I hope that this potted history is suitable reading for those who want more than just a simple one- or two-page overview, but who may be put off by full blown books, scholarly works that are principally aimed at students and historians rather than general readers. My aim is to provide a modest piece which is both informative and readable.
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Contents
From Pre-History to late Middle Ages
Ancient Egypt
The Bible
The Ancient Greeks
Divination
China and India
The Roman Republic
The Roman Empire
Early Islam
The Inquisitions
Venice, Ambassadors, Spying and Codebreaking
Tsar Ivan the Terrible
Elizabethan Plots
Cardinal Richelieu
The English Civil War and Beyond
Early 18th Century
The Jacobite Threat
Revolutions and Fear of Revolution
The American War of Independence
The French Revolution
Napoleon
The Fear of Revolution
Mazzini et al
1848 followed by Marx, Engels et al
Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny
The American Civil War
Assassinations
The Beginnings of the Bolsheviks
The Beginnings of MI5 and MI6
Turf Wars
Use of New Technology
World War I
1919 to the end of World War II
The Inter-war Years
Codebreaking
Pearl Harbor
Stalin’s Paranoia
Start of the Soviet Offensive
The Double XX System and Deceptions
Spying on the Manhattan Project
America after the War
Alliances and Liaisons
Science and Technology
Walk-ins
Spying for the Other Side
Religion
Mossad
Cyber Spying and Crime
Whistleblowing
Further Assassinations
Terrorism
Mass Surveillance
Elizabethan Spymasters
Double XX Deceptions
Envoys, Ambassadors and Embassies
Industrial Espionage
Cryptography
Names of Russian and Soviet Intelligence Agencies
Bibliography & Further Reading
Introduction
Christopher Andrew, in The Secret World, A History of Intelligence, states that “twenty-first-century intelligence suffers from long-term historical amnesia”. He is indicating that there is little written history on past experiences. For example, he states that in World War II Western intelligence services were largely unaware of experiences in the first decades of the 20th century. Perhaps the lack of a coherent history is not surprising, given the subject matter?
Intelligence has both foreign and homeland aspects. Offensively, the objective is to obtain information on your enemy or competitor, which may typically be achieved through a mixture of reconnaissance, along with open and covert information gathering. Defensively, the aim is to stop them obtaining information about you, where “they” may include citizens of your own state who wish to take power from you. This is commonly known as counterintelligence.
This potted history proceeds in a chronological fashion from pre-history up to recent times. Topics which warrant some further detail can be found in the Odds and Sods section at the end. They include: Walsingham’s period as spymaster in the reign of Elizabeth I; disinformation and deception during World War II; envoys, ambassadors and embassies; industrial espionage; and cryptography.
There are a number of recurring themes:
- the degree to which rulers and military leaders take due notice of available intelligence on other tribes, kingdoms or states has varied significantly over time. Some have recognised its value, others have tended to ignore it. The naysayers may be guilty of arrogance or they may be believers in what the Gods or other omens indicate
- on the contrary, all rulers have tended to be extremely interested in receiving internal intelligence on their own state, particularly anything which might threaten their own positions
- until recent times, the relative importance that was attached to intelligence could wax and wane, depending on events and on the individuals in power
- the reason why any one individual indulges in spying on behalf of another state can be ideological, pecuniary or as a result of blackmail
- when multiple intelligence departments appeared within a state in the 20th century, the inevitable turf wars were invariably a hindrance.
Notes
With reference to dates, BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) are used in this document in preference to BC and AD.
Various terms with INT (for intelligence) suffixes are used:
- SIGINT – signals intelligence
- HUMINT – intelligence gained by human interaction
- IMINT – imagery intelligence.
Soviet and Russian intelligence services have undergone many name changes since the time of their revolution. I provide links in the Odds and Sods section to articles which provide detailed information on this subject.
One final note. The word espionage is French (spelt espionnage) and came into use in the 1790s at the time of the French Revolution.
From Pre-history to the late Middle Ages
From the earliest times, forms of reconnaissance should have been mandatory before embarking on battles and conquests, or before establishing trade links with other kingdoms. This was not always the case.
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was a place of high intrigue, both internally and abroad. Spies were expected to carry out assassinations when ordered to do so, often by the use of toxins and poisons that they had been trained to use.
