Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad

How to Be a Counterintelligence Officer

William R. Johnson

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781589015814
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Intelligence & Espionage
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A Classic in Counterintelligence—Now Back in Print

Originally published in 1987, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad is a unique primer that teaches the principles, strategy, and tradecraft of counterintelligence (CI). CI is often misunderstood and narrowly equated with security and catching spies, which are only part of the picture. As William R. Johnson explains, CI is the art of actively protecting secrets but also aggressively thwarting, penetrating, and deceiving hostile intelligence organizations to neutralize or even manipulate their operations.

Johnson, a career CIA intelligence officer, lucidly presents the nuts and bolts of the business of counterintelligence and the characteristics that make a good CI officer. Although written during the late Cold War, this book continues to be useful for intelligence professionals, scholars, and students because the basic principles of CI are largely timeless. General readers will enjoy the lively narrative and detailed descriptions of tradecraft that reveal the real world of intelligence and espionage. A new foreword by former CIA officer and noted author William Hood provides a contemporary perspective on this valuable book and its author.

1

WHAT IS COUNTERINTELLIGENCE?

People like to confuse counterintelligence (CI) with security. In practice, the two are related but not identical. Put it this way: Security is an essential part of all intelligence work, including CI.

So we have physical security—the fences around buildings, the badges people wear, the safes and the officers who regularly inspect them after hours to make sure they are locked and nothing is left out of them that should be locked up, the burn bags, the guard posts, the closed-circuit TV monitors, the coded telephone circuits to prevent eavesdropping—and a lot more. They keep out burglars and help prevent accidental or absentminded losses of information.

Then we have personnel security—background investigations of candidates for employment, periodic reinvestigation of employees—and more.

Finally, and especially in the intelligence business, we have operational security. This boils down to keeping your mouth shut, guarding secrets, both yours and your government’s, and not letting anybody get into position to blackmail you. One more thing, the most important: Operational security requires adherence to the Law of Need-to-Know: Only persons who need to know a piece of sensitive information can have access to it. Incidentally, this law promotes efficiency by reducing paper handling.

Operational security is a way of life in all secret activity, whether it be CI, counterespionage (CE), espionage, adultery, or poker. It is to these activities what style is to a writer, an athlete, or a musician, but it is not itself a work, a game, or a performance. Like all security, its purpose is prophylactic: It excludes toxic and infectious organisms.

So much for security. What is different about CI?

Just what the name says: It is aimed against intelligence, against active, hostile intelligence, against enemy spies. And it is itself active, not passive.

CI uses a number of techniques, mostly various kinds of detection, investigation, and research. Ultimately, it uses the various techniques of CE. All its techniques are aimed at frustrating the active efforts of alien conspiratorial organizations to acquire secret or sensitive information belonging to the government that employs you.

Some people—journalists, politicians, novelists, and even some professionals—confuse CE with its parent, CI. The British tend to use “CE” to include “CI”—the opposite of the way this book will use the terms. Some lazy officers in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) simply say “CI/CE,” but that is cheating. For the purposes of this book, CE is the branch of CI that penetrates and manipulates any alien spy apparatus. It is not only active; it is aggressive.

So the special thing about CE is manipulation. That is the final goal of all CI.

To look at it another way, remember that CE is a branch of espionage, and that espionage is theft. Espionage is stealing information and thereby breaking a law—the other person’s law. If that person didn’t have a law against you stealing it, it wouldn’t be espionage. Nothing enfuriates a professional espionage officer more than to be told that her job is gathering information, as if she were a little girl in a pinafore gathering nuts in May, or a journalist. She steals information—carefully, selectively, secretly—using an apparatus of agents who are secretly recruited, trained, tested, monitored, and protected.

CE is also theft of information by use of an apparatus of agents. The difference is that when you steal a military secret from some country’s air force or army, or a political secret from some country’s foreign office, you call it espionage. When you steal it from an intelligence service, it is CE. And, along with the British and the American services, you may call that person you recruit, train, protect, pay, and supervise to steal a secret from a foreign government an “agent.” If you are stealing from the former Soviet KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopastnosti, Committee on State Security), the Swiss national police, or the Palestinian Liberation Organization, you have to call him or her a “penetration” (“mole”). Either way, he or she is a spy spying on a (“conspiratorial”) spy service, and the information he or she steals will be used to manipulate that service.

Later in the book, we’ll be talking about the techniques of CI, the tools of the trade:

• The support apparatus

• Interrogation

• Surveillance, and physical and technical double agents

• Penetrations (moles)

• Defectors

• Liaison

• Collating files

These are all used together for CI, for some special tasks like counterterrorism, and for the most important job that CI is called on to do: strategic deception.

