The spy in the bathroom

Despite convicted Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard’s betrayal, the US still considers the Mossad an indispensable ear to the ground in a region that is most difficult to spy upon and understand.

By ALEXANDER ZVIELLI
The spy in the bathroom (photo credit: JERUSALEM POST)
The spy in the bathroom
(photo credit: JERUSALEM POST)
Do spies protect our lives? Our intelligence failed to warn us about the advent of the Yom Kippur War. A famous Polish spy hanged himself before the outbreak of World War II, because no one wanted to hear the bad news he brought about German might and intentions.
Accordingly, CIA man Joseph Wilson went to Niger to verify Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s uranium purchases. He found nothing, but this was not what his superiors wanted to hear. Once he published an op-ed in The New York Times accusing America of invading Iraq on false pretenses, both he and his wife, Valerie Plame, also a CIA official, were severely punished.
So spies must be careful in their assessments, which are frequently disregarded.
British intelligence never recovered from the betrayal of the “Cambridge Group,” which for years worked for the Soviet Union.
Edgar Snowden was a US national security adviser, before he found asylum in Russia. How is security protected, then, when one may never be sure of either the agent or his superiors? The latest “spy” attempt to throw mud at Israel would be funny, if it was not tragic. Just imagine an Israeli spy hiding in an air-conditioning duct above Al Gore’s hotel bathroom in 1988 – had the story not been picked up by Newsweek in an apparent attempt to further sour already strained American-Israeli relations.
Would Israeli visitors spy on America, if allowed to come without a visa? Is this how intelligence operates? Certainly it does not operate in such an obvious manner. Indeed, a frank description of the follies of Western intelligence is long overdue.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, author of The CIA and American Democracy and The FBI: A History, undertakes this challenge in his latest work, In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence.
American secret intelligence came with its War of Independence.
In 1793, the secret fund at president George Washington’s disposal already comprised $1 million, or 12 percent of the national budget.
On April 14, 1865, just before his assassination, president Abraham Lincoln established the US Secret Service, whose main objective was to fight the Ku Klux Klan, moonshiners and greenback forgers.
The force trained the first American federal detectives; in 1880, naval and military intelligence were added.
The British Secret Service Bureau, the forerunner of both MI5 and MI6, came into existence in October 1909, after a much longer history.
As early as 1580, Sir Francis Walsingham organized an effective espionage network for Queen Elizabeth I when Spain threatened Britain with an armada. But it was only toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century that both British and American intelligence achieved their modern shape.
The German Admiralty “N” secret service, for its part, was established in 1901. The main task of all spies was to spy on each other. As such, the promoters of secret intelligence presumed that the lower orders were untrustworthy, and engaged only officers and “gentlemen.”
The multitude of spy books, films in the tradition of James Bond, and tabloid journalism describing their heroic feats contributed to such views.
During World War I, the graduates of Groton and Yale and those of Eton and Balliol gladly worked with each other. It took the US 50 years to admit candidates to its security services other than those of the Ivy League, the East Coast establishment or of Anglo-Saxon heritage. And yet when Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Jim Cairncross of the Cambridge Group betrayed Britain, the Foreign Office, which sheltered them, commented that “chaps like us can’t be traitors.”
In another instance, Sir William Wiseman and his colleagues in British intelligence tricked the US into entering World War I on the British side, but only after Americans became convinced that he was not a Jew and appeared in Burke’s Peerage. A photo fell into Wiseman’s hands depicting the ambassador, Count Bernstorff, chief of the German spy network in the US, posing between two American bathing beauties. The photo made the rounds on both sides of the Atlantic, and undermined German standing. For Britain and France this was a major propaganda success.
The author describes in great detail the ups and downs of intelligence cooperation between the American and British services during both world wars. By August 4, 1914, British underwater spies had found and cut five cables linking Germany to France, Spain, the Azores and the US, ensuring London would be able to communicate much more effectively with the US.
On January 16, 1917, Arthur Zimmerman, German foreign secretary, invited Mexico to enter the conflict on the German side, promising it Texas, Arizona and New Mexico (forgetting California) in case of victory. But the Churchill-established center for decoding messages, Room 40, had warned Washington.
The story appeared in the American press on March 1, 1917, in an attempt to stab the US in the back. It did not appear earlier because British intelligence did not wish to reveal its secret sources.
It is widely assumed that the special World War I and II intelligence cooperation between England and the US contributed to Allied victories, but the 1944 Battle of the Bulge was won only due to the Allied air force superiority, after it suffered heavy losses on the ground in an unexpected German counterattack.
The CIA, created in 1947 by the US to fight the Cold War and contain the Soviet Union, embarked on a number of critical, failing escapades in the years after, like the Bay of Pigs invasion. One of the most fascinating exploits of the joint CIA and MI6 cooperation was the digging of a 1,000-yard-long tunnel from the American to the Soviet sector of Berlin. It terminated under its target – a Soviet military post. Since February 1955, 600 tape recorders, using 800 reels a day, taped 295 Soviet communication lines.
Several chapters are devoted to the conflict between intelligence research, which demands secrecy, and the need to know as much as possible; this involves civil rights violations. The British Official Secrets Act prosecuted not only journalists but investigative reporters, who were tried and sentenced.
The author finds French intelligence to be the most important for Western defenses. He is less enthusiastic about the European Parliament intelligence and thinks that Brussels wishes to separate itself from the US. Moreover, current US-British relations are not what they were in the past. Jeffreys-Jones believes that clandestine Western intelligence, reputed to assist in winning wars, should be ready to augment them.
The 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Munich Games resulted in the creation of a consortium of 12 European nations, known as the Trevi Group, which call for a more coordinated approach to anti-terrorism. The European Council agreed on a plan of action that envisaged an economic squeeze on terrorists’ finances, information-sharing with the US, introduction of a European arrest warrant, the formation of Eurojust and the expansion of Europol.
Despite convicted Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard’s betrayal, the US still considers the Mossad an indispensable ear to the ground in a region that is most difficult to spy upon and understand.
Is Western intelligence up-to-date, able to penetrate and confront Islam’s ongoing challenges? One can only wonder – as no answer to this urgent question was provided.