famous Soviet publicity picture of the junk heap first designated as the downed U-2. The rocket in the Red Army Day parade, witnessed and photographed by Western newsmen and military attachés, may be a dud, an assemblage of odd rocket parts that do not really constitute a working missile. Easy as it is to collect overt intelligence, it is equally easy to plant deception within it. For all these reasons clandestine intelligence collection (espionage) must remain an essential and basic activity of intelligence.
Clandestine intelligence collection is chiefly a matter of circumventing obstacles in order to reach an objective. Our side chooses the objective. The opponent has set up the obstacles. Usually he knows which objectives are most important to us, and he surrounds these with appropriately difficult obstacles. For example, when the Soviets started testing their missiles, they chose launching sites in their most remote and unapproachable wastelands. The more closed and rigid the control a government has over its people, the more obstacles it throws up. In our time this means that U.S. intelligence must delve for the intentions and capabilities of a nation pledged to secrecy and organized for deception, whose key military installations may be buried a thousand miles off the beaten track.
Clandestine collection uses people: “agents,” “sources,” “informants.” It may also use machines, for there are machines today that can do things human beings cannot do and can “see” things they cannot see. Since the opponent would try to stop this effort if he could locate and reach it, it is carried out in secret; thus we speak of it as clandestine collection. The traditional word for it is “espionage.”
The essence of espionage is access. Someone, or some device, has to get close enough to a thing, a place or a person to observe or discover the desired facts without arousing the attention of those who protect them. The information must then be delivered to the people who want it. It must move quickly or it may get “stale.” And it must not get lost or be intercepted en route.
At its simplest, espionage is nothing more than a kind of well-concealed reconnaissance. This suffices when a brief look at the target is all that is needed. The agent makes his way to an objective, observes it, then comes back and reports what he saw. The target is usually fairly large and easily discernible—such things as troop dispositions, fortifications or airfields. Perhaps the agent can also make his way into a closed installation and have a look around, or even make off with documents. In any case, the length of his stay is limited. Continuous reportage is difficult to maintain when the agent’s presence in the area is secret and illegal.
Behind the Iron Curtain today, this method of spying is hardly adequate—not because the obstacles are so formidable that they cannot be breached, but because the kind of man who is equipped by his training to breach them is not likely to have the technical knowledge that will enable him to make a useful report on the complex targets that exist nowadays. If you don’t know anything about nuclear reactors, there is little you can discover about one, even when you are standing right next to it. And even for the rare person who might be technically competent, just getting close to such a target is hardly enough to fulfill today’s intelligence requirements. What is needed is a thorough examination of the actual workings of the reactor. For this reason it is unrealistic to think that U.S. or other Western tourists in the Soviet Union can be of much use in intelligence collection. But for propaganda reasons, the Soviets continue to arrest tourists now and then in order to give the world the impression that U.S. espionage is a vast effort exploiting even the innocent traveler.
Of far more long-term value than reconnaissance is “penetration” by an agent, meaning that he somehow is able to get
Clandestine intelligence collection is chiefly a matter of circumventing obstacles in order to reach an objective. Our side chooses the objective. The opponent has set up the obstacles. Usually he knows which objectives are most important to us, and he surrounds these with appropriately difficult obstacles. For example, when the Soviets started testing their missiles, they chose launching sites in their most remote and unapproachable wastelands. The more closed and rigid the control a government has over its people, the more obstacles it throws up. In our time this means that U.S. intelligence must delve for the intentions and capabilities of a nation pledged to secrecy and organized for deception, whose key military installations may be buried a thousand miles off the beaten track.
Clandestine collection uses people: “agents,” “sources,” “informants.” It may also use machines, for there are machines today that can do things human beings cannot do and can “see” things they cannot see. Since the opponent would try to stop this effort if he could locate and reach it, it is carried out in secret; thus we speak of it as clandestine collection. The traditional word for it is “espionage.”
The essence of espionage is access. Someone, or some device, has to get close enough to a thing, a place or a person to observe or discover the desired facts without arousing the attention of those who protect them. The information must then be delivered to the people who want it. It must move quickly or it may get “stale.” And it must not get lost or be intercepted en route.
At its simplest, espionage is nothing more than a kind of well-concealed reconnaissance. This suffices when a brief look at the target is all that is needed. The agent makes his way to an objective, observes it, then comes back and reports what he saw. The target is usually fairly large and easily discernible—such things as troop dispositions, fortifications or airfields. Perhaps the agent can also make his way into a closed installation and have a look around, or even make off with documents. In any case, the length of his stay is limited. Continuous reportage is difficult to maintain when the agent’s presence in the area is secret and illegal.
Behind the Iron Curtain today, this method of spying is hardly adequate—not because the obstacles are so formidable that they cannot be breached, but because the kind of man who is equipped by his training to breach them is not likely to have the technical knowledge that will enable him to make a useful report on the complex targets that exist nowadays. If you don’t know anything about nuclear reactors, there is little you can discover about one, even when you are standing right next to it. And even for the rare person who might be technically competent, just getting close to such a target is hardly enough to fulfill today’s intelligence requirements. What is needed is a thorough examination of the actual workings of the reactor. For this reason it is unrealistic to think that U.S. or other Western tourists in the Soviet Union can be of much use in intelligence collection. But for propaganda reasons, the Soviets continue to arrest tourists now and then in order to give the world the impression that U.S. espionage is a vast effort exploiting even the innocent traveler.
Of far more long-term value than reconnaissance is “penetration” by an agent, meaning that he somehow is able to get
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