If only the Central Intelligence Agency had sneaked an
informer into the group that planned last Tuesday's attacks on New
York and Washington.
As the CIA and other security agencies struggle to explain one of
the worst intelligence failures in their history, many critics are
blaming the disaster on official faith in machines over men.
But the experience of other countries that have used more
traditional cloak-and-dagger double agents to penetrate their
enemies' ranks suggests that the results are not always as good as
they might be. And these governments have often preferred to ignore
ethical questions about the sort of people they deal with in the
dirty world of espionage.
In the wake of this week's savage assaults, a chorus of voices
has accused US intelligence agencies of paying too little attention
to 'human intelligence' - information coming from people on the
ground.
"When electronic capabilities came onstream, the Americans went
the technological route," says Michael Clarke, head of the Centre
for Defence Studies at Kings College in London. "Human intelligence
was messier and more dangerous, and most Western agencies got out of
it" to some extent.
A handful of countries, however, stuck with their agents in the
field.
The Russians, for example, who built their spy network in the
1920s, when technology was scarce, scored successes with double
agents such as Kim Philby, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hanssen.
The Israelis have always relied heavily on informers among
Palestinian ranks, and the British learned almost all they knew
about the IRA from members they had 'turned.'
"The most important secrets can only be found in the human mind,"
says Mikhail Lyubimov, a 25-year veteran of the Soviet KGB, who is
now a popular author of espionage novels.
In this difficult and dangerous work, the Israelis have an
advantage; they have been able to use Jews born in Arab countries
who can blend into Arab society, and they have been able to
blackmail or manipulate Palestinians in the occupied territories
into informing on their neighbors.
The British Army has been able to draw on Catholics in Northern
Ireland who oppose the IRA, and has also been known to use
blackmail. The Soviets could exploit ideological sympathies in
closet communists, or simply pay a lot of money.
But the task of penetrating the sort of closely knit Islamic
terrorist cell typical of the Middle East - the sort that is widely
believed responsible for Tuesday's atrocity - is much, much
harder.
"When you have a family or clan-based terrorist cell, and where
the requirement for getting in is to kill some people, penetrating
those groups is no walk in the park," former CIA Director Robert
Gates said earlier this week.
Nor can you set up such double agents overnight. "It takes years
to get human intelligence up and running," says Professor Clarke.
"You need 'sleepers' who come to recognize patterns of behavior, and
those sources are critical. When you need human intelligence,
nothing else will do."
The US National Commission on Terrorism found in its report last
year that the CIA had paid too little attention to such sources.
"Complex bureaucratic procedures now in place send an unmistakable
message to CIA officers in the field that recruiting clandestine
sources of terrorist information is encouraged in theory but
discouraged in practice," it said.
Among those procedures are 1995 guidelines "restricting
recruitment of unsavory sources," such as those who had committed
human rights abuses, or killed Americans.
CIA officials insist that these guidelines merely "make us
cognizant of the sort of people we are dealing with," in the words
of spokeswoman Anya Guilsher. "We don't shy away from dealing with
unsavory characters." In 1998, she added, the CIA launched a
seven-year program to increase the recruitment of operations
officers by 30 percent.
But recruiting undercover agents who can get close to Islamic
terrorist organizations is hard, she points out. "These are not the
sort of people you meet at cocktail parties. James Bond would not
make it in this era."
The sort of people you do need have emerged in recent years in
Northern Ireland, telling their stories of undercover work for the
British army and the Northern Irish police, the Royal Ulster
Constabulary.
Brian Nelson, for example, has recalled how he worked as a
British army agent when he was intelligence chief for the Protestant
paramilitary Ulster Defence Association. In that role, he provided a
UDA hit squad with a photograph of prominent Catholic attorney
Patrick Finucane, to make sure they killed the intended target.
The British Army ran a covert unit, working under the biblical
motto "Fishers of Men," dedicated to recruiting and managing
informers. One former soldier, who infiltrated the IRA, says their
work was invaluable.
"We were the eyes and ears of the Army," he says. "We provided
everything from low-level intelligence, like gossip... to high-grade
intelligence. We provided de tails of bombings and shootings."
Catholic Willie Carlin, an ex-informer, says he and fellow spies
may have been involved themselves in such violence, but that overall
"they saved more lives than they cost. Because of these men, bombs
went wrong and didn't go off. Or the Army was tipped off long enough
in advance to make sure the area was evacuated."
The use of such agents, however, undermined the rule of law, say
some. "This distorted the criminal justice system, because you had
people involved in criminal acts who were not pursued, in order to
encourage them to inform on paramilitary activities," says Maggie
Beirne of the Belfast-based human rights watchdog, the Committee for
the Administration of Justice.
"When those who make the law break the law, then there is no
law," reads one piece of Catholic republican graffiti in
Belfast.
In practice, say intelligence experts, agents are rarely
squeamish about the sort of people they recruit if they want to
track terrorists. "Ethical questions do not exercise the security
agencies. They are pragmatic people who want to get the job done,
and there is not a great deal of moral agonizing, because they know
the intelligence world is extremely dirty,"says Professor
Clarke.
But that, he adds, makes it all the more important that the
agencies are accountable in some way to the public - for example,
through parliament.
In Britain, the parliamentary committee responsible for the
intelligence agencies works in private, and generally reports only
to the prime minister. And incidents of British-paid agents being
involved themselves in murder "have not been properly dealt with,"he
adds. "There is a blind spot, when it comes to Northern
Ireland."
There are questions, too, about the real value of 'human
intelligence,' even when it is accurate, since it is not always
properly appreciated.
"In some ways, the whole discussion about human versus technical
means of intelligence gathering is pointless," argues Vitaly
Shlykov, a former senior official in the Soviet military
intelligence agency GRU. "Both tend to produce fairly reliable raw
results; things go wrong in the way information is analyzed and
used."
Josef Stalin, for example, ignored repeated reports from a Soviet
spy that Germany was about to attack the USSR in 1941; he found the
reports incredible given the non-aggression pact he had signed with
Hitler. And in 1973, recalls Yossi Alpher, an Israeli security
analyst, Israeli spies warned that Egyptian and Syrian planes were
about to attack Israel. But "the intelligence analysts...had no
corroboration from technical means, and they put so much stock in
technical means that they tended to pooh-pooh human sources."
The worst intelligence failure ever - of both the American and
Soviet agencies - was not foreseeing the collapse of the Soviet
Union, says Mr. Shlykov. They "failed to see the fatal weaknesses of
the USSR, though both had more than enough information to do so.
This really shows the limitations of intelligence," he says.
"Even the most effective secret services cannot guarantee the
security of the state."
from The Sports
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