The Anatomy of a Spy

A History of Espionage and Betrayal

Michael Smith

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780750992572
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750993586
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this compelling investigation, author Michael Smith explores the critical moment in a spy's life: that split-second decision to embrace a double life; to cheat and hide and hurt; to risk disgrace – even death – without any guarantee of being rewarded or even recognised. Each chapter centres on a number of different spies, following the path they took that led, finally, to the point of no return. Were they propelled by personal convictions? Blackmailed and left without a choice? Too desperate for money to think about the consequences? Through in-depth insider knowledge, Michael Smith also uncovers new and unknown cases, including a spy inside ISIS, President Trump's links with Russia and Edward Snowden's role as a whistle-blower, to offer compelling psychological portraits of these men and women, homing unerringly on the fault-lines and shady corners of their characters, their weaknesses and their strengths, the lies they tell other people, and the lies they always end up telling themselves.

Chapter 1

WHY SPIES SPY

Why did she betray him?

That most masculine of questions has been a dominant theme for storytellers ever since the ancient biblical tale of Samson and Delilah – someone whose name has become so associated with betrayal that it is even now frequently used to describe a woman who has been unfaithful to her husband or lover. The adulteress terrified male-dominated society. The cuckold was a laughing stock. Stories set around the activities of an unfaithful wife evoked an irresistible mix of sex and horror for the male reader, while creating a disquieting sense of female empowerment. This fascination with female sexual betrayal has been a dominant theme of such literary classics as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

But while Delilah has come to epitomise female sexual infidelity, her betrayal of Samson had nothing whatsoever to do with adultery. Her actions were those of a spy, an enemy agent inside the unsuspecting hero’s camp. She exploited her sexual power over Samson to destroy him at the behest of Israel’s enemy, the Philistines, repeatedly using the post-coital slumber induced by their love-making to test ways of rendering him helpless.

Samson was so hopelessly in love with her, or more likely so possessed by lust, that he failed to realise what was happening and eventually admitted that if his hair were shaved off, he would lose his strength and become ‘just like any other man’. Delilah duly made love to him one more time, and when he fell asleep, she had his hair cut off before handing him over to the Philistines in what is still seen as one of the greatest betrayals in history.

So why did she betray him?

The Book of Judges says that every one of the Philistine leaders promised to pay her 1,100 pieces of silver. This would have been a substantial sum and a considerable financial inducement to betrayal. Money is often a factor in agent motivation, but it is rarely the only one. Here was a man, and a powerful one – not just a legendary strongman in the tradition of Heracles or Goliath, but the Jewish leader, who according to the Bible ‘judged’ Israel for twenty years. He had fallen in love with Delilah. He could have transformed her life.

Yet her loyalty to him was not so deep as to prevent her betraying him. The Bible tells us very little about their relationship or Delilah herself, but it says enough to provide some clues as to other possible motives for the betrayal.

It might simply be that her loyalty was to the Philistines and not to Israel. She lived in the Valley of Sorek, west of Jerusalem, which formed the boundary between the coastal strip controlled by the Philistines and the lands of Israel. Samson is known to have had a penchant for Philistine women but, while the Bible does not state Delilah’s ethnic origins, if she were a Philistine, the writer of the very moralistic tale of Samson’s downfall would surely have said so. Nevertheless, people living in areas separating warring communities frequently suffer at the hands of one side or the other. Revenge is one of the most powerful motives for any agent. Had Delilah or her family suffered ill by the Israelites? Any examination of her motives would need to investigate the possibility that she was already a supporter of the Philistines, perhaps under their control from the start of the relationship and had been instructed by them to seduce Samson.

Even if their relationship was a genuine love affair, there is a strong suggestion that she was either trying to gain control over him or testing him. Did this powerful man really love her or was he just using her? She asked him three times how he could lose his strength and each time he fed her a different line. She bound him with green tree stems, new ropes and even plaited locks of his hair. All of these failed. Could he really be in love with her if he would not tell her the truth?

‘How canst thou say, I love thee, when thine heart is not with me?’ she complained. ‘And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, that his soul was vexed unto death, that he told her all his heart.’

Money, tribal loyalty, revenge, control or doubt over his sincerity. There are any number of possible reasons for Delilah’s betrayal of Samson, of which those silver pieces are only the most obvious. The Philistines’ money gave her a powerful motive but it is unlikely to have been her sole reason. The one thing that is clear is that the reason she succeeded was her sexual power over Samson.

