2. The Spy’s Lot
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
It’s no secret that spies aren’t always saints—even when doing good, they can cross ethical boundaries. But when a spy agency’s secrets are exposed, pretty much anything they get up to looks bad, and it can be very difficult to remind everyone why we need them at all. When the curtain is drawn back on spooks’ activities, the public tends to lap it up. We’re getting a glimpse into what we’re not meant to know, like seeing how a magician performs their tricks.
The danger is that this fascination can seem justification enough for secrets to be revealed. Most people understand that espionage involves deception, and that we can’t expect our intelligence agencies to gather information on our enemies by simply asking them what they’re doing, so instead must resort to other means: recruiting assets, pretending to be people they aren’t, and all the rest. As long as the aim of this is to gather intelligence on our enemies, we accept this as necessary.
Intellectually, we might know that espionage is often justified and extremely important, but the thrill of discovering how it’s done can blind us to that, especially because to deceive people nowadays, and to deceive terrorist cells and other spies, our intelligence operatives are being much sneakier than we could possibly have imagined. So the complexity of their techniques can seem bewildering, shocking—and de facto wrong.
But the significant point ethically is not how they do it, but why they do it. As long as they are trying to extract intelligence needed for the security of our country—and it doesn’t needlessly invade people’s privacy—it doesn’t make any difference if the method is simply to swipe a USB drive filled with Russian passwords, as we’re used to seeing in Hollywood thrillers, the seconds counting down as the hourglass icons hangs on the screen and the footsteps in the corridor outside grow louder, or if they’ve set up an entire fake cyber-cafe to lure in surveillance targets.
This strange concoction of emotions, where readers are fascinated to learn how spies operate and at the same time are shocked that they behave in such ways and feel it must be wrong regardless of the intentions or success of these activities, isn’t new to the Snowden affair. It happened in Britain with Peter Wright and his memoir Spycatcher, and with David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson. All three were disgruntled British intelligence officers who did their best to paint MI5 and MI6 in the blackest light they could. Many of these revelations were spurious or exaggerated, but the agencies had very little comeback: who would believe the spooks?
So unfortunately, we tend to be interested in reading about top secret information even if it’s a leak from our own side, and it’s all too easy to forget or dismiss that people’s lives may depend on it. I’d personally find it fascinating to read all of the CIA’s and MI6’s operational documents from the last fifty years, but my interest doesn’t mean they should all be declassified. As is frequently pointed out but more frequently ignored, public interest doesn’t mean ‘what the public is interested in’.
To give an example, one of the most important spies of the Cold War was Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence who passed reams of classified material to the CIA and MI6 in the early Sixties. His intelligence is widely credited as having been instrumental in forestalling a nuclear conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But in 1961 someone with access to material about the operation might have been shocked by some of the practices involved in it: Penkovsky’s intelligence was so highly valued that MI6 and the CIA went to great lengths to keep him sweet, even going so far as to arrange for prostitutes for him. One can easily imagine a leak of this distasteful fact to an enterprising reporter, who could then have splashed their scoop all over the Guardian or the New York Times. ‘British And US Intelligence Buy Prostitutes For Soviet Asset’ would be a juicy headline, and lots of people would have been outraged by such an exposé. But the lapse in scruples is miniscule when placed against the wider scheme of things, and had the operation been exposed in the Western press in such a way, the KGB would have launched an immediate enquiry and might have identified Penkovsky sooner than they did as a result—and I might not be here writing this nor you reading it.
I’m not suggesting that all the revelations from the Snowden documents have been as small beer as that indiscretion—but I think some have been, and a few haven’t been indiscretions at all. And the principle is the same: in exposing a wrongdoing one might in the process traipse into exposing legitimate and even very valuable activities and methods.
The rise of the Islamic State and Russia’s invasion of Crimea have both put into stark relief the fact that, although it is clear surveillance practices have overstepped the mark in several areas that endanger civil liberties, we still very much need our intelligence agencies. One hopes further events won’t make that clearer, but if they do that will likely be a result of our intelligence agencies not doing enough rather than doing too much.
And let’s not be complacent about what is at stake here. A common argument I’ve seen on social media is that Snowden’s disclosures can’t have caused damage because those who could benefit from knowing about these techniques would have already known about them and taken measures to avoid them. This doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Firstly, there’s no way of knowing that every cyber-criminal, terrorist or person with ill intentions against the United States and its citizens already knew about each revelation. Such people take security measures into greater consideration than the average person, naturally, but that doesn’t afford them clairvoyance into the every movement of the NSA, GCHQ or other agencies whose methods and activities have been revealed. If everything these agencies do or consider is known to their targets, both agencies might as well pack up and go home.
If it were the case that the Bad Guys know about everything already, leaving these agencies only to spy on Us Good Guys, no terrorists or cyber-criminals’ plots would have been foiled, and the American administration would be spending an enormous budget thinking up operations and schemes that have no chance of working because they have already been guessed at by the targets. And yet the documents contain numerous instances of NSA staff noting that this or that method had yielded useful intelligence.
Common sense suggests a far more likely scenario: that prior to the Snowden disclosures there was a range of knowledge among bad actors of what the NSA can do. Perhaps some of their methods were suspected—but confirmation in black and white could nevertheless prove useful.
One of the clearest examples of this is The Guardian’s story revealing that in 2009 the NSA, working with GCHQ, had spied on the then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev when he’d visited London for the G20 summit.[1]
There was no public interest in revealing this, and it could only really have caused national security and/or diplomatic damage, even if it were minor. Bizarrely, The Guardian effectively acknowledged the damage the exposure they’d chosen to pursue would likely cause:
‘While it has been widely known the two countries spy on each other, it is rare for either to be caught in the act; the latest disclosures will also be deeply embarrassing for the White House as Obama prepares to meet Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Medvedev as president, in the margins of the G8 summit this week.’[2]
The Guardian seems to have been under the impression that this was activity worth exposing in the public interest because the NSA was operating on British soil:
‘The new revelations underline the significance of RAF Menwith Hill and raise questions about its relationship to the British intelligence agencies, and who is responsible for overseeing it. The 560-acre site was leased to the Americans in 1954 and the NSA has had a large presence there since 1966.’[3]
The UK and the US are close allies, and the NSA and GCHQ working in tandem to intercept communications such as this has been standard for decades and isn’t evidence of wrongdoing. Both are part of Five Eyes, and the article indicates the intelligence was shared within that group. It might say something about the relative power dynamic that the US has intelligence officers operating with Brits in the UK like this, but that’s simply common knowledge: it was a theme in John le Carré novels three decades ago. The fact that the NSA has been at Menwith Hill since 1966 is a clue that this isn’t news.
As for who’s responsible for overseeing such activities, an article published by The Guardian the same day on this and other attempts to intercept communications at that summit seems to provide an answer:
‘The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.’[4]
That second article mentions that the NSA and GCHQ were trying to intercept communications of diplomats from ‘long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey’ and that it wasn’t to stop terrorism or nefarious acts but ‘the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings’. There is an ignorance of realpolitik here, and either real or feigned naivety. If the NSA’s remit were only to stop terrorism or nefarious acts, there might be a point. But it isn’t. It’s ‘to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances’.[5] GCHQ’s remit also includes this, and has done since 1994:
‘We are primarily a foreign-focused intelligence agency, with a signals intelligence role that can only be exercised for three limited purposes:
In the interests of national security
In the interests of the economic well-being of the UK
In support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.’[6]