The Washington Post’s compelling three-part series on “Top Secret America” has become the topic of water cooler conversation all over the country.  The series portrays a mysterious and murky world of government agencies and contractors that is growing like kudzu and draining our pocket books, unconstrained by meaningful oversight.  This is a world of silence and secrecy, a world of office buildings with no signs on them, a world of impenetrable Oakley sunglasses and lie detectors.

Reading the “Top Secret America” series and looking back on my years inside that world, I am struck by what we might call the banality of secrecy.  There are not many James Bonds or for that matter Fox Mulders here.  These Americans may have a “haunted look” that betrays a fear that “someone is going to ask them something about themselves,” as one Maryland resident who lives on the borderlands of Top Secret America put it, but other than that they are relentlessly normal people.  They are food service workers, police officers, van drivers, mechanics, computer techs, soldiers, and harried professionals who sit behind computers in offices reminiscent of Dunder Mifflin.  They lean Red or Blue, they have mortgages, belong to the PTA, follow the NFL and NASCAR, and hold backyard cookouts.  Americans have a healthy suspicion of government and much that goes with it.  Americans also look askance at secrecy, but it is important to remember that these Top Secret Americans are just like the rest of us.  In fact, they are us.

It is entirely reasonable to ask, however, whether Top Secret America needs to be so big.  The answer is probably no.  According to the Post, there are 854,000 people in the top secret intelligence and security complex producing 50,000 intelligence reports per year at the cost of many tens of billions of dollars.  Existing contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, L3 Communications, and SAIC, are ballooning and new companies are sprouting like mushrooms.  “Competitive analysis” is a good thing, all other things being equal, more eyes on a problem are better than fewer, but surely some belt tightening is in order.

How did Top Secret America become a “hidden world, growing beyond control?”  There are two answers to this question.  First, the US Government, in the absence of good information, almost certainly overreacted and overestimated the threat in the early years of the “War on Terrorism.”  Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has commented that “the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”  Admiral Blair is right and he points to a very American way of approaching problems.

Second, Americans demand total security from their government even as they grouse at the price tag.  In other words, every one of us who votes and, indeed, who contributes to our national culture, is in part to blame.  Americans may be suspicious of government but they also want it to provide them a perfect life and they vote accordingly.  As Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum put it recently:

“Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong.”

Woe betide the politician who tries to deny Americans what they want.  The next time there is an attempted terrorist attack, the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence and the Congress all want to be able to say that they did everything they could to stop it.

Is there any hope that the growth of Top Secret America can be curtailed or even reversed?  The answer is yes.  A little historical perspective might help.

We’ve been down this road before.  When the United States entered World War I in 1917, it had only a handful of intelligence personnel.  At the signing of the Armistice a year and a half later, there were many thousands, plus 250,000 volunteer members of the quasi-official American Protective League, but during the interwar years most of this bureaucracy was demobilized.  The same thing happened during and after World War II.  The Cold War, of course, saw a gradual increase in the size of the intelligence and security communities, but again came a retrenchment after the fall of the Berlin Wall as American voters and politicians clamored for a “peace dividend.”

What does this history suggest?  It suggests that there is hope that Top Secret America can and will be pruned back someday.  However, the War on Terrorism, or whatever we are presently in, will not have a dramatic and definite end like the World Wars and the Cold War had.  We shall have to depend on less dramatic domestic political processes to reign in Top Secret America.  Perhaps the Washington Post’s series will put those processes in motion.

Mark Stout is the Historian of the International Spy Museum.  He spent more than twenty years working in the national security community, serving in the Defense Department, State Department and CIA and working in a Defense Department think-tank.  Professor Stout has degrees in political science, applied mathematics and public policy from Stanford and Harvard Universities and has recently defended his PhD dissertation in history at the University of Leeds.  He is the co-author of three books and he has published or forthcoming articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Intelligence and National Security, and Studies in Intelligence.

