Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence

Rodney Carlisle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780765680686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317471769
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From references to secret agents in The Art of War in 400 B.C.E. to the Bush administration's ongoing War on Terrorism, espionage has always been an essential part of state security policies. This illustrated encyclopedia traces the fascinating stories of spies, intelligence, and counterintelligence throughout history, both internationally and in the United States. Written specifically for students and general readers by scholars, former intelligence officers, and other experts, Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence provides a unique background perspective for viewing history and current events. In easy-to-understand, non-technical language, it explains how espionage works as a function of national policy; traces the roots of national security; profiles key intelligence leaders, agents, and double-agents; discusses intelligence concepts and techniques; and profiles the security organizations and intelligence history and policies of nations around the world. As a special feature, the set also includes forewords by former CIA Director Robert M. Gates and former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin that help clarify the evolution of intelligence and counterintelligence and their crucial roles in world affairs today.

A

Abel, Rudolf

ALONG WITH Andrew Kayotis, Emil R. Goldfus, Martin Collins, Mark, and many other names, Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was an alias used by Soviet intelligence agent William August “Willi” Fischer (1903–1971).

Abel was born in northern England to Russian exiles of German descent. The family returned to Russia after the Russian Revolution, where 17-year-old Abel adjusted amazingly well. He married and used his multilingualism (he was fluent in English, German, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish) to gain employment in 1927 with the Obedinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (OGPU), a predecessor to the KGB intelligence service. For the next two decades, he lived a very turbulent life, establishing radio-communication networks and spy cells throughout Western Europe, becoming an expert in microphotography, and surviving Stalinist purges and World War II before being chosen for service in America in 1948.

Abel entered the United States from Canada on November 16, 1948 using papers stolen from a Lithuanian-American émigré, and settled in Brooklyn, New York City, using the guise of an eccentric photographer and the papers of an infant who died in 1902. Abel’s ambitious mission was to establish a web that would bring together Moscow’s disparate and autonomous “illegal agents” from Argentina to Alaska without sacrificing their secrecy. Over the next several years, he worked with numerous spies (including Lona and Morris Cohen), recruited nuclear physicist Theodore Hall as an agent, and established a radio-communications infrastructure so effective that parts are still in use today.

Abel was recalled to Moscow for debriefing and investigation in 1955 following Hall’s re-defection and false allegations of embezzlement from agent Reino Hayhanen (who knew his superior only by the alias Mark). Abel assuaged Moscow’s doubts of his loyalty while casting suspicion on Hayhanen and was returned to New York City.

When Hayhanen defected, Abel immediately went into hiding for two months in Florida. He returned cautiously to retrieve papers and equipment from his apartment, believing he could dodge surveillance agents, but was discovered and arrested on June 21, 1957. His treasure trove of espionage tools (including micro-storage technology and hollow cufflinks) was confiscated and after heavy interrogation, he finally identified himself as Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. (The real Rudolf Abel was a friend of Fischer’s who had recently died in Moscow.)

Abel was sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment and $3,000 in fines for spying. (Though he had seen many fellow KGB agents executed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Abel formally complained that the United States had violated his constitutional rights.) In 1962, Abel was released by presidential order and exchanged with great ceremony on an East German bridge for Frederic L. Pryor (an American student held in East Berlin) and captured spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers. He returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow.

JONATHAN DARBY
GEORGIA COLLEGE & STATE UNIVERSITY

SEE ALSO: Cohen, Lona and Morris; Hall, Theodore; Hayhanen, Reino; KGB.

Bibliography.

Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 1999);

Louise Bernikow, Abel (Trident Press, 1970);

James B. Donovan, Strangers on a Bridge (Atheneum, 1964).

Adams, John

SECOND PRESIDENT of the United States from 1797 to 1801, John Adams (1735–1826) brought to the office some previous experience in elementary intelligence tradecraft (basic use of codes and ciphers, direction of personal agents, and techniques for evading capture or observation) as a former overseas agent of the Continental Congress, as U.S. minister plenipotentiary to both France and England, and U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands.

