That Other Old Profession
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN That Other Old Profession Allen Dulles warned a Congressional committee in 1947 that if the CIA became "a great big octopus" it would not function well. The staff...
...Sinclair's elegantly written essay is fascinating and disturbing...
...During many postwar years, the KGB knew more about SIS and MI5 than any British government...
...The staff should be small, he said, "scores rather thanhundreds...
...Most spies were not worth their keep, and many were double agents...
...it is no accident that, as intelligence agencies have expanded, our civil liberties have contracted...
...Peter Wright has said he spent his first five years in MI5 bugging and burgling his way across London, while pompous civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way...
...one was so incompetent his subordinates revolted...
...and, if it were not for its murderous consequences, comic inanity...
...This secrecy is dangerous also because—in Britain more than in the U.S.—it makes effective control of the agencies impossible and is a cover for incompetence, irresponsible initiatives and treachery, as in the Philby affair...
...He goes on to demonstrate just how ill-informed and incompetent the British SIS was in the two world wars...
...MI5 and SOE (a hastily formed covertaction service) were not much better...
...AntiHitler elements in the Abwehr gave the Allies useful information...
...Today, 16,000 people are on the CIA's payroll and it has an annual budget of at least $ 1.5 billion...
...A small example (not drawn from Knightley): Since 1939, SIS has had five chiefs, excluding the present incumbent...
...Even more disturbing, and scrappily written, is The British Intelligence Services in Action by Kennedy Lindsay (Dunrod Press, Ireland, 28 8 pp., about $15...
...The NSA's computers already cover 11 acres, and its shredders are said to chomp up 40 tons of unwanted printouts and other documents daily...
...When Hoover was warned personally by the now famous Abwehr agent Dusko Popov that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor in a few months' time, he was too busy quibbling over Popov to bother to inform the U.S...
...Satellites, bugs and sneakies can produce information no human spy has access to, but the expense of high-tech espionage is becoming a burden even to the two big powers...
...In our peacetime spywarrens, on Knightley's evidence, the pattern has changed—mainly for the worse: •Spies are now better equipped, yet who can be sure who owns which...
...In Russia, the KGB has a voice at all official levels and hoisted spymaster Yuri Andropov into the top political slot in 1982...
...Knightley argues that the intelligence community is able to get away with organized immorality and illegality, despising its nominal political masters and juggling with our destinies, thanks to "a secrecy which corrodes democratic society...
...Intrigue One reason why Whitehall leaked so badly in the 1940s-60s is that the Russians had been recruiting spies in British universities, notoriously Cambridge, since the early '30s, years before UK services got around to the idea...
...Fortunately for the Allies, German intelligence was inefficient, too, and hampered by more factional back-stabbing than the British secret services...
...The pattern was a familiar one in every wartime intelligence service...
...Cavalry...
...If some spies obtained rapid promotion, the fault lay outside Cambridge...
...but were they the right men to advise the Foreign Office and Defense Ministry on delicate international issues...
...There is," Knightley concedes, "some case to be made for intelligence organizations in wartime, although their record even here is patchy...
...Many intelligence men, faced with anguishing moral dilemmas, drink heavily: Alcoholism and neurosis are occupational hazards...
...As for the FBI— well, its chief, J. Edgar Hoover, may have been a good cop, but what Knightley calls his "policeman's mentality" dimmed his understanding of intelligence issues...
...agencies appear to have been infested with fewer major moles than SIS and MI5, but a hunt for a probably imaginary Supermole almost paralyzed the CIA for a decade...
...The huge budgets and massive bureaucracies of the main secret services have made them as powerful as departments of state, with an influence on policymaking that is exercised at times with something like contempt for the government of the day...
...Many swallowed their distaste for what they considered a corrupt society and attained distinction in science, the media, politics, and government...
...The evidence he offers has strengthened the view of observers who suspect that a sector of British officialdom considers Ulster a substitute for the training areas and useful trouble spots the British forces once had in the Middle East, and that an almost symbiotic relationship has come into being between the IRA and some British "special" services...
...Even Britain, although now empireless, has increased expenditures on cloakand-stagger activities during the past three decades: SIS (Intelligence) and MI5 (Security), spend about $500 million a year, while "Government Communications HQ" (Sigint) disposes of another $500 million or so, much of this contributed by the United States...
...another was an egocentric fantasist...
...Like millions of individuals throughout the world, I am comforted by the belief that the CIA and NSA, helped occasionally by European and Israeli allies, are keeping a shrewd eye on Soviet, Libyan, Syrian and other despots and hoods...
