Strategic Intelligence in the Cold War and Beyond

Jefferson Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415782067
• eBook ISBN: 9781317637684
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Strategic Intelligence in the Cold War and Beyond looks at the many events, personalities, and controversies in the field of intelligence and espionage since the end of World War II. A crucial but often neglected topic, strategic intelligence took on added significance during the protracted struggle of the Cold War.

In this accessible volume, Jefferson Adams places these important developments in their historical context, taking a global approach to themes including

• various undertakings from both sides in the Cold War, with emphasis on covert action and deception operations
• controversial episodes involving Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Poland, and Afghanistan as well as numerous lesser known occurrences.
• three Cold War spy profiles which explore the role of human psychology in intelligence work
• the technological dimension
• spies in fiction, film and television
• developments in the intelligence organizations of both sides in the decade following the fall of the Berlin wall

Supplemented by suggestions for further reading, a glossary of key terms, and a timeline of important events, this is an essential read for all those interested in the modern history of espionage.

1  Introduction

Strategic intelligence on a broad front lay at the heart of countless struggles waged during the Cold War. Some have called it the secret war in the Cold War. One historian has fittingly characterized the intelligence networks of this era as its “light infantry” – the only force that could be mobilized given the nuclear stalemate that had developed between the superpowers.¹ Yet, unfortunately, too many accounts dealing with this period persist in ignoring the vital dimension of intelligence, preferring to concentrate almost solely on the political and diplomatic maneuverings of the major adversaries. When the subject of espionage is broached, one often encounters a glaring asymmetry: on the one hand, frequent references to the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – notably in the Third World – but, on the other, few if any regarding Soviet and Eastern bloc intelligence operations. Besides providing a general introduction to the topic, this volume is intended to help correct this imbalance. It also extends the time frame to examine post-Cold War developments in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For most laypersons, matters involving intelligence tend to be reduced to images of covert action – the toppling of an unfriendly foreign government or supplying under-the-table subsidies to ostensibly independent groups or individuals. The field of intelligence, however, is multifaceted and comprised of various distinct components such as research and analysis, counterintelligence, and cryptography. Each has a separate methodology, and each tends to develop its own esprit de corps, if not rivalry with other intelligence branches. A former CIA analyst referred to a “bureaucratic Berlin Wall” that separated his branch from the clandestine service, except at the uppermost levels.² Seen in monetary terms, it is striking that the budget of the National Security Agency (NSA), charged with safeguarding the US government’s communications network, easily eclipses the allotment received by the CIA. Of those funds, covert action receives only a small percentage. Altogether the US intelligence community encompasses 17 agencies and organizations within the executive branch of the government.

Despite countless attempts to formulate an all-embracing theory by scholars and practitioners alike, intelligence work defies a positivist or scientific approach. The analyst is often grappling with ambiguous and fragmentary evidence and must weigh its validity in the context of the prevailing threat level. The same piece of information might be accorded a high degree of relevance if a potential attack were deemed imminent or basically discounted should that not be the case. And as classified reports move through the large secret service bureaucracies, they are subject to constant review and evaluation. Hard inconvertible facts, as a result, rarely exist on their own. In addition, the successful recruitment of an informant usually depends upon a keen intuitive understanding of the individual involved. In fact, real life espionage, full of unexpected twists and turns, can easily trigger some of the most bizarre examples of human behavior. Were some of these incidents submitted in fictional form to a publishing house, they would likely be rejected as simply too implausible. What the American spymaster Allen Dulles once dubbed as “the craft of intelligence” seems as apt a characterization as any that has ever been advanced. He further added that it is “probably the least understood and the most misrepresented of the professions.”³

There is inevitably the crucial question of sources. How, many ask, can one know what really transpired in the shadowy realm of espionage? Reasons for skepticism clearly abound. So often confidential exchanges are purposely conducted orally in order not to leave a domestic paper trail or run the risk of being monitored by an enemy service. An old intelligence axiom holds that “if you want to keep it secret, don’t write it down.” Documents themselves can be difficult to obtain from government archives, particularly given the ever-present tension between historians desiring to reconstruct as complete a picture of the past as possible and state officials wary of releasing materials that could compromise individuals or methods. In the case of the Cold War, the Russian archives present a most formidable obstacle. Neither the KGB nor the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) archives have been made available for general inquiry. According to Moscow’s highly manipulative procedures, only certain batches of documents, often extracted from their historical context, tend to be shown to selected researchers. A special fee might even be imposed, and an appropriate KGB co-author assigned to the project.

