Throwing light on the spooks
THE NEW SPYMASTERS: INSIDE ESPIONAGE FROM THE COLD WAR TO GLOBAL TERROR
by Stephen Grey
(Viking, £20)
THE British have always loved a spy story, judging from the popularity of fiction by Erskine Childers, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, Ian Fleming and John le Carré, in which an intrepid hero thwarts the Kaiser or Spectre, or in the last case, succumbs to patrician moral defeatism.
But the reality of much intelligence work is that it has conspicuously failed to identify the major existential threats. These failures, attributable to various intelligence agencies, include Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, the Yom Kippur War, the al Qaeda attacks on 9/11, the rise of Islamic State and the equally manifest dilapidation of the Iraqi National Army. In these cases, intelligence agencies have been as useless as political pollsters.
That subversive thought haunts one’s reading of Stephen Grey’s book. The best thing about it is that it strives to be comparative, though his range does not extend beyond the SIS (MI6), the CIA, France’s DGSE, and Germany’s Bundesnachrichten Dienst (BND). He omits Mossad and Shin Bet and Cuba’s remarkable G2, or the Netherlands’ AIVD, which is good at monitoring the internet, and Italy’s agencies, which have a head start in a country where pervasive and strategically leaked wiretaps substitute for a labyrinthine judicial system in which no one is punished.
Grey has had the good idea of examining different facets of the spying game, though he has little to say about recruitment and training or the political context. Official agents recruit “spies” within the target organisation, though this has become harder now that the predictable hierarchies in the Cold War intelligence struggles have been replaced by myriad Islamist affiliates, resembling the startling movements of flocks of birds, as SIS chief Sir Richard Dearlove memorably put it.
Grey opens with the standard story of colourful British agents in Bolshevik Russia, moving on to combined MI5/MI6/RUC Special Branch operations in Northern Ireland. The latter adds little to existing accounts of double agents such as “Stakeknife” who was in charge of the Provisional IRA’s internal “nutting squad” that tortured and murdered other informants. The Gardai Special Branch hardly warrant a mention.
The end of the Cold War (though China receives no mention here) led to opportunistic “re - purposing” to defend agency budgets, notably the war on organised crime and drugs. Grey’s most original chapter concerns a former Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorist, Andreas Antoniades, who re-purposed himself as a major London drugs baron, with a sideline in informing on his rivals, under the general protection of murky customs and police agencies.
The 9/11 attacks put paid to any Nineties hopes of a “peace dividend” in the world of intelligence, though (France apart) western agencies have found it tough to recruit spies within jihadi organisations. Grey is good on the dilemmas and dangers of this work. How far do you allow “your” terrori st to advance in order to harvest intelligence? Should you trust someone handed over by an allied service?
The CIA was completely conned by the Iraqi WMD expert “Curveball”, whom it only accessed second-hand via the German BND, while an entire CIA team was wiped out in Afghanistan by a treacherous agent they inherited from their cocky Jordanian colleagues.
As Grey rightly says, the intelligence trade is not one that can advertise its triumphs, while its failures are glaringly obvious. It is justified in protecting both sources and methods from the likes of Edward Snowden. But we should also avoid buying into the wider mythology of such agencies, which in recent times have acted like eager lapdogs of politicians and PR men such as Alastair Campbell, rather than the providers of inconvenient facts and hard truths. No doubt that subversive thought will have struck the Chancellor too.