2

WHO GOES INTO COUNTERINTELLIGENCE, AND WHY?

In our time every country—large or small; communist or non-communist; aligned or nonaligned; developed, undeveloped, or developing—must conduct counterintelligence. In some countries CI is a major industry, in others it is a sideline of the local police, but it goes on everywhere because no country is exempt from espionage. In places like Burkina Faso, Paraguay, and Luxembourg, spies ply their trade, not against the local government but against other countries and against each other. Switzerland and Austria are not notorious spy centers because they have important secrets of their own, but because they are convenient places to run espionage operations.

The result of this situation of international espionage is an “International Counterintelligence Corps,” an unofficial fraternity whose members do the same jobs and use the same tools, whatever language they speak and whatever flag they salute when their national anthem is played. There is no official Inter-CI like Interpol, but unofficially there is a comfortable cooperation among CI services. During the Cold War, the anti-Soviet services worked together in ad hoc arrangements. The Soviet Bloc services worked under the direct control of the KGB. And the neutrals picked and chose.

WHAT IS PECULIAR ABOUT CI OFFICERS?

An old hand comes to know that both within his own and in other CI services, professionals have traits in common, and they fall into three groups. The first is the positive intelligence analyst—give her a piece of paper with sentences of information on it, and she will immediately do three things:

1. Check it for accuracy.

2. Evaluate its place in the context of her own knowledge of its subject matter.

3. Try to exploit it for the production of a finished report or study that can be disseminated to decision makers at some level, the higher the better.

The second is the espionage case officer—give the same piece of paper to a case officer who runs agents to collect military or political or economic intelligence. He will also do three things, but they are different things:

1. Examine it to identify its source.

2. Attempt to learn or guess the author’s motive for promulgating it.

3. Grope for a way of using it to influence somebody, usually a prospective agent.

The third is the CI officer. The CI officer’s actions are a combination of those of the two other types of officers:

1. Like the intelligence analyst, the CI officer will try to exploit it by incorporating it into the context of her own knowledge, not for a “dissem” (disseminated finished intelligence report) but for her growing and changing working files (see chapters 16 and 17). The “positive” intelligence—military, political, economic—is not of interest, except insofar as it may be deception or fabrication, and thus may point toward a CI target.

2. Like the espionage case officer, the CI officer will grope for a way to use the report to influence somebody, not to produce further espionage operations but to recruit a double agent or a penetration. If the report appears to be fabricated, he will intensify his investigation of the source, because that source is a point at which the enemy can be engaged. Note: Positive intelligence reports are normally in two parts, one containing the information, the other identifying the source by some sort of code. The part that gives the code name of the source is not disseminated to consumers. In those “conglomerate” services that conduct both espionage and CI, it is one of the jobs of the CI shop to maintain a continuous investigation of agents to detect those who have been mounted against the service (the agents provocateurs) or who have been uncovered and “turned” (doubled back) by an adversary.

3. Unlike either of his or her colleagues, the CI officer will wring the report dry of all information on persons, and incorporate that information into the file system.

Obviously, these distinctions are arbitrary. In practice—especially in conglomerate services like the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst—an officer must shift from one discipline to another and must often wear several hats at once—espionage case officer until lunch, intelligence analyst until dinner, and CI officer until bedtime. In these services individual officers tend to suffer a little from schizophrenia, which they alleviate by adopting one or another discipline as their specialty. The assignment of officers who are “CI oriented” to supervisory positions over units with heavy espionage burdens has been found to improve the quality of espionage production. Conversely, “production-oriented” supervisors often improve the efficiency of CI units they command. In the conglomerate services, all officers must be generalists, that is, a mixture of the three types we have been discussing, with an orientation toward one of the three.

CI TRAITS: DO YOU HAVE THEM?

Newcomers to the CI trade, and those thinking of joining it, may ponder some of the following traits.

Curiosity

It goes without saying that the kind of person to whom a job is only a job—a crank to be turned, a procedure to be followed, a day to be gotten through—will not want a job in the CI business, nor be wanted there. CI officers must have a special kind of curiosity, the kind that focuses on the material at hand and then ranges beyond it to adjacent areas. Even the beginner starting out as a file clerk must be curious about what he or she is filing and about the filing system itself. The venerable principle of operational security that a person should only have knowledge of what he needs to know is not violated by professional curiosity on the part of CI officers. Proper compartmentation, itself not possible without curiosity on the part of those who arrange it, keeps discipline.