There is evidence that Egypt sought intelligence about neighbouring kingdoms. It desired authority over the Levant, the name given to the east coast of the Mediterranean. This naturally led to the need for intelligence about Canaan before the Israelites settled there, and about Amurru, a particularly troublesome kingdom in the early Bronze Age.
In the middle and later Bronze Age, Egypt had diplomatic relations and trade links with the likes of Assyria, Babylonia and Hatti, roughly areas covering present-day Iraq and south eastern Turkey, all necessitating intelligence.
The Bible
Various examples of intelligence gathering and spying activities can be found in the Bible.
Somewhere around the 14th or 15th century BCE, Moses sent 12 leaders of the Jewish tribes to reconnoitre the land of Canaan. They could be regarded as amateurs in the field of spying, and only two reported back in favour of occupying Canaan, while the other 10 were against. God was said to be displeased, leading to the Israelites being condemned to wander in the wilderness for 40 years.
Joshua, the successor to Moses, sent two professionals to spy out Jericho. They stayed with Rahab, the owner of a local brothel, who helped them, preventing the rulers from capturing them. Their recommendation was to take Jericho, which the Israelites subsequently did, massacring all its inhabitants in the process.
Finally, in the New Testament, there is the account of Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus to the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane for 30 pieces of silver.
The Ancient Greeks
The Persian Empire was arguably at its peak around 500 BCE during the reign of Darius I. Defeat by the Greeks at Marathon in 490 BCE only served to reinforce the Persian desire to subjugate Greece.
There were two battles of note in 480 BCE: at Thermopylae when the Greeks were betrayed by Ephialtes of Trachis who led the Persians around the Greek lines; and a naval battle at Salamis where Sicinnus, a Persian slave of the Athenian leader Themistocles, while acting as a negotiator between his master and Xerxes, the Persian leader, managed to persuade the Persians into narrow straits where their larger fleet was out-manoeuvred by the smaller Greek vessels, resulting in a loss of 200 vessels, as compared to 40 Greek vessels.
Divination
Divination is defined as “the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means.” Oracles and seers acted as the purveyors of such knowledge. Oracles were in direct contact with the Gods, the most notable being the Oracle at Delphi near the Gulf of Corinth (established around 1400 BCE) and the Sybil at Cumae near Naples (500 BCE). Seers were not in contact with the Gods. They used the flight patterns of birds, thunder and lightning, the entrails of sacrificial animals and other phenomena which they would interpret to help them to predict the future.
Greeks and Romans often placed significant reliance on the predictions of oracles and seers in preparation for battles and conquests, rather than by obtaining intelligence and analysing it.
Here are some Greek examples. Pericles, the famous politician and general, refused to use intelligence. After him, Xenophon, philosopher, military leader and historian saw the usefulness of intelligence, but at the same time he also believed in divination, while Aristotle arguably just sat on the fence. Finally, Alexander the Great attempted to cover all the bases, making heavy use of reconnaissance, some use of spies and substantial use of seers.
China and India
The military treatise, The Art of War, is attributed to Sun Tzu, a Chinese military strategist from around the 5th century BCE. It has remained influential over the centuries. It consists of 13 chapters on the subject of warfare, the last dealing with the use of spies. He Identified the following types:
- native agent recruited from enemy countryside
- inside agent within enemy officialdom
- double agent, whom the enemy wrongly regards as its own loyal agent
- expendable agent, used to feed disinformation to the enemy
- and living agent, who brings intelligence from within the enemy camp.
When these five types of agent are all working simultaneously, and nobody is aware of their operations, they are called the “Divine Skein who are the treasure of a sovereign”.
Arthashastra is an ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, which probably dates from the 3rd century BCE, with revisions and additions up to the 2nd century CE. The initial author was possibly Kautilya, a polymath and royal advisor. In its call for a professional intelligence service, it discusses recruitment and identifies 19 types of spy with 50 sub-types.
The Roman Republic
To generalise, there was significant reliance on divination and little use of intelligence with a couple of notable exceptions.
During the 2nd Punic War, the Romans were constantly outsmarted by Hannibal, a great military strategist, user of spies, and someone who had no time for divination. Rome was slow to learn that he had crossed the Alps with his elephants, but the battle of Cannae (216 BCE) provides the best illustration of the effects of his planning and the Romans lack of it. Hannibal’s understanding of the terrain and of the opposing forces allowed him to bring off the first known complete pincer movement and rout the Romans. The battle is regarded as a classic which is still studied by military personnel today.
