The Cold War's end has seen no let up to spying. If anything, the compound fracturing of Russia's empire made the problem worse for Western intelligence agencies. Now, in the former "evil empire," there is a host of new countries; and all the newly independent ex-Soviet states face challenges of political and economic stability. They were little known and unimportant in the days when Moscow was the center of empire. The new states now have their own espionage, counterintelligence security and military intelligence services. They were formed immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and incorporated the local Committee for State Security (KGB) and Interior Ministry personnel.
In the old days, in Europe, Western intelligence officers worked mainly under diplomatic covers from their Moscow embassies - fine when only the Kremlin counted and the now defunct USSR was the prime target. In theory, there is much work to be done - new languages to learn, new officials and contacts to cultivate and new threats such as nuclear materials theft, drug smuggling and organized crime to monitor. In practice, intelligence agencies collect what their political and military leaders think important.
The White House is not particularly interested in former Soviet states - except for their nuclear weapons and materials that might be smuggled to a "rogue" country or to terrorists. The former KGB women and men now working for Ukraine or Kazakhstan are very interested in Washington. Are they working for Kiev and Tashkent or for Moscow?
Though unpleasant, it's logical that the former Soviet states would spy on the West. What could be more important to a newly independent country than inside knowledge of the intentions, perceptions and plans of donor countries and investors? Besides, what can not be used by their own gov- ernment may be valuable in trade - to Moscow, Beijing, Teh- ran, whatever. Economic policy and political intelligence are more important than ever. Competition in cutting edge technologies - bio-tech, composite materials, cryogenics, super conductors, optics and lasers - makes industrial espionage more intense than ever.
However, the former Soviet states are not alone in their quest for political, economic and social information. There are emerging nuclear powers such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea; there are emerging imperial states such as India, desperate for more lebensraum - living space; there are still other states that seek to impose their version of Islamic government across their borders. China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom have their own political and economic agendas; as even peripheral news readers know each of these countries spy not only on each other, but also on the United States. Certainly, throughout the world the initials CIA are as well known as USA - and sometimes used synonymously. And, within the CIA there is a much repeated - and respected - saying: "There may be such a thing as friendly foreign government, but there is no such thing as a friendly foreign intelligence service."
THE OLDEST PROFESSIONS
Based on Biblical accounts, spying has been called the world's second oldest profession. Sex and spying have been paired for some 4,000 years. Doubters are referred to the story of Joshua's two young men sent to spy out the defenses of Jericho. Where do the two strangers go to lie low, so to speak? To Rahab, a prostitute whose house abuts the town wall close to the gate. When the guards come to arrest the spies, Rahab hides them on her roof. Later in the night, she gives them provisions, directions on how to avoid the patrols scouring the countryside for them, and lowers them by rope over the wall in return for a promise of protection when Joshua captures the city.
Some 1,500 years after Joshua, China's great military strategist Sun Tzu had developed enormous sophistication as a spymaster. He prefaced the chapter of his handbook, The Art of War, on the use of secret agents by emphasizing that no general or ruler could be successful without spies. Foreknowledge of an enemy's decisions cannot be obtained by divination, "by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation."Sun Tzu wrote of one of the most ruthless tactics - feeding an expendable agent false information to divulge when he is captured. Sun Tzu described the types of spies used: penetration agents who move among the enemy notables who have access to the inner circles of leadership to collect critical information, the enemy's spies who have been "doubled," ordinary people in the enemy's country who know the lay of the land and can unobtrusively observe and carry messages and agents recruited among enemy officials.
The 9th century A.D. Chinese commentator Tu Mu described the character of these spies unerringly: "Among the official class there are worthy men who have been deprived of office; others who have committed errors and have been punished. There are sycophants and minions who are covetous of wealth. There are those who wrongly remain long in lowly office; those who have not obtained responsible positions, and those whose sole desire is to take advantage of times of trouble to extend the scope of their own abilities. There are those who are two-faced, changeable and deceitful, and who are always sitting on the fence." "Tie them to you," said Tu Mu. They will give you the facts of the situation in their country and determine its plans against you; and added, "They can as well create cleavages between the sovereign and his ministers."
