Following excerpts adapted from The New Spymasters: Inside the Modern World of Espionage from the Cold War to Global Terror by Stephen Grey
‘When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object’ – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
On 31 December 2009, a Jordanian doctor opened the door of a pick-up truck and prepared to greet officers of the Central Intelligence Agency for the first time. There were eight people waiting. They had even made a birthday cake for him. The CIA and the White House had high hopes for this day. The doctor was a spy, a man who had driven to this US base in Khost, Afghanistan, from the wild tribal zone of neighbouring Pakistan. They hoped he could lead them to the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden.
Wrong. The doctor was working for the other side, for al-Qaeda. He reached into a pocket, pressed a detonator switch and blew himself up. Seven people from the CIA were killed: the base chief, Jessica Matthews, four other officers and two security guards. The eighth victim was a Jordanian intelligence officer; the ninth an Afghan driver. Matthews had made the birthday cake. She had been searching for bin Laden for years. Perhaps that made her desperate to believe in the doctor. But she had misread the signs. She had been one of the world’s leading experts on al-Qaeda. One commentator suggested her death was the intelligence ‘equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier in a naval war’.
The doctor had been a double agent, maybe a triple agent. Here was the first real hope of getting a spy next to bin Laden, a genuine lead. He had seemed to be the perfect New Spy: a mole inside America’s biggest adversary since Soviet Russia. And then it all was blown away.
His name was Humam al-Balawi. He was a Jordanian national but by descent he was a Palestinian, the people who were in conflict with America’s close ally, Israel. Having worked at refugee camps, he had seen the victims of what he saw as Israel’s aggression and he had every reason to be furious with a United States that financed Israel. And he had proved his hatred, writing a blog on the Internet that advocated war on the Americans. He was an obvious man to attack the CIA. He was also a perfect man to spy for the CIA.
It was a brilliant cover story. If al-Balawi really was working for the CIA, then he would have been one of their greatest ever spies. He was such an unlikely spy – and therefore so right for the job.
It was not to be. If only they had checked. They had never met him before. Yet when he came to the base, he wasn’t even searched. Jessica had not wanted to offend him. She had wanted to accord him ‘respect’. But as a last testament that al-Balawi recorded on video made clear, he had been playing the American and Jordanian spy services for weeks.
On a marble wall back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they carved seven more stars. Seven more of their comrades killed in the field of action. Since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, twenty-five stars had been added.
Welcome to the deadly world of spycraft.
* * *
By any measure, the al-Balawi mission in Khost was a tragic, wretched and careless venture. But the operation was also an audacious act: a dance into the unknown and a proof-of-life signal that, despite the careless blunders of those days, the spy game was not over.
This book is an inquiry into the modern secret agent and his employer, the spymaster. Our subject is what the novelist and sometime intelligence officer Graham Greene called ‘the human factor’, the business in which a real walking, talking person like al-Balawi sets about gathering ‘intelligence’, by which I mean some secret or protected information.
In the trade, the use of a human being, a spy, to gather intelligence is known as human intelligence (HUMINT) collection. There is obviously a dark side to our subject. Spying is the art of betrayal. Almost inevitably, to gather secrets a spy must betray his country, or at least betray the trust placed in him by those who have given him access to the secrets.
While it showed that the spy game continued, did the debacle of Khost show that the spymasters were now incompetent? The CIA’s potential secret agent had been ‘grotesquely mishandled’, said a military historian, Edward Luttwack, among other critics. Or was it that using human spies against al-Qaeda leaders was just too difficult?
In these pages, I address the state of human intelligence and do so by seeking to answer three questions. First, how has spying changed in the twenty-first century? Second, when can spying still be effective? And third – the essential question posed by Khost – what kind of spying is needed and will help deal with the specific threats of today and the future?
* * *
Given the incredible things that can be divined in the twenty-first century by stealing a copy of someone’s electronic mail or listening to their phone, for instance, the idea of taking the word of an old-fashioned human source may seem rather questionable. Spying has been called the world’s second-oldest profession, but it can also seem to be an anachronism.
As the Khost mission showed, spying carries tremendous risks. Spies must betray the secrets of the country or group they target. But betrayal can be addictive. Spies can, in turn, also betray those who recruit them. Since spies must survive by telling lies, it can be hard to know when they are telling the truth.