Scipio (Africanus) was one Roman general who did use spies and reconnaissance, which helped him to eventually defeat Hannibal at Zama (202 BCE), and bring the 2nd Punic War to an end. However, his use of spies was frowned upon by those back in Rome who regarded it as underhand (“not cricket” to use that British phrase).
Julius Caesar, probably the greatest general of the Roman Republic, had little time for divination. He employed three levels of reconnaissance: procursatores (scouting the area just ahead); exploratores (further ahead); and speculatores (spying deep into the enemy’s territory). He acted as his own intelligence analyst and chief interrogator, dealing with prisoners, merchants, et cetera. He is thought to have been one of the first to use substitution ciphers (for personal correspondence).
The Roman Empire
The Romans suffered a heavy defeat at Teutoberg (9 CE) at the hands of the Cherusi, a Germanic tribe, losing between 15 and 20,000 men. Varus, the Roman commander, was blamed for not listening to intelligence that had been provided by Segestes, a German mole, who had indicated that the Cherusi were planning something.
Back in Rome, the emperor Augustus subsequently became concerned for his own safety after his purge of the Senate in 18 CE, using informers (delatores) to obtain information on alleged plots. Tiberius, his stepson, used even greater numbers of informers when he succeeded Augustus, as he was particularly paranoid about conspiracies.
Boudicca’s uprising in Britain around 60-61 CE, as with the disaster at Teutoberg, came about because the Romans were arrogant and totally underestimated the locals.
Approximately 75% of Roman emperors were either assassinated or overthrown. Unsurprisingly therefore, they tended to pay particular attention to their own safety. The Praetorian Guard, who acted as personal bodyguards and intelligence agents for the emperor, eventually fell out of favour, mainly due to their involvement in various uprisings among the Roman elite. The frumentarii, originally responsible for collecting and distributing grain, came to be used as informers because they travelled a great deal and were therefore likely to come across information which they could relay back to the emperor. In fact, the emperor Hadrian used them to spy on his friends. Probably for that reason, they became unpopular and were eventually disbanded by the emperor Diocletian and replaced by general agents (agentes in rebus) who fulfilled much the same role, although they were civilians.
45 years after the emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion, divination was made illegal. However, Roman struggles with barbarian tribes (Goths) and with the Huns continued, not helped by the lack of military intelligence. The battle of Adrianople (378 CE), when somewhere between 20 and 40 thousand Romans were killed by Gothic tribes, is seen by some historians as signalling the start of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Early Islam
Muhammad, the prophet, was a strong believer in the use of intelligence. Examples include: warning from a spy helped him to flee from Mecca to Medina when he was being sought by the Quraysh leaders; the use of disinformation on his whereabouts helped him to defeat the Quraysh at the battle of Badr; and the use of assassins to dispose of poets and others who criticised him and his teachings.
Similarly, two of the early successful generals, Khalid ibn al-Walid and Amr ibn al-As, were firm believers in intelligence as they expanded the Islamic Empire across the Middle East, including defeats of the Roman and Persian empires.
Although spying by one Muslim on another was forbidden, this did not apply to the ruling elite.
With the fall of the Western Roman empire, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad became the centre of learning. Greek writings, such as Aristotle’s, were translated into Arabic as they were disappearing in the West. Al-Khawarizmi, a polymath, is the father of algebra, while Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, another polymath, began the science of cryptanalysis, writing A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages. It is thought that it was only around this time that Caesar’s personal letters were able to be deciphered.
The Inquisitions
The Inquisitions are included because they required a bureaucracy and a methodical record-keeping which would subsequently be found in one-party states. They began in the late 12th century to root out heresies. They were local affairs which were called into existence by the Pope until 1542 when they were centralised in Rome, where they were controlled by what became known as the Holy Office.
The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) in SW France was instigated by Pope Innocent III to end Catharism. The Cathars believed that the world was evil; God was good, and therefore the world must the work of the Devil.
Denunciations were a frequent ploy and Dominicans became the main inquisitors. Although there are probably exaggerations with respect to the overall numbers of heretics who were burned or executed, there was the massacre of all the citizens of Béziers in 1209 after they refused to hand over alleged heretics. Books were banned. Somewhat perversely, Michel de Montaigne’s book which attacked heretics was banned on the basis that it provided propaganda to those who were mentioned. Even unauthorised translations of the Bible into the vernacular were banned.
Heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable. One accused leper “admitted” to poisoning water supplies, using a consecrated Host mixed with ground-up snakes, toads, lizards and human excrement.
