Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering, as a subfield of the intelligence field, is the act of obtaining secret or Confidentiality (intelligence). A person who commits espionage on a mission-specific contract is called an espionage agent or spy.
Espionage is often part of an institutional effort by a government or commercial concern. However, the term tends to be associated with state spying on potential or actual enemies for military purposes. Spying involving is known as corporate espionage.
One way to gather data and information about a targeted organization is by infiltrating its ranks. Spies can then return information such as the size and strength of . They can also find within the organization and influence them to provide further information or to defect.[Fischbacher-Smith, D., 2011. "The enemy has passed through the gate: Insider threats, the dark triad, and the challenges around security". Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, 2(2), pp. 134–156.] In times of crisis, spies steal technology and sabotage the enemy in various ways. Counterintelligence is the practice of thwarting enemy espionage and intelligence-gathering. Almost all have strict laws concerning espionage, including those who practice espionage in other countries, and the penalties for being caught are often severe. ( right), a Finnish socialite and spy, with her chauffeur Boris Wolkowski ( left) in 1930s]]
History
Ancient world
Espionage has been recognized as of importance in military affairs since ancient times.
The oldest known classified document was a report made by a spy disguised as a diplomatic envoy in the court of King Hammurabi, who died in around 1750 BC. The had a developed secret service, and espionage is mentioned in the Iliad, the Bible, and the Amarna letters.
The thesis that espionage and intelligence has a central role in war as well as peace was first advanced in The Art of War and in the Arthashastra. "The Art of War," identifies five types of spies that are essential for gathering intelligence and achieving victory: local spies (citizen informants within the enemy's territory), inward spies (recruited within the enemy ranks), converted spies (recruited Defection converted to serve your side), doomed spies (expendable fabricators used to spread disinformation; acts as decoy for counter-intelligence), and surviving spies (spies that provide accurate intelligence after gathering information from the enemy).
Middle Ages
In the
Middle Ages European states excelled at what has later been termed counter-
subversion when Catholic
were staged to annihilate
heresy. Inquisitions were marked by centrally organised mass
and detailed record keeping. Western espionage changed fundamentally during the Renaissance when Italian
installed resident
in
capital cities to collect intelligence.
The Renaissance
Renaissance
Venice became so obsessed with espionage that the Council of Ten, which was nominally responsible for
security, did not even allow the doge to consult government
freely. In 1481 the Council of Ten barred all Venetian government officials from making contact with ambassadors or foreigners. Those revealing
could face the death penalty. Venice became obsessed with espionage because successful international trade demanded that the city-state could protect its
.
Under Queen Elizabeth I of England (), Francis Walsingham ( 1532–1590) was appointed foreign secretary and intelligence chief.[
]
United States
During the American Revolution,
Nathan Hale and
Benedict Arnold achieved their fame as spies, and there was considerable use of spies on both sides during the American Civil War.
Though not a spy himself, George Washington was America's first , utilizing espionage tactics against the British.
World War I, World War II
In the 20th century, at the height of World War I, all
except the
United States had elaborate civilian espionage systems, and all national military establishments had intelligence units. In order to protect the country against foreign agents, the U.S. Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917.
Mata Hari, who obtained information for Germany by seducing French officials, was the most noted espionage agent of World War I. Prior to World War II,
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan established elaborate espionage nets. In 1942 the Office of Strategic Services was founded by Gen. William J. Donovan. However, the British Special Operations Executive was the keystone of Allied intelligence. Numerous resistance groups such as the Austrian
Heinrich Maier-Messner Group, the French Resistance, the
Witte Brigade,
Milorg and the Polish
Home Army worked against Nazi Germany and provided the Allied secret services with information that was very important for the war effort.
