically being able to deny involvement in a covert action.

Polizei: “Policing” in German, meaning a 17th- and 18th-century ideal of close supervision and ef¿ cient statecraft.

199 

Project Greek Island: The secret construction of a massive underground bunker between 1959 and 1962 to house Congress in case of nuclear war. The bunker was located at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.

provocation: A deliberate misleading of the opposing side to incite action that compromises or damages their reputation.

Pumpkin Papers: Materials related to Soviet espionage, produced by former Soviet courier Whittaker Chambers, in connection with accusations of spying against Alger Hiss; the materials had been hidden in a hollowed-pumpkin on Chambers’s farm.

Red Scare: From 1919 to 1920, anxieties about foreign radicalism in the United States, marked by the Palmer Raids.

redundancy: A deliberate duplication, whether of channels of information or of chains of responsibility, to maximize the chances for success.

Room 40: An of¿ce in the London Old Admiralty Building, run by Captain Blinker Hall, where enemy codes were deciphered.

RSHA: The German Reich Security Main Of¿ce from 1939, run by Heinrich Himmler’s protégé Reinhard Heydrich as the main coordinating body of the police and intelligence services.

Samson Option: The Israeli plan from 1965 to acquire a nuclear deterrent.

Savak: The Shah of Iran’s feared secret police from 1956 until his overthrow.

Sicherheitsdienst (SD): The Nazi Party’s internal Security Service.

SIGINT: Signals intelligence, the use of interceptions of enemy communication by technical means, as opposed to human intelligence.

sleeper: An agent sent to in¿ltrate the structures of the opposing side with the long-term goal of being ready to be activated at some crucial future time.

200 

SOE: The British Special Operations Executive, founded in 1940 on Churchill’s orders to enÀame revolt in Nazi-occupied Europe.

spy panic: Mass social hysteria based on fears of in¿ ltration by enemy agents.

spy phobia: Mass social panic fearing in¿ltration by spies as in Europe from the 1890s through 1914.

spy ring: An intelligence organization, which in good tradecraft should not have all the agents known to each other but is rather compartmentalized.

Stasi: The informal name for the Ministry for State Security of the East German Democratic Republic.

Stuxnet worm: Computer virus launched in 2010 targeting Iranian nuclear facilities and destroying hardware.

surveillance: Constant observation of an opposed party to gain intelligence.

surveillance society: A term coined in 1985 to describe the modern ubiquity of being under observation.

SVR: The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Taliban: Meaning “students” in Arabic, the name of the fundamentalist movement that took over Afghanistan in the later 1990s and hosted al-Qaeda.

tradecraft: The set of maxims and rules distilled from past experience of espionage or covert actions.

transparency: The extent to which a society or institution is marked by openness of access and information.

triple agent: An agent who pretends to be a double agent but actually is still loyal to his or her original employer.

201 

Trojan Horse: The classic legend of the use of subterfuge (in the form of troops inside a wooden horse) to defeat Troy.

Trojanize: The modern term for computer hacking or viruses, echoing the Trojan Horse ploy of classical legend.

Trust: A fake opposition group set up by the Soviet Cheka in the 1920s for counterintelligence and to lure Russian exiles back to their homeland.

Twenty Committee: The British double cross (XX) operation that successfully subverted Nazi espionage in Britain and spread disinformation back to Germany.

U-2 plane: American spy plane used for overÀights of the Soviet Union from the 1950s; Gary Powers was shot down in one and captured in 1960.

Underground Railroad: In the 1850s and 1860s, secret escape routes set up by abolitionists to assist slaves Àeeing the American South.

V-1 and V-2: Nazi secret weapons used toward the end of World War II; these were terrifying but came too late to change the war’s outcome.

VENONA: American decrypts of Soviet communications of the 1940s, which only became public in the 1990s, changing our understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States.

Watergate: A 1970s political scandal over employees of President Richard Nixon, including former CIA agents, breaking into and bugging Democratic Party headquarters in Washington DC, leading to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

weapons of mass destruction (WMD): A term referring to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons capable of mass casualties.

WikiLeaks: A 2010 scandal concerning the release of over a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables by computer activists.