...He situates the phenomenon in its cultural and political context, and traces its consequences in the postwar years...
...This was noticeable as long ago as the late 1940s and '50s, when Philby and others in the SIS succeeded in orienting British policy in the Near East, and influencing British media comment, with a cunning mishmash of pro-Soviet, anti-American and residually imperialist attitudes...
...A few months earlier, Stalin had refused to believe reports from Soviet and other sources that Hitler was preparing to attack Russia...
...Phillip Knightley, a British journalist who followed the Philby affair closely, is a doubter...
...It was saved from discredit and dissolution in 194045 by its intake of academics and writers, and by the achievements of a new cipher-cracking school that was attached to SIS for administrative convenience...
...As John Stockwell, a former CIA officer has written, "you can't spend your life bribing people, seducing people into committing treason [and] sometimes betraying their own families, and come away a healthy, wholeperson, whatever your rationales are...
...As the title of his latest book, The Second Oldest Profession (Norton, 436 pp., $19.95), announces, he has little sympathy for the denizens of "the sordid world of espionage with its easily-bought loyalties, loose morals...
...Distrust reached such a peak in British spyworks that MI5 officers put their director and his visitors under surveillance, even in the toilet...
...but all secret services violate the moral and legal codes of their societies, usually with impunity...
...Its sturdy brother, the National Security Agency, employs about 20,000 in America and 100,000 overseas, and has a budget of more than $3.5 billion...
...High-tech tends to pulverize information, with more and more individuals knowing less and less, and alarmingly few seeing a balanced perspective...
...In 1939 it was staffed by a weird hierarchy of upper-class lounge lizards and lower-class legmen (former police officers "of quite extraordinary stupidity," in the words of the historian and wartime SIS-recruit Hugh Trevor-Roper...
...An SIS recruit told me that at his first interview he was asked if he would be willing to "work against" his mother's people, who are not English...
...Lindsay, a Canadian-born Ulster academic hostile to the IRA, has been profoundly shocked by the intrigues and violence of "special" military units controlled by British officers whose aim appears to be to maintain a high level of tension in Northern Ireland...
...Knightley recalls how the SIS and KGB together wrecked the life of a bright young English journalist, the son of a distinguished scholar, using him as a chesspiece in a cynical interservice game that was little more than a training exercise...
...And the mass of information spookdom's ionospheric vacuum cleaners suck in threatens to bury the mere people employed...
...In The Red and the Blue: Cambridge, Treason and Intelligence (Little, Brown, 179 pp., $17.95), Andrew Sinclair, aFellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, explains why secrecy, intrigue and what once seemed a progressive cause attracted so many young men of Britain's privileged classes in the late '30s...
...His carefully researched, agreeably written volume ranges over the history of 20th-century spyworks in search of an answer to the question: Are these monsters really necessary...
...government...
...The contribution of the OSS to victory was "minimal," Knightley says...
...and Anthony Blunt, one of the moles in MI5, received Palace favors after retrieving from Germany embarrassing documents that linked prominent royals with unpopular Germans...
...at least two were, in addition, drunks...
...For brutality, the KGB is in a class of its own...
...About 30 MI5 men are alleged by a senior colleague, Peter Wright, to have bugged the home of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson and plotted to undermine his government...
...America's intelligence services at that time were the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the FBI...
...No informed discussion of the problem was legally possible in Britain under official-secrets legislation that serves essentially to conceal facts from the British Parliament and media— though not, of course, from the Russians...
...Four of them were vulnerable to blackmail and would have been barred from even a modest diplomatic appointment by any serious inquiry into their mentality and mores...
...As Sinclair observes "alcoholic promiscuity" (especially homosexual) seemed to be "a passport for preferment" at the Foreign Office...
...Yet, in the small hours, the truest believer is apt at times to wonder: Is our faith justified...
...All were, no doubt, deserving of our sympathy and such help as welfare agencies could give them...
...The KGB and other Soviet thugtanks are thought to spend about 10 per cent more than the American agencies but employ many more people...
...How efficient is that huge machine...
...In America, the CI A has at times exercised undue influence over policymaking...
...one had a son with a drug problem...
...The quest has produced one of the best studies of espionage and security matters available to the public...
...One was a toilet-cruising homosexual...
...Paradoxically, some of the most important information supplied to Russia by Cambridge men was communicated not by spies but, openly, by scientists...
...Are the CIA and NSA really a new incarnation of the U.S...
...Not all of Cambridge's fellow travelers became convinced Stalinists...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