Cold War
Since the end of World War II, the activity of espionage has enlarged, much of it growing out of the
Cold War between the United States and the former USSR. The
Russian Empire and its successor, the
Soviet Union, have had a long tradition of espionage ranging from the
Okhrana to the
KGB (Committee for State Security), which also acted as a secret police force. In the United States, the 1947 National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate intelligence and the National Security Agency for research into codes and electronic communication. In addition to these, the United States has 13 other intelligence gathering agencies; most of the U.S. expenditures for intelligence gathering are budgeted to various Defense Dept. agencies and their programs. Under the intelligence reorganization of 2004, the director of national intelligence is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the activities and budgets of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
In the Cold War, espionage cases included Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Rosenberg Case. In 1952 the Communist Chinese captured two CIA agents and in 1960 Francis Gary Powers, flying a U-2 reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union for the CIA, was shot down and captured. During the Cold War, many Soviet intelligence officials defected to the West, including Gen. Walter Krivitsky, Victor Kravchenko, Vladimir Petrov, Peter Deriabin, Pawel Monat and Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU. Among Western officials who defected to the Soviet Union are Guy Burgess and Donald D. Maclean of Great Britain in 1951, Otto John of West Germany in 1954, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, U.S. cryptographers, in 1960, and Harold (Kim) Philby of Great Britain in 1962. U.S. acknowledgment of its U-2 flights and the exchange of Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel in 1962 implied the legitimacy of some espionage as an arm of foreign policy.
China has a very cost-effective intelligence program that is especially effective in monitoring neighboring countries such as Mongolia, Russia and India. Smaller countries can also mount effective and focused espionage efforts. For instance, the Vietnamese communists had consistently superior intelligence during the Vietnam War. Some Islamic countries, including Libya, Iran and Syria, have highly developed operations as well. SAVAK, the secret police of the Pahlavi dynasty, was particularly feared by Iranian dissidents before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Modern day
Today, spy agencies target the illegal drug trade and
terrorism as well as state actors.
[Arrillaga, Pauline. "China's spying seeks secret US info." AP, 7 May 2011.]
Intelligence services value certain intelligence collection techniques over others. The former Soviet Union, for example, preferred human sources over research in open sources, while the United States has tended to emphasize technological methods such as SIGINT and IMINT. In the Soviet Union, both political (KGB) and military intelligence (GRU)
Targets of espionage
Espionage agents are usually trained experts in a targeted field so they can differentiate mundane information from targets of value to their own organizational development. Correct identification of the target at its execution is the sole purpose of the espionage operation.
Broad areas of espionage targeting expertise include:
-
: strategic production identification and assessment (food, energy, materials). Agents are usually found among bureaucrats who administer these resources in their own countries
-
Public opinion towards domestic and foreign policies (popular, middle class, elites). Agents often recruited from field journalistic crews, exchange postgraduate students and sociology researchers
-
Strategic economic strengths (production, research, manufacture, infrastructure). Agents recruited from science and technology academia, commercial enterprises, and more rarely from among military technologists
-
Military capability intelligence (offensive, defensive, manoeuvre, naval, air, space). Agents are trained by military espionage education facilities and posted to an area of operation with covert identities to minimize prosecution
-
Counterintelligence operations targeting opponent's intelligence services themselves, such as breaching the confidentiality of communications and recruiting defectors or moles
Methods and terminology
How the United States defines espionage
Although the news media may speak of "spy satellites" and the like, espionage is not a synonym for all intelligence-gathering disciplines. It is a specific form of human source intelligence (HUMINT). Codebreaking (
cryptanalysis or COMINT), aircraft or satellite photography (IMINT), and analysis of publicly available data sources (OSINT) are all intelligence gathering disciplines, but none of them is considered espionage. Many HUMINT activities, such as prisoner
interrogation, reports from military
reconnaissance patrols and from diplomats, etc., are not considered espionage. Espionage is the disclosure of sensitive information (classified) to people who are not cleared for that information or access to that sensitive information.
Unlike other forms of intelligence collection disciplines, espionage usually involves accessing the place where the desired information is stored or accessing the people who know the information and will divulge it through some kind of Deception. There are exceptions to physical meetings, such as the Oslo Report, or the insistence of Robert Hanssen in never meeting the people who bought his information.
The US defines espionage towards itself as "the act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defence with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation". Black's Law Dictionary (1990) defines espionage as: "... gathering, transmitting, or losing ... information related to the national defense". Espionage is a violation of United States law, and Article 106a of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Technology and techniques
Source:
Organization
A spy is a person employed to seek out secret information from a source.
