Espionage or spying involves a government or individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it is known that the information is in unauthorized hands.
Espionage is usually part of an institutional effort by a government or corporation, and the term is most readily associated with state spying on potential or actual enemies primarily for military purposes. Spying involving corporations is known as industrial espionage.
One of the most effective ways to gather data and information about an enemy (or potential enemy) is by infiltrating the enemy's ranks. This is the job of the spy (espionage agent). Spies can bring back all sorts of information concerning the size and strength of an enemy army. They can also find dissidents within the enemy's forces and influence them to defect. In times of crisis, spies can also be used to steal technology and to sabotage the enemy in various ways. Counterintelligence operatives can feed false information to enemy spies, protecting important domestic secrets and preventing attempts at subversion. Nearly every society has very strict laws concerning espionage, and the penalty for being caught is often severe. However, the benefits that can be gained through espionage are generally felt to outweigh the risks.
Further information on clandestine HUMINT (human intelligence) information collection techniques is available, including discussions of operational techniques, asset recruiting and the tradecraft used to collect this information.
Events involving espionage are well documented throughout history. The ancient writings of Chinese and Indian military strategists such as Sun-Tzu and Chanakya contain information on deception and subversion. Chanakya's student Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Maurya Empire in India, made use of assassinations, spies and secret agents, which are described in Chanakya's Arthasastra. The ancient Egyptians had a thoroughly developed system for the acquisition of intelligence, and the Hebrews used spies as well, as in the story of Rahab. Spies were also prevalent in the Greek and Roman empires.[1] During the 13th and 14th centuries, the Mongols relied heavily on espionage in their conquests in Asia and Europe. Feudal Japan often used ninja to gather intelligence. More recently, spies played a significant part in Elizabethan England (see Francis Walsingham). Many modern espionage methods were well established even then.[2] Aztecs used Pochtecas, people in charge of commerce, as spies and diplomats, and had diplomatic immunity.
The Cold War involved intense espionage activity between the United States of America and its allies and the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and their allies, particularly related to nuclear weapons secrets. Recently, espionage agencies have targeted the illegal drug trade and those considered to be terrorists. Since 2008 the United States has charged at least 57 defendants for attempting to spy for China.[3]
Different 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. Both Soviet political (KGB) and military intelligence (GRU[4]) officers were judged by the number of agents they recruited.
Espionage agents are usually trained experts in a specific targeted field. This allows them to differentiate mundane information from a target which has intrinsic value to own organisational development. Correct identification of the target at its execution is the sole purpose of the espionage operation.
The broad areas of espionage targeting expertise are:
While news media may speak of "spy satellites" and the like, espionage is not a synonym for all intelligence functions. It is a specific form of human source intelligence (HUMINT). Codebreaking (cryptanalysis or COMINT), aircraft or satellite photography (IMINT) and research in open publications (OSINT) are all intelligence gathering disciplines, but none of them are espionage. Many HUMINT activities, such as prisoner interrogation, reports from military reconnaissance patrols and from diplomats, etc., are not espionage.
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 subterfuge. There are exceptions to physical meetings, such as the Oslo Report, or the insistence of Robert Hanssen in never meeting the people to whom he was selling information.
The US defines espionage towards itself as "The act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defense 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, 18 U.S.C. §§ 792–798 and Article 106 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice".[5] The United States, like most nations, conducts espionage against other nations, under the control of the National Clandestine Service. Britain's espionage activities are controlled by the Secret Intelligence Service.
A spy is a person employed to obtain such secrets. Within the United States Intelligence Community, "asset" is a more common usage. A case officer, who may have diplomatic status (i.e. official cover or non-official cover), supports and directs the human collector. Cutouts are couriers who do not know the agent or case officer, but transfer messages. A safe house is a refuge for spies.
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 to supervise intelligence agents, who in turn spy on targets in their countries where they are assigned. A spy need not be a citizen of the target country. While the more common practice is to recruit a person already trusted with access to sensitive information, sometimes a person with a well-prepared synthetic identity, called a Legend in tradecraft, may attempt to infiltrate a target organization.
These agents can be moles (who are recruited before they get access to secrets), defectors (who are recruited after they get access to secrets and leave their country) or defectors in place (who get access but do not leave).
