International Spy Museum Blog

Historian Mark Stout – Feb 10,2012

Intelligence is a field that usually builds on itself.  Old tools and techniques stay useful for years, even centuries.  Spies figured in the oldest battle about which we have detailed tactical information, the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE, and they are still key sources today.  Intelligence personnel have been tapping cables for more than 150 years now and they aren’t likely to stop anytime soon.  True, intelligence techniques often undergo some updating but they usually remain recognizable.  Codes and ciphers have grown more sophisticated over the years, for instance.  Similarly, cameras were carried aloft on balloons and birds then later on airplanes and finally satellites.

 Seldom, however, does the intelligence business completely abandon a technique.  I was pondering this the other day while talking with a colleague about the earliest days of the intelligence business.  She mentioned that the science of prediction had its roots in ancient Greece with Aristotle.  This caused me to suddenly recall divination.  In the ancient world emperors and generals had specialists who would read the entrails of chickens, cast bones, or observe the flights of birds to determine the likely outcome of an impending battle or important political move.  On military campaigns a Roman general would often bring sacred chickens under the care of special chicken handlers.  When the general wanted to know if the move he proposed to undertake would meet with success, the chicken handler would open the chicken cage and throw grain in front of the birds.  If the birds gobbled it up, this was a good sign.  If they didn’t, the general should rethink his plan.  One Roman general, eager for combat in the First Punic War was so frustrated when the chickens wouldn’t eat, that he grabbed them and threw them into the sea saying “Well then, let them drink.”

 Today we look on such practices as magical mumbo-jumbo but weren’t they also an intelligence function?  I’m not the first person to have this realization, of course.  In fact, the legendary Allen Dulles describes such practices as “the earliest sources of intelligence” in his classic book The Craft of Intelligence.  For a more scholarly approach, you might look at Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, But Verify by Professor Rose Mary Sheldon of the Virginia Military Institute, the leading expert on intelligence in the ancient world.

 This line of thought encouraged me to think of other intelligence techniques that have been completely abandoned.  I came up with only one: for many years the US Intelligence Community employed psychics for their purported clairvoyant abilities.  The CIA has declassified its records on their part in this, something called STAR GATE.  As far as we know publicly, such efforts were abandoned in the mid-1990s.  (For what it’s worth, I worked in the Intelligence Community from 1990 to 2003 and I heard, early on, a hint of the existence of such a program, but as far as I know, I never saw any of its products.  I would have instantly rejected a piece of reporting that came across my desk if I’d heard that it came from psychics.)  It has been widely reported that the KGB explored the use of psychics for many years, but I haven’t heard anything to suggest that the Russians have continued down this road.

 Are there other abandoned intelligence techniques that I’m not able to think of?  Let me know if you’ve got any in mind that I’ve left out.

September 8, 2011

Historian Mark Stout

On September 11^th, 2001 I was a team chief, leading a small group of analysts at the CIA.  My part of the Agency did not work on terrorism.  Some of us knew a bit about al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden but as far I know none of my immediate colleagues were aware that the Counterterrorism Center had been issuing dire warnings all summer of a major attack.

 Not long after the attacks, the order came to evacuate CIA Headquarters.  I joined a large group of people milling about right outside the building.  People who had lingered inside kept trickling out with additional news.  Someone said that a car bomb had gone off at the State Department.  I had worked at the Department until only a few years previously and I had many friends there.  I’m ashamed to admit this, but by this time I was so numb that while I realized that my friends might have been hurt or killed, the thought did not disturb me as it should. 

 After a time, an Agency security guard came running out of the building, shouting at us to stop clustering around the entrance.  “This building has a giant target on it!” he yelled.  The crowd moved away and I found myself in the parking lot where I ran into the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.  She and I had been trying for some time to get together to plan a conference about some important analytic issues.  Well, here we were, and a massive traffic jam on the compound precluded us from going home for a while.  We might as well have our meeting.  So she and I sat next to each other on the curb in the CIA parking lot and planned our conference while fighter planes flew overhead.  By the time we’d got our work done, the traffic had dispersed and we both went home. 

 That fall was very stressful, as it was for so many people, but several incidents stand out in my mind.

 Along with everyone else from the CIA, I was back at work on September 12^th.  The management team of my group had its regular morning meeting in the group chief’s corner office.  I remember our deputy group chief wrapping his tongue carefully around the obviously unfamiliar syllables, “al qay-ee-duh,” while I sat and looked out the big glass windows and wondered what it would look like if an airplane flew through them.

 Starting that very day an endless flurry of assignments starting coming down to every bit of the Agency, even those that had not previously dealt with terrorism, including my team.  Everyone pitched in, working long hours.  The Counterterrorism Center was flooded with more volunteers than it could handle, among them some of my analysts.  Many officers, again including some of my analysts, refused to put in for the overtime pay they were entitled to.  A directive from on high requiring them to take the money put an end to that. 