Within the United States Intelligence Community, "asset" is more common usage. A
case officer or
Special Agent, who may have diplomatic status (i.e.,
official cover or non-official cover), supports and directs the human collector. Cut-outs are
who do not know the agent or case officer but transfer messages. A
safe house is a refuge for spies. Spies often seek to obtain secret information from another source.
In larger networks, the organization can be complex with many methods to avoid detection, including clandestine cell systems. Often the players have never met. Case officers are stationed in foreign countries to recruit and supervise intelligence agents,
These agents can be moles (who are recruited before they get access to secrets), Defection (who are recruited after they get access to secrets and leave their country) or defectors in place (who get access but do not leave).
A legend is also employed for an individual who is not an illegal agent, but is an ordinary citizen who is "relocated", for example, a "protected witness". Nevertheless, such a non-agent very likely will also have a case officer who will act as a controller. As in most, if not all synthetic identity schemes, for whatever purpose (illegal or legal), the assistance of a controller is required.
Spies may also be used to spread disinformation in the organization in which they are planted, such as giving false reports about their country's military movements, or about a competing company's ability to bring a product to market. Spies may be given other roles that also require infiltration, such as sabotage.
Many governments spy on their allies as well as their enemies, although they typically maintain a policy of not commenting on this. Governments also employ private companies to collect information on their behalf such as SCG International Risk, International Intelligence Limited and others.
Many organizations, both national and non-national, conduct espionage operations. It should not be assumed that espionage is always directed at the most secret operations of a target country. National and terrorist organizations and other groups are also targeted.
Communications both are necessary to espionage and clandestine operations, and also a great vulnerability when the adversary has sophisticated SIGINT detection and interception capability. Spies rely on COVCOM or covert communication through technically advanced spy devices.
Industrial espionage
Industrial espionage, also known as
economic espionage,
corporate spying, or
corporate espionage, is a form of espionage conducted for
Commerce purposes instead of purely national security.
While political espionage is conducted or orchestrated by governments and is international in scope, industrial or corporate espionage is more often national and occurs between companies or
Corporation. It may include the acquisition of intellectual property, such as information on industrial manufacture, ideas, techniques and processes, recipes and formulas. Or it could include sequestration of proprietary or operational information, such as that on customer datasets, pricing, sales, marketing, research and development, policies, prospective bids, planning or marketing strategies or the changing compositions and locations of production. It may describe activities such as theft of
trade secrets,
bribery,
blackmail and technological surveillance. As well as orchestrating espionage on commercial organizations, governments can also be targets – for example, to determine the terms of a tender for a government contract.
Reportedly Canada is losing $12 billion[" Defectors say China running 1,000 spies in Canada". CBC News. June 15, 2005.] and Germany companies are estimated to be losing about €50 billion ($87 billion) and 30,000 jobs[" Beijing's spies cost German firms billions, says espionage expert". The Sydney Morning Herald. July 25, 2009.] to industrial espionage every year.
Agents in espionage
In espionage jargon, an "agent" is the person who does the spying. They may be a citizen of a country recruited by that country to spy on another; a citizen of a country recruited by that country to carry out
false flag assignments disrupting his own country; a citizen of one country who is recruited by a second country to spy on or work against his own country or a third country, and more.
In popular usage, this term is sometimes confused with an intelligence officer, intelligence operative, or case officer who recruits and handles agents.
Among the most common forms of agent are:
-
Agent provocateur: instigates trouble or provides information to gather as many people as possible into one location for an arrest.
-
Intelligence agent: provides access to sensitive information through the use of special privileges. If used in corporate intelligence gathering, this may include gathering information of a corporate business venture or stock portfolio. In economic intelligence, "Economic Analysts may use their specialized skills to analyze and interpret economic trends and developments, assess and track foreign financial activities, and develop new econometric and modelling methodologies."
[Cia.gov] This may also include information of trade or tariff.
-
Agent-of-influence: provides political influence in an area of interest, possibly including Propaganda needed to further an intelligence service agenda.