The Spanish Inquisition made use of waterboarding, long before the CIA and the US Military latched on to this form of torture.
European States
Around the late Middle Ages, the gradual development of formal, organised intelligence systems began to take place, or at least the increasing volume of information on the subject allows us to believe so. This is particularly true when we reach Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State in the Elizabethan period, when the significant archive of documents and the subsequent research which has been carried out on its contents has led to claims that he was the architect of modern espionage.
Venice, Ambassadors, Spying and Codebreaking
By the late Middle Ages Venice had become the greatest trading nation (city-state) with sole access to the spice trade in the East until Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to India (1497-1499), thus connecting the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
The responsibilities of the Council of Ten, first formed in 1310, included state security. Venice was among the first states to deploy resident ambassadors who were responsible for supplying both political and commercial intelligence, either gained openly or secretly through the use of agents. For example, Venice made heavy use of interpreters and secretaries in Constantinople, some of whom had been captured from Christian families as teenagers but who had maintained loyalty to European culture, while others were simply bribed. Merchants were also used as agents.
Around this time, part-time or full-time professional agents began to appear. In the late 16th century Nicolò Rinaldi appeared to be working for the Venetians, the French, the Habsburgs, and most probably the English.
SIGINT (the interception of communication between individuals) began to become established, and with it the need to decipher coded material. Leon Battista Alberti’s book De Componendis Cifris (Concerning the Solution of Ciphers) was published in 1467. He also devised a disc containing two concentric circles of letters and numbers, allowing a technique known as polyalphabetic substitution to be used. This permitted the use of multiple alphabets within a single message. The Council of Ten established a codebreaking agency in 1506, headed by Giovanni Soro.
As regards internal security, the Venetian love of masks allowed spies and informers to disguise themselves. The denunciation of individuals by letter was made possible by the provision of specified post boxes, called lions’ mouths. The writer had to provide his name, although his identity was protected.
After Soro, it was to be the French who would lead in the world of cryptography through François Viète (1540-1603), lawyer, mathematician and someone who contributed significantly to the work which ultimately led to modern algebra.
Tsar Ivan the Terrible
Ivan IV lived in fear of conspiracies, and so he set up Oprichniki, Russia’s first state secret service, headed by Maliuta Skuratov. Its work led to a series of brutal murders and massacres, notably at Novgorod in 1570.
Ivan Mikhailovich Viskovaty became the first head of diplomacy in 1549, although Russia had no resident ambassadors at this time. The Englishman, Richard Chancellor, found himself in Moscow in 1553 after a failed attempt to find the North East passage. He managed to develop a relationship with Ivan which led to the establishment of the Muscovy Company for trade with England, along with an embassy in Moscow, although Russia only sent an envoy (Nepeya) to England. Chancellor, who subsequently drowned, was followed by Anthony Jenkinson, a man who Ivan liked. However, apart from Jenkinson, Ivan blew hot and cold in his relations with England, mainly cold, although the Muscovy company had become too important for him to break off relations.
Elizabethan Plots
The move to Protestantism made England a major target for Catholic Europe during the reign of Elizabeth I, with Mary Stuart being the focus of various plots to bring the country back to the Catholic faith. They included the Ridolfi, Throckmorton and Babington plots. In addition, there were attempts to stop the arrival of Catholic priests from the Continent, and of course there was the threat of the Spanish Armada.
William Cecil, the chief advisor of Elizabeth, dealt with the Ridolfi plot, but thereafter Walsingham was principally responsible for all matters of security until his death in 1590. He is arguably known as the first Spymaster.
This area of Elizabethan history has been extensively researched and written about, a brief summary of which can be found the Odds and Sods section.
Cardinal Richelieu
Richelieu became the chief minister of Louis XIII of France in 1624, and remained so until his death in 1642. He was known as L’Eminence Rouge. Eminence is how cardinals are addressed, and they wear red robes.
He was mainly concerned with the Habsburg empire (Spain and Austria) abroad, while keeping the Protestant Huguenots in check at home. He appointed François Le Clerc du Tremblay, a Capuchin friar better known by his religious name, Père Joseph de Paris, to carry out negotiations with other states on his behalf. Dressed in his grey habit, Père Joseph unsurprisingly became known as the l’éminence grise, a phrase which has passed into the English language, as well as the French, to describe a person who wields power and influence without holding an official position.