If Delilah was one of the first spies, how does her modern fictional counterpart, James Bond, compare? The intelligence services repeatedly claim that the work of the real spies is nothing like that portrayed in the films. James Bond’s escapades for the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, have blurred the lines between fact and fiction. SIS chiefs insist that most intelligence officers sit behind desks, never using a gun and certainly not living a life of glamour, seducing foreign spies and drinking cocktails (whether shaken or stirred). While this is to a large extent true, at one level it is misleading. SIS intelligence officers who need weapons training are taught how to use small-arms by a former special forces warrant officer based at their Fort Monckton training base in Hampshire and, given that they have to run agents in very difficult situations, in dangerous areas such as Libya, Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, this is scarcely surprising.

One former senior SIS officer said:

MI6 officers certainly do not routinely carry weapons, but there is a difference between for instance an officer working under diplomatic cover, who would not be armed, and one employed on a particular operation which may or may not involve an element of risk. Just because you were taking part in an operation you wouldn’t necessarily say: ‘Oh, I must go to the safe and get out a gatt [gun].’ But where there is some likelihood of weapons being needed, given the proper authorisation, they are available.

Whatever his bosses might say, James Bond still has recourse to a gun and, when operating on the front line, he (or she) retains a licence to kill. All of the world’s leading foreign intelligence services employ special operations teams who carry out difficult operations such as protecting intelligence officers, making contact with people whose reliability has not been tested, exfiltrating agents, or removing captured material and equipment from enemy territory.

Nevertheless, even in a war zone, the intelligence officer is only rarely carrying out the spying. That is the job of the agent. There is a key difference between officers and agents. Unlike officers, agents are not on the staff of the intelligence service; they are recruited by an individual officer for a specific role. It might be because they have direct access to the intelligence that is being sought, such as a traitor inside the target country or organisation, or because for some reason they have access to a region where the intelligence officer cannot operate, such as a businessman selling his wares in a country such as North Korea, which it is difficult for Westerners to visit. They might have a specific skill that is needed to acquire the intelligence, such as the local knowledge and linguistic ability to impersonate an insider. It is these agents, and only rarely the intelligence officers themselves, who are the real spies.

So why are they prepared to put their lives and their loved ones at risk in order to collect intelligence, often for a country to which they have no natural allegiance? How do the intelligence services induce ordinary men and women to spy for them? How do they ensure that the agents they recruit do what they want and produce the intelligence required? How can they be confident the agent will not betray them? What makes the perfect spy? Why do spies spy?

There is no simple answer to these questions. There are common denominators that occur frequently, but every case is different, just as every human being is different. Many people are prepared to spy for money. It is the simplest of motives, but even with money there has to be another reason in the background that led the agent to decide it was worthwhile taking that money.

It is imperative for the intelligence officer running an operation or handling a specific agent to understand why he or she is betraying their country or their colleagues, to know the triggers that they can use to control the agent, but also to understand those that might lead to a loss of control, blowing the operation. How far can the agent be pushed? Someone who has already betrayed one side is likely to react badly if he or she is asked to do something that conflicts with their original motivation for betrayal. Those motivations can also change over time, creating addition problems. Getting it wrong risks seeing an operation fall apart, often with catastrophic results.

‘The motivation of a continuing agent is, or should be, the subject of constant study on the part of his case officer,’ one former CIA officer said. ‘Unless a case officer knows what it is that drives his agent, he cannot know to what lengths the man will go, freely or under pressure, what risks he is willing to take, at what point he will break, tell another intelligence service what he is doing, or simply stop producing.’

Knowing what motivates the agent offers far greater control, and so long as the officer handling the agent has grown close enough to build up the necessary relationship of trust that has to exist between two people who can often hold the other’s fate, even their life, in their hands, the motivation can even be adjusted in order to improve the degree of control.

‘An agent’s motivation can be changed, either by circumstances or through the efforts of an interested and patient case officer,’ the former CIA officer said. ‘Some of the less desirable motives – money, hatred, love of adventure, fear – can be redirected and tempered by a careful programme of indoctrination designed to bring out whatever finer purposes the agent has.’

Most intelligence agencies have teams of intelligence officers and psychologists looking at this issue. The CIA has a Behavioural Activities Branch specifically tasked to look at agent motivation and provide psychological assessments on request, although even obtaining the data needed for such studies from the agents risks pushing them too far. The FBI uses an acronym for agent motives. MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise or ego, but this is far too simplistic. Agents do things for the same reasons any human being does things, anything.

It used to be said, not least by the KGB, that British traitors, such as the Cambridge Five, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, spied for ideological reasons, while American traitors spied for money. This has a certain truth to it but is overstated. Philby, for example, began by spying for ideological reasons, but it very quickly developed into an egotistical adventure. Burgess began as an ideological traitor but was soon much more concerned with being needed by the Russians and was even hurt when they decided to put all five of the Cambridge Spy Ring on hold, believing they were too good to be true. Ultimately, Burgess needed someone, the KGB in this case, to need him, and to make him believe that he was someone who mattered.