A high-profile Iranian nuclear scientist may have defected to the United States last year.  And today he may have defected back.  What are the implications for American intelligence?

The case is rife with mysteries.  Shahram Amiri disappeared last June while on a pilgrimage in the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia.  The Iranian government accused the United States of kidnapping him in order to interrogate him about the purported Iranian nuclear weapons program.  In support of this claim, Iranian television last month broadcast a videotape of uncertain origin in which a man claiming to be Amiri said that he had been kidnapped by Saudi intelligence officers and then handed over to the Americans.  Since arriving in the U.S. he claimed to have been “heavily tortured and pressured.”

The American version of the story is quite different.  The United States Government has denied kidnapping Amiri.  In March, ABC news reported that according to anonymous American officials Amiri had defected to the US and that this was a great “intelligence coup.”  Then, the day after Iranian television broadcast its Amiri tape, a video appeared of a man also claiming to be Amiri appeared on YouTube.  This Amiri said that he was in the United States of his own free will studying medical physics but that he remained loyal to Iran.

Clear as mud.  And then today, the press is reporting that Amiri has showed up at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington and asked to be immediately returned to Iran.

At this stage, it appears that Amiri actually did defect and then defect back.  Assuming that to be true, the question arises whether his initial defection was genuine or whether this was a deception or provocation by the Iranian government.  A false nuclear defector could learn a great deal about what the CIA knows about the Iranian nuclear program by taking note of what sort of questions his debriefers asked him.

Obviously much remains to be revealed about this story, but the full truth is likely to remain a matter of conjecture for a long time, perhaps even within the US and Iranian governments.  There are precedents for this sort of event.  In the 1980s, Vitaly Yurchenko, a senior Soviet intelligence officer defected to the United States.  After extensive debriefings, he eluded his CIA handlers and apparently willingly got on an Aeroflot plane heading back to Moscow.  In the 1950s, Otto John, the head of the German equivalent of the FBI, defected to the East and then came back 18 months later claiming to have been kidnapped.  Both of these cases puzzled practitioners and historians for years.  Amiri may soon join that list of intelligence mysteries.

Mark Stout is the Historian of the International Spy Museum.  He spent more than twenty years working in the national security community, serving in the Defense Department, State Department and CIA and working in a Defense Department think-tank.  Professor Stout has degrees in political science, applied mathematics and public policy from Stanford and Harvard Universities and has recently defended his PhD dissertation in history at the University of Leeds.  He is the co-author of three books and he has published or forthcoming articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Intelligence and National Security, and Studies in Intelligence.

A contract signed by Josephine Baker in 1944 with the French government confirming her services to entertain the troops

Amanda A. Ohlke, Adult Education Director

This week marks the anniversary of the death of Josephine Baker, one of history’s most famous female spies. We recently received copies of numerous documents from the files of the French Ministere de la Defense related to Josephine Baker.  Baker was an immensely popular African American entertainer who came to prominence in Paris in the 1920s and used her international stardom as a cover to spy for France and the French Resistance during World War II.  The document included here is an agreement between Baker and the Director of Personnel of the “Femin Militaire” signed in Algiers in 1944.  It’s significant that the paper was signed in Africa as Baker was an active member of the French military intelligence service, the Deuxieme Bureau, there.

She was recruited to work for the Deuxieme Bureau by Jacques Abtey.  Initially she merely used her access to international contacts and diplomats to gather information in France, but after the installation of the German-collaborationist Vichy Government in France, she worked with Abtey to smuggle secrets out of France to the Resistance and the Allies.  Baker and Abtey readied “all the information that had been gathered concerning the German Army in France.” Photos, Abtey says, were pinned under Josephine’s dress, and documents were recreated in a new form: “Using invisible ink, we transcribed all fifty two pieces of information onto Josephine’s sheet music.” After crossing a treacherous border, Baker laughed and told Abtey, “You see what a good cover I am!”

