Have you ever thought about the CIA’s seal and what it means? The CIA’s website says:

Here’s how we interpret our seal:

• The American Eagle is the national bird and is a symbol of strength and alertness.
• The radiating spokes of the compass rose depict the convergence of intelligence data from all areas of the world to a central point.
• The shield is the standard symbol of defense and the intelligence we gather for policymakers.

In other words, the CIA claims to defend the country by being alert and gathering intelligence information from all around the world.

How about the KGB’s seal?  It looks rather different.  There are actually quite a number of small variations on it, but they all look more or less like this:

The ribbon says in Cyrillic, “VChK-KGB,” indicating that the KGB (the Committee for State Security), which only took that name in 1954, saw itself as the continuation of the VChK, the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage” which was formed in 1917.

The dominant symbols, however, are the sword and the shield.  Indeed, the KGB liked to refer to itself as the “sword and the shield of the Communist Party.”  In other words, the KGB saw itself as an executive agency.  In this metaphor, intelligence is a form of national power, directly defending the party and state and directly striking their enemies.  This is in sharp contrast to the CIA’s claim that intelligence is not itself a form of power but merely supports the application of power by America’s armed forces, diplomats, and others.

The question of whether intelligence is in itself a form of national power, is a subject that scholars of intelligence argue about.  But this is not just an abstract debate among academics.  It is also a question about how intelligence practitioners see their work.

Next time you are at the International Spy Museum have a look at some of the agency seals—which come from all over the world—on the walls in our “Covers and Legends” exhibit area.  What can you figure out about each agency’s mission and its understanding of the intelligence profession?

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.

Q: When a former CIA officer goes “public” does the information need to be cleared for its possible sensitivity to national security first?

A: Everything a former CIA officer writes has to be cleared by a panel called the Publications Review Board (PRB).  And I mean everything has to be cleared, from a letter to the editor of House Beautiful magazine to a memoir about a CIA career.  But clearance is not a science and the process can take years, or 18 months, in my case.  An author frequently finds himself in a fight with PRB over language, and there is an appeals process which most authors take advantage of.  In the end, the author and PRB usually can come to an agreement, but with both sides somewhat unhappy.

Q: You have been at times at the center of the debate regarding the effectiveness waterboarding.  Where do you stand on the issue now?

A: I believe now, as I believed in December 2007 when I went public, that waterboarding was morally wrong.  I said then and I maintain now that Abu Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence after being waterboarded.  I was wrong when I said he had been waterboarded once.  That was what I was told.  We know now that he had been waterboarded 83 times.  But there are two separate issues here.  Did waterboarding work (on Abu Zubaydah it did in a limited way, but it did not work on other prisoners, who simply told the interrogators what they wanted to hear), and was it morally right?

Q: It has been suggested your position on waterboarding was part of a deception campaign.  Are you lying to us now?

A: If I said no, would you believe me?  Seriously, I’ve seen a couple of conspiratorial, fringe blogs make that accusation.  It’s ridiculous.  I called it as I saw it.  It made a lot of people angry and started an important national debate.  I stand by my position.

Q: Stephen Colbert has suggested the need to waterboard you to get the “real” truth.  Would this work or have you been trained to resist torture?

A: I feel like I already have been waterboarded!  Repeatedly.  I was never trained to resist torture.  I wish I had had training in press relations, however.

Want to learn more? Read Kiriakou’s book The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror

SPY Artifact: Handkerchief with Secret Writing

Invisible ink.  Lemon juice, milk, and, for those most desperate, urine are the most commonly known recipes for invisible ink.   These techniques were literally child’s play for many of us.  Yet, when Mata Hari was arrested with a vial of a German issued invisible ink, it was used as evidence of her status as a German spy.   But what use can these potions and methods practiced for centuries still hold for our national security?

Well, quite a bit according to the CIA.  The oldest classified documents in US archives happen to be German invisible ink recipes from 1917 and 1918. As recent as 2002, the CIA successfully defended the classification in federal court fearing the “risk of compromise of…intelligence methods” and of allowing the “more sophisticated methods of secret writing” to fall in terrorists hands.  Perhaps we have Mata Hari to thank for those recipes?

