Frederick Forsythe on Spying

The spying game

Frederick Forsythe

Sir Francis Walsingham intercepted letters, eased them open with a hot razor, read, copied, resealed them and had them delivered to the unsuspecting enemy agent.

His tricks – trailing suspect arrivals, drawing up lists of those they visited, employing serving knaves to listen at door panels – could have come straight from John le Carré.

If the practice became something of a British speciality, so did writing about it and the tradition has never died.

Wilkie Collins in The Woman In White, Erskine Childers with The Riddle Of The Sands, John Buchan with his agent Richard Hannay, were all writing and enthralling more than 100 years ago.

And we pioneered great detectives such as Sherlock Holmes. Spooks and ’tecs, they became our national speciality and still are.

But what about the real thing? What is the point of espionage? Simply, it is one word: forewarning. In a perfect world our country would have no rivals, no enemies, no one wants to do us down.

But we all know it is far from perfect. This country has had – occasionally internally, always externally – enemies who lust to see our diminishment, even destruction.

Today IS has us on its insane death list. We need to know what plots are being prepared against us, who is behind them and when they will come.

Politicians of all stripes have a horror of the terrible surprise. If only we had known about four fanatics who self-triggered bombs in London on July 7, 2005.

These were British-born, British-raised but dedicated enemies.

So were the Provisional IRA who murdered 3,000 over a 30-year terror campaign, both in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland.

It is primarily the Security Service MI5 that deals with internal foes but these are often aided by our enemies abroad.

The Secret Intelligence Service MI6 concerns itself mainly with these, though the two co-operate closely despite scare stories of feuding.

Both are supported by GCHQ, Government Communication Headquarters, which listens and listens and listens.

It also decrypts codes and seeks to perfect our own. Our enemies never sleep; neither do we.

For those of my generation – born 1938 – much of our lives were dominated by the Cold War.

The enemy was world communism and specifi cally the USSR. The Cold War really started way back in the 1920s, although we did not know it.

That was when Stalin, having completed his early internal purges, turned the efforts of Soviet spy agencies OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB outwards to try to bring down the pillars of the democratic and capitalist West.

The main traitors to the Soviets were recruited in the 1930s. Again, we were slow, we did not wake up to the truth that we had two enemies – Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The Second World War was never an alliance of allies, just a four-year truce after Hitler invaded the USSR.

When the Red Army swept west across Europe and Hitler’s evil empire collapsed, Stalin simply resumed his efforts to destroy the West, of which in 1945 Britain was the last undefeated pillar.

Churchill spotted it with his 1946 Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri.

The Berlin Blockade of 1948 cast aside the last pretence, triggering the Cold War for all to see.

Gone were the pretences of Russian joviality.

The KGB, with the secret police of the six new satellite countries of Eastern Europe, formed a powerful alliance against us.

The new factor was the entry into world affairs of the USA and its formation of the CIA, our partner then and still.

Since then the collaboration between American intelligence and our own has been unequal but close, much closer than many in the media care to admit.

We have never been able to match the gigantic budgets the Americans have poured into their agencies.

We have no camerabearing satellites rolling gently in space, gazing down and transmitting what they see in real time back to receptors on Earth.

We cannot match the size and scope of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, but our own GCHQ works in exceptional closeness.

Between them they monitor trillions of e-communications for that slip by a terrorist “online” that will reveal plans, dangers or simply locations.

But what we do bring to the table is what we have always been best at: human intel or “humint.”

Even if 90 per cent of intelligence today is gathered electronically, there is always something that the machines can never see, never hear.

That is where only the human agent will do. There are things that happen under roofs or below ground that no satellite, no U2 plane, no drone can see.

There are conversations that are only voiced in rooms scoured for listening devices and thus “secure”.

But if you had an agent standing right there… So: penetration, the practice of suborning a high ranker among the enemy to switch allegiance, change sides and work for you.

It was thought that during the Cuba missile crisis of 1962 President Kennedy was brilliant in outwitting Nikita Khrushchev.

Not quite; he was like a poker player staring across the table at his opponent and his cards.

But standing behind Khrushchev as if with a mirror was Col Oleg Penkovsky of Soviet military intelligence… working for us.

JFK could see everything. It is quite an operation to recruit an agent in the highest ranks of the enemy.

First, someone has to spot a flaw, a man who looks unhappy with his lot, perhaps resentful at his treatment, in his marriage, burdened with debts or some sexual guilt.

Then the trawler moves in to make first contact, strike up a friendship, become a sympathetic ear.

When “chummy” has brought over his first consignment of information he will pass under the control of his “handler” or “runner”.

He may be in the local embassy or outside the country where the spy operates. In either event, personal contact may be very rare.

Packages may have to be left in dead-letter boxes to be collected later.

Or an errand boy may be needed, to slip through the border posing as businessman or tourist, bring something in, take something out and slip back to safety.

The intermediary will never know who briefed him, what he was carrying or who he met.

The whole picture is a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, thousands of tiny pieces of information brought in by agents to the desks of the analysts for assessment, interpretation and placing until the picture emerges.

And the point of it all? In today’s world where the primary danger is the terrorist, the point is that as the bomb-maker completes his assembly the door comes crashing down and the “hard squad” are all over him.

As the cell door slams he will never know who betrayed him, what foolish boast online was overheard, decoded, translated.

He does not need to know how he was detected, followed, unmasked; whether his name was mentioned by two men talking in some faraway desert or scrawled in a semi-literate letter.

And there is a third person who does not need to know.

John Citizen, abiding by the law, paying his taxes, taking his family shopping.

He does not need to know why there will not be a bomb in the supermarket today.

All he needs to know is that the part of his taxes devoted to the world he will never see is the best expenditure he makes.