When Intelligence Services are useful

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: The cold war is dead but won't lie down. In the same week that Egon Krenz's appeal against his conviction for being responsible for the murders of would-be escapers over the Wall has failed, we have one of those huge expulsions of spies under diplomatic cover that provided periodic drama during the years of east-west confrontation. The Mir space station, it seems, is not the only chunk of the recent past falling about our ears.

The American action against the alleged Russian agents, like a whole range of other spy scandals and revelations in many countries, raises the issue of just what the role and value of espionage is in our supposedly new era.

It also touches on the important question of whether, under Bush and Putin, some regression to the hostile relations of earlier years could be on the cards. The two are connected, for espionage can be indulged and even encouraged between countries that are bent on good relations with each other.

On the other hand, if they are heading toward a more difficult passage in their joint affairs, it can be used to trigger quarrels and stage humiliations that will make things worse. This is not to say that spying and foreign policy are the same thing, but only that they intersect in ways that can be illuminating.

The expulsion of the Russians is part of a longer story which probably began late last year with the defection of two senior Russian agents, one at the United Nations in New York, and one in Ottawa. The best guess is that these two provided information that led to the arrest last month of Robert Hanssen, the long time FBI mole whose traitorous career rivaled that of Aldrich Ames at the CIA.

Further information from them, as well as the interrogation of Hanssen, may have helped identify some of the 50 now ordered to leave America. Or, more likely, the Americans already knew all or most of these men, but felt they needed a grand expulsion to offset the Hanssen affair.

The Hanssen arrest, in any case, may well have been the espionage equivalent of checkmate -- a final move compromising everybody on both sides, and therefore making it necessary that the pieces be cleared from the board in preparation for a new game. Still, that could have been done both more gradually and more discreetly.

There can be no disputing the value to governments of good intelligence in the broadest sense. The debate over secret intelligence, however, revolves around the question of whether it is an expensive way of providing and protecting vital information or an expensive way of providing and protecting mediocre information.

There is the additional liability that intelligence agencies can skew their product to suit the prejudices of politicians or the needs of defense establishments. As far as human intelligence or "humint" is concerned, the modern picture is often not encouraging.

The former CIA agent Edward Shirley has written of American spies virtually confined to embassies, rarely walking the streets of the cities to which they are posted, and often without the language or other skills they need to interpret what little they do pick up. He has accused colleagues of pinching their "intelligence" from newspapers and pretending it was obtained covertly.

But even where both human and other kinds of intelligence, from electronic eavesdropping and surveillance, are both good, there is the problem of interpretation. The history of secret intelligence notoriously shows many cases of good information being ignored or misinterpreted.

Counter-intelligence carries special political dangers, since it can become at once an instrument of domestic control and a permanent irritant in foreign relations. The "foreign enemy" and the "internal enemy" are concepts which feed and grow on each other.

In Russia there are some signs of a worrying reversion to the bad habits of Soviet days, with a number of cases under way in which Russians have been accused of espionage for passing along information which was not secret in any military sense.

Sometimes the information has been controversial or embarrassing to the Russian state, like revelations about radioactive pollution.

Sometimes it has simply been well-organized factual material, all on the public record, supplied to western businesses. Either way, a government run by a former KGB man and which now includes many ex-intelligence people among its officials seems to be signaling that it expects to control information and will punish those who break its rules.

Why are Russia and America, and perhaps other western countries as well, still pointing so many of their intelligence big guns at each other? Russia, the Americans say, normally has 450 agents in the United States.

The Russians recently claimed to have identified 350 Russians working as spies for foreign states, presumably most of them NATO countries.

It is admittedly important to NATO countries, for example, whether Russia is or is not cheating on arms control treaties by conducting nuclear tests in Novaya Zemla, and the state of the national missile defense project in America is unavoidably of interest to Russians.

But there are other critical matters around. Intelligence chiefs might reply that, in addition to keeping an eye on each other, they have reorganized to focus on new dangers such as nuclear proliferation, other weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, environmental threats, and organized crime. There is no shortage of grand mission statements on these lines.

The trouble here is that it is not evident that secret intelligence should be in a lead role across this whole spectrum, nor that it has so far delivered much of value. There is a consensus that governments need to be better at forecasting risk, identifying conflicts before they erupt, and trying to alleviate the conditions that give rise to conflict.

But, if this ambition is to be fulfilled, it will be by a concerted effort by many organizations, inside and outside government.

One of the ways intelligence services can best help is by sharing information, not something they find easy to do even when their governments are close allies. Policemen involved in the hunt for Balkan war criminals have described agonizing sessions in which western intelligence agencies placed scraps of information on the table like poker players guarding their hands.

And it is in the Balkans that the sharpest commentary on intelligence performance can be found today. While Russian and American agents were maneuvering in Washington and Moscow, a threat was developing in Macedonia that burst on the US and European governments, NATO, the EU, the Kosovo Force, and the Kosovo international administration like a thunderclap two weeks ago.

If the leaders concerned had had any warning from their diplomats and their intelligence people they gave no sign of it. It only goes to underline that, to be useful, intelligence must first of all be intelligent, which is to say it should be looking for the right things.

-- Guardian News Service