National Post (National Edition)
SPYING IN THE AGE OF COVID-19
Concealing secret meetings in train stations and parks devoid of people has created quite a challenge
With November's release of No Time to Die, the latest Bond film, and rumours of Tom Hardy taking over the 007 role when Daniel Craig finally hangs up his Walther PPK, it's worth pointing out that — in the real world, at least — there has rarely been a more challenging time to be an international spy.
Why? Because COVID-19 has shaken up the the world's spies as vigorously as one of James Bond's vodka martinis. For the past two decades, intelligence officers have been undergoing a period of profound change. The advent of the smartphone has meant individuals can be tracked, traced and listened to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Modern intelligence services have access to our most sensitive personal data, from medical records to banking transactions. At the same time, huge amounts of personal information is available via social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These myriad technological advances were already making life extraordinarily difficult for spies operating in the field, who have to travel using false identities. But into this brave new world comes a challenge of a very different sort: coronavirus.
While completing my latest novel, Box 88, a thriller about a putative Anglo-American spy agency, I became fascinated with how the pandemic had affected the intelligence community. During my research, one former MI6 officer told me that the global lockdown had “the same result as the song stopping in a game of musical chairs.” When I asked what he meant by this, he used as an illustration the (fictional) case of a U.S. spy secretly working in China.
It is February. The man from the CIA suddenly finds himself stranded in a hostile environment as all flights out of the country are grounded. He must continue to live under a false identity for several weeks, hoping his extended stay in China does not draw the attention of the authorities.
The same scenario would have applied to a French businesswoman secretly working for the French security services, who arrived in Dubai in early April with the intention of meeting a source in the Iranian government. No sooner had she checked into her apartment than she would have been ordered into quarantine. By the time she emerged from lockdown, her source would have long since returned to Tehran.
In short, COVID-19 has made old-fashioned espionage all but impossible. Spying is about information. But how can an intelligence officer obtain that information if they cannot meet the person giving it to them?
For years, sporting arenas, cinemas, nightclubs and department stores have provided perfect natural cover for clandestine meetings. Throughout the global lockdown, all such places were closed. A Russian spy hoping to recruit a prospective agent over a bottle of Stolichnaya in a Moscow restaurant would have had to shelve her plans. A nervous informant in a terrorist cell wanting to meet his MI5 handler in the back row of his local multiplex would have been told to sit tight for several weeks and await further instructions.
Brush contacts — that is to say, the discreet passing of information from one individual to another — might characteristically take place in a crowded train station. It's harder to pull that sort of thing off when you are the only two people standing on the platform — socially distanced. All of us have seen movies in which surveillance teams close in on a target on foot and in moving vehicles. But how to conceal such activity on deserted city streets or in parks devoid of people under the watchful eye of satellites and CCTV?
As a former military intelligence officer told me last week, widespread restrictions on human contact have “further tipped the scales away from human intelligence towards technical surveillance and data analytics.” Loosely translated, this means that spying in 2020 has gone online.
Typically, individuals on a terrorist watchlist send thousands of messages and make hundreds of phone calls in the course of a month. Confined to home, with operations mothballed, they may contact only a few key individuals. With the volume of communications traffic significantly reduced, technicians can strip back the “noise” around an individual and learn a great deal more about them.
By the same token, a terrorist mastermind who has been forced into hiding by lockdown can more easily be eavesdropped (or targeted for assassination) than would be the case if he were sleeping in a different bed every night. Yet terrorists themselves have also been taking advantage of the pandemic. Confined to their homes for long periods with only the internet for company, impressionable young men and women have been spending more time online than ever before. As one intelligence source told me: “As well as continuing to recruit, Islamic State have been setting up online clinics and advising their followers on how to deal with COVID, using lockdowns to further their own aims.”
Extremist groups on both left and right have also taken note of the half-assed way many Western governments have handled the crisis. The internet is awash with lunatic conspiracy theories — Bill Gates intends to use the pandemic as an excuse to fit us all with a chip, Dr. Anthony Fauci filed a personal patent on the coronavirus in 2007 — which, alas, are all-too easily swallowed by the gullible and the disaffected. COVID-19 has only accentuated already prevalent inequalities between society's haves and havenots. Should the crisis continue deep into 2021, intelligence services are concerned that it could foment wider civil unrest of the sort we have already seen in parts of the U.S.
There has also been a change in what governments are asking of their spies. Whoever wins the race to find a vaccine stands to gain a great deal, both financially and in terms of international prestige. Though the collaboration of the scientific community has largely negated the need for competing intelligence services to steal data, industrial espionage is still a threat. Imperial and Oxford University laboratories, where vaccine trials are under way, have been subjected to cyberattacks, allegedly by hackers linked to the Russian government. There are also concerns that China, should it develop a successful vaccine, will use it as a diplomatic tool to further build relationships in mineral-rich countries in the developing world.
For now, all but the most vital human intelligence operations are on the back burner. As one former MI6 officer told me: “The degree of planning and risk assessment and mitigation has been stepped up dramatically as a result of the pandemic.” Translation: the only risky spying taking place this side of Christmas will be at a cinema showing No Time to Die.