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 routinely 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 and others.
Reportedly Canada is losing $12 billion[6] and German companies are estimated to be losing about €50 billion ($87 billion) and 30,000 jobs[7] to industrial espionage every year.
In espionage jargon, an agent refers to the person who does the spying; a citizen of one country who is recruited by a second country to spy on or work against his own country. In popular usage, this term is often erroneously applied to a member of an intelligence service who recruits and handles agents; in espionage such a person is referred to as an intelligence officer or case officer. There are several types of agent in use today.
Espionage is a crime under the legal code of many nations. The risks of espionage vary. A spy breaking the host country's laws may be deported, imprisoned, or even executed. A spy breaking his/her own country's laws can be imprisoned for espionage or/and treason, or even executed, as the Rosenbergs were. For example, when Aldrich Ames handed a stack of dossiers of 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 FBI, he faced life in prison; his contact, who had diplomatic immunity, was declared persona non grata and taken to the airport. Ames's 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.
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 targets.
Communications both are necessary to espionage and clandestine operations, and also a great vulnerability when the adversary has sophisticated SIGINT detection and interception capability. Agents must also transfer money securely.
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,[11] Robert Philip Hanssen,[12] Jonathan Pollard, John Anthony Walker, James Hall III, and others have been prosecuted under this law.
However 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. It was later used to suppress publication of periodicals, for example of Father Coughlin in WWII. In the early 21st century, the act was used to prosecute officials who communicated with US journalists, such as Thomas Andrews Drake and Stephen Jin-Woo Kim[13]
George Adams
One of the innovations in the American Civil War was the use of proprietary companies for intelligence collection. See Allan Pinkerton.
Dutch professor Snouck Hurgronje world leading authority on Islam was a proponent of espionage to quell Muslim resistance in Aceh in the Dutch East Indies. In his role as Colonial Advisor of Oriental affairs he gathered intelligence under the name "Haji Abdul Ghaffar".
His knowledge of Islamic and Aceh culture enabled him to devise strategies which significantly helped crush the resistance of the Aceh inhabitants and impose Dutch colonial rule on them, ending the 40 year Aceh War with varying casualty estimates of between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants dead and about a million wounded.
Informants were common in World War II. In November 1939, the German Hans Ferdinand Mayer sent what is called the Oslo Report to inform the British of German technology and projects in an effort to undermine the Nazi regime. The Réseau AGIR was a French network developed after the fall of France that reported the start of construction of V-weapon installations in Occupied France to the British.
Counterespionage included the use of turned Double Cross agents to misinform Nazi Germany of impact points during the Blitz and internment of Japanese in the US against "Japan's wartime spy program". Additional WWII espionage examples include Soviet spying on the US Manhattan project, the German Duquesne Spy Ring convicted in the US, and the Soviet Red Orchestra spying on Nazi Germany. The US lacked a specific agency at the start of the war, but quickly formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Spying has sometimes been considered a gentlemanly pursuit, with recruiting focused on military officers, or at least on persons of the class from whom officers are recruited. However, the demand for male soldiers, an increase in women's rights, and the tactical advantages of female spies led the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to set aside any lingering Victorian Era prejudices and begin employing them in April 1942. Their task was to transmit information from Nazi occupied France back to Allied Forces. The main strategic reason was that men in France faced a high risk of being interrogated by Nazi troops but women were less likely to arouse suspicion. In this way they made good couriers and proved equal to, if not more effective than, their male counterparts. Their participation in Organization and Radio Operation was also vital to the success of many operations, including the main network between Paris and London.
In the United States, there are several federal agencies that form the United States Intelligence Community. The Central Intelligence Agency operates a Clandestine Service (NCS)[15] to collect human intelligence and perform Covert operations.[16] The National Security Agency collects Signals Intelligence. Other agencies do similar work. The CIA used to head the IC but after the September 11 attacks a new agency was formed, the Director of National Intelligence, to lead the group.
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 to their work. To fill in the blanks, the popular conception of the secret agent has been formed largely by 20th and 21st century literature and cinema. 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 existential 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.
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. His less fantastic rivals include Le Carre's George Smiley.
