When Moses, acting on God’s order, sent Caleb and his men into Canaan to find out if its people possessed weapons of mass destruction – a plentiful supply of poisons, disease-spreading germs and chemical substances dug from the earth – Moses became the world’s first known spymaster and the founder of what is today an ever growing intelligence gathering industry that affects everyone’s life.
Caleb’s spies found nothing. They returned to Moses with news that the land, which later became Israel, “flowed with milk and honey.” There was no mention of the violence that would plague the land for the next 3,000 years.
You could say Caleb’s report to Moses was selective – as so many reports from intelligence chiefs are to their political masters.
For over 30 years, I have worked closely among these people to learn their secrets. It helped that my own late father-in-law was a senior MI6 intelligence officer and that a good friend was Bill Buckley, the CIA chief in Beirut murdered by Hezbollah. There are many others who helped and are still serving in what is now an estimated $200 billion a year global industry. It employs over a million people who can call upon the most advanced technology to conduct their business.
Contrary to what their political masters say, intelligence personnel do commit assassinations. Israel has its kidon unit, specialists in the art of killing. MI6 contracts such operations out to freelance assassins. The Chinese Secret Intelligence Service has its own state-approved executioners. Russia, having closed down its infamous KGB, transferred its specialist killers to work for its new security service. Iran has its team of killers, who usually travel under diplomatic cover. I have not discovered one intelligence service that does not have men and women who will terminate to order.
Sovereign, proud and expansionist, the secret empire of intelligence gathering is often fiercely divided by internal strife.
In MI5, it led to the departure of its two brilliant women directors, Dame Stella Rimington and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. Women, in general, have still to work their way into the top ranks of espionage.
Current MI6 chief John Scarlett will, after this coming August, have worked his term to unexpected resignation. No longer will he have to write his reports in green ink – a tradition dating back a hundred years – or sit at Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s elbow during critical Cabinet meetings. After August, he will have more time to stroll through England’s medieval churches, his hobby.
But the spying world will continue along its aggressive, duplicitous road, using any means to achieve what its political masters require.
Robots in the deep black of space, supported by other cutting edge technology, are only theirs to access. Some of the workers in this secret empire spend long days creating ways to exploit what the satellites, with their mechanical ears, tell them.
Today, the gathering of information by the intelligence services is an issue of major importance in the modern world. But there are also serious questions to be asked – and answered.
What are the ethical responsibilities of how that material is obtained? The current scandal of Britain’s role in the torture of terrorist suspects is at the core of a fierce debate that could see ministers resign.
How is intelligence collected, assessed and used? That issue drove George Tenet to resign as director of the CIA over the Iraq war.
What is the impact and significance of the self-protective state that has been constructed over the years since the Gulf War?
So many good intelligence officers have either resigned or been sacked for seeking to resolve these questions.
The answers to these matters raise profound questions for the future of democracy and human rights. That is one of the reasons I wrote “Secret Wars,” to trace the route from Secret State to Self-Protective State.
A turning point on that road was 9/11. It was a failure of intelligence. And that failure was the result of MI6 and the CIA not adapting after the Cold War to the modern-day terrorists. It is still catch-up time.
While phone-tapping, surveillance techniques, running agents and keeping untold numbers of secret files on activists are still the bread-and-butter of intelligence gathering, it is done against a peculiar obsession with bureaucracy where crucial information is often not acted upon properly.
In the years it took me to research and write “Secret Wars,” it never failed to surprise me how what turned out to be misplaced secrecy was an overriding factor within the intelligence services.
Today, the real threat to a nation comes not only from terrorism, but from a failure to make proper use of prior knowledge.
The catalogue of terrorism – 9/11, the Bali bombings, the attack on London, the Madrid train massacre, the Mumbai atrocity, the Islamabad hotel bombing – could well have been stopped by proper human intelligence gathering.
Meir Amit, a former head of Mossad, told me: “Satellites can’t think. They only do what we tell them.”
Three thousand years ago, Caleb and his spies did not have robots. They depended on what they saw and learned. The current world of counterterrorism requires more of the same.
While espionage continues to exert a perennial hold on the public appetite, there is also a need for a new reality in understanding by those who work in its secret empire.
Gordon Thomas is the author of “Secret Wars: One Hundred Years Of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6,” which is officially released today.
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