Richelieu set up a codebreaking agency in 1633, known as the Cabinet Noir (Black Chamber) with Antoine Rossignol, a cryptanalyst who had come to his attention, in charge. He remained in that position until his death in 1682.
Philip IV of Spain was no match for Richelieu’s wiles, although he is noted for using the painter Rubens to get close to Charles I of England and carry out secret negotiations on his behalf. This was helped by the fact that Charles distrusted the French.
The English Civil War and Beyond
Among the Royalist faction, Viscount Falkland, the Secretary of State, thought that intelligence work was underhand. This was not the view of the Parliamentarians who found John Wallis, a cleric, mathematician and cryptanalyst of genius. He decrypted Charles I’s correspondence which had been found after the defeat of the Royalist forces at the battle of Naseby (1645).
After Charles’ execution, Thomas Scot(t) was appointed head of intelligence in July 1649, and he quickly developed an effective network of agents, including Robert Werden who was located within the royal court in exile.
Scot(t) was succeeded by John Thurloe who, like Walsingham, was Secretary of State and Spymaster. Werden was able to supply information on Charles II’s plan to invade and regain the crown in 1651. Charles was defeated at the Battle of Worcester, and he only managed to escape after hiding in a tree (which subsequently gave rise to the Royal Oak pub name).
While in exile, the Royalists managed to carry out a couple of assassinations on the Continent of individuals who had been involved in Charles I’s trial and subsequent execution, viz. Anthony Ascham in Madrid and Isaac Dorislaus in the Hague.
Charles II regained the crown in 1661, and he was succeeded in 1685 by his brother James II, whose short reign was ended in 1688 when he was forced to flee to France after his attempts to convert England back to Catholicism proved unacceptable. His supporters, known as Jacobites (the Latin name for James is Jacobus), quickly began efforts to get him back on the throne, invading Ireland with help from the French. Wallis decrypts of relevant correspondence helped the English, as they pointed out that James’ forces and the French did not get on. James went into permanent exile after his defeat at the battle of the Boyne in 1690.
James was succeeded by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. William III’s understanding and appreciation of foreign intelligence was unrivalled among European monarchs at the time. Apart from using Wallis, he also had access to a Black Chamber which had been established at Celle in Lower Saxony. In 1696 there was a threat to invade England and assassinate William. Knowledge of the proposed plot spooked the would-be assassins, who fled, and the invasion failed to materialise.
Wallis continued to do occasional cryptanalysis work, including: some work for Frederick I of Prussia, William’s cousin; and decrypting various French correspondence including items which had been sent to Colbert, the First Minister of State, and to Louis XIV. He died in 1703 and was succeeded by his grandson William Blencowe.
Early 18th Century
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) saw England and France in conflict. The Duke of Marlborough generally received good intelligence during this period, provided through Cadogan, his Quartermaster General, who ran an agent network in France, principally at the ports, and through Adam de Cardonnel, his French-speaking private secretary. Conversely, the French had relatively poor intelligence at this time.
The Act of Union (1707) which joined England and Scotland was helped by the work of the writer and newspaper proprietor Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe fame) who had been sent to Edinburgh in 1706 by Harley, the English Spymaster at the time, to do all that he could to help secure the Union. He did this by producing significant amounts of propaganda through his writing, and of course by relaying relevant intelligence back to London.
In France, Louis XIV had started his reign as a monarch who (a) had some interest in intelligence and (b) tried to balance the country’s books. He ended with no real interest in the former and managed to effectively bankrupt the latter.
The Jacobite Threat
Blencowe, the British cryptanalyst, was succeeded, first by John Keill in 1712 and then by Edward Willes in 1716. Willes decrypted correspondence which revealed contacts between Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester and undeclared leader of the Jacobites in England, and the Jacobites in exile abroad. He also decrypted a document which showed the possibility of Swedish support for the Jacobites.
The Jacobite revolt of 1715 was led by John Erskine, the Earl of Mar (known as Bobbing John). However, after taking the area of Scotland to the north of the Firth of Forth, they marched south, only to be defeated at the battle of Preston.
In the 1740s, an official at the French foreign affairs secretariat, François de Bussy, was employed as an English spy. He provided details of a plan for a French invasion in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie (the Young Pretender). Although the invasion failed to materialise, Charles went ahead on his own, enjoying a victory at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, in September 1745, and getting as far as Derby on his march south before his force became worried about three English armies that were approaching it from different directions. He decided to retreat to Scotland where he suffered a heavy defeat at Culloden, after which he managed to escape to the Continent with the help of Flora MacDonald.