This is a classic description of the agent of influence. Marcus Tullius Cicero, patriot of the Roman republic, recognized the danger of traitors. Of the enemy within, Cicero said: "A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared."
THE WAY THINGS WERE
The spy game contains a fundamental paradox. It is the duty of every government to defend its interests and thus to collect as much information, open and secret, on as many other countries as it can manage. At the same time, it must counteract the spies from the countries spying on it. Obviously, there are priorities since resources are limited. Every government concentrates on the countries most likely to engage in military aggression then on those with an economic noose around their neck. Interest moves outward from the borders, and those interests can change rapidly as the collapse of the Soviet empire showed. In the years between 1945 and 1990, the intelligence services of Central and Eastern Europe worked for Moscow. The internal security or secret police kept their own people obedient; the foreign intelligence service and military intelligence service spied on Bonn, London, Rome, Paris and backed up the Russians in the United States and Canada.
For the past five years, these countries have been in business for themselves. At the end of December, the Ukrainians reported with some glee that the KGB of neighboring Belarus has learned of at least twenty attempts by Poland's "special services" [the favored East European euphemism] to recruit agents in Belarus. It is not amusing to Central Europeans whose countryside has been fought over for more than a thousand years. The devastation of World War II and its aftermath have not faded from memory; and lurking underneath is the recollection that just 200 years ago the Polish Kingdom's eastern borders extended all the way to the Dnieper River and included both Belarus and the western half of Ukraine.
Americans responsible for national parks, forests, public land management, environmental protection with the U.S. Department of the Interior are often taken aback by the reception given them when traveling abroad. In most countries, the Interior Ministry means the secret police, not Smokey the Bear. Internal spying in the developing countries means the secret police, usually attached to the Ministry of the Interior if they were French or Belgian colonies, or to the Ministry of Home Affairs if Britain was the colonial power. These ministries generally handle the ordinary police, secret police, and customs. In Latin America, the secret police may be part of the Ministry of Government, Interior or Justice. In small countries with tight budgets, external spying is often limited to the Foreign Ministry's diplomats, plus military attachees. Concerned with potential border wars, the military of the Third World worries mainly about bean counting - how many soldiers, tanks, artillery pieces, helicopter gunships do the immediate neighbors and traditional enemies have - monitoring military exercises, and recruiting contacts among the officers and civilian officials of other countries.
NO END TO SPIES
The lowering of tensions between Washington and Moscow has not meant any reduction in espionage. Only seven months after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, in an interview with the Russian Defense Ministry's Krasnaya Zvezda [Red Star], KGB Lt. General Vadim Alekseyevich Kirpichenko (who from 1974 to 1979 was head of Directorate S [illegals] of the KGB First Chief Directorate and for the previous two years was leader of the group of consultants to Russian spymaster Yevgeny Primakov), stated: "I want to note that President Yeltsin and the Russian Government understand the need for us to function normally. We have the necessary minimum." Kirpichenko said that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVRR) and GRU [Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff] had "worked out a rhythm of collaboration" and avowed that while they were reducing intelligence activities in countries of secondary interest, "where it is necessary to our state, we shall continue our activity."