Although the CIA is still protecting the German’s secret recipes, we have our own rich tradition.  George Washington himself was an avid practitioner and dabbler in invisible inks.  Washington instructed the use of “sympathetic stain” developed by Jon Jay’s brother for the transmission of secret information.

In Invisible Ink by John Nagy, we are introduced to the American Revolution as this war of deception waged by British and American forces employing invisible inks, codes, secret rendezvouses, spy rings, and complicated military deception operations.  After their defeat England’s chief of intelligence was reputed to have said, “Washington did not really outfight the British, he simply outspied us!”  I guess tea makes a poor invisible ink…

                Espionage can be a dangerous business. Just consider the case of Soviet intelligence defector Walter Krivitsky. Born Samuel Ginsberg in Austria-Hungary in 1899, Krivitsky adopted his nom de guerre when he joined Soviet military intelligence in 1917. His assumed name loosely translates as “crooked” or “twisted”—an irony Krivitksy must have been aware of. After running a number of successful espionage operations in Germany, Austria, and Italy, in 1937 he was posted to The Hague where he managed Soviet espionage operations throughout Western Europe.

                Initially an ardent communist, Krivitsky gradually became disenchanted with Joseph Stalin’s violent and erratic purges. When Stalin’s henchmen killed his friend, Soviet intelligence defector Ignace Porevsky, in Switzerland, Krivitsky himself defected in Paris. With World War II looming, he came to the United States in 1938.

                Even though he dreaded Soviet reprisals, Krivitsky hardly missed a beat before publicly denouncing the machinations of Moscow’s secret service. When a Soviet agent murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, Krivitsky feared he would be next. “If I am ever found apparently a suicide, you will know that the N.K.V.D. [Soviet intelligence] has caught up with me,” he told a group of friends. But largely ignored and unable to fully integrate in his host country, Krivitsky became increasingly despondent.

                About a year later, on 2 February 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in The Bellevue, a seedy Washington hotel (today known as the posh Hotel George), with three suicide notes by his bed. While the police eventually ruled his death a suicide, others claimed he had committed a “Kremlin suicide”—forced by one of Stalin’s henchman to write suicide notes and then kill himself, in return for a promise that his family would be left unharmed.

Whatever happened at The Bellevue, Krivitsky was a haunted man long before his death. A CIA officer once noted that “every defector has just committed emotional suicide.” And whether Krivitsky killed himself or was forced to do so, he was caught in a maelstrom beyond his control and paid the ultimate price for being in the spy business.

Nothing is what it seems.

Not many people will remember the date, but 45 years ago, on August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. This measure authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia (read: Vietnam), notably without a formal declaration of war by Congress. If you think about it, this procedure was very similar to the one adopted through the Iraq War Resolution, which in 2002 authorized the administration to invade Iraq. It almost seems to me that, whenever we try to relegate the Vietnam War to the back pages of our history books, the conflict comes back to teach us another lesson.  

Vietnam as well as Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the U.S. military to engage in asymmetrical warfare—regular troops, using the latest military equipment, fighting primitively armed but highly motivated guerrilla forces. In the 1970s as well as today, U.S. commanders have drawn on the intelligence services, especially the CIA, to wage this kind of counter-insurgency. In Vietnam, the CIA developed and led the so-called Phoenix program: small teams of South Vietnamese paramilitary troops and American “advisers” would systematically seek out known or suspected Vietcong cadres and “neutralize”—i.e., arrest, interrogate, or kill—them; by 1972, over 80,000 Vietcong had been neutralized, of which over 25,000 were killed.

At the time, Phoenix incurred much criticism. Small wonder—taking the war to the villages, Phoenix teams often “neutralized” Vietcong cadres and innocent civilians alike. But if you talk to experts on Phoenix today, they will mostly tell you that the program was effective and dealt severe blows to the Vietcong infrastructure in South Vietnam.

As an avid student of intelligence history, I am keen to learn if and how the lessons of Vietnam can or should be applied in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I am asking myself: Is it legitimate to hunt down and selectively “neutralize” our enemies, even at the risk of killing innocent civilians? Or should we refrain from adopting Phoenix-style operations, both for moral considerations as well as concerns over possible backlashes in public opinion abroad?

Nothing is what it seems.