As the war progressed, Baker and Abtey connected with key French Resistance figures and allied intelligence officers.   British Intelligence ultimately put Abtey and Baker in charge of setting up a permanent intelligence liaison and transmission center in Casablanca, Morocco. As they struggled with international red tape to get settled in Northern Africa, Baker’s health landed her in a private clinic in Casablanca.  She was in hospital for 19 months with illness compounded by exhaustion.  Her sickroom served as a perfect cover for American diplomats to meet, at her bedside, Moroccan leaders and share clandestine conversation.  An American vice-consul told Abtey how “happy Washington was with the material [they] had been supplying.”

When she recovered, she began entertaining Allied troops in North Africa.  In the summer of 1943, she covered nine thousand miles, ranging across Tunis, Libya, and Egypt entertaining British troops.  At a grande fête on 13 August of 1943 in Algiers, then the capital of wartime France, the two leaders of the French Resistance were both expected to attend.  De Gaulle led the Free French Forces fighting the Battle of North Africa and General Henri Giraud led the Imperial Council.  While she was performing Baker stopped, unable to go on she said, because, “He is here,” pointing to De Gaulle in his box.  Raymond Boucher, then an officer in the French Navy remembered, “The top-ranking Americans supported Giraud, but when they saw Josephine on the side of de Gaulle, she authenticated, a little bit, the Free French.”   In gratitude, Charles de Gaulle gave her a tiny gold Cross of Lorraine.  On August 24, the U.S. and Britain recognized the French Committee for National Liberation.  Five days later, the Americans, British and Russians, acknowledged De Gaulle as “Chief of the Resistance.”

Baker continued touring and rallying support for De Gaulle. In the words of Abtey, they “were vagabonds of the road in the service of France.” In Beirut she auctioned the cross De Gaulle had given her and raised 300,000 FF for the Resistance.  She spent the rest of the war touring, mixing politics and show business.  Some thought she and Abtey were adventurers; but she was made a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Her grueling schedule landed her back in the hospital in Morocco, and it was there that she received the Medal of the Resistance on October 8, 1946.  The newspapers announced: “Secret Agent of Free France Decorated!

Baker had been a truly effective spy.  Her fame combined with her willingness to take chances had made her a perfect agent. Baker’s celebrity and touring schedule were the perfect cover story allowing her to be an excellent courier, and her fearlessness made it work.  But most of all her commitment to de Gaulle and his demand that the “flame of French resistance must not and shall not die” made her a true heroine of the Resistance.

Baker continued to entertain throughout the rest of her life. In 1961 she was named Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur and presented the Croix de Guerre by the French government for her wartime services.  It was presented to her with attendance from the consuls of Spain, Morocco, the U.S., Italy and Finland.  She died on 12 April 1975 in her sleep after a vigorous and acclaimed nightclub performance.    She was 69 years old.

Our References:

Baker, Jean-Claude and Chase, Chris.  Josephine: The Hungry Heart, Cooper Square Press, 2001

Abtey, Jacques.  La Guerre Secrète de Josephine Baker, La Lauze, 1948.

http://www.cmgww.com/stars/baker/index.php, official site of Josephine Baker

In the lobby of the International Spy Museum is a large black and white image of a man bathed in shadow.   Enveloping him in this darkness is post-World War II Vienna, a city up to the task of casting a further level of intrigue into the frame.   Vienna had been spared the worst of what many European cities had suffered during the war.  Yet, the charm and pleasant music of pre-war Austria now came accompanied with ruins, a thriving black market, and refugees attempting to escape from Soviet occupation.  Divided into four zones by the conquering British, French, Americans, and Russians, an international patrol of all four was responsible for controlling and rehabilitating the city.   However, early cold war politics was turning it into a playground for international espionage.