-
Double agent: engages in clandestine activity for two intelligence or security services (or more in joint operations), who provides information about one or about each to the other, and who wittingly withholds significant information from one on the instructions of the other or is unwittingly manipulated by one so that significant facts are withheld from the adversary. , fabricators, and others who work for themselves rather than a service are not double agents because they are not agents. The fact that double agents have an agent relationship with both sides distinguishes them from penetrations, who normally are placed with the target service in a staff or officer capacity."
-
Re-doubled agent: forced to mislead the foreign intelligence service after being caught as a double agent.
-
Unwitting double agent: offers or is forced to recruit as a double or redoubled agent and in the process is recruited by either a third-party intelligence service or his own government without the knowledge of the intended target intelligence service or the agent. This can be useful in capturing important information from an agent that is attempting to seek allegiance with another country. The double agent usually has knowledge of both intelligence services and can identify operational techniques of both, thus making third-party recruitment difficult or impossible. The knowledge of operational techniques can also affect the relationship between the operations officer (or case officer) and the agent if the case is transferred by an operational targeting officer] to a new operations officer, leaving the new officer vulnerable to attack. This type of transfer may occur when an officer has completed his term of service or when his cover is blown.
-
Triple agent: works for three intelligence services.
-
Fabricator: used to spread disinformation.
-
Sleeper agent: recruited to wake up and perform a specific set of tasks or functions while living undercover in an area of interest. This type of agent is not the same as a deep cover operative, who continually contacts a case officer to file intelligence reports. A sleeper agent is not in contact with anyone until activated.
Less common or lesser known forms of agent include:
-
Access agent: provides access to other potential agents by providing offender profiling information that can help lead to recruitment into an intelligence service.
-
Confusion agent: provides misleading information to an enemy intelligence service or attempts to discredit the operations of the target in an operation.
-
Facilities agent: provides access to buildings, such as garages or offices used for Staging area operations, resupply, etc.
-
Illegal agent: lives in another country under false credentials and does not report to a local station. A nonofficial cover operative can be dubbed an "illegal"
[ Illegal Mi5.gov. "How spies operate".] when working in another country without diplomatic protection.
-
Principal agent: functions as a Agent handling for an established network of agents, usually considered "blue chip".
Law
Espionage against a nation is a crime under the
legal code of many world states.
Espionage law in the United States
In the United States, it is covered by the Espionage Act of 1917. The risks of espionage vary. A spy violating the host country's laws may be deported, imprisoned, or even executed. A spy violating its own country's laws can be imprisoned for espionage or/and
treason (which in the United States and some other jurisdictions can only occur if they take up arms or aids the enemy against their own country during wartime), or even executed, as the
Rosenbergs were. For example, when
Aldrich Ames handed a stack of dossiers of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents in the
Eastern Bloc to his KGB-officer "handler", the KGB "rolled up" several networks, and at least ten people were secretly shot. When Ames was arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), he faced life in prison; his contact, who had diplomatic immunity, was declared
persona non grata and taken to the airport. Ames' wife was threatened with life imprisonment if her husband did not cooperate; he did, and she was given a five-year sentence. Hugh Francis Redmond, a CIA officer in China, spent nineteen years in a Chinese prison for espionage—and died there—as he was operating without diplomatic cover and immunity.
In United States law, treason,[ treason ] espionage,[ spying ] are separate crimes. Treason and espionage have graduated punishment levels.
The United States in World War I passed the Espionage Act of 1917. Over the years, many spies, such as the Soble spy ring, Robert Lee Johnson, the Rosenberg ring, Aldrich Hazen Ames,
In modern times, many people convicted of espionage have been given penal sentences rather than execution. For example, Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American CIA analyst, turned KGB mole, who was convicted of espionage in 1994; he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the high-security Allenwood U.S. Penitentiary.[ (Search result)] Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence officer and analyst who committed espionage against his country by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.
Use against non-spies
Espionage laws are also used to prosecute non-spies. In the United States, the Espionage Act of 1917 was used against socialist politician Eugene V. Debs (at that time the Act had much stricter guidelines and amongst other things banned speech against military recruiting). The law was later used to suppress publication of periodicals, for example of
Father Coughlin in World War II. In the early 21st century, the act was used to prosecute
such as Thomas Andrews Drake,
John Kiriakou, and
Edward Snowden, as well as officials who communicated with journalists for innocuous reasons, such as Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.