Adams as president, however, encountered obstacles gathering useful intelligence to help the U.S. navigate between two much more powerful, potential enemy nations, Great Britain and France. Like other early presidents in an era long before formal establishment of military and civilian intelligence-gathering offices, Adams had at his disposal the Contingent Fund for Foreign Intercourse, also known as the Secret Service Fund. Authorized in 1790 by Congress, the fund could be used to “pay persons to serve the United States in foreign parts” and did not require disclosure of all expenditures to Congress.

Personal agents with little or no intelligence training, but often possessing great ideological zeal or a desire for money or revenge, could also be employed within the United States to engage in counterintelligence duties. Adams’s fellow New Englander and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering hired William Eaton, a dissatisfied former army officer, to investigate and successfully expose Dr. Nicholas Romayne, a prominent New York physician recruited by the British to spy on American preparations for military defense along the border with the huge Louisiana territory (then under Spanish control but coveted by both France and England as colonial prospects).

Pickering turned over the evidence against ROmayne to Congress; Romayne left the country, and the Senate expelled Senator William Blount of Tennessee, who had conspired with the British to mount an armed attack on Spanish Louisiana and Florida. The Spanish minister to the United States, Don Carlos Martinez de Yrujo, had supplied Pickering with information against Blount and the British ambassador, but the latter remained in place, while Romayne and Blount suffered the consequences of their actions.

Adams had no suspicion that General James Wilkinson, commanding general of the U.S. Army, was also a well-paid agent of the Spanish government based in Kentucky. Meanwhile, U.S. relations deteriorated and finally fell apart with France, whose seizure and pursuit of American merchant vessels led to the undeclared naval “Quasi-War,” as well as the first U.S. federal laws against foreign espionage, the Alien Acts of 1798, that permitted deportation of foreigners deemed “dangerous” by the president.

Adams never invoked this right, and the accompanying Sedition Act was so broadly written that it could not be used effectively to prosecute spies. Adams’s legacy in the intelligence field is thus a mixed one; although he may have intended that passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts would prevent espionage by foreign powers against America, the laws and their dramatic enforcement against Jeffersonian editors primarily succeeded in stirring up political opposition to Adams. That ended up costing him a second term in the national election of 1800, when he was defeated by Thomas Jefferson.

MICHAEL REIS
HISTORY ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED

SEE ALSO: Jefferson, Thomas; American Revolution.

Bibliography.

Samuel Edwards, Barbary General: The Life of William H. Eaton (Prentice Hall, 1968);

David Cullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001);

G.J.A. O’Toole, Honorable Treachery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991);

Edward F. Sayle, “The Historical Underpinnings of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (v.1/1, Spring 1986).

Adams, John Quincy

SIXTH PRESIDENT of the United States (1825– 1829) and the son of second president John Adams, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), like his father, brought extensive diplomatic experience to the White House and was sensitive to the need for secret intelligence-gathering as a tool of diplomacy. In an intrigue-filled atmosphere in Paris in 1800, Adams had negotiated the secret convention that ended the unofficial, naval “Quasi-War” between the U.S. and French navies.

Later, as President James Monroe’s secretary of state, he had supported U.S. General Andrew Jackson’s occupation of Florida (and Jackson’s execution of British agents), as well as Jackson’s contention that he acted as a presidential agent, and had negotiated a treaty for purchase of what is now the state of Florida. As secretary of state and later as president, however, Adams resorted most often to secret intelligence-gathering when he confronted the first Monroe Doctrine challenge of keeping the British and other European powers from snapping up, or economically dominating the former Spanish colonies in South and Central America and the Caribbean, then emerging as newly independent nations.

Many of Adams’s agents were sponsored or paid out of the Contingent Fund for Foreign Intercourse, or Secret Service Fund, established by Congress in 1790 to permit the president to employ confidential agents “offthe books” when necessary. These agents included Alexander Macrae, sent to Europe to secretly learn what he could about French schemes to recover their New World colonies; Joel Poinsett, sent to Mexico to report on intentions of the new republic there in advance of American recognition; and Condy Raguet, the U.S. consul at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who was also instructed to secretly collect trade intelligence. Neither the State Department with its tiny staff and underpaid, often incompetent consuls, nor the post-War of 1812 U.S. Navy, could do much more than forward basic intelligence (on a country’s political leanings or economic relations, for instance) through official channels.