202 

Wrath of God operation: The name the media gave to the Avner Group’s mission from 1972.

Zimmerman Telegram: German secret message sent in January 1917 to the German ambassador in Washington DC, suggesting Mexico enter the First World War against United States; its revelation by the British prompted American entry into the war.

Zinoviev Letter: A letter published in 1924 in Britain, purporting to be from a Soviet of¿cial encouraging revolution, that shifted British domestic politics.

203 

Biographical Notes

Aitken, James (1752–1777): British criminal who volunteered to help the American cause in 1776 by setting ¿re to the British Àeet in Portsmouth, England; captured and hanged.

Ambler, Eric (1909–1998): British thriller author credited with producing a harder-edged spy thriller, especially the 1939 A Cof¿n for Dimitrios.

Ames, Aldrich (1941– ): CIA of¿cer who spied for money for the Soviets and Russians for nine years, from 1985 until his arrest in 1994; sentenced to life in prison. His actions exposed many covert operations and led to the death of about 10 spies.

André, Major John (1750–1780): British intelligence of¿cer and handler of Benedict Arnold, captured out of uniform as spy in Tarrytown, New York; hanged and buried with honor in Great Britain.

Angleton, James Jesus (1917–1987): Former OSS agent, later the CIA’s expert on counterintelligence, who after being tricked by his friend—the Soviet spy Kim Philby—engaging in a hunt for moles in his own organization that threatened its cohesion, was forced to resign in 1974. His actions earned him the nickname “Gray Ghost.” He called counterintelligence a “wilderness of mirrors.”

Arnold, Benedict (1741–1801): American Revolutionary War hero whose bitterness led him to offer to betray West Point to the British; when his betrayal was detected, he Àed to the British and ended his life in exile.

Babington, Anthony (1561–1586): English Catholic gentleman at the center of conspiracy to kill Queen Elizabeth I and restore Catholicism to England.

Baden-Powell, Robert (1857–1941): British military attaché and founder of the Boy Scouts movement.

204 

Bancroft, Edward (1744–1821): American scientist who spied on Benjamin Franklin in Paris for the British.

Beria, Lavrenti (1899–1953): Josef Stalin’s fellow Georgian and chief of his secret police, feared and ambushed by his own comrades in the Soviet leadership after Stalin’s death.

bin Laden, Osama (1957–2011): Son of a wealthy Saudi family, organizer of religious warfare in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, organizer of al-Qaeda and its September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Finally tracked down and assassinated in Pakistan in 2011.

Blondel (À. late 12th century A.D.): Legendary medieval troubadour who was supposed to have located the imprisoned King Richard I of England by covert means.

Booth, John Wilkes (1838–1865): Southern agent and assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

Borgia, Lucrezia (1480–1519): Italian noblewoman who was rumored to be a talented poisoner with political motivations.

Boursicot, Bernard (1944– ): French embassy of¿cial in Beijing who fell in love with the Chinese agent Shi Pei Pu and spied for China until he was arrested in 1983.

Bowser, Mary Elizabeth (1839–?): African American servant in the White House of the Confederacy, passing secrets to Union side.

Boyd, Belle (1844–1900): The Siren of the Confederacy, a celebrity spy for the South who later took her story to the stage.

Buchan, John (1875–1940): Turn of the century thriller writer, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916).

Bush, George H. W. (1924– ): Director of the CIA from 1975 to 1977 and 41st president of the United States.

205 

Campion, Edmund (1540–1581): English Jesuit captured on mission to England; tried, executed, and canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.

Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm (1887–1945): Chief of the German Abwehr military intelligence, opposing some aspects of the Nazi regime; the Abwehr was dissolved in 1944, and Canaris was arrested on suspicion of plotting the assassination of Hitler. He was hanged in the last days of the war by the Nazis.

Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo (1725–1798): Famed Venetian lover and spy.

Cavell, Edith (1865–1915): British nurse executed by the German army in occupied Belgium during World War I for helping people escape.

Chambers, Whittaker (1901–1961): Former American Soviet courier for espionage, who broke with his earlier faith and authored Witness (1952); accused Alger Hiss of spying.