[See the article on John Kiriakou]
, India and Pakistan were holding several hundred prisoners of each other's country for minor violations like trespass or visa overstay, often with accusations of espionage attached. Some of these include cases where Pakistan and India both deny citizenship to these people, leaving them statelessness. The BBC reported in 2012 on one such case, that of Mohammed Idrees, who was held under Indian police control for approximately 13 years for overstaying his 15-day visa by 2–3 days after seeing his ill parents in 1999. Much of the 13 years were spent in prison waiting for a hearing, and more time was spent homeless or living with generous families. The Indian People's Union for Civil Liberties and Human Rights Law Network both decried his treatment. The BBC attributed some of the problems to tensions caused by the Kashmir conflict.[ Your World: The Nowhere Man , Rupa Jha, October 21, 2012, BBC (retrieved 2012-10-20) (Program link: The Nowhere Man)]
Espionage law in the UK
From ancient times, the penalty for espionage in many countries was execution. This was true right up until the era of World War II; for example,
Josef Jakobs was a Nazi spy who parachuted into Great Britain in 1941 and was executed for espionage.
Espionage is illegal in the UK under the National Security Act 2023, which repealed prior Official Secrets Acts and creates three separate offences for espionage. A person is liable to be imprisoned for life for committing an offence under Section 1 of the Act, or 14 years for an offence under Sections 2 and 3
Government intelligence law and its distinction from espionage
Government intelligence is very much distinct from espionage, and is not illegal in the UK, providing that the organisations of individuals are registered, often with the ICO, and are acting within the restrictions of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). 'Intelligence' is considered legally as "information of all sorts gathered by a government or organisation to guide its decisions. It includes information that may be both public and private, obtained from much different public or secret sources. It could consist entirely of information from either publicly available or secret sources, or be a combination of the two."
However, espionage and intelligence can be linked. According to the MI5 website, "foreign intelligence officers acting in the UK under diplomatic cover may enjoy immunity from prosecution. Such persons can only be tried for spying (or, indeed, any criminal offence) if diplomatic immunity is waived beforehand. Those officers operating without diplomatic cover have no such immunity from prosecution".
There are also laws surrounding government and organisational intelligence and surveillance. Generally, the body involved should be issued with some form of warrant or permission from the government and should be enacting their procedures in the interest of protecting national security or the safety of public citizens. Those carrying out intelligence missions should act within not only RIPA but also the Data Protection Act and Human Rights Act. However, there are spy equipment laws and legal requirements around intelligence methods that vary for each form of intelligence enacted.
Military intelligence and military justice
In war, espionage is considered permissible as many nations recognize the inevitability of opposing sides seeking intelligence each about the dispositions of the other. To make the mission easier and successful,
wear
to conceal their true identity from the enemy while penetrating enemy lines for intelligence gathering. However, if they are caught behind enemy lines in disguises, they are not entitled to
prisoner-of-war status and subject to
prosecution and punishment—including
execution.
The Hague Convention of 1907 addresses the status of wartime spies, specifically within "Laws and Customs of War on Land" (Hague IV); October 18, 1907: Chapter II Spies".
The ones that are excluded from being treated as spies while behind enemy lines are escaping prisoners of war and downed airmen as international law distinguishes between a disguised spy and a disguised escaper.
Sabotage are treated as spies as they too wear disguises behind enemy lines for the purpose of waging destruction on an enemy's vital targets in addition to intelligence gathering.
The U.S. codification of enemy spies is Article 106 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This provides a mandatory death sentence if a person captured in the act is proven to be "lurking as a spy or acting as a spy in or about any place, vessel, or aircraft, within the control or jurisdiction of any of the armed forces, or in or about any shipyard, any manufacturing or industrial plant, or any other place or institution engaged in work in aid of the prosecution of the war by the United States, or elsewhere".
Spy fiction
Spies have long been favorite topics for novelists and filmmakers.