‘Pickle’ was the name of a British spy in the Jacobite camp, thought to be Alastair Roy MacDonell of Glengarry. He was able to provide information on the Elibank plot of 1752 which proposed to take the Tower of London and St. James’ Palace, and also to kidnap George II and his family. The plan was thus thwarted, and the Jacobite threat markedly declined after this point.
Revolutions and the Fear of Revolution
The American War of Independence, and more notably the French Revolution, induced fear among European powers in the first half of the 19th century that revolutionary ideas would spread to their kingdoms.
In general, the ideas did spread, albeit not as quickly or as effectively as they had speculated. The thoughts of left-leaning adherents and anarchists were slow to germinate, becoming more noticeable in the second half of the 19th century.
The American War of Independence
Benjamin Franklin, the famous polymath and one of America’s Founding Fathers, was sent to Paris in 1776 as a commissioner for the United States, from where he became responsible for the publication of anti-British propaganda. He was also involved in negotiations with the French which led in 1778 to their open declaration that they would recognise America’s independence, their support having previously been limited to providing covert aid. Britain was well-informed about what was going on in Paris after Bancroft, Franklin’s secretary, became a double agent.
In America, George Washington had previously learnt the importance of intelligence in the 1750s while he was an officer in the British army. He became his own intelligence analyst and Spymaster. He particularly excelled at deception, producing fake documents that would lead the British to misjudge his planned movements or the strength of his army (to indicate that he had more troops when in fact he had less). Meanwhile, the Culper spy ring provided him with information on British troop movements in New York.
The Yorktown campaign of 1781 saw the surrender of the British army and ultimately led to the end of the war. They had been hampered by the lack of naval intelligence which allowed the French to populate the Chesapeake Bay area, and hence cut off any British escape by sea. The British had 7,000 troops in the area, while the Americans had 11,000, bolstered by 9,000 French.
The Americans were also helped by the work of James Lovell, America’s first cryptanalyst. After independence, he asked for, and received, a Secret Service fund. By the third year this amounted to over $1m, approximately 12% of the federal budget.
The French Revolution
The British were initially in favour of the unrest in France, if only because it kept the French quiet and hence less troublesome. However, after Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were arrested in 1792, the government broke off diplomatic relations with France. With the closure of their embassy in Paris and hence the loss of intelligence, the Foreign Office sent an agent, George Monro, to Paris to see what he could find out. Not a great deal was the answer, as it was difficult to assess the political mood in those turbulent times. He was principally limited to monitoring the activities of those British ex-pats in Paris who had republican sympathies. By the time that Louis had been executed in January 1793, Monro’s role as a republican sympathiser had been compromised, and then France declared war on Britain in February.
Robespierre, an influential member of the Committee of Public Safety, was a major player in the unfolding events. However, he was a divisive figure who saw conspiracies everywhere. It was to bring his own downfall in July 1794 when fellow revolutionaries recognised that they might well lose their lives to his seeming paranoia, as had Danton, unless they managed to accuse him first.
Fear that revolutionary fervour might spread to Britain led to the setting up of the Alien Office within the Home Office in 1793 to control the arrival of French and other suspected revolutionaries. Subsequently, the Inner Office was set up as a separate security and intelligence department within the Alien Office.
British intelligence failures during this period included: involvement in a failed French royalist plot of 1799 to kill the five executive members of the Directory, the Revolutionary government that had been set up after Robespierre’s execution; and a failed plot to kill Napoleon in 1803.
Napoleon
Intelligence had indicated the likelihood of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798, but the British failed to spot his fleet when it set out from Toulon. While Napoleon was in the middle of his campaign, Nelson eventually located the French fleet off Egypt and destroyed most of it during the Battle of the Nile. However, Napoleon continued with his land campaign, returning in 1799 in preparation to assume the leadership of France.
Napoleon was a voracious reader (probably a speed reader?). To generalise, he did not pay too much attention to the foreign intelligence reports that were prepared for him on British troop movements. He preferred to read English newspapers which tended to give detailed information on British forces and their positions, much to Wellington’s annoyance.
However, like most leaders, he did pay great attention to internal intelligence, particularly any information regarding those who reported to him. He had appointed Joseph Fouché as Minister of Police. Although he had a high regard for Fouché, who effectively set up the first modern police state, he made separate arrangements for him to be monitored. In addition, Napoleon had his own network of twelve agents who reported directly to him.