The image is a still from the film The Third Man, written by spy novelist Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed, and with strong contributions from Orson Welles.  With this legendary pedigree, it may be unsurprising that it is widely considered one of the greatest films; included in the AFI top 100 films and ranked the Greatest British film of the 20^th Century by the British Film Institute.  Reed and Greene’s Vienna is a city facing the realities of a world blown apart by one war while witnessing the birth of another.   The man in the shadows too is caught in between these worlds, being plunged once again back into darkness. What better environment to be first introduced to the world of the International Spy Museum?

At the height of World War II, in 1942, the Germans began to produce massive amounts of British counterfeit banknotes. Their goal—bring down the British economy by flooding the United Kingdom with fake money.

The scheme was run by SS intelligence officer Bernhard Krüger, hence its name, “Operation Bernhard.” Upon orders from SS boss Heinrich Himmler, Krüger selected over 140 concentration camp inmates to implement the operation. This course was as ingenious as it was diabolical—while the camps offered a large pool of talent (graphic designers, printers, professional forgers), the selectees could simply be liquidated at the end of the operation to ensure secrecy. Krüger himself always treated his workers kindly—in fact, some testified on his behalf after the war—, but they knew all too well that they lived on borrowed time, and that any day could be their last.

Operation Bernhard was an unparalleled success. Within two years, the inmates produced nearly 9 million pound notes—13 percent of the £1 billion worth of real notes then in circulation. When the Bank of England detected some of the counterfeit notes, it reverently described them “as the most dangerous ever seen.” And even though a lack of German aircraft prevented the notes from being dropped over Britain, and cause financial havoc there, the SS used the notes on a large scale in Europe to buy arms, raw materials, and pay their own spies. The notes also underwrote the liberation of fallen Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in a daring commando operation in 1943.

Operation Bernhard’s most cherished result, however, was that it saved lives. When the war ended, the SS guards in charge of the prisoners simply disappeared. Whether any of the inmates would have survived without joining Operation Bernhard, is highly doubtful.

Operation Bernhard was recently turned into an excellent movie, The Counterfeiters, which won an Oscar as the best foreign (Austrian) film in 2008. The International Spy Museum is pleased to screen it on 4 February, and provide a historical context. For more information, see: http://www.spymuseum.org/programs/calendar_pages/2010/q1/2010_02_04_prog.php

Espionage fiction has long influenced people’s notions of intelligence. And there are a good number of first-rate espionage authors to choose from, including John le Carré, Graham Greene, and Ian Fleming. But who did it best?

The answer, of course, depends much on one’s own taste, but my choice is the British writer Eric Ambler (1909-1989). Here is why: Ambler never loses focus, uses unstilted, crisp prose, and simply tells a good story well. His protagonists are believable, and his scenarios are realistic. Many of his novels are set in the interwar period, and as a contemporary of Mussolini and Hitler, Ambler masterfully uses the backdrop of a Europe gripped by totalitarianism, and on the brink of war, to craft powerful stories. Since Ambler’s hero is typically not a professional spy, but someone who accidentally stumbles into a major politico-espionage plot, the reader can easily identify.

If I had to pick one of Ambler’s many excellent novels, it would have to be Journey into Fear. Published and set in 1940, the book describes the flight of an Englishman, Howard Graham, aboard a small Italian steamer from fascist agents. As the vessel is chugging across the eastern Mediterranean from Istanbul to Genoa, Graham discovers with growing horror that his fellow passengers are not what they initially seemed—and that his journey may not lead to safety at all.

Journey into Fear is a relentlessly paced suspense novel. Whether you are interested in espionage, interwar Europe, or simply a good story, you will not be disappointed. Read and enjoy!

Nothing is What It Seems

January 8, 2010

Continuing the Spy Museum’s SPYCast®, Peter Earnest, Museum Executive Director and 36 year veteran of the CIA, is interviewed by Museum Historian Dr. Thomas Boghardt on this week’s breaking intelligence news.
The U.S. authorities’ failure to prevent a Nigerian suicide bomber from boarding a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day, and the suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan have roiled the intelligence community. International Spy Museum historian Dr. Thomas Boghardt discusses with SpyCast host and CIA veteran Peter Earnest how these incidents unfolded and their implications for intelligence reform.

