Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.
Alexander Litvinenko’s death is unlikely to be solved for months. There are as many theories about who killed the former KGB officer as there are reporters working on the story. For my money, the circumstantial evidence points to the FSB, who took over the KGB’s role and for whom Litvinenko once worked.
Few organisations have access to Polonium-210. It is made in nuclear reactors, and with a half-life of 138 days cannot be stored; it has to be made to order. It is an almost-perfect murder weapon, although in one sense the murderer was unlucky. If Litvinenko had not died in London where all the facilities existed to detect the Polonium-210, the cause might have remained a mystery. Litvinenko himself was in no doubt. “The bastards got me,” he told a friend.
There are no tanks at Heathrow – yet. There is no ring of troops around London’s financial district – yet. But Britain is on a “heightened” state of alert as police at Paddington Green station continue to question terrorist suspects arrested at gunpoint in raids across the country earlier in the week.
Across the Atlantic, the Americans are on “orange” (the second highest) alert as the Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, said new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda planned car or truck bomb attacks on the Citicorp building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington. American banks in London could also be targets.
The furore about Australia’s intelligence community – its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers – is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.
Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.
On the face of it, spying should be easy. You go out into the world and try to uncover dangers that threaten your nation. You recruit agents, bribe and blackmail people in the know, put all this into a report, give it a reliability assessment and then hope that it makes its way to someone with the power to act on it.
It’s a sexy, well paid job, certainly not nine to five, with a reasonable pension and, like the mafia, secret recognition from those in the know. There are downsides: lots of moral dilemmas, the shame of using people, bitter bureaucratic infighting and the constant nagging doubt about whether it makes any difference to the bigger picture.
Poor old James Bond has had a terrible thrashing this week. First former British ambassador Sir Peter Heap accused Bond and his colleagues in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) of being useless spies who frequently made things up. Then the the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) reported that it could find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus underlining a fundamental failure of intelligence and removing at a stroke Britain’s justification for going to war.
James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the government, revealed by the Hutton Inquiry, are–for better or worse –here to stay.
Intelligence bureaucracies such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency have traditionally seen their role as identifying monsters. Their officers go out into the world, keep their eyes and ears open and return with warnings for their masters of threats to the well-being of the nation they serve.
If you go to the opera you risk being taken hostage. If you go on holiday you might be blown up. If you stop for petrol you could be shot by a sniper. Open a letter – does it contain anthrax? What’s going on these days? Where will the next outrage be? People feel a sense of unease and a loss of innocence. Safer and happier times, they believe, are now gone for ever. But is life really more dangerous, or are we becoming wimps?
At the height of the Cold War, even the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union had one good word to say about the Communists. They were hot on law and order. Moscow was one of the safest cities in the world, especially for foreign visitors. There were no muggers, there was no street crime, and there was great civic pride. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the truth emerge: Moscow was actually one of the world’s more dangerous cities. Visitors thought it was safe because the Communist authorities simply suppressed the crime statistics that showed otherwise. It was all a matter of perception. People perceived Moscow to be safe, therefore it was.
In the middle of the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to President Kennedy and gave him the bad news. The Cuban-exile troops were trapped on the beach. Kennedy would have to reverse his public pledge and openly introduce American air and naval power if the invasion to topple Castro were to succeed.
Kennedy’s reaction was interesting. He did not say, as he well might have, that he could not risk such a move because it would provoke Moscow. Instead he was inclined to agree to protect his public image. He said he would “rather be called an aggressor than a bum.”