Chesney, Sir George Tomkyns (1830–1895): Author of the 1871 invasion thriller The Battle of Dorking, which inspired a spy panic and many imitators.

Child, Julia (1912–2004): Later a noted television chef, she was a member of the OSS and worked on recipes for shark repellent.

Childers, Erskine (1870–1922): Author of what is considered the ¿ rst true spy thriller, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), and later a secret agent and partisan of the Irish cause, for which he was executed.

Church, Benjamin (1734–1778): Early American patriot, activist, and chief medical of¿ cer of the Continental Army, in fact spying for the British. Caught by George Washington but released and allowed to go into exile.

Churchill, Winston (1874–1965): Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1940 to 1945, in its most dif¿cult hour, standing alone against Nazi Germany, who ordered that occupied Europe be “set ablaze” by SOE operations.

206 

Clancy, Tom (1947– ): American best-selling and proli¿c author of technological thrillers, whose career was launched by President Reagan’s praise for his novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851): Author of The Spy (1821), on espionage in the American Revolution.

Cyrus the Great (c. 600 B.C.): Famed Persian ruler and supposed builder of the Persian road system who used spies, or the threat of spies, to keep his own administrators in line.

Darragh, Lydia (1729–1789): Philadelphian who passed to Americans information overheard from British of¿cers quartered in her house.

Daumantas (1921–1951): Pseudonym of Lithuanian resistance ¿ ghter Juozas Lukša, ¿ghting against Soviet occupation after World War II, trained by Western intelligence services, returned to Lithuania in 1950, then betrayed and killed by Soviets the next year.

d’Éon, Chevalier (1728–1810): French spy who dressed as both a man and a woman and whose true sex was a matter of famous dispute; d’Éon was sent on secret missions to Russia and Britain, then ended life in British exile while threatening to blackmail the king of France.

Donovan, William “Wild Bill” (1883–1959): Decorated American hero of the First World War; director of the wartime OSS.

Dreyfus, Captain Alfred (1859–1935): French Jewish of¿ cer falsely convicted in 1894 of spying for Germany; only acquitted years later after the protracted “Dreyfus Affair.”

Dulles, Allen (1893–1969): American diplomat, lawyer, and long-serving and very independent director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961; let go after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Dzerzhinshky, Feliks (1877–1926): Known as “Iron Felix,” this Polish aristocrat led the Cheka secret police of the Bolsheviks.

207 

Fawkes, Guy (1570–1606): English mercenary with a leading role in the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

Fleming, Ian (1908–1964): Naval intelligence of¿cer in World War II, author of the James Bond spy novels and also author of literature for children, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Follett, Ken (1949– ): British writer, author of numerous thrillers set during World War II.

Fouché, Joseph (1758?–1820): Napoleon’s chief of police, alternately needed and distrusted.

Friedman, William (1891–1969): Talented American code breaker who had worked under Herbert Yardley breaking German codes during World War I; he was put in charge of the new Signal Intelligence Service, established in 1930, and led the team that broke the Japanese codes during World War II, in Operation MAGIC.

Fritz, Samuel (1654–1728): Bohemian-born German Jesuit who explored the Amazon and was mistaken for a spy.

Fuchs, Klaus (1911–1988): German-born British scientist, committed communist, and the most important asset of the Soviets in the Western atomic bomb project. Worked in the United States and passed secrets to the Soviets. Identi¿ed in the VENONA transcripts, confessed, and on release from prison moved to East Germany to work at a nuclear research institute there.

Furst, Alan (1941– ): American author of spy novels set in and just before World War II (especially recommended are Dark Star and The Polish Of¿cer).

Fusoris, Jean (c. 1365–1436): French canon of Notre Dame Cathedral tried for spying for the English during the Hundred Years’War.

208 

Gapon, Georgi (1870–1906): Russian Orthodox priest and organizer of the demonstration in 1905 that led to the Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg; afterwards killed by revolutionaries.

Garcia, Juan Pujol “Garbo” (1912–1988): A young Spaniard who became the centerpiece of the British Twenty Committee to doublecross German intelligence. He had volunteered to spy for the British and had 27 fake agents in his stable. He played a key role in misleading the Nazis on the Allied landing in Normandy.

