Drama and suspense require that fictional spies swing into action at a second’s notice, rather than wasting time writing operational plans and worrying about overspending their budgets. They are untroubled by the nagging concerns of counter-intelligence: the weaknesses – human, financial, bureaucratic, operational and technical – that an enemy could exploit. Routine and discipline are the tiresome exception, not the mundane rule. Equipment appears as if by magic and always works. These exciting exploits bear as little relation to real espionage as Star Wars does to astrophysics. Though spies such as le Carré’s cerebral George Smiley do exist, in real-life espionage brain-boxes are as rare as sex-gods. Real intelligence officers – as the professional employees of state spy agencies are called – generally do not know how to pick locks, steal cars, create explosive devices from household chemicals or disable an assailant with a single punch.1 They hate standing out in a crowd, don’t wear flashy clothes and certainly don’t flirt. Their job is to get unnoticed from A to B, to perform task C and return. Scriptwriters would find that rather dry.
Moreover few intelligence officers steal secrets directly: it is too hard to get the right access, and too risky to exploit it when gained. Their main role is recruiting others to do the dirty work. Here the real talent kicks in: successful spies tend to be good at dealing with people – unobtrusively, imaginatively and persuasively. They could easily be executive coaches, psychotherapists, salesmen, confidence tricksters or (scraping the barrel) journalists. Their job is to extract information and consent by concocting and administering the right cocktail of pressure, ideology, flattery and money.
Each ingredient has its drawbacks. Blackmail can be a jolt that offers an opening for other, more durable means of persuasion; but the resentment it creates limits its usefulness. The victim twists and turns in his mind, desperately seeking a way out – which may be suicide, flight or confession, not treason. Blackmail works best when it comes from a third party, with the intelligence officer appearing as a friend, brokering a deal that involves betraying (initially minor) secrets. Ideology plays a diminished role but can also be useful. A Russian intelligence officer may play on anti-Americanism (most often in allied countries, but sometimes even in the United States). Western recruiters have used Russians’ dislike of the regime’s authoritarian crony capitalism. Flattery is the most potent technique. A friendly voice passing favourable judgement on work overlooked by an unappreciative boss is one of the most formidable weapons in the intelligence officer’s arsenal, particularly when dealing with a ‘developmental’ agent: one who is on the road to treachery, but not yet arrived. When and if the real nature of the clandestine relationship becomes clear, flattery can be crystallised in the form of a rank or a medal.
A final complementing ingredient is money. This can be paid as ‘expenses’ or ‘salary’, whichever seems less demeaning. (Many of the biggest traitors, from Britain’s Kim Philby to Estonia’s Herman Simm, have insisted that they were not mere turncoats but the other side’s employees.) Money on its own has its limits though: it buys information, but not loyalty. The sneaking suspicion in any intelligence relationship based chiefly on cash is that if a higher bidder comes along, the first customer can easily come last. A taste for treachery is often accompanied by a fast-growing appetite.[26] Praise a source for what he does and he demands more. Criticise him and he will say that he needs to take still greater risks – and demands more. Recruiting an agent from an impenetrable country such as North Korea is even harder; he may demand a huge sum of money for making any contact at all, and then disappear. Has he been caught? Has he simply disappeared to Brazil to enjoy life at your expense? Was the whole thing a dangle designed to boost the other side’s operational funds? You will never know.
The rules that hamper terrorists and money-launderers have also hit espionage. Opening an anonymous bank account in Vienna, accessed perhaps with a password, or by presenting half a torn postcard (the bank had the other half and would simply check that they fitted), was easy thirty years ago. Now banks are supposed to ‘know their customers’. In clandestine work, even a passport or home electricity bill requires forgery; creating a credit history that will stand up to checking is a serious nuisance. These hassles are potentially lethal. Imagine that you are a North Korean official in Vienna, who is considering selling some secrets. Your home is subject to regular searches by your fearsome State Security Department. If they get suspicious, you go home to eat grass in one labour camp while your wife gnaws tree bark in another. If you are paid in wads of €500 notes and keep them in a bank safety deposit box, you not only miss out on the interest: if you survive long enough to get the money out, you will find that large quantities of cash, gained from an undisclosable source, are more of a problem than a delight.
Some spy agencies therefore run a notional bank account for a source, letting interest build up on the ‘salary’. Assuming the agent reaches retirement, the money is a nest egg for his new life. This also avoids the danger of conspicuous consumption, which can easily attract unwelcome interest. Another trick is to pay agents in rare stamps. These are easily portable, highly concealable, readily exchanged into cash – and leave no trace. Other means include gambling chips from casinos, especially from chains that allow them to be exchanged for cash in any one of several countries. Keeping intelligence officers themselves supplied with money is tricky too. Those working under alias need credit cards that will withstand a credit check. But they may also need to make or receive payments that leave no electronic trace. Here the kind of dodgy money-transfer company that Ms Chapman seems to have been associated with during her time in London (which I describe in the next chapter) can come in useful. Also handy are prepaid debit cards that can be topped up with cash. These featured in the contents of the Boston home of two other spies, ‘Donald Heathfield’ and his wife, listed in the search warrant obtained by the FBI.2
Good spies are not only manipulative and ingenious; they also need good memory skills: when writing things down is dangerous, the easy and accurate recall of number plates, phone numbers, map references and passwords is vital. Spies are naturally inquisitive, and pedantic when it comes to facts, figures, times and dates. They have good Thespian skills, being able to think themselves deeply and convincingly, like a Stanislavski-trained actor, into someone else’s character. All these qualities, however, do not eliminate the paradoxes of spying: first, that using secretly obtained information necessarily endangers its source; second, that systematic attempts to be inconspicuous risk being noticed; and third, that the sort of people who deal in broken promises are unlikely to be good at keeping them.
For those running spy agencies the last of these is the worst. The people most drawn to the shadows are often those people most unsuited to working there. Though some spy for noble or intellectual reasons, for others their motivation is part of the problem, not its solution. The lucrative opportunities that the private sector offers ex-spies can erode loyalties, especially in later years as the job market looms. Those with a philosophical or mystical bent sometimes feel themselves to be part of a lay priesthood, armed with the powers of the curse and the confessional. This can shade into weirdness. Espionage also attracts those obsessed by secrecy for its own sake, and, most lethally, those for whom betrayal is a tantalising extra thrill. Breaking the other side’s rules brings a buzz; sidestepping your own team’s a bigger one. The more adept you are in the dark arts, the more tempting it is to use them widely. At a harmless level, that can involve simply fiddling expense accounts, charging meals and taxis to operational funds. It can mean bending the rules to do a pal a favour. It also invites sexual shenanigans. Spies only rarely use bedroom arts in pursuit of official business: their bosses usually veto such plans, wisely fearing that emotions may impinge on the operation. Outside work, intelligence officers are often formidable adulterers and fornicators – they know all too well how to cover tracks and avoid suspicion. In a life constrained by rules and routines, the temptation to throw over the traces can be huge. Betraying spouses can be a step to betraying secrets.
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z A related problem is that a single money-grubbing source may sell the same, slightly tweaked, information to several agencies: to America’s CIA and Germany’s BND for example. A dubious piece of information checks out from several seemingly different sources, and counts as solid. Yet behind it is just one agent, single-mindedly maximising his income. It is this that lay behind the colossal blunder that Western intelligence made over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.