And so they do. In January 1995, Britain expelled Aleksandr Malikov, 43, a journalist attached to Russia's government-controlled Ostankino television station. The stated reason, "national security." The United States, to the contrary, has not been expelling spies lately though the SVRR rezident in the Russian Embassy was declared persona non grata after the arrests of CIA traitor Aldrich Ames and his wife in February 1994. FBI counterintelligence agents are aware of SVRR and GRU officers, but they have not been ordered to leave. The word is the White House National Security Council and State Department officials do not want to embarrass Boris Yeltsin at a time when his own security and guard service appears to be taking control of much of the government. It is like the Victorian admonition to children: "Hold on tight, stay close to Nurse, for fear of finding something worse." With this, Maldon offers a survey of some of the globe's intelligence and counterintelligence services:
DIRECTORY OF INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATIONS
ALBANIA: OSSH - Organs of State Security - Albania's Sigurimi, part of the former Ministrae Punæve tæ Brendshme (MPB) [Ministry of Internal Affairs]. ShIK - National Intelligence Service - Albania's post-Communist restructured intelligence service, formerly the Sigurimi or OSSh. Irakli Kocollari is chairman of the ShIK. Sigurimi - [Security], Albania's foreign and internal intelligence service, the OSSh; reorganized as the ShIK in 1991. The Tirana publication Zeri I Popullit, in an article headlined, "Where are the Sigurimi Collaborators Today?" noted in February 1994 that there have been no revelations of the identities of collaborators, no opening of the secret police files and that the danger of political blackmail continues.
ARAB STATES: Mukharabat [listening post] - the most common term of reference for the intelligence services of most Arab countries including Libya and Syria. In point of fact, the military intelligence services of these countries are the principal foreign intelligence organizations. In addition, the Foreign Ministries maintain information collection groups. In Syria, because President Hafiz al-Assad himself was an air force officer, the Air Force Intelligence is favored.
ARGENTINA: CNI - National Intelligence Center - Argentina's foreign intelligence organization. SIDE - Secretariat for State Intelligence - Argentina. SIE - Secretariat for State Intelligence - Argentina.
AUSTRALIA: ASIO - Australian Secret Intelligence Organization. Australia's internal security organization came into being during the early days of the cold war as a counter-espionage agency. Its origins were in Australian military intelligence and General Douglas MacArthur's Allied Intelligence Bureau, established in Melbourne during World War II. The need for more professional intelligence was made plain in the 1970s after the defection of Vladimir Petrov, a KGB agent from the Soviet Embassy in Canberra who told of extensive Soviet operations in Australia. Over the years ASIO has had some successes and some embarrassments. ASIS - Australian Secret Intelligence Service - foreign intelligence is an organization that can trace its origins to the Coast Watchers, which during World War II was a network of Australian spies on islands overrun by the Japanese.
BELARUS: KGB of Belarus - Mikhail Zhukovets, head of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus, died in Minsk on 13 July 1993. "Officials of the information service of the Belarus KGB refrained from giving details and only stated that the death was the result of an accident," reported Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda. Allegedly, "He fell from the 10th floor of a block on the Nemiga, where he lived with his family. But even severely intoxicated, it would not be so easy to topple over the more than meter-high balcony railings." Kiev MOLOD UKRAYINY on December 30, 1994, said, "The press service of the Belarusian KGB has reported that it has more than 20 statements by citizens notifying about attempts on the part of the Polish special services to recruit them for collaboration."
BOLIVIA: DIE - State Intelligence Directorate - Bolivia.
BRAZIL: DSI - Security and Intelligence Division - Brazil. SNI - National Intelligence Service - Brazil's intelligence agency; closely tied to the Brazilian military institution, the SNI is rumored to have played a key role in Brazil's effort to make its own nuclear weapons and in pre-Gulf war dealings with Iraq.
BULGARIA: DS - State Security, also called Drzaven Sigurnost [Department of Security], Bulgarian security service under Zhivkov regime that was overthrown in December 1989.
CANADA: CSIS - Security Intelligence Service. Intelligence agencies lack imagination in their choice of names, and the Canadian agency responsible for internal security and counterintelligence obviously looked toward Australia for guidance when it was formed in 1981. For external intelligence, the Canadians rely heavily on their NATO relationships with the British and the Americans. Prior to 1981, Canada's internal security problems were the responsibility of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which investigated the terrorist Quebec Liberation Front with all too much enthusiasm. As a result a number of RCMP officers were accused of illegal wire-taps, breaking and entering and acts of provocation. In August 1994, charges were made against the SIS that they too had been involved with illegal acts in investigations of neo-Nazi groups and racism in an army unit. Other charges were made that their investigations extended into the activities of journalists working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Jewish Congress. Critics were charged with violating the Official Secrets Act but were quickly released.