Gehlen, Reinhard (1902–1979): Chief of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front, who at World War II’s end surrendered to the Americans with his information on the Soviets, set up a new intelligence organization (including many former comrades from Nazi Germany), which in 1956 became the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst—the Federal Intelligence Service.

Gifford, Gilbert (1560–1590): Walsingham’s double agent inside the Babington Plot.

Gold, Harry (1910–1972): American chemist who served as courier between the atomic spies and their Soviet handlers; identi¿ed by Klaus Fuchs on his arrest, he was arrested and jailed until 1965.

Greene, Graham (1904–1991): British author and former MI6 intelligence of¿cer whose works also explore morality in spying, especially the novel Our Man in Havana (1958).

Greenglass, David (1922– ): Brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg who served as an agent inside the Los Alamos laboratory; arrested in 1950 and released in 1960.

Greenhow, Rose (1813–1864): Washington hostess and socialite who passed military secrets to the Confederacy; she was arrested, released, and sent by the South to Europe on a public relations tour, but she perished on her return to America.

209 

Guillaume, Gunther (1927–1995): East German spy who became an advisor to Chancellor Willy Brandt in West Germany and whose exposure led to Brandt’s resignation.

Hale, Nathan (1755–1776): American spy captured and hanged by the British in New York, whose last words were reported to be “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Hall, Reginald “Blinker” (1870–1943): British military attaché and later director of British code breaking in Room 40 of the Admiralty during World War I.

Hanssen, Robert (1944– ): An FBI agent who used subtle tradecraft to spy for the Soviets for more than 20 years, beginning in 1979. Through his communications to the Soviets, Hanssen never revealed his identity to his handlers. He was arrested in 2001 after a former Soviet agent pinpointed him. His activities did vast damage and cost two American agents their lives.

Heydrich, Reinhard (1904–1942): Model Nazi, protégé of Heinrich Himmler, in charge of the RSHA, and organizer of the Final Solution. He was assassinated by Czech agents.

Himmler, Heinrich (1900–1945): Failed chicken farmer and master of bureaucracy who built the SS and Gestapo empire within the German empire.

Hiss, Alger (1904–1996): American civil servant accused of spying for the Soviets who always maintained his innocence.

Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945): German dictator, one of the greatest mass murderers in history, who inaugurated genocide by claiming a world conspiracy against Germany.

Hoover, J. Edgar (1895–1972): Director of the American FBI for decades, cultivator of his own legend, and controversial ¿ gure.

210 

Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547–1584): Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, brutal and paranoid ruler who established the oprichnina regime of early modern secret police.

Kautilya (4th century B.C.): Ancient Indian statesman and author of the Arthashastra text on statecraft, which included advice on espionage.

Keegan, John (1934– ): Most notable military historian; British author of the thoughtful and skeptical work Intelligence in War (2003).

Kent, Tyler G. (1911–1988): American embassy code clerk convicted by the British of spying during World War II.

Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936): Writer from British India, imperialist, Nobel Prize winner for literature, and creator of the boy spy hero in his novel Kim (1901).

Knowlton, Thomas (1740–1776): American founder of the Knowlton Rangers, the precursors to later American Special Forces.

Lawrence, Thomas Edward (1888–1935): Mythologized as “Lawrence of Arabia,” a British archaeologist who helped inspire Arab revolt in World War I and suffered from his legendary status after the war.

le Carré, John (1931– ): Pen name of British author David Cornwell, whose former career was in MI5 and MI6; author of novels featuring disillusioned spies, such as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974).

Lengsfeld, Vera (1952– ): Member of the opposition in East Germany, later a politician in united Germany after 1990, who discovered from her Stasi ¿ le that her husband had been spying on her.

 

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich revolutionaries in Russia, through Germany.

 

(1870–1924):     Leader     of     the     Bolshevik whence he returned in 1917 by a train

 

211 

Litvinenko, Alexander (1962–2006): Former KGB and FSB agent, turned ¿erce critic of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government; assassinated by radioactive poison in London in 2006.