There are three examples where Napoleon suffered, notwithstanding his military genius and administrative talents, due to his inability to take due notice of foreign intelligence. After his conquest of Spain, the Spanish and Portuguese were not happy when he appointed his brother Joseph as the King of Spain. In the Peninsular War the Duke of Wellington benefited from: the intelligence which was readily supplied by unhappy Spanish and Portuguese; and the breaking of the Great Paris cipher (Grand Chiffre) by Scovell, a member of the quartermaster’s staff in Iberia. While Napoleon had British troop numbers and positions, he did not cater for Spanish forces and guerillas in his calculations. Cryptanalysis helped Wellington to win the battle of Vitoria (1813) which effectively ended French control in Spain.
Tsar Alexander I made better use than Napoleon of foreign intelligence. It was supplied to him by Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, the Defence Minister, who is regarded as the founding father of Russian military intelligence, known initially as the Special Chancellery. In addition, Alexander Chernyshev, the Tsar’s personal representative at Napoleon’s court, was highly successful in creating and running his own agent network while stationed in Paris. He reported back to the Tsar with respect to Napoleon’s build-up of troops in the east. In his final report (1811) he considered that Napoleon was going to invade Russia, and that, as he would have superior forces and would be looking for quick wins, he recommended that Russia should avoid pitched battles. General Kutusov followed this advice, apart from events at Smolensk and Borodino. The Russian forces even vacated Moscow as the French approached. Napoleon stayed too long in Moscow, not allowing enough time to get out of Rusia before the winter set in, especially as the Russians harried them and employed a scorched-earth policy, which hindered the French who tended to live off the local land. Napoleon eventually lost at least 75% of his forces during the Russian campaign.
Finally, and very briefly, Napoleon virtually ignored intelligence that the Prussians were imminently to come to Wellington’s aid at Waterloo.
The Fear of Revolution
In Europe, there was a general fear that the ideas of the French Revolution would spread:
- Metternich, Interior Minister and subsequently the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, ordered heightened surveillance of students
- Carbonari was a network of secret societies in Italy, established in 1800 and active until around 1831
- Tsar Nicholas I established the Third Section (political policing) which engaged in widespread letter-opening as part of its surveillance activities
- There was a very brief uprising in Paris in 1839, organised by the Société des Saisons, a secret society
- The Chartist movement, mainly active from 1836 to 1848, whose aim was to obtain political voting rights for the working class, was seen by some as a possible threat in Britain.
Mazzini et al
Mazzini was an Italian revolutionary who sought a unified Italy. He had been forced to flee, ending up in London in 1837, from where he continued his revolutionary work. Metternich pressed the British government to intercept his mail, but Mazzini eventually got wind of this and kicked up a fuss, helped by Thomas Carlyle and various other politicians.
The radical MP for Finsbury, Thomas Duncombe, presented to the House of Commons a petition from Mazzini and others complaining that the opening of their letters had introduced to Britain “the odious spy system of foreign countries” a system “repugnant to every principle of the British constitution”.
In a subsequent debate the renowned historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Whig MP for over a quarter of a century, denounced spying activities in this country as un-British. The Commons appointed a Committee of Secrecy to investigate the matter. After their report had been issued, Peel’s government closed down the Deciphering Branch and the Secret Office of the Post Office which had been formed around 1653 to open mail arriving in / departing from this country.
1848 Uprisings, Marx, Engels et al
There were a number of uprisings in 1848. In February in Paris it brought an end to the constitutional monarchy which had been in power since Napoleon’s fall, and it saw the beginning of France’s Second Empire, with Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon being appointed president.
This was closely followed in the Habsburg empire by Metternich’s resignation and his flight to London, along with the abdication of Emperor Ferdinand who was succeeded by Franz Joseph.
Karl Marx arrived in London in 1849 after short spells in Brussels, Paris and Cologne. Friedrich Engels, who had previously worked for a spell at his father’s company in Manchester, met Marx in Brussels, and he returned to England in that same year. Through his father’s wealth, he was able to support Marx while the latter studied. The Metropolitan Police was forced to monitor Marx, Engels and other revolutionary refugees who had fled to Britain. The Prussian police also had agents in London on a similar mission.