Pattern Recognition

Cousin to curiosity is the habit of mind that looks for patterns, analogies, and parallels. The simplest form of pattern is what criminal police call modus operandi—“method of working”—the work habits of a particular criminal. The bank robber who twice wears a ski mask and twice points his weapon at the teller’s head rather than body, then both times backs out of the bank, rather than running, has set a pattern that helps identify him.

In CI work, the patterns are more complex. If the enemy case officer tells your double agent that his appraisals of the crisis in Sri Lanka are highly valued by the center in Moscow, Prague, or Havana and that the service has just promoted him to colonel, you know that your double agent is being developed not as a writer of appraisals but as a support agent. His next requirement may well be to take a little trip to a region denied to the enemy case officer, where he is to empty a dead drop. How do you know this? Because you know the pattern: The Soviets, Czechs, or Cubans habitually flatter their agents and ease their agents’ conscience and keep their agents busy by having them write “appraisals,” which they then chuck in the burn bag while waiting for the time when a dead drop in Ouagadougou, El Arish, or Albuquerque has to be serviced by somebody who is not under suspicion and has a “cover” (an innocent reason) for traveling there. Or perhaps your double will be asked to introduce the enemy case officer to a friend, somebody with access to an intelligence target or to another friend with such access. The enemy case officer may suggest an innocent lunch at which she will be introduced under the false name she is already using with your double. She will suggest the lunch, of course, only as a minor, incidental favor in no way concerned with the important appraisals your double is writing about Sri Lanka.

Patterns are the name of the game when working against illegals (agents documented as nationals of a Western country, often having actual former Soviet Union country or satellite citizenship). During one period of the Cold War, a number of ostensible Canadians were uncovered as Soviet agents. Thus the Russian KGB officer Kolon Molodiy used the identity of a dead Canadian named Gordon Arnold Lonsdale, and another illegal used the identity of a Canadian who was still alive but had been judged never likely to apply for a passport. The KGB illegal support apparatus, using its own support agents, had formed a pattern of researching birth and death records in Canada (and Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere) in order to acquire birth certificates and thereby passports to alter and issue to illegals. When the pattern became clear to Western CI officers, a number of Soviet illegals were brought to book and a number of others were hastily recalled by the KGB and the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedovatel’noe Upravlenie, Soviet Military Intelligence Service).

Sensitivity to pattern is essential in detecting deception. The first pattern to look for in any case where your service seems to be having a great intelligence success is the success itself. Remember that the basic principle underlying deception is to tell your target what he wants to believe. If you have a success on your hands, look at it carefully: Is it telling you what you want to believe, or what is logical and probable? There is always a difference. Samson wanted to believe that Delilah loved him, when simple logic and knowledge of the Philistine pattern of behavior would have told him that she was after his scalp. Too late he found himself eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves. Which shows that the history of CI goes back a long way, and the principles do not change.

At first glance, catching spies and studying English poetry do not seem to be closely related, but they have one thing in common: Both, when competently done, are based on recognizing patterns. It is no accident that some of the most effective British and American CI officers in World War II were drafted into that war from positions as critics of English literature. They had been trained to look for multiple meanings, to examine the assumptions hidden in words and phrases, and to grasp the whole structure of a poem or a play, not just the superficial plot or statement. So the multiple meanings, the hidden assumptions, and the larger pattern of a CI case were grist for their mill. I do not require my young CI officers to be able to discuss the complexities of a Shakespeare play, but if I catch them studying Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, I do not instantly send them off to the firing range. I tell them to go read Cleanth Brooks on “the language of paradox,” because CI is the act of paradox.

Interest in People

A physician who does not like to deal with patients face to face had better become a radiologist, forensic pathologist, or researcher. So a CI officer who shrinks from face-to-face contact with people had better stick to supporting the case officers from the safety of a desk. He or she must forswear the active part of CI—interrogation, field investigation, running double agents—and be forever subordinate, with no disgrace, to the officer in the field, the one who meets people, handles people, manipulates people.

The CI officer in the field, if he only pushes doorbells (please, Ma’am, just give me the facts), must have that quality that sales-people and priests have: a sympathetic interest in people and an incentive to manipulate them, like a priest to make them see the light and like a salesperson to make them buy his product. Without that quality, he should stay at the desk with the files. But that quality alone is not enough—in fact, alone, it is disastrous to a CI officer. He must also have the other traits described here.

The case officer in the field must interview strangers, manage surveillance teams, handle double agents, conduct interrogations, run (if she’s lucky) penetrations, handle (if she’s lucky) defectors—in other words, deal with people. And she must do this within the discipline of CI analysis and all that stuff about files.

Skepticism

Remember, newcomer to the CI business and old-timer as well, you are being paid to be lied to. The lies will come out of the mouths of your contacts and they will be on the paper you work from. You...