Lockhart, Robert Bruce (1887–1970): British diplomat sent to Bolshevik Russia and colleague of Sidney Reilly. Arrested by the Bolsheviks for a conspiracy to assassinate Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Maclean, Donald (1913–1983): Member of the Cambridge spy ring who in 1944 was ¿rst secretary at the British embassy in Washington and became the main coordinator of American-British cooperation on atomic weapons. Warned of his upcoming arrest by Kim Philby, Maclean and Guy Burgess Àed to the Soviet Union in 1951.

Markov, Georgi (1929–1978): Bulgarian dissident working for the BBC in London, where he was assassinated with a poisoned umbrella by the KGB in 1978.

Mata Hari (1876–1917): Dutch-born exotic dancer and courtesan-turned-spy in World War I who was executed by the French.

Maugham, W. Somerset (1874–1965): British author credited with being the ¿rst in a series of authors of spy ¿ction who themselves had worked in intelligence, he had been a British spy in World War I and wrote Ashenden, or The British Agent (1928) based on his experiences.

McCarthy, Joseph (1908–1957): Republican senator from Wisconsin who became famous and controversial for his charges of communist in¿ ltration of American government and the military, until the wildness of his charges discredited him and led to his censure in 1954.

Metternich, Klemens von (1773–1859): Prince and chief minister of the Habsburg Austrian Empire; chief counterrevolutionary of the Concert of Europe after Napoleon’s defeat.

212 

Mielke, Erich (1907–2000): Long-serving Stasi chief (1957–1989). He was convicted, decades previously, of murdering two policemen but was never held to account for the killings at the East German border or the activities of the Stasi.

Morozov, Pavel (1918–1932): Mythologized ¿gure in Stalin’s Soviet Union, praised by the state for denouncing his own family.

Mossadegh, Mohammad (1882–1967): Charismatic prime minister of Iran, deposed by the CIA and British intelligence services in a coup when he threatened to nationalize the Iranian oil industry.

Orczy, Baroness Emmuska (1865–1947): Author of the inÀ uential adventure novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905).

Oswald, Lee Harvey (1939–1963): A drifter and former defector to the Soviet Union who assassinated U.S. president John F. Kennedy and then was himself killed while in custody.

Palmer, Alexander Mitchell (1872–1936): U.S. attorney general who led the Palmer Raids against radicals in 1919 and 1920, promoted J. Edgar Hoover.

Pelton, Ronald (1942– ): Former National Security Agency of¿ cer who retired in 1979 but then for ¿nancial gain approached the Soviet Embassy with an offer to pass along information. He was convicted in 1986 and is now serving three life sentences.

Penkovsky, Oleg (1919–1963): Double agent for the Americans and British inside Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, providing crucial information during the Cuban Missile Crisis and then soon after caught and executed.

Philby, Harold “Kim” (1912–1988): Considered the most important spy of the cold war, Philby joined the Cambridge spy ring and went on to a high career in British intelligence while spying for the Soviets until his escape to the Soviet Union in 1963. There he authored My Silent War (1968) and was honored on a postage stamp.

213 

Pinkerton, Allan (1819–1884): founder of the private detective agency bearing his name, he served as Lincoln’s Union spymaster in the Civil War but was sidelined due to problems with his tradecraft.

Pollard, Jonathan Jay (1954– ): American naval intelligence analyst who spied for the Israelis, convicted and given a life sentence in 1987.

Polo, Marco (1254–1324): Famed Venetian explorer and merchant who gathered intelligence from the Near East to China.

Powers, Gary (1929–1977): Pilot of the U-2 spy plane downed over the Soviet Union in 1960 that caused an international crisis.

Putin, Vladimir (1952– ): Former KGB and FSB of¿cer who became president of Russia after Boris Yeltsin.

Reilly, Sidney (1874–1925): British master spy, born in Russia, who may have been one of the models for James Bond. He was the nemesis of the Bolsheviks, who ¿nally lured him back to Russia and, probably, to his death.

Richebourg (1768–1858): Shortest spy in recorded history, able to disguise himself as a child to evade French revolutionaries.

Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal and duc de (1585–1642): French cardinal and chief minister to King Louis XIII, practitioner of power politics and constructor of the French secret services.

Richer, Marthe (1889–1982): Female airplane pilot who spied on German of¿cials in neutral Spain during World War I.

Rosenberg, Ethel (1915–1953): Wife of Julius Rosenberg, sister of David Greenglass, member of the Communist Party, convicted of spying in 1951, and executed in 1953—a sentence that is still controversial.

214 

Rosenberg, Julius (1918–1953): Electrical engineer, member of the Communist Party, and key member of the Soviet atomic spy ring in the United States, identi¿ed by the VENONA transcripts, convicted of spying in 1951, and executed in 1953.

Schragmüller, Dr. Elisabeth (1887–1940): German professor-spy who aimed to teach spy methods methodically; she was the inspiration for the legend of the Beautiful Blond of Antwerp.

Schulmeister, Karl (1770–1853): One of Napoleon’s master spies, who in¿ltrated the Austrian military.

Sebold, William (1899–1970?): German American who was pressured into becoming a spy for Germany but then became a double agent, helping the FBI round up Nazi spies in the United States from 1939 to 1941.

Shi Pei Pu (1938–2009): Chinese agent who seduced Bernard Boursicot, claiming to be a woman and to have had his son, later arrested in France in 1983.

Smalls, Robert (1839–1915): African American pilot who sailed a ship out of Charleston harbor to the Union forces in 1862.

Stalin, Josef (1879–1953): Soviet dictator, successor to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and one of the greatest mass murderers in history. Unleashed spy panics in the Soviet Union to justify purges and terror.

Stieber, Wilhelm (1818–1882): Bismarck’s German spymaster, who set a new standard for methodical collection of intelligence and a new low in personal use of his post.

Stimson, Henry (1867–1950): American secretary of state who in 1929 famously declared that gentlemen do not read each other’s mail, condemning espionage.

215 

Strong, Anna Smith (1740–1812): American patriot who signaled messages to the Culper Ring of spies on her washing line in code.

Sun Tzu (À . 5th century B.C.): Chinese philosopher and author of The Art of War.

Tallmadge, Benjamin (1754–1835): First director of American intelligence during the War for Independence, serving under George Washington.

Tanaka Giichi (1864–1929): Japanese military attaché in Russia and able observer of the Trans-Siberian railway.

Throckmorton, Francis (1554–1584): English Catholic gentleman at the center of a plot, exposed in 1583, for a French invasion of England that would depose Elizabeth I and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne.

Tubman, Harriet (1822–1913): African American organizer of the Underground Railroad and agent during the Civil War.

Turing, Alan (1912–1954): Brilliant Cambridge mathematician and visionary who proposed the computer and led the efforts at decoding German Enigma machine messages at Bletchley Park during World War II; he committed suicide after the war.

van Lew, Elizabeth (1818–1900): Northern sympathizer living in Richmond, Virginia, who directed intelligence to the Union while posing as a madwoman.

von Braun, Werner (1912–1977): German rocket engineer instrumental in the development of the V-2 rocket at the end of the war, controversial for the use of slave labor, and recruited for scienti¿c work in the United States and eventually with NASA.

von Rintelen, Franz (1877–1949): German agent sent to the U.S. to sabotage American aid for the Allies in World War I; arrested and jailed.

216 

Walker, John Anthony (1937– ): A retired U.S. Navy radioman who recruited his brother, son, and best friend into a spy ring for the Soviets and continued his activities even after retiring from the navy in 1976. He was arrested by the FBI at a dead-drop after his wife turned him in.

Walsingham, Sir Francis (c. 1532–1590): Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster and principal secretary of the Privy Council.

Washington, George (1732–1799): Father of his country and American spymaster (also Agent 711), organizing intelligence gathering and disinformation in the War for Independence.

Webster, Timothy (1822–1862): Pinkerton’s ablest agent in the South, who was captured and executed by the Confederacy due to mistakes in tradecraft and betrayal.

Wickham, William (1761–1840): British agent who established a spy network from Switzerland to spy on France during the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rule.

