Spycraft - Melton [209]
My quest began in Washington, D.C., and eventually required many trips to Russia, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, France, Israel, and into Asia and South America. Repeatedly my travels took me to KGB headquarters in Moscow and to the Berlin study of Markus Wolf, legendary head of the East German Intelligence Service (HVA). I became a regular guest of Walter Pforzheimer, the late dean of intelligence bibliophiles and founder of CIA’s Historical Intelligence Collection, and through him a lifelong friend of his eventual successor, Hayden Peake, the noted historian, author, and intelligence bibliographer.
Eventually I discovered a commonality among all the world’s spy agencies, that each selects its intelligence officers for the ability to recruit and manage agents and not for their technological skills. Only rarely does an operations officer understand the technology inside the spy gear employed in secret operations. For this necessary technical assistance expertise and creativity, intelligence services created a cadre of specialists known as techs, to support and, at times, even conduct the operational activity.
Techs were usually recruited because they had preexisting knowledge in fields such as photography, radios, electronics, chemistry, woodworking, fabrics, or communications. Techs working for the KGB, HVA, CIA, MOS-SAD, MI6, DGSE, or DGI shared a technical language. Each intelligence service had an internal component dedicated to examining espionage devices captured or recovered from its adversaries. Analysis of “foreign finds” could identify the originator of the gadget, provide new technology and techniques, and lead to countermeasures. Over time, many of the technical tools, regardless of the nationality of the service, began to look similar. Commonality of functions resulted in commonality of forms.
In compiling my research, I also discovered that the fundamental work of clandestine intelligence could be grouped into five general categories, and within each grouping, technical support was critical. Photos and illustrations of spy gadgets used by various services appear in my previous books, Clandestine Warfare (1988), OSS Special Weapons and Equipment (1992), CIA Special Weapons and Equipment (1993), The Ultimate Spy Book (1996), and Ultimate Spy (2003). Early in the preparation of this book, the authors faced the dilemma of using tradecraft terminology in the text without having space to provide a definition and explanation each time the term appeared. The solution has been for me to write a primer that draws together explanations of the essential technical terminology used throughout Spycraft.
In this six-chapter section, I have attempted to integrate the gadgets with the doctrine of intelligence that lies behind their development and use. Chapters 20 through 24 describe the five pillars of tradecraft common to all intelligence operations. When merged with the clever devices created by innovative engineers, these pillars distinguish the professional intelligence services from those operations that are performed by quickly apprehended amateur “spies.” Chapter 25 summarizes the revolutionary changes that digital technology and a global Internet have brought to each of the pillars.
CHAPTER 20
Assessment
If one attempt in fifty is successful [for recruitment], your efforts won’t have been wasted.
—British turncoat and KGB spy Harold “Kim” Philby, as quoted in The Literary Spy
Clandestine intelligence operations using human agents, whether conducted in the eighteenth century by America’s Revolutionary War spymaster, General George Washington, or in the twenty-first century by Islamic terrorists, have common characteristics. Five categories of recruitment and agent handling