John Quincy Adams used secret executive agents to conduct covert missions on behalf of the United States.

The so-called President’s Men or secret executive agents, were the only means available to conduct secret or covert missions. The fact-finding commission sent by Monroe and Adams to Latin America in 1818 included several distinguished members but also the Baltimore propagandist Theodoric Bland, who supported Chilean independence, but not without an element of personal greed (Bland’s son-in law made a loan to the Chileans that Bland intended to collect). Although many nations did emerge from the former Spanish possessions, Cuba did not and its proximity to the United States and continuing Spanish colonial status concerned Adams enough to prompt him to authorize secret intelligence-gathering missions. In 1825, Adams and his Secretary of State Henry Clay attempted to hire a Louisiana judge, Thomas Robertson, as a confidential agent to go to Cuba to assess the need for intervention, but Robertson declined. Two years later, however, British designs on Cuba were so well known that Adams and Clay sent Illinois politician Daniel P. Cook to Cuba as a secret agent; Cook completed his mission, returned to Illinois, but died before he could file a report (although Abraham Lincoln’s future political rival Ninian Edwards did send Adams as much of Cook’s papers as he could find). Enciphered letters to the president and secretary of state from U.S. Minister to Madrid Alexander Everett also warned of British intentions, although Everett himself was sympathetic to a British takeover of Cuba.

Research has also established that as secretary of state, Adams sent at least two agents to the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) out of a desire to see if a commercial treaty could be negotiated between the Ottoman ruler and the United States. A U.S. lawyer went under cover to Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, but the lawyer was compromised when the British ambassador blew his cover. Adams tried again in 1823 with the larger-than-life George B. English, who had previously converted to Islam and served as an officer in the artillery branch of the Ottoman Army. English covertly secured an advance copy of the proposed treaty and traveled throughout the Ottoman provinces disguised in Turkish robes.

MICHAEL REIS
HISTORY ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED

SEE ALSO: Adams, John; France; Monroe, James; United States.

Bibliography.

Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (Knopf, 1950);

Edward F. Sayle, “The Historical Underpinnings of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (v.1/1, Spring, 1986);

Henry Merritt Wriston, Executive Agents in American Foreign Relations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929).

Adenauer, Konrad

IN APRIL, 1953, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, only eight years after the end of World War II, a U.S. Army band played the German national anthem for a special visitor: Konrad Adenauer (1867–1967), the Chancellor of the West German Federal Republic. This was testimony to how far Adenauer had brought West Germany from the wreckage of the German defeat in May 1945.

Konrad Adenauer reviews documents for the Federal Republic of Germany to become a member of NATO in 1955.

Adenauer served as the first chancellor of West Germany from its foundation in 1949 out of the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. His Christian Democratic Union Party was one of the successes of the CIA in providing West Europeans with a democratic answer to the heavily Soviet-financed effort to communize Europe. Adenauer oversaw the entry of West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955, making his country a full participant in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its East German allied (or conquered) nation. From the beginning of the Federal Republic, Adenauer found his country on the front line of the Cold War conflict, sharing a common border with the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

In order to meet the threat of both East German and Soviet intelligence against the Federal Republic, Adenauer turned for assistance to Reinhard Gehlen. During the war, Gehlen had served as head of the Foreign Armies East section of German military intelligence, that answered to the German Armed Forces High Command, the OKW. As such, Gehlen became the most widely informed officer in the German Army on the Russian enemy.

Adenauer also authorized a less-known intelligence service: the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The Federal Office was, on the surface, tasked with counterespionage, but mainly focused on the protection of West Germany against neo-Nazis who would seek to take the Germans back to the dark days of the Third Reich. Yet, Adenauer was not content with merely establishing West Germany as an important NATO player against the Soviet Union. He envisioned a role for German intelligence more daring than any conceived by Germany in the days of the Third Reich. In 1960, Adenauer staged a historic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Foreword I: Robert M. Gates
• Foreword II: Oleg D. Kalugin
• Timeline of Intelligence
• List of Articles
• List of Contributors
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Xyz
• Resource Guide
• Appendix: 9/11 Commission Report Excerpts