Wilson, Charles (1933–2010): Democratic Congressman from Texas who championed CIA aid to the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan; subject of the ¿ lm Charlie Wilson’s War.

Wolf, Markus (1923–2006): For 34 years, director of the Stasi’s foreign spying through the HVA. He was long known as “the man without a face” as Western intelligence agencies did not have a photograph of him for many years.

Yagoda, Genrikh (1891–1938): One of a succession of Stalin’s secret police chiefs, used as an instrument of terror and then executed, like his successor Nikolai Yezhov.

Yardley, Herbert (1889–1958): American code breaker who ran the Black Chamber of the State Department in the interwar period, breaking Japanese codes and provoking Henry Stimson.

217 

Yezhov, Nikolai (1895–1940): One of a succession of Stalin’s secret police chiefs, used as an instrument of terror and then executed; his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda, would follow an identical trajectory and fate.

Yoshikawa, Takeo (1914–1993): Japanese naval intelligence of¿cer sent to the Honolulu consulate under diplomatic cover, observed Pearl Harbor in the lead-up to the attack in 1941.

Yushchenko, Viktor (1954– ): Opposition leader of the independent Ukraine who in 2004 was poisoned by dioxin; although dis¿gured and ill, he went on to win the presidential elections.

218 

Bibliography

Allen, Thomas B. Declassi¿ed: 50 Top-Secret Documents That Changed History. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2008. Rich collection of reproduced secret documents and commentary on them.

———. George Washington, Spymaster: How America Outspied the British and Won the Revolutionary War. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2004. Brief and elegant revelation of a new side of Washington.

Ambler, Eric. A Cof¿n for Dimitrios. New York: Vintage, 2001. InÀ uential thriller formula of an ordinary man entangled in intrigue, giving spy ¿ ction a hard edge.

Buchan, John. The Thirty-Nine Steps. New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 2010. Best seller in its day, embodying the formula of the man-on-the-run thriller.

Budiansky, Stephen. Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage. New York: Penguin, 2005. Evocative portrait of “Mr. Secretary” Walsingham.

Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1979. A compelling and classic memoir of ideological conversion in the 20th century.

Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. New York: Penguin, 1995. Often considered the ¿rst spy thriller, vastly worth reading today.

Clancy, Tom. The Hunt for Red October. New York: Berkley, 2010. First published in 1984, this high-tech thriller launched Clancy’s career as a best-selling author.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground. New York: Penguin, 1997. One of the ¿rst American novels, a narrative of spying in the American Revolutionary War.

219 

Crowdy, Terry. The Enemy Within: A History of Spies, Spymasters and Espionage. New York: Osprey, 2006. The very best current world history of espionage.

Fishel, Edwin C. The Secret War for the Union. Boston: Houghton MifÀ in, 1996. Underlines the importance of key intelligence in the outcome of the U.S. Civil War.

Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. New York: Penguin, 2002. The thriller that introduced James Bond to the world, especially worth reading for the contrast with the ¿lm version of the character.

Furst, Alan. Dark Star. New York: Random House, 1991. A Soviet news correspondent takes on tasks for the Soviet secret police in the lead up to World War II while struggling with issues of identity and loyalty.

———. The Polish Of¿cer. New York: Random House, 2001. In this novel set during World War II, as Poland falls, Captain de Milja smuggles gold reserves and travels across Europe to combat the Nazis.

Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Scholarly study of the medieval business of relic theft.

Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana. New York: Penguin, 2007. Classic Greene, a darkly humorous moral meditation on espionage.

Haswell, Jock. Spies and Spymasters: A Concise History of Intelligence. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Wonderfully illustrated and narrated older survey of espionage history.

Hawkins, Timothy. “Napoleonic Subversion and Imperial Defense in Central America, 1808–1812.” In Napoleon’s Atlantic: The Impact of Napoleonic Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by Christophe Belaubre, Jordana Dym, and John Savage. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010, 97–117. Fascinating documentation of the transatlantic reach of spy panics in the age of Napoleon.

220 

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myths and Reality of Espionage. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Written by a former inspector general of the CIA who asks whether espionage in fact or ¿ction is stranger.

