In global intelligence, you also spy on friends

In a 2004 TV interview, spy novelist John Le Carre summed up the murky world of intelligence thus: the global intelligence community is a ‘trading pit’ for secrets, open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, on every continent.

In that global marketplace, everything and anything goes. While nothing prevents individual security agencies from spying on enemies, nothing prevents friendly intelligence services from spying on each other too. So, former CIA contractor and NSA employee Edward Snowden’s claim that Britain and the US spied on some friendly countries should not outrage us.

Those who express indignation that these democratic countries could spy on ‘friends’ like Turkey and Russia are either naïve or live in a utopian world. There is nothing good and evil about spies and there is no legality or morality in espionage which, like trade and commerce, medicine and engineering, transcends the political constraints of international borders.

According to two former CIA officers, Daniel Silver and Frederick Hitz, there is something ‘oxymoronic’ about addressing the legality and morality of espionage.

The paradox of intelligence is based on the principle that while the core of espionage is deceit and treachery, the core of international law is mutual respect and decency. But espionage is beyond the scope of the legal because it takes place in the shadows of international law and treaties.

A few years ago, I was shocked to learn that a retired senior IB officer had for years maintained a trunk-load of black-and-white photographs of almost every single KGB officer who set foot in Calcutta in the ‘70s.

The KGB was a friendly secret service, but the IB thought it prudent to keep a watchful eye on the aggressive KGB intelligence officers. Spying or withholding information among friendly intelligence services was not unknown in the west during the Cold War.

In Spycatcher, Peter Wright, who was an MI5 Techint officer, writes that when his agency knew it would be difficult to test the efficacy of a new SIGINT asset on the Russians, the British security service and the Cheltenham-based Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) tried to “break” the cipher machine at the French embassy in London.

During the Clinton era, the CIA was instructed to launch economic espionage against British and French companies. On another occasion, Wright says, MI5 concealed a SIGINTwonder, called Rafter, from the CIA, which in turn, told the British “next to nothing about the state of their technical intelligence.” This, despite a UK-USA agreement which expressly specified that there should be complete exchange of SIGINTbetween the National Security Agency and the GCHQ.

In the ’80s, the Mossad recruited Jonathan Pollard, a US civilian intelligence man, who passed classified information to Mossad. Enemies also make deals with enemies. The Syrians cooperated with the CIA in the rendition programme, involving aggressive interrogation of Al-Qaeda suspects.

Earlier, in the ‘80s, there was the infamous Iran-Contra affair. Closer home, even after India and the US agreed on a ‘strategic partnership’, the CIA ran a senior officer of the RAW, Ravinder Singh, who subsequently defected to the US in May 2004.

At least on one occasion in the early ‘90s, American counter-intelligence officers successfully identified a RAW officer, relative of a former chief, who had landed at Washington DC’s Dulles airport under an assumed name, before confronting him with the fact and later, as suspected at RAW headquarters in Delhi, he was successfully “turned around” to work for US intelligence.

In the mid-‘90s, the CIA spied on officers of the Drug Enforcement Administration operating out of Burma. The list of friendly intelligence services spying on each other is seemingly endless.

Foreign policy and intelligence gathering are not ‘ideal things’ in a world in which states pursue objectives based on self-interest. Countries that have been targets of friendly intelligence agencies have usually swallowed their injured pride and moved on.

India has done so without even a whimper of protest against the Americans or the Russians; and so will Turkey and Russia. Foreign policy based on so-called trust does not change the reality of espionage.

(The author is senior assistant editor, The Times of India)