The discovery of a spy operation can trigger diplomatic rows, sow discord and, at worst, be a pretext for war. By contrast, the use of spy satellites or the bugging of conversations – technical methods of getting intelligence – can seem a far safer way to gather information. A former CIA operative described being told by an analyst colleague, ‘Please give us a great agent. Satellite photos don’t tell us where the missile is aimed or who can fire it.’ But Admiral Stansfield Turner, a CIA director under President Jimmy Carter, declared that technical spying ‘all but eclipses traditional, human methods of collecting intelligence’. After the 1990 Gulf War he again summed up what became a dominant, if often unspoken, view that the US should not depend on old-style spies:
The litany is familiar: We should throw more and more human agents against such problems, because the only way to get inside the minds of adversaries and discern intentions is with human agents. As a general proposition that simply is not true … Not only do agents have biases and human fallibilities, there is always a risk that an agent is, after all, working for someone else.
But despite the risks that Turner described, hardly a month goes by without a new spy being unmasked. At the time of writing, the United States was being accused by Germany of recruiting a spy inside its defence department and another in its secret services. In response, the CIA’s Berlin chief of station was expelled, with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, declaring that the Americans had ‘fundamentally different conceptions of the work of the intelligence services’. And yet for governments whose secret services or law enforcement agencies employ spies like these, the potential benefit of having a ‘spy in the enemy camp’ is frequently too seductive, even if the ‘enemy’ is actually a close ally.
Spies, then, are a persistent feature of modern states. But do they make much difference, in particular against the biggest threats that nations face today?
Good specific human intelligence is still critical. It might arguably have permitted action to thwart the attacks of 11 September 2001, in which 2,753 people died, or the tribal massacres in Rwanda, East Africa, in which 800,000 people died in just 100 days in 1994. But bad intelligence suggesting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction also helped lead to an invasion of that country which cost the lives of up to 500,000 people.
* * *
Espionage is an old and elemental human art, susceptible to endless permutations, which is why it is always hard to generalize about spying, though the motivations for betrayal – ideology, religion, money, blackmail etc. – tend to remain unchanged. As I once heard a former chief of British intelligence say, ‘There have been no new motives since the Mesopotamians.’
This book is not a comprehensive survey. It reflects the experiences of those I have met while working primarily in the western hemisphere and dealing mainly with the security services of the United States and Britain, with some additional contacts in Germany and France and across the Middle East and South Asia. It omits huge developments in eastern Asia, South America and Africa.
Just as the Cold War finished, I began a career as a journalist and writer. In the years that followed, working mainly abroad, and particularly reporting on national security, I have been privileged to meet spies, and the spymasters who recruit and run them, everywhere from cigar rooms in Washington, tea rooms in London, beer gardens in Germany and coffee shops in Cairo and Beirut, to military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and walled compounds in Pakistan. Some of them worked for secret services and some for other agencies in the military and law enforcement that also practise espionage.
In this sense, I have grown up with a new generation of spies, watching as they redefined their enemies and raison d’ĂȘtre, and changed their character too. I was fortunate that this occurred at a time of greater openness, when someone such as myself – with only modest connections – was able to find a window into this world.
While sharing the experiences and insights of the spies and spymasters I have met, I have also tried to maintain the critical distance that is lacking from most official publications or books written by retired spies, who, even if they do not say so, must submit their accounts for approval by the secret services.
In addition, I have included experiences of the spied-upon: the violent militants or radical activists who come up with new strategies on a daily basis to escape attention. At a conference in Oxford, a former chief (known as ‘C’) of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service introduced me in a wary tone to the panel as ‘someone who has actually met al-Qaeda’.
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Book Details: The old world of spying-dead-letter boxes, microfilm cameras, an enemy reporting to the Moscow Center, and a hint of sexual blackmail-is history. The spymaster's technique has changed and the enemy has, too. He or she now frequently comes from a culture far removed from Western understanding and is part of a less well-organized group. The new enemy is constantly evolving and prepared to kill the innocent. In the face of this new threat, the spymasters of the world shunned human intelligence as the primary way to glean clandestine information and replaced it with an obsession that focuses on the technical methods of spying ranging from the use of high-definition satellite photography to the global interception of communications. However, this obsession with technology has failed, most spectacularly, with the devastation of the 9/11 attacks. In this searing modern history of espionage, Stephen Grey takes us from the CIA's Cold War legends, to the agents who betrayed the IRA, through to the spooks inside Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Techniques and technologies have evolved, but the old motivations for betrayal-patriotism, greed, revenge, compromise-endure. Based on years of research and interviews with hundreds of secret sources, Stephen Grey's The New Spymasters is an up-to-date exposé that shows how spycraft's human factor is once again being used to combat the world's deadliest enemies.
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