Regular counter-intelligence screening can uncover suspicious patterns of behaviour, or anomalies in the subject’s private life. But the more senior and experienced the subject of scrutiny, the harder it is to trip him up – and the more damage he can do. Aleksandr Poteyev, the American agent at the heart of Russian intelligence who betrayed Ms Chapman and her colleagues, had apparently escaped routine lie-detector tests by virtue of seniority and good connections. Spies are necessarily practised and skilful in fending off unwelcome questions and concealing their real intentions and feelings. The endemic duplicity of the profession makes it hard to deliver sincere praise or to appreciate it.
The mutual dislike that often exists between spies and spy-catchers poses a further problem. Counter-intelligence officers tend to be suspicious, methodical types who like every fact to be nailed down and distrust flair, initiative or anything irregular. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that they see their field-officer colleagues as a self-indulgent menace to security. For their part, the active spies are at heart intuitive rule-breakers with a strong sense of the rightness of their own judgement. They think the spycatchers’ silly rules hamper the chance of doing any real work. (This is one reason why his former colleagues from the elite foreign-espionage division of the KGB detest Mr Putin, who was a lowly counter-intelligence officer during his time in Germany.) The rivalry can be debilitating. When agencies such as the FBI or Britain’s Security Service scent a spy on their turf, their priority is to arrest him to protect the nation’s secrets. When the CIA or SIS (the official title of MI6) finds one, their instinct is to watch, not pounce. The longer the game, the more they learn about the other side’s methods and sources, and the greater the chance of a successful ruse – recruiting the traitor as a double agent, feeding disinformation to the other side, or trying to flush out his case officer or controller.
The constant aim of intelligence work is to provide otherwise unobtainable information to policymakers. But spy agencies vary in size, techniques, susceptibility to political interference and most of all effectiveness. A good index of excellence is discretion: crudely, the lower the profile, the greater the success. Sweden’s Kontoret för särskild inhämtning (Office of Special Collection) is a clear winner. It has no published street address, let alone a website.3 Another variable is necessity. Countries facing an existential threat tend to take their security seriously. Those that don’t (Belgium springs to mind) see it as a low priority. Poor countries find it hard to keep their spy services honest, as the rewards for misbehaviour are proportionately greater for those on low salaries. Spookish meddling in public life is a big problem in many ex-communist countries, where compromising information is political currency. An agency’s ability to bug politicians’ telephones can easily divert its attention from threats to the national interest.
The essential elements of espionage everywhere – boredom, deceit, secrecy and ambition – are an inherently toxic compound. The success or failure of a spy service depends on its ability to mitigate the negative effects of this compound, through selection, training, morale, discipline, scrutiny, and procedure. For all the high stakes and sharp wits, the biggest part of espionage is therefore meticulous, careful work; it can even be rather dull. The focus on routine also reflects the paradox that the most successful breaches of a rule are unmarked. A truly successful operation goes unnoticed by everyone but those who ran it. Every trace left restricts future options and increases the risk of the other side limiting the damage, taking countermeasures and tracking down sources. The hallmarks of successful spying are pedantic planning, plentiful patience, prudent precautions, and most of all invisibility.
The risks sharpen the focus. Officialdom often wastes public money. Errors in espionage mean not just unwanted buildings or ill-conceived regulations but deep damage and ruined lives. Treason bears heavy criminal penalties. In most operations, therefore, the human costs of failure outweigh the benefits of success. The resulting caution is in constant tension with the central means of espionage – rule breaking – yet it is vital that it does not overwhelm it. An intelligence officer who flinches at this might as well be a diplomat.
Imagine, for example, that you are a spymaster considering a potential source – someone, perhaps, like Sergei Skripal, a Russian intelligence officer who for many years passed his country’s secrets to Britain. If your service successfully recruits and runs him, your country gains invaluable information about Russia’s military capabilities and intentions, about its decision-making processes, about the weaknesses and strengths of its security procedures, about its intelligence-gathering efforts abroad, and much more besides. Your country is better informed and safer. Your taxpayers have got value for money. Your political masters will be pleased. Your career will flourish. But your source, if caught, is likely to end his days in a hard labour regime camp somewhere near the Arctic Circle (Mr Skripal was sentenced to thirteen years in 2006; he was one of the four prisoners that Russia swapped for Ms Chapman and her colleagues).4
The danger can be even greater. If your operation in China, Iran or Syria is blown, your source faces not just prison, but death, perhaps by torture. For their induction into the Soviet GRU military intelligence service, recruits were shown a film of the fate awaiting those who betrayed its secrets (the account comes from a defector who was undeterred). It showed a man, gagged and wired to a steel stretcher, being trundled to the door of a furnace prior to being burned alive:
He strains to the point of breaking his own bones, and tearing his own tendons and muscles. It is a superhuman effort. But the wire does not give. And the stretcher slides smoothly along the rails. The furnace doors move aside again and the fire casts a white light on the soles of the man’s dirty patent leather shoes. He tries to bend his knees in an effort to increase the distance between his feet and the roaring fire. But he can’t.5
To save a source from such a fate means a lot of dull errands. Go to the Hotel Sheraton in Kiev and leave this envelope at reception to be collected by Mr Brown. Go to the DHL office in Riga and pay cash for the delivery of this envelope to a Mr Smith in Dublin. Go to a bank in Helsinki, leave one package in a safe-deposit box and collect another. Buy a coffee and read a newspaper in the glass-walled metro station at Moscow’s Sparrow Hills between eleven and twelve every Saturday, wearing a red scarf. That is a signal to Mr Skripal (en route to his regular sports club) that everything is all right. If he is wearing a hat, he’s OK too.