Huang, J. H. Sun Tzu: The New Translation. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993. Useful rendering of the classic work by Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

Keegan, John. Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003. Written by the leading military historian of our day, this work subjects espionage to an acid test of skepticism, as Keegan concludes that intelligence is always subordinate to other factors on the battle¿ eld.

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Vastly inÀ uential Romantic rendering of British imperialism and the “Great Game,” with the boy spy Kim as the hero.

le Carré, John. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. New York: Coward-McCann, 1964. Classic spy novel tracking the life and death of Alec Leamas during the cold war.

———. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. New York: Pocket Books, 2002. Thriller about the search for a double agent, inspired by Kim Philby’s long record of betrayal.

Lockhart, Robin Bruce. Reilly: Ace of Spies. New York: Penguin, 1984. Written by the son of one of Sidney Reilly’s associates, an adventure narrative of the mysterious spy, said to be a model for James Bond.

Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Sociological study of the challenges of modern surveillance.

Macintyre, Ben. For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Fascinating study of the real-life inspirations for

221 

the ¿ctional world of Ian Fleming, including models for James Bond, the villains he combats, and the high technology of his equipment.

———. Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. Riveting history of Allied deception in World War II, saving great numbers of lives.

Mackaris, Kristie. Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. A historian of science explores the East German Stasi’s love affair with high technology, including “smell science.”

Maugham, W. Somerset. Ashenden, or: the British Agent. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1941. Largely forgotten today, this is a novelistic rendering of Maugham’s experiences as an agent in World War I.

Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. The Scarlet Pimpernel. New York; Signet Classics, 2010. Called the greatest adventure story of all time, this novel depicts the perfect English gentleman as a super spy rescuing French aristocrats during the Reign of Terror.

Parker, Geoffrey. “The Worst-Kept Secret in Europe? The European Intelligence Community and the Spanish Armada of 1588.” In Go Spy the Land: Military Intelligence in History, edited by Keith Neilson and B. J. C. McKercher. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992, 49–72. A cautionary tale in how not to keep secrets by a leading historian of the period.

Paul, Joel Richard. Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Spycraft and diplomacy in the American War for Independence, with the astonishing character of the transvestite Chevalier d’Eon in a starring role.

Philby, Kim. My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy. New York: Modern Library, 2002. A strange book, requiring critical reading, in which the most effective spy of the cold war, who spied for the Soviets while working in British intelligence, seems to reveal some of his motivations.

222 

Polmar, Norman, and Thomas B. Allen, eds. Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage. 2nd ed. New York: Random House Reference, 2004. The very best reference work on the world of espionage.

Proctor, Tammy. Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War. New York: NYU Press, 2003. Examination of gender roles in the mythologizing of women in spy narratives of World War I, especially Mata Hari.

Souyri, Pierre. “Autonomy and War in the Sixteenth-Century Iga Region and the Birth of the Ninja Phenomenon.” In War and State Building in Medieval Japan, edited by John A. Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 110–123. Amidst all the legends propagated about ninjas, this article reveals their far more interesting true antecedents.

Stove, Robert J. The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003. Rich, synthetic account of internal spying and the power wielded by domestic secret police forces worldwide.

Thomas, Gordon. Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. Updated ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 2009. Popular account of the legendary Israeli intelligence services.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Zimmermann Telegram. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Classic account of the most disastrous telegram in history, which provoked American entry into the First World War.

Volkman, Ernest. Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the 20th Century. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995. Well-written vignettes of modern espionage.

Waller, Douglas. Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the O.S.S. and Modern American Espionage. New York: Free Press, 2011. Biography of the larger-than-life ¿gure who established the precursor to the CIA.

223 

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. New York: Anchor Books, 2008. Critical evaluation of the history of American intelligence, its challenges and failings.

Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Detailed summary of Soviet spying in America before and during World War II.

Wright, Jonathan. God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, Power—A History of the Jesuits. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Erudite and entertaining overview of a self-conscious and controversial elite society, the Jesuits, over 500 years.

Internet Resources

United States Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/library/. A large collection of resources relating to intelligence, including reading lists and the publications of the Center for the Study of Intelligence.