Sun, Jul 04, 2010 page9

• Russian spy ring brings a touch of nostalgia

  The anachronistic spy saga shows how security services are struggling to find new roles as threats continue to change

  • By Simon Jenkins / THE GUARDIAN
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  What a laugh we have all had at Russia’s expense. They have apparently been caught red-handed spying on the US, with secret agents, passwords, codes, woodland drops and invisible ink. At a London breakfast yesterday on Tuesday addressed by Sir John Sawers, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, the assembled top brass were full of beans. They do things differently in the UK.

  They had been to trooping the color, an annual military pageant where Britain’s foes are deterred with up-to-the-minute stallions, breastplates, drums and waving swords. They’ll have Johnny Taliban quaking in his flip-flops in next to no time.

  The saga of the Russian spy ring is yet more evidence that whatever defense spending is about, it has nothing to do with defense. The FBI and the CIA have bust an operation that must have cost the Russians millions and yielded nothing that could not have been gleaned from the New York Times, Washington Post and political blogs. Why not leave the spies at it? I am sure they were paying tax. It is laughable that they posed any threat to the US public.

  

  Clearly old habits die hard. There must be George Smileys in Russia’s federal security service who date from the great days of the KGB. They mutter that the ancient methods are the best. Not for them unreliable newfangled electronics. Just put a boot on the pavement. Never trust the Internet when you can use a beer-bottle drop. You never know when you will need an agent in place. It is like the macho detective in the satire Last Tango in Aberystwyth: “Louie needed a druid — and needed one fast.” The spy ring was merely Russia’s trooping the color, a touch of the old days to keep the lads on their toes.

  Spies love to assert that, while 90 percent of secret service activity is barking mad, you can never tell which is the other 10 percent. James Bond might seem no more than a sadistic clotheshorse, but once in a while he saves the planet. Hence the motto of security services down the ages: “You never can tell.” Or as that modern philosopher Donald Rumsfeld would put it: “The unknown unknowns are what get you in the end.”

  While most defense spending these days is bonkers, I can see the case for secret intelligence, especially the independent variety in which the British and US security services claim to deal. The likelihood of Russia or North Korea or Pakistan or even Iran launching a nuclear attack on Britain is so infinitesimal as to be trivial, but a modest outlay to keep the government up to speed on aggressive lunatics in those countries is an insurance premium worth paying.

  Likewise the case put by British Prime Minister David Cameron that Britain’s currently deployed army, navy and air force are “absolutely essential” to deter a terrorist attack may be an insult to the most modest intelligence. However, I hope the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) has penetrated the terrorist cells once concentrated in a single Afghan bunker and now dispersed and multiplied across the Arab world, thanks to NATO. We may not share former British prime minister Tony Blair’s view that a terrorist bomb could “undermine British values and way of life” — those values are more robust than he thinks — but we would like authority to seek out such bombers, within the bounds of civil liberty and as far as resources permit.

  For 20 years since the cold war, the security services, like the armed forces, have been seeking a new role when their chief reason for existing has gone. The world is a vastly safer place.

  Soldiers think they can guard children against drug traffickers, ships against pirates, dirty bombs against proliferation and states against failing. They cannot. All they can do is try to make people more afraid. Americans are susceptible to being scared witless by the defense lobby. Britons are commendably resistant.

  The most effective protection I have from a terrorist bomb in my street is a competent intelligence service and a police force not dancing to the home secretary’s (interior minister) tune, but plugged in to neighborhood street life. The coalition can spend all it wants on defense kit, but it will not make me feel safe, not like a police force that knows each nook and cranny of a locality and can tell when something is nasty in the woodshed.

  Any competent government needs good intelligence, in the widest sense of the word. Spies are part of that. They are not burdened with the historical baggage of the armed forces and their consequent, often fanatical, conservatism. They can redeploy with ease, formulate their own objectives and speak truth to power in private and without political constraint.

  However, effectiveness depends on two factors — secrecy and independence. Secrecy has been partly blown by the eagerness of both the domestic British Security Service, known as MI5, and the overseas SIS to be publicly accountable and “avowed.” I could never see the point. Secret means advice given and received secretly, otherwise “intelligence” is just another competing input to policy, its content inevitably leaking into the public domain.

  Independence is related to that. On Wednesday, the government’s Chilcot committee resumed its hearings on the Iraq War. The talk is already that the SIS — or at least its crucial top assessors — was so much in Number 10 Downing Street’s pocket before the Iraq War that it stifled warnings from the ranks that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were not all Blair wanted them to be. Public confidence in the security services risks taking a further battering in the inquiry into complicity in torture of terror suspects that Cameron is expected to confirm in coming days.

  The corruption of intelligence by politics, by rulers who hear only what they want to hear, is such a familiar hazard of espionage as no longer to be an excuse for failure, but the risk of corruption must rise when intelligence is doctored against the possibility of parliamentary and press scrutiny, and when its independence is compromised by closeness to ministers (and their spin doctors).

  Spies like to protest that they fail in public, but must succeed in private. That is the fate of all who work in defense and security, but having compromised both their secrecy and, under Blair, their independence, they have a credibility problem in pleading for support. We can only wonder how far the rumored skepticism of the intelligence services toward the Afghanistan operation has been adequately conveyed to ministers. There is scant public evidence of it. To have been party to one dud war is bad enough, but two would be more than careless.
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