The New Spymasters Read Free

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. 5 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’. 6 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. 7
    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