[Brett F. Woods, Neutral Ground: A Political History of Espionage Fiction (2008) online ] An early example of espionage literature is
Kim by the English novelist
Rudyard Kipling, with a description of the training of an intelligence agent in the
Great Game between the UK and
Russia in 19th century
Central Asia. An even earlier work was James Fenimore Cooper's classic novel,
The Spy, written in 1821, about an American spy in New York during the Revolutionary War.
During the many 20th-century spy scandals, much information became publicly known about national spy agencies and dozens of real-life secret agents. These sensational stories piqued public interest in a profession largely off-limits to human interest news reporting, a natural consequence of the secrecy inherent in their work. To fill in the blanks, the popular conception of the secret agent has been formed largely by 20th and 21st-century fiction and film. Attractive and sociable real-life agents such as Valerie Plame find little employment in serious fiction, however. The fictional secret agent is more often a loner, sometimes amoral—an existentialism hero operating outside the everyday constraints of society. Loner spy personalities may have been a stereotype of convenience for authors who already knew how to write loner private investigator characters that sold well from the 1920s to the present.[Miller, Toby, Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2003).]
Johnny Fedora achieved popularity as a fictional agent of early Cold War espionage, but James Bond is the most commercially successful of the many spy characters created by intelligence insiders during that struggle. Other fictional agents include Le Carré's George Smiley, and Harry Palmer as played by Michael Caine.
Jumping on the spy bandwagon, other writers also started writing about spy fiction featuring female spies as protagonists, such as The Baroness, which has more graphic action and sex, as compared to other novels featuring male protagonists.
Spy fiction has permeated the video game world as well, in games such as Perfect Dark, GoldenEye 007, , Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and the Metal Gear.
Espionage has also made its way into comedy depictions. The 1960s TV series Get Smart, the 1983 Finnish film Agent 000 and the Deadly Curves, and Johnny English film trilogy portrays an inept spy, while the 1985 movie Spies Like Us depicts a pair of none-too-bright men sent to the Soviet Union to investigate a missile.
The historical novel The Emperor and the Spy highlights the adventurous life of U.S. Colonel Sidney Mashbir, who during the 1920s and 1930s attempted to prevent war with Japan, and when war did erupt, he became General MacArthur's top advisor in the Pacific Theater of World War Two.
Black Widow is also a fictional agent who was introduced as a spy, an antagonist of the superhero Iron Man. She later became an agent of the fictional spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and a member of the superhero team the Avengers.
Real espionage is actually quite boring work.
See also
-
American espionage in China
-
Central Intelligence Agency
-
Chinese espionage in the United States
-
Clandestine operation
-
Cover (intelligence gathering)
-
Covert operation
-
Detective
-
Federal Bureau of Investigation
-
Foreign agent
-
History of Soviet espionage
-
Human intelligence (intelligence gathering)
-
Intelligence assessment
-
James Gannon (author)
-
List of intelligence agencies
-
List of intelligence gathering disciplines
-
MI5
-
Military intelligence
-
Secret identity
-
Secret service
-
Sleeper agent
-
Special agent
-
Spying on United Nations leaders by United States diplomats
-
Undercover operation
Citations
Works cited
Further reading
-
Aldrich, Richard J., and Christopher Andrew, eds. Secret Intelligence: A Reader (2nd ed. 2018); focus on the 21st century; reprints 30 essays by scholars. excerpt
-
Andrew, Christopher, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, 2018.
-
Burnham, Frederick Russell, Taking Chances, 1944.
-
Felix, Christopher pseudonym A Short Course in the Secret War, 4th Edition. Madison Books, November 19, 2001.
-
Friedman, George. America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between the United States and Its Enemies 2005
-
Adam Gopnik, "Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy: How valuable is espionage?", The New Yorker, 2 September 2019, pp. 53–59. "There seems to be a paranoid paradox of espionage: the better your intelligence, the dumber your conduct; the more you know, the less you anticipate.... Hard-won information is ignored or wildly misinterpreted.... It happens again and again that a seeming national advance in intelligence is squandered through cross-bred confusion, political rivalry, mutual bureaucratic suspicions, intergovernmental competition, and fear of the press (as well as leaks to the press), all seasoned with dashes of sexual jealousy and adulterous intrigue." (p. 54.)