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.
Author(s) | Title | Publisher | Date | Notes |
Babington-Smith, Constance | Air Spy: The Story of Photo Intelligence in World War II | - | 1957 | - |
Bryden, John | Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War | Lester | 1993 | - |
Hinsley, F. H. and Alan Stripp | Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park | - | 2001 | - |
Hinsley, F. H. | British Intelligence in the Second World War | - | 1996 | Abridged version of multivolume official history. |
Hohne, Heinz | Canaris: Hitler's Master Spy | - | 1979 | - |
Jones, R. V. | The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945 | - | 1978 | - |
Kahn, David | Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II' | - | 1978 | - |
Kahn, David | Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes, 1939-1943 | - | 1991 | FACE |
Kitson, Simon | The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France | - | 2008 | |
Lewin, Ronald | The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan | - | 1982 | - |
Masterman, J. C. | The Double Cross System in the War of 1935 to 1945 | Yale | 1972 | - |
Persico, Joseph | Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage | - | 2001 | - |
Persico, Joseph | Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey-From the OSS to the CIA | - | 1991 | - |
Ronnie, Art | Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy | - | 1995 | ISBN 1-55750-733-3 |
Sayers, Michael & Albert E. Kahn | Sabotage! The Secret War Against America | - | 1942 | - |
Smith, Richard Harris | OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency | - | 2005 | - |
Stanley, Roy M. | World War II Photo Intelligence | - | 1981 | - |
Wark, Wesley | The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 | - | 1985 | - |
Wark, Wesley | "Cryptographic Innocence: The Origins of Signals Intelligence in Canada in the Second World War" in Journal of Contemporary History 22 | - | 1987 | - |
West, Nigel | Secret War: The Story of SOE, Britain's Wartime Sabotage Organization | - | 1992 | - |
Winterbotham, F. W. | The Ultra Secret | Harper & Row | 1974 | - |
Winterbotham, F. W. | The Nazi Connection | Harper & Row | 1978 | - |
Cowburn, B. | No Cloak No Dagger | Brown, Watson, Ltd. | 1960 | - |
Wohlstetter, Roberta. | Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision | - | 1962 | - |
Author(s) | Title | Publisher | Date | Notes | |
Aldrich, Richard J. | The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence | - | 2002 | - | |
Ambrose, Stephen E. | Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Intelligence Establishment | - | 1981- | - | |
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin | The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB | Basic Books | 1991, 2005 | ISBN 0465003117 | |
Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky | KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev | - | 1990 | - | |
Aronoff, Myron J. | The Spy Novels of John Le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics | - | 1999 | - | |
Bissell, Richard | Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs' | - | 1996 | - | |
Bogle, Lori, ed. | Cold War Espionage and Spying | - | 2001- | essays | |
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin | The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World | - | - | - | |
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin | The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West | Gardners Books | 2000 | ISBN 978-0-14-028487-4 | |
Colella, Jim | My Life as an Italian Mafioso Spy | - | 2000 | - | |
Craig, R. Bruce | Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter Spy Case | University Press of Kansas | 2004 | ISBN 978-0-7006-1311-3 | |
Dorril, Stephen | MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service | - | 2000 | - | |
Dziak, John J. | Chekisty: A History of the KGB | - | 1988 | - | |
Gates, Robert M. | From The Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story Of Five Presidents And How They Won The Cold War' | - | 1997 | - | |
Frost, Mike and Michel Gratton | Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments | Doubleday Canada | 1994 | - | |
Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr | Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America | - | 1999 | - | |
Helms, Richard | A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency | - | 2003 | - | |
Koehler, John O. | Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police' | - | 1999 | - | |
Persico, Joseph | Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey-From the OSS to the CIA | - | 1991 | - | |
Murphy, David E., Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey | Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War | - | 1997 | - | |
Prados, John | Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II | - | 1996 | - | |
Rositzke, Harry. | The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Action | - | 1988 | - | |
Srodes, James | Allen Dulles: Master of Spies | Regnery | 2000 | CIA head to 1961 | |
Sontag Sherry, and Christopher Drew | Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espinonage | Harper | 1998 | ||
Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies and Secret Operations | Greenwood Press/Questia | 2004 | - |
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