CHILE: CNI - National Information Center - Chile's intelligence service. Under the junta of General Augusto Pinochet, it was formerly called the DINA. The name was changed after the scandal exposing the DINA responsibility for political assassinations of Chilean opponents in exile, among them the shooting of General Rene Schneider in Rome and the car-bomb murder of former Defense Minister Orlando Letelier, killed in Washington, D.C. DINA - National Intelligence Directorate - Chile's former intelligence service - name changed to CNI. DINE - Chile's Army Intelligence Directorate; not to be confused with the former DINA.
CHINA: Nicholas Eftimiades, author of the only modern book- length study of Beijing's espionage and secret police network [Chinese Intelligence Operations. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994], criticizes the shortsightedness of the U.S. intelligence agencies who dismissed China's wholesale spying for years. China has the world's largest army, but it never developed the force-projection capabilities needed to invade another Asian country or to take Taiwan from the Nationalists. Thus, Beijing's spying goes largely unmonitored by the CIA abroad and by the FBI's counterintelligence division at home, says Eftimiades. The FBI disagrees. Yet, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of 1995 is strikingly different from the one that existed in 1979 when Deng Xiaoping's economic liberalization began.
In 1979, China's huge army was mocked for its lumbering, incoherent invasion of Vietnam that bogged down a few miles inside Vietnam's border. China naval arm was a coastal patrol service; the air force flying knockoffs of 1950s-vintage Russian MiGs. As for China's nuclear forces, they were mounted on a relatively small force of missiles of dubious accuracy. Their role was believed to be mainly a deterrent to the Russians. Over the past ten years, China has made great strides in modernizing its army. China has transformed the naval forces from a coast guard into the beginnings of a bluewater navy capable of exerting Beijing's claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands and their presumed reserves of petroleum and natural gas. China has a comprehensive missile development program and is an exporter of short-, medium- and intermediate range missiles to the volatile Mideast.
Intelligence sources report that for many years China and Israel have had a secret arrangement under which Israel uses nuclear and missile test facilities around the legendary Lop Nur [90 degrees E. 40 degrees N] in western China. Recent reports indicate some U.S. technology found its way into Chinese missiles via this route. Ironically, against the interests of both Israel and the United States, China is selling missiles with a range up to 1,200 miles to a variety of Mideast countries. To a considerable degree, China's military-industrial complex is supported by an espionage apparatus second to none in size.
China's espionage operations go beyond mere information collection and industrial espionage to penetration of U.S. intelligence. In 1988, Harry Godfrey, III, then head of the counterintelligence section of the FBI field office in Los Angeles, stated, "If we are talking about violations of U.S. law, the Chinese are surpassing the Russians. We know they are running operations here. We have seen cases where they have encouraged people to apply to the CIA, the FBI, Naval Investigative Service, and other Defense agencies. They have also attempted to recruit people at our research facilities at Los Alamos and at Lawrence Livermore." Last April, the Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. spy catchers avowing that in terms of sheer numbers, China's espionage efforts vastly surpass those of Russia or any other nation operating in the United States; and they pointed to the case of convicted PRC spy Bin Wu as typical of operations involving theft of restricted technologies. The PRC's intelligence, counterintelligence and secret police agencies include the following:
GAB - Ministry of State Security, usually known by the English acronym (MSS). The MSS is a creation of Deng Xiaoping's modernization of state structures, having been formed in 1983 by the merger of the espionage, counterintelligence and internal security functions of the Investigations Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MSS cooperates with the MPS in cases dealing with possible disloyalty among returning Chinese students and dissidents. Since 1985, the MSS has been headed by Jia Chunwang, a member of the CPC Central Committee. Jia, a 1964 graduate from the engineering physics department of Qinghua University, earlier was responsible for loyalty and counterintelligence as secretary of the Beijing Party Committee for Discipline Inspection. Jia's deputy ministers oversee the geographically based foreign intelligence bureaus. Arrests and exposures of China's intelligence operations in various countries over the past three decades demonstrate extensive use of both "legal covers" [accredited diplomats, military attachees, governmental trade representatives] that give spies some protection [they are expelled, not jailed] and "illegals" - journalists, students, scientists, businessmen without diplomatic status who face imprisonment if caught. Among the covers given to Chinese intelligence officers abroad are positions with the CPC's International Liaison Department, the New China News Agency (XINHUA), Chinese People's Friendship Association, the trade offices and trade missions. China's illegals, supplied with expertly forged or sometimes genuine identity papers and passports, may set up shop in the West in the guise of being Singaporeans, Thais, Hong Kong or Overseas Chinese of varied citizenships. This has been especially true of illegals involved in running commercial fronts used to obtain and ship banned dual-use technology home to China.