‘Motives are often mixed or become mixed even if they aren’t to start with,’ one former SIS officer said. ‘Motives for spying are as varied as motives for not spying and sometimes genuinely change over time. That’s partly what makes it so fascinating. Agents will often give different accounts of their motives depending on when they’re asked, just as we all do in other areas of life, for example: why did you marry X, not marry Y, become a journalist, move to Scotland?’

So, why do spies spy?

Chapter 2

SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

Agent motivation – why spies spy – is a complex subject. As in the case of Delilah, what seems at first sight to be the reason for betrayal is often not the sole one, or even the defining one. A short list of what appear to be the most common motivations: money, sex, revenge, love, hatred, patriotism, ideology, ego and fear, only scrapes the surface. The answer to the question why do spies spy is only rarely simple and straightforward. However, as with Samson and Delilah, sex can be an extremely powerful inducement, particularly when employed by a woman.

During the American Civil War, between 1861 and 1865, a number of female spies from the South seduced senior Union officers and politicians into indiscretions that helped the Confederate cause. Most of these men were unwitting traitors to the North’s cause – what would now be known as ‘unconscious’ or ‘unwitting’ agents – although some undoubtedly realised what was going on and just did not care. Their lust for the women overwhelmed any sense of loyalty.

Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a society hostess in Washington DC, entertained prominent admirers at her fashionable home close to the White House and from these guests she extracted vital intelligence that she passed on to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, credited her early intelligence reports as being the key factor in the Confederate Army’s victory in the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, the first major clash in the war.

‘Wild Rose’ ran a network of conscious and unconscious agents in the US capital, and although some of those were motivated by a belief in the southern cause, a substantial number were simply beguiled by her seductive personality. The Confederate Naval Secretary Stephen Mallory said, with no little amount of admiration, that Greenhow ‘hunted man with resistless zeal and unfailing instinct’, enjoying, and using, romantic trysts with Union officers and politicians alike. Henry D. Wilson, a Republican senator, who as chairman of Abraham Lincoln’s Committee on Military Affairs was fully aware of the Union forces’ plans, wrote passionate, even obsessive, love letters to Greenhow. ‘You know that I do love you,’ Wilson said in one signed simply ‘H’. ‘I am sick physically and mentally and know nothing that would soothe me so much as an hour with you. And tonight, at whatever cost, I will see you.’ The Union Army officer Colonel Erasmus D. Keyes, another who spent many hours alone with ‘Wild Rose’, described her as ‘one of the most persuasive women that was ever known in Washington’.

Another female spy, Ginnie Moon, whose equally attractive sister, Lottie, also spied for the Confederates, was at one point engaged to sixteen different Union soldiers, all of whom sent her regular love letters in which they inadvertently included details of what they and their units were doing, producing useful intelligence that she passed on to her Confederate contact, Lieutenant-General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Undoubtedly, the most brazen of the leading Civil War female spies was Belle Boyd, who was described by one jealous love rival as ‘the fastest girl in Virginia, or anywhere else for that matter’. When the Boyds’ home town of Martinsburg, at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley, was taken by Union forces in mid May 1862, her mother sent Belle, then just 17, up the valley to the town of Fort Royal, where her aunt owned the Fishback Hotel. Belle and her maid arrived there around the same time as the advancing Federal forces to find that the Union general James Shields had taken over her aunt’s hotel as his headquarters. Undeterred, Belle seduced Shields, spending four hours ‘closeted’ alone with him, and then moved on to his aide-de-camp Captain Daniel Kelly who was so entranced by her beauty that he bombarded her with flowers and love poems. She recorded in her memoirs that she was indebted to him for ‘some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and last, but not least, for a great deal of very important information’. The most significant thing Kelly told her was the date and time of the next meeting of the general’s war council which was to be held in the hotel. Boyd drilled a small hole through the floor of the room above and watched the meeting taking place, making a transcript of all that was discussed before sneaking out and crossing the lines to pass it on to the Confederate forces.

While the male sex drive might seem to make men more susceptible to the use of seduction, women have proven just as vulnerable. The very human need for physical and emotional sexual intimacy with another person has been almost as much of a boon for espionage as it has for prostitution. It is no accident that the two are deemed to be the world’s two oldest professions.

Britain’s modern espionage apparatus dates from 1909 when a Secret Service Bureau was set up in response to the increasing threat of war with Germany. The Bureau was instructed ‘to deal both with espionage in this country and with our own foreign agents abroad’.

The first head of its foreign section, the organisation that would become the Secret Intelligence Service, was a 50-year-old Royal Navy commander who had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 Why Spies Spy
• 2 Sexual Relationships
• 3 Money
• 4 Patriotism
• 5 Adventurers, Fantasists and Psychopaths
• 6 Revenge
• 7 The Right Thing to Do
• 8 Unconscious Agents
• Sources
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• The Author