Spying... it’s not just about girls and gadgets
When you think about the risks secret agents take — the lonely, un- Jame s - Bond-like lives they lead, the way they’re controlled or ‘run’ by intelligence officers who treat them like puppets, and how many of them have ended up either being shot or serving life-long jail sentences — you can’t help wondering: why on earth do they do it?
Why would anyone spend years taking surreptitious microfilm photos of the classified documents on their boss’s desk and hand them over to someone in a Mac on a park bench, risking arrest for high treason at every turn?
In this revealing book, Michael Smith seeks to understand the chief human motives behind spying.
The FBI has an acronym for ‘ agent motives’: MICe. Money, ideology, compromise, ego. Smith thinks it’s more complicated than that — most spies are driven by a toxic mixture of those, plus others, including patriotism and revenge.
It’s a terrifying thought that you and I could easily have been trapped, or ‘compromised’, into becoming a spy by a sexual ruse in the Cold War days.
The Soviets in the Fifties had no qualms about using suave men to seduce nice, unsuspecting members of embassy staff with the aim that the women would divulge top- secret information during post-coital pillow chat.
John Vassall, a hapless young staffer at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954, was induced into taking part in a gay orgy, after which photos taken were used to blackmail him into working for the Soviets. he was so terrified, particularly of the ambassador’s wife seeing those incriminating photographs (imagine the shame! — homosexuality was still a crime), that he did as the Soviets told him and handed them thousands of secret documents over many years.
Smith thinks Vassall’s driving force was, in fact, deep loneliness — some people will betray their country in order to feel useful to someone.
Money is a big motive: ‘ walk- ins’ volunteer to spy for a fee. All very well — but if an agent is unable to find genuine intelligence, he or she might fabricate it to keep the job. Forged documents, Smith tells us, discredit genuine information from other sources. Wars can, and do, start as a result of such wilful misinformation.
The ‘good’ motive is patriotism. There are some extraordinary stories of brave agents who helped the country they loved or hindered the country they hated: for example the French agent who identified 31 V-1 rocket sites, allowing the RAF to bomb them, preventing a vast number of British casualties.
Patriotism is even more effective as a motive if it’s spiced with a desire for
revenge. One of the most valuable agents ever ‘run’ by the British secret service was Oleg Penkovsky, driven by the need to avenge his father’s death at the Bolsheviks’ hands when he was a child.
He passed 100 cassette films and 8,000 pages of documents to the British containing vital information about the development of Russian missiles, which helped to diffuse the Cuban Missile Crisis because then U.S. President John F. Kennedy knew Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been bluffing about how advanced his missiles were. A secret agent really can save the world.
Some betray their country, believing it is ‘the right thing to do’. Double agent, John Cairncross, passed huge amounts of vital information summarising Britain’s atomic research into Soviet hands, which then formed the basis of the Soviet atomic weapons programme. And he died comfortably in his bed.
Then there are the crazy fantasists addicted to the whole idea of espionage. They can be useful because they tend to be reckless. Juan Pujol Garcia ( codename ‘Garbo’) filed ‘highly imaginative’ reports that totally fooled the Germans into believing the D-Day landings would take place in Calais rather than Normandy.
This book takes us right up to early 2017, discussing the Russians’ alleged murky dealings that many believe enabled the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President.
An MI6 officer suggests that Trump may well be acting as an ‘unconscious agent’ for the Russians — he would be ‘a dream’ for the role: ‘His vanity, narcissism, egocentricity, naivety, sensitivity to criticism and his desire for revenge and getting even, as well as his intellectual weaknesses and lack of knowledge of, and interest in, international politics, are all factors to be exploited.’
That’s a pretty damning summingup of Trump’s character traits. We may soon find out to what extent this surmise is accurate.