China's greatest publicized success was its penetration agent, Larry Wu-tai Chin [his name also is transliterated Jin Wudai]. U.S. officials say he held the rank of deputy bureau chief of the GAB/MSS. Chin was arrested in November 1985. According to Chin's confession to three FBI agents shortly before he was arrested - a confession he unsuccessfully attempted to suppress - in 1942, after he had become a translator on the staff of the U.S. Army Liaison Office in Fuzhow, he was recruited to the Communist Party of China. Later, the espionage department of the CPC was amalgamated with the Ministry of Public Security into the MSS. In the Korean War, Chin was an interpreter during the interrogation of Chinese POWs and informed his superiors of what sorts of information the Americans were seeking and which prisoners cooperated. In 1952, Larry Chin joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was awarded the CIA's career intelligence medal when he retired. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1965. Chin was far more than a mere translator of open source radio programs and newspaper articles. He did as much damage to U.S. interests in Asia as Aldrich Ames did to interests in the Soviet Union. According to the 17-count indictment against him, Chin "reviewed, translated and analyzed classified documents from covert and overt human and technical collection sources" and "was involved in and aware of the West's intelligence requirements" regarding the People's Republic of China and efforts to obtain the information to meet those requirements. For much of his career, Chin was a "document control officer" who routed "finished intelligence products" through the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Departments of State and Defense and the White House. Chin had access not just to materials on the PRC, but to the entire body of analytical intelligence - the "finished intelligence products" - on all of Asia, including the National Intelligence Estimates that are a cornerstone for policy development, national intelligence requirements on the PRC and all other Asian countries, and reports on the Asian countries originating in other government agencies sent to the CIA for review or filing. Since one of the principle centers for Western intelligence operations regarding China is the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the language of the indictment about "the West's requirements" indicated Chin may have been able to betray some British or U.S.-British cooperative intelligence programs. During the period of the Vietnam war, Chin would have been able to provide details of U.S. policy, planning and operations in Indochina. Virtually everything that passed through his hands, Chin stole and copied for Beijing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), most probably citing a defector, stated that the volume of materials obtained by Chin was so great that each delivery of filmed U.S. intelligence documents took two months to completely translate. In addition, he cultivated other CIA employees of Chinese ancestry, especially those with relatives still on the Mainland, to obtain information to help Beijing recruit them. He followed the parameters recommended by Sun Tzu precisely. A federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, convicted Chin of 17 charges including six counts of espionage. He faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment plus 83 years imprisonment and $3.3 million in fines. Sentencing was scheduled for March 17. On February 21, 1986, Chin apparently used his shoelaces to tie a plastic garbage bag around his head while lying on his bed and suffocate himself although he was in a suicide watch cell in which prisoners are to be checked every 30 minutes around the clock.