 Along with many others in my part of the Agency, I was cleared to read materials in the compartment containing US war plans for this new war on terrorism.  Sometime in September I learned that we were actually going to invade Afghanistan.  Boots on the ground in Afghanistan?  I was stunned.  For me, this only increased the pressure, the sense that my country was in serious trouble.  I certainly wanted Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda brought to justice and they were in Afghanistan, but I also knew a good bit about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and before that the British experience.  I wondered how this could possibly succeed and I wondered how many lives and how much money we were going to spend on a war in a landlocked country that had already defeated two great powers.

 Then the anthrax attacks started.  Every time I opened a piece of mail I wondered what I would find inside.  Trace amounts of anthrax were found on at least one piece of mail coming into the Agency.  Of course, the Agency soon implemented special security measures but that meant that our mail started arriving late and often mangled or melted in strange ways.  That was still unsettling in a different way.

 I think all of us had the sense that things were teetering on the edge of being out of control.  I remember a long conversation with an analyst I’d worked with on several projects.  His name was also Mark and he was one of the smartest people I knew, a real big-thinker.  Mark and I chewed over the strategic implications of what was going on.  In retrospect, it is clear to me that the pressure of all of these crazy events was badly affecting our judgment, but I didn’t understand that at the time.  Mark’s pessimism and mine fed off each other and soon we were speculating whether the United States might find itself forced sometime soon to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.

 Fortunately, that never happened.  The invasion of Afghanistan was successful, the Taliban regime fell like a house of cards and Al Qaeda scattered.  Anthrax stopped arriving.  Slowly things calmed down and we settled into the new normal that continues to this day, ten years later.

March 2, 2011

Mark Stout, SPY Historian

The sometimes contentious relationship between the government and the Muslim community over issues like profiling, the alleged surveillance of mosques, the scrutiny of charities, etc.  Even the possibility of internment camps for Muslims gets bandied about the blogosphere from time to time.  A very well educated friend of mine, a Muslim, personally expressed this fear to me a few years ago.  However, it is not at all clear to me that there is a predisposition in the United States polity or in its government to oppress Muslims, per se.  Rather, I think that Muslims today are simply the latest “hyphenated Americans.”  Sadly, other hyphenated Americans have gone through similar travails during previous periods of national security stress.

The attention paid to religious groups during 1917 and 1918, the period of the American involvement in World War I, is an example.  Numerous religious groups, large and small came under scrutiny and appear in the files of military intelligence, but the Lutherans were a particular target of military intelligence because their Church had many German followers and purportedly ‘contained many elements of disloyalty and activity in behalf of the enemy.’  Ironically, widespread Lutheran pacifism stood in sharp contrast to what military intelligence referred to as the “Prussian will to power and…spirit of unscrupulous warfare.”  Pacifism did not spare the Church from close scrutiny.  Not surprisingly, the military’s concern was greatest with regard to pastors preaching to servicemen at military camps, but clergymen in purely civilian life also were investigated. 

In one of many such cases, private citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania reported their pastor, the Reverend J. C. Nicholas, to the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) on the grounds that he refused to include prayers for the success of the American Expeditionary Force in his Sunday service on the grounds that this would be dictating to God.  It did not help that Nicholas had denounced Selective Service, had opposed contribution to the Belgian Relief Fund, and had only contributed one dollar to the Red Cross.  The National Lutheran Commission subsequently appointed him as a camp pastor at the Newport News point of embarkation and the MID kept him under close observation, but could find no excuse to have him removed.

With regard to actual espionage, the MID was greatly concerned by the fact that the Lutheran church collected detailed information on a routine basis from its camp pastors about how many Lutheran soldiers were at their camp, how many were coming and going, and where they were going to.  This information could be used to develop a detailed order of battle of the Army and to discern when units were embarking for France.  The question was whether it was making its way to Germany.  Ultimately, apparently after the war, the MID concluded that though the church had gathered data “that they did not need to possess” and which should have been held within the US Government, “no satisfactory evidence” existed that the church’s gathering of information was done at the behest of Germany or exploited by Germany, rather that the church had done this for its own pastoral purposes.  This did not mean that no Lutheran pastors had violated the law.  In fact, at least eight were interned or convicted under the draconian Espionage Act.

After the war, the MID admitted in its official history that the German-speaking communities were by-and-large a “happy disappointment” to the “prophets of evil who had feared wholesale insurrections or insidious intrigues.”  Indeed, some of the most German areas, such as Milwaukee, “made themselves almost amusingly conspicuous by an Americanism which, whether genuine or not in spirit, was satisfactory in its outward manifestations.”

One encouraging aspect of this story is that even in the depths of the war, military intelligence was not unified in its reflexive suspicion of Lutherans and after the war the MID admitted in its official history that the German-speaking communities—where the Lutherans tended to live—were by-and-large a “happy disappointment” to the “prophets of evil who had feared wholesale insurrections or insidious intrigues.” 

While continued vigilance is necessary today to keep the Government in check, I think that historical experience suggests that we shouldn’t be too quick to predict the end of the American way of life when something bad happens.  America survived what it did to Lutherans (and numerous others) during World War I.  In fact, arguably, after each of these incidents the nation has grown stronger and developed to be more in consonance with its expressed values.  Nevertheless, it’s a sad fact that there is always a perceived “other” and eventually we are likely to regret much of what was done to that “other” during wartime.