Still, the historian need not despair. In the wake of the Watergate affair, Congress expanded the Freedom of Information Act in 1974, which has permitted access to many files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the first time, while an executive order issued in 1982 has given individual researchers and former presidential appointees the possibility of examining classified documents of the CIA. Open sources, too, can provide a unique and often underappreciated window into the world of intelligence. Such was the experience of those academics assigned to the Research and Analysis Division of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Much to the surprise of the military commanders, these specialists managed to ascertain key changes in the enemy’s disposition of resources by closely perusing scholarly works, specialized journals, and foreign newspapers and magazines. In another instance, the historian Richard Pipes, while assigned to the National Security Council in the early 1980s, found that the Intelligence Daily that landed on his desk every morning added little to what he had already read in the world press. From his vantage point, it was difficult not to conclude that classified data rarely outweighs what can be found in the public domain. More recently, a CIA analyst noted that nearly 60 percent of the sources utilized by his technical branch originated in scientific journals, computer databases, newspaper reports, and translated items by the agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service.⁴ Other analysts place the figure closer to 80 percent in their work.

In the meantime, a number of former Soviet intelligence officers fled safely to the West, bringing with them their detailed memories relating to what had transpired at the upper levels of decision-making in Moscow. When Oleg Gordievsky made his escape from Moscow in 1985, he departed with a wealth of information on the KGB’s operations, personnel, and organizational structure. In another extraordinary instance, Vasili Mitrokhin even managed to bring an entire archive with him to Britain in 1992 – ten manuscript volumes of daily notes that he secretly made while covering a 12-year period working in the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch. An invaluable source regarding Soviet espionage in the United States have been the notebooks of Alexander Vassiliev, a Moscow journalist and ex-KGB officer who was given privileged access to archival holdings a year after the demise of the Soviet Union as part of a large-scale book project. Then, too, there is the case of the former German Democratic Republic, whose total collapse at the end of the Cold War created the unprecedented opportunity to examine the surviving voluminous records of its powerful and seemingly ubiquitous state security apparatus.

Sometimes a lengthy time lag may be involved. Not until the early 1970s – more than 25 years following the end of World War II – did the story reach the general public of how Ultra and Bletchley Park overcame enormous odds and defeated the sophisticated German Enigma cipher machine. Or in another classic code-breaking feat, the Venona decryptions of Soviet intelligence traffic during the period 1942–1949 remained highly classified information by the US government until after the end of the Cold War. What therefore follows in these pages reflects the painstaking research of many scholars in the field of intelligence – particularly since 1989 – with the important proviso that more revelations about the Cold War period will doubtlessly see the future light of day.

Notes

1  Vladislav M. Zubov, “Spy vs. Spy: The KGB vs. the CIA, 1960–62,” in Cold War International History Project Bulletin (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars), no. 4, 22.

2  Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 33–34.

3  Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1963), 5.

4  Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 4.

2 The Players

One of the defining moments following the end of World War II was the decision of President Harry S. Truman to sign the National Defense Act on July 26, 1947. This piece of legislation brought the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into official existence, thus ending several years of acrimonious debate. Such an organization had faced opposition from various quarters of the federal government: the State Department, which had sought a lead role in peacetime intelligence; the armed services, which had wanted no civilian interference in their own operations; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose director J. Edgar Hoover saw a major rival and competitor and never moderated his stiff resistance during his own long tenure in office.

To a large extent, the design of the new agency followed the recommendations of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the former head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had grown to over 10,000 worldwide operatives. Above all, he had called for “the establishment for the first time in our nation’s history of a foreign secret intelligence service which reported information as seen through American eyes.” Stressing the importance of its independence from other government departments, Donovan further urged research and analysis to become “an integral and inseparable part of this service.” Because building a modern system – never an easy matter – was more difficult in peacetime than war, Donovan urged immediate action before the OSS completely disappeared to take advantage of “its experience and know how.”¹

Fears had to be allayed that the new organization might be generally construed as an “American Gestapo.” Yet this apprehension gained little traction, in part because the legislation specifically denied the agency any police, subpoena, and law-enforcement powers as well as a domestic security function. In addition, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 remained a vivid memory. Had a centralized agency been in place at that time, some argued, advance warning might well have reached the president in a timely manner, thereby averting the catastrophe that occurred. Now, with ominous communist threats taking shape throughout the world, the imperative for an organization of this sort seemed all the greater.

Somewhat ironically, for the next 15 years, the CIA facilities were scattered around the nation’s capital, some located in various office buildings, others in flimsy prefabricated huts on the Mall which acquired the nickname “cockroach alley.” It was not until 1961 that the persistent efforts of Allen Dulles found realization and a centralized site with a seven-story concrete-and-glass headquarters building was established in nearby suburban Langley, Virginia (the next significant physical expansion, doubling the space, did not occur until 1988). The agency’s initial personnel – a mixture of lawyers, journalists, and academics – were drawn primarily from Ivy League institutions and the East Coast establishment. Many, too, arrived with a background of wartime experience in the OSS. From their perspective, working at the CIA had both an idealistic and exotic appeal. Not only did they feel that their efforts, unencumbered by the ingrained bureaucratic habits of older government departments, would make a difference, but the new agency offered the possibility of working in glamorous faraway locales. The semisecret mystique of simply “working for the US government,” when asked by an outsider, should not be discounted either. As might be expected, colleagues came to form closely knit relationships in this environment, socially as well as professionally, and to regard the population at large with a certain elitist disdain.