Find past SPY Casts here: http://www.spymuseum.org/programs/spycast.php

Q: Who was Igor Gouzenko?

A:  Igor Gouzenko was a code clerk for the GRU, Soviet military counterintelligence, in Ottawa, Canada.

Q:  How and why did he defect?

A:   He defected in September 1945 with a large number of secret documents by turning himself in to the Canadian RCMP. 

Q:  Why was his defection so important in “starting” the Cold War?

A:   Gouzenko’s defection had a huge impact, contributing to the growing Cold War between the Soviets and the West, because he had clear proof that the Soviets had an extensive espionage operation in North America.

Q:  Beyond the documents Gouzenko defected with, how did the western intelligence agencies utilize him afterward?  Did his training as a cipher clerk provide any unique opportunities?  

A:   Gouzenko’s training as a cipher clerk as such did not offer western intelligence unique technical opportunities to learn more about Soviet espionage, but his broader knowledge about what the Soviets were up to was seen as invaluable to western intelligence.

Q:  What became of Gouzenko in his later years? Did the Soviets ever attempt any known acts of retribution against him?

A:   Gouzenko’s use to the west gradually declined because his knowledge became outdated.  He lived with his large family under an alias in a town near Toronto and became very embittered with Canadian authorities, who he thought did not treat him fairly.  The Soviets never attempted to go after Gouzenko, as far as I know.  Stalin reportedly ordered that Gouzenko be left alone because an act of retribution would make the Soviets look bad.

Today The Wall Street Journal ran an article revealing that militants inside Iraq have hacked U.S. Predator drones and were able to access real time information used by the military.  

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, are used extensively by the CIA and Pentagon to conduct surveillance, as well as identify and kill insurgents and terrorists. In fact, armed drones have eliminated half of the CIA’s twenty most wanted “high value” targets, including Saad bin Laden, Osama’s oldest son. A few months ago, CIA director Leon Panetta even referred to the drone program as “the only game in town.”

Given the drones’ central role in America’s counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism efforts, it is worrisome to learn that Iran-backed Iraqi insurgents this summer successfully hacked into a drone feed and downloaded large amounts of surveillance footage (which the U.S. military later discovered on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant). To date, there is no indication that any drones have been manipulated, but the implications are troublesome.

As successful as the drones have been tactically, their usage is controversial. Missiles fired from drones have killed numerous innocent civilians—exact numbers are hard to come by—further complicating America’s already difficult relationship with Pakistan, where many of the strikes were conducted. What if someone hacked into a drone and fired a U.S.-made hellfire missile into a major Pakistani city? True, it is a far-fetched scenario, but then again, who would have imagined that insurgents could have downloaded highly classified drone video footage simply by using commercially available software, as happened this summer?

Nothing is What It Seems

The International Spy Museum’s permanent exhibition ends with the following quote: “The most successful spies—those too clever to be caught, too loyal to defect, too shrewd to speak up—will never be recognized, their missions never revealed.” This statement is largely true. It is in the nature of spies and secret services to stay covert, and we usually hear only about those spies who were caught. But sometimes we get a glimpse of what lies beyond.

I was recently visited by an inconspicuous-looking gentleman who told me that he used to work for the foreign ministry of a Soviet Bloc nation. He calmly elaborated that, while serving as a diplomat in a Western country in the 1970s, he contacted the CIA and provided information to the agency up to the end of the Cold War. It is a remarkable story, given that most Cold War Human Intelligence (Hummit) espionage operations known to the public lasted far shorter than a decade, and a reminder of how much there remains to be learnt about the “secret history of history.”

Our Museum will remain in touch with the above-mentioned gentleman who has by now returned to his home country. He has already generously donated some of his spy gear to our collection, and we are hoping to tell more of his fascinating story in the future. Stay tuned as an amazing tale of Cold War espionage unfolds!

Nothing is what it seems