The New Spymasters Read Free Page B

the former Soviet Union and the West. The spy game was central to the Cold War: the KGB and its allies on one side, the CIA and its partners on the other. While the military stood poised for action but remained largely motionless, the spy wars were real.
    For those like me who grew up in this time of confrontation, who can forget the spy stories in the news, in literature and in the movies? As children we played spy: we put on false moustaches, tailed our enemies across the playground, learned to write in code and passed messages in invisible ink. The problem was that in the excitement over espionage’s trappings – its intrigue, dangers and gadgets – underlying questions about its success or failure were rarely posed.
    The first part of this book takes us back to the Cold War and the origins of the modern secret service. I want to explain not only the nuts and bolts of spying, but also why the assumptions that many people make about spying, based on our understanding of this period, are often dubious. When operations like Khost are criticized by old-timers, it is worth knowing, for instance, that there never really was a past golden age of espionage.
    History can give us direct and positive lessons for the present. For example, while the fight against terrorism would come to dominate intelligence work, this was not a new concern for secret services. The real story of Britain’s secret espionage fight against the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for example, is only just emerging. And it provides a template for how spying against terrorists can work, even if modern terrorists are different in important ways.
    With the second part of the book we enter the uncharted period after the Cold War, when the spymasters confronted ill-defined or unfamiliar adversaries and had to find new targets for their spies. Initially, there was even some suggestion that spymasters and spies were no longer relevant. Sir Colin McColl, the chief of SIS at the end of the Cold War, recalled being treated by ‘intelligent, knowledgeable people’ like a long-forgotten uncle and asked, ‘Are you still here?’ 10 Years later, following new wars and colossal attacks by terrorists, few doubted the need for intelligence. But the debate continued as to whether, with improvements in technology, human spies were still valuable. In a little-noticed discussion, some argued that spies were useful to spy on governments but useless against modern targets such as radical Islamists and their suicide bombers. Some highly experienced spymasters argued that human intelligence was a ‘dying art’ and would play at best a secondary, if not negligible, role compared to technical methods.
    I had to establish if this was true before I could consider what kind of spies we really need. Could a spy get close to such ruthless, chaotic enemies, and do so without stirring up the proverbial hornet’s nest and thereby making those enemies more dangerous?
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    The road to the failure of human intelligence collection in Khost started with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As the Soviet Union disbanded two years later, debate began about whether the end of superpower rivalry would lead to a ‘peace dividend’, a scaling back of defence and intelligence spending. According to the New York Times in an editorial on 9 March 1990, there was ‘a fabulous fortune to be amassed’ by such budget cuts. Within a decade, it predicted, up to $150 billion a year could be saved. Others argued that intelligence services should be cut back too. Bills were introduced in the US Congress to emasculate and even abolish the CIA. Congressman Dave McCurdy told the House of Representatives in 1992, ‘With the demise of the Soviet Union, that threat has been substantially reduced … the governmental organizations which have been primarily focused on the Soviet Union must … be re-evaluated.