The director of the CIA held the additional title of director of central intelligence (DCI), although this designation has a far more imposing ring than was actually the case. From the outset, lacking jurisdiction in budgetary and personnel matters apart from the CIA, the DCI has been ill equipped to assert his authority over the entire foreign intelligence community within the federal government. It is also worth noting that covert action did not explicitly form part of the CIA’s original mandate. The main purpose of the agency was, rather, one of collection and coordination – to bring together and evaluate, for example, information from all areas related to national security, and to perform specific tasks as requested by the newly created National Security Council.

Soon enough, however, voices could be heard urging the establishment of this additional capability. One of its most forceful advocates was James Forrestal, the secretary of defense in the Truman administration, who argued that Soviet covert operations abroad should not go unchallenged. Another was George Kennan, recently installed as the head of the powerful Policy Planning Staff, who believed that “indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the Free World” should receive clandestine support from the US government. Especially in Europe, that came to mean providing secret assistance to the noncommunist left – ranging from social democratic politicians and sympathetic trade union officials to ex-communist literary intellectuals.

Through several executive directives, an arrangement was cobbled together that resulted in the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) under Frank Wisner, a highly able former Wall Street lawyer and OSS station chief in Romania. Possessing a most unwieldy structure, the OPC received its orders from the State Department and the Department of Defense but maintained funding and personnel links to the CIA. Its head was appointed by the secretary of state, not the DCI. Still, this configuration proved no barrier to its rapid expansion, for, by 1952, the OPC could count 47 foreign stations and a staff of 2,812, not including an equally large supplemental force of contracted individuals. Those OPC officers stationed abroad – usually as second-in-command in their respective embassies – had considerable freedom of action and often the ability to initiate their own operations. Should anything go awry, a provision was officially formulated for “plausible deniability,” thereby shielding the president from accusations of direct responsibility. In his subsequent memoirs, Truman wrote of his strong distaste for “peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” but this recollection runs directly counter to the historical record. US covert action had its birth during his tenure in the White House, its authorization bearing his signature.

The emergence of the CIA was not just a domestic matter. The recent wartime alliance had sealed the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain, and it seemed almost axiomatic that this transatlantic tie would extend into the realm of postwar intelligence. The British, of course, could boast of a much longer tradition – one dating from the reign of Elizabeth I – and many considered their expertise in such matters to be unsurpassed by any other country. That was certainly the opinion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had expressed high praise for their earlier performance during World War I.

An immediate priority of the British was to conclude a CIA–SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) treaty – similar to the agreements that had previously defined the wartime relationship between the OSS and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and SIS. Indeed, that cooperation had flourished to a remarkable degree, even though the Americans were more often in the position of eager learners. It could be readily detected in the close rapport that developed between Donovan and William Stephenson, the SIS liaison to the American intelligence services, who provided entrée to the top levels of the British hierarchy, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, King George VI, and members of the war cabinet. Daily contact was also maintained between Donovan and Colonel Stewart Menzies, the chief of SIS. Upon arriving in Britain in June 1942 as commander of the US military forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower received a personal briefing from Churchill on Ultra, his country’s successful reading of German radio traffic. It came to have immense strategic importance to Eisenhower, saving the lives of thousands of British and American soldiers and accelerating the moment of German surrender, as he acknowledged in a fulsome tribute sent to Menzies at war’s end. Reflecting this close relationship, the two countries proceeded to conclude a unique agreement – not publically known until 2010 – to refrain from spying on one another and not to recruit each other’s nationals without permission (with the addition of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, this group became known as the “Five Eyes” club or alliance).

Yet, in one important respect, the CIA that began to take shape after 1947 must have caused a measure of consternation in London. One of the few lessons that the British had taken to heart from the Americans was Donovan’s insistence that secret intelligence and secret operations function more effectively when placed under a single authority, not in rival entities. Accordingly, the British had merged SOE with SIS after 1945 in a manner resembling the OSS. By contrast, US covert action was only semi-attached to the CIA in the OPC – a situation that stubbornly persisted for a number of years before formal integration occurred.

Another key reversal in the partnership between the two countries involved signals intelligence (SIGINT) – the generic term for deriving information from the interception of electromagnetic waves. As Ultra had so clearly demonstrated, the British wartime cryptanalysts had held the upper hand, but with the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952 – and the abundant resources and support that it received throughout the Eisenhower administration – it was the Americans who were to take the undisputed SIGINT lead in the Western world. If for no other reason, the severe economic doldrums experienced by postwar Britain prevented the country from making the costly hightech investments that modern communications increasingly demanded. The huge technical apparatus at its disposal all...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Players
• 3 The Early Years
• 4 The Struggle Deepens
• 5 Three Profiles of Cold War Spies
• 6 Espionage in Fiction and Film
• 7 The Climax of the Cold War
• 8 The Aftermath
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index