In the United States, the GAB/MSS has a huge manpower pool to draw on for services: 1,500 PRC accredited diplomats and commercial representatives; 70 PRC offices, agencies and establishments; 10,000 members of various scientific, trade, commercial and political delegations visiting for a period of up to several weeks. Each year; 15,000 Chinese students arrive in American universities and there is a large ethnic Chinese-American community. Make no mistake, the overwhelming number of Chinese-Americans have no love for the Beijing regime, but Beijing is ruthlessly manipulative of feelings of ethnic solidarity, general pride in China's emergence on the world scene and family loyalty; so it hunts for those that Beijing can manipulate. The June 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy uprising in Beijing and scores of other Chinese cities brought defections of many PRC diplomats and GAB/MSS officers, who detailed the efforts of the intelligence ministry to intimidate and control the overseas students and scientists. The first secretary at the Washington Embassy, Wang Zurong, was especially active against the PRC students at the University of Maryland in College Park. Another MSS officer, Wang Weiji, defected and described his activities against the students; but his bona fides were questioned when his wife returned to Beijing. The GAB/MSS often sends agents abroad as a married couple, but with the woman being the lead agent. MID - Military Intelligence Department of the People's Liberation Army's General Staff Department (GSD). The MID, also known as the PLA's Er Bu [Second Department], is China's second-largest intelligence agency. The primary customers for the Er Bu's intelligence product are the Central Military Commission (CMC), the core guarantor of the security of the People's Republic, and the GSD.
Other recipients of Er Bu products include the Ministry of National Defense, the service headquarters, the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND) and other elements of the military-industrial complex and unit commanders. One of the more intriguing parts of the Er Bu is the Beijing Guo Zhanlue Yanjiusuo [Beijing Institute for International Strategic Studies (BIISS), which also is called the Beijing Guoji Zhanlue Xuehui [Beijing International Strategic Studies Association]. The BIISS is staffed almost entirely with current and retired military officers and many divide their time between the Military Intelligence Department and the institute. The Er Bu Analysis Bureau works especially closely with the institute. A Chinese defector described the BIISS to Eftimiades as "our window on the world" that allows the PLA's military intelligence to make contact with foreign specialists in foreign policy and sound them out on various issues. Major General Xiong Guangkai, a professional military intelligence officer in his late fifties, heads the Er Bu. Xiong reports to a deputy chief of the GSD. Nicholas Eftimiades noted that China's military spies are building a new breed of officers with ample familiarity with the West, Xiong's personal aide, Colonel Li Ning, for example, was a military attachee in London in the late 1980s where he identified new Mideastern markets for Chinese weapons and sought to acquire "advanced technology with military applications." In 1990, Li completed graduate work at the prestigious School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University. Other sources report that during the 1980s, the Er Bu and GAB/MSS pressed scores of graduate and post-graduate students into service, especially those in research departments and institutes involved with biotechnologies, optics, communications technologies, advanced physics, chemistry and mathematics, cryogenics, laser research and medicine. Research fellows in these fields often have access to research papers of other teams, submitted for peer-review, and to papers on new technologies at early development stages before they are officially classified. "A vacuum-cleaner approach" was how one U.S. official described it.
The Er Bu may number China's First Family among its members. Take the intriguing career of Deng Xiaoping's highly influential youngest daughter, Deng Rong. In the late 1970s, after graduation from the Beijing Medical School, she joined the CPC and the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army, which has intelligence as well as ideological functions. She also joined the Communist Party. In 1979, the year formal U.S.-PRC relations began, her husband, He Ping, received a fast-track position in military procurement and military intelligence.Deng Rong then changed her name to Xiao Rong and with her husband was dispatched to China's Embassy in Washington. For the next four years, the couple worked at the embassy for the PLA's General Political Department (GPD) collecting information. Rong expanded her contacts with Americans by taking a course in government management at American University. After their return to Beijing, Deng Rong was appointed deputy director of the Policy Research Institute of the National People's Congress.