-
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. In Spies, We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (2013), covers U.S. and Britain
-
Jenkins, Peter. Surveillance Tradecraft: The Professional's Guide to Surveillance Training
-
Kahn, David, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, 1996 revised edition. First published 1967.
-
John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, 2003.
-
Knightley, Phillip, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, Norton, 1986.
-
Paul Krugman, "The American Way of Economic war: Is Washington Overusing Its Most Powerful Weapons?" (review of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Henry Holt, 2023, 288 pp.), Foreign Affairs, vol. 103, no. 1 (January/February 2024), pp. 150–156. "The U.S. dollar is one of the few currencies that almost all major banks will accept, and... the most widely used... As a result, the dollar is the currency that many companies must use... to do international business." (p. 150.) "Local banks facilitating that trade... normally... buy U.S. dollars and then use dollars to buy another. To do so, however, the banks must have access to the U.S. financial system and... follow rules laid out by Washington." (pp. 151–152.) "But there is another, lesser-known reason why the U.S. commands overwhelming economic power. Most of the world's fiber-optic cables, which carry data and messages around the planet, travel through the United States." (p. 152.) "The U.S. government has installed 'splitters': prisms that divide the beams of light carrying information into two streams. One... goes on to the intended recipients, ... the other goes to the National Security Agency, which then uses high-powered computation to analyze the data. As a result, the U.S. can monitor almost all international communication." (p. 154) This has allowed the U.S. "to effectively cut Iran out of the world financial system... Iran's economy stagnated... Eventually, Tehran agreed to cut back its nuclear reactor programs in exchange for relief." (pp. 153–154.) "A few years ago, American officials... were in a panic about the Huawei... which... seemed poised to supply 5G equipment to much of the planet thereby giving China the power to eavesdrop on the rest of the world – just as the U.S. has done.... The U.S. learned that Huawei had been dealing surreptitiously with Iran – and therefore violating U.S. sanctions. Then, it... used its special access to information on international bank data to show that Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou (... the founder's daughter), had committed bank fraud by falsely telling the British financial services company HSBC that her company was not doing business with Iran. Canadian authorities, acting on a U.S. request, arrested her... in December 2018. After... almost three years under house arrest... Meng... was allowed to return to China... But by then the prospects for Chinese dominance of 5G had vanished..." (pp. 154–155.) Farrell and Newman, writes Krugman, "are worried about the possibility of U.S. overreach. If the U.S. weaponizes the dollar against too many countries, they might... band together and adopt alternative methods of international payment. If countries become deeply worried about U.S. spying, they could lay fiber-optic cables that bypass the U.S.. And if Washington puts too many restrictions on American exports, foreign firms might turn away from U.S. technology." (p. 155.)
-
Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth & K. Lee Lerner, eds. Terrorism: essential primary sources Thomas Gale 2006
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Lerner, K. Lee and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, eds. Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security (2003), worldwide recent coverage 1100 pages.
-
May, Ernest R. (ed.). Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars (1984).
-
O'Toole, George. Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA 1991
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Murray, Williamson, and Allan Reed Millett, eds. Calculations: net assessment and the coming of World War II (1992).
-
Owen, David. Hidden Secrets: A Complete History of Espionage and the Technology Used to Support It
-
Richelson, Jeffery T. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (1977)
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Richelson, Jeffery T. The U.S. Intelligence Community (1999, fourth edition)
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Shaw, Tamsin, "Ethical Espionage" (review of Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, Simon and Schuster, 2023, 672 pp.; and Cécile Fabre, Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 251 pp., 2024), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 2 (8 February 2024), pp. 32, 34–35. "In Walton's view, there was scarcely a US covert operation that was a long-term strategic success, with the possible exception of intervention in the Soviet–Afghan War (a disastrous military fiasco for the Soviet Union) and perhaps support for the anti-Soviet Solidarity movement in Poland." (p. 34.)
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Smith, W. Thomas Jr. Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency (2003)
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Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram, New York, Macmillan, 1962.
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Warner, Michael. The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (2014)
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Zegart, Amy B. Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (2022), university textbook. online reviews
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