What became the First International, an organisation which aimed to unite various left-wing groups, was set up in London in 1864, although it had faded by 1872, as it began to fragment into multiple groups such as the Marxists (the Reds) and anarchists (the Blacks who opposed state socialism). In essence, Marx wanted to form a political party, something that was anathema to Mikhail Bakunin, the leader of the anarchists.
Mid-19th Century Wars
1850s, Crimean War and Indian Mutiny
The introduction of the telegraph in the 1840s greatly speeded up communications. It was in part responsible for the introduction of the journalist role of war correspondent. This led to complaints that detailed information from such a person could appear in a British newspaper almost before the British hierarchy had obtained it, and obviously the enemy also had sight of it.
In the Crimean War of the 1850s, the British had no intelligence at the start. However, Charles Cattley, who spoke Russian, French and Italian and had been taken on as an interpreter, improvised and ran a military intelligence department. Unfortunately, the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary at War, did not pay heed to any intelligence.
After the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II appointed military attachés at the Russian embassies in Paris, London, Vienna and Constantinople with orders to seek out various types of intelligence.
The ultimately unsuccessful Indian Mutiny of 1857 was another supreme example where arrogance with respect to the abilities of the local population meant that the British were taken completely unawares by the uprising.
The American Civil War
Both sides saw the need for military intelligence and established various agent networks. A significant amount of Confederacy work was based around Alexandria in Virginia, while the North’s efforts were more decentralised. Much of their useful information actually came from slaves and smugglers. After the Civil War, the USA tended to become somewhat naïve about security.
1880s through to 1918
A period of assassinations ultimately led to World War I after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were killed at Sarajevo in 1914. This major event was preceded by the advent of the Bolsheviks and the beginnings of MI5 and MI6 in Britain. Meanwhile, new technologies that came to influence the conflict included sonar, radio messaging and the airplane.
Assassinations
Firstly, some words on the origin of the word assassin. The Nizaris were a small Shia Muslim sect, whose state was set up by Hassan-i Sabbah in 1090 in an area that straddled Persia and the Levant. Their people were called assassins or Hashashins. Being small, they survived by killing important enemy leaders, both Muslim and Crusader, and by using psychological warfare.
Gelignite, invented in 1875 by Alfred Nobel the Swedish chemist, came to be used in a number of assassination plots. Tsar Alexander II was killed by bombs in 1881 which were thrown by two members of the People’s Will terrorist group, this being the second attempt on his life. This led to the Third Section being replaced by the larger Okhrana which was set up within the police department. By the end of the 19th century, it had a workforce of 20,000, and its tasks included the widespread opening of mail. By 1884 it also had a fully functioning foreign agency in Paris under Pyotr Rachkovsky to monitor Russian dissidents.
In Britain, the Fenian bombing campaign in London ran from 1881 to 1885. The Special Irish Branch which was set up in 1883 to combat this problem was subsequently renamed Special Branch, and the Special Branch of the Met was made responsible for all political crime.
Meanwhile, Rachkovsky became an exponent in the use of black propaganda. He had ensured that two printing houses belonging to emigré Russian Populists in Geneva and Paris were blown up in 1886 and 1887 respectively. Rachkovsky engineered matters so that the Populists blamed the Marxists. He also drew the Populists into a bogus plot to kill Tsar Alexander III when Abram Landezen, one of his agents, supplied money to make a bomb. Rachkovsky then informed the Russian Ambassador about the plot, and his complaints led to the French arresting the plotters and imprisoning two of them.
Between 1880 and 1914 around 150 individuals were killed and at least treble that number injured. Apart from Tsar Alexander II of Russia (1881), the list included: President Sadi Carnot of France (1894), Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898), King Umberto I of Italy (1900), President William McKinley of the United States (1901), King Carlos I of Portugal (1908), King George I of Greece (1913) and Franz Ferdinand with his wife Sophie (1914), along with prime ministers Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain (1897) and Pyotr Stolypin of Russia (1911). Many, but not all, were anarchist-based plots.
The assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie at Sarajevo in 1914 ultimately led to World War I. The plot involved three members of Young Bosnia, a revolutionary group: Gavrilo Princip (the eventual assassin); Nedeljko Čabrinović (who carried out the first failed attempt earlier in the day); and Trifko Grabež. They were assisted and trained by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret nationalist group, while the plot was hatched by Apis, the chief of military intelligence in the Serbian General Staff. It is unclear how much the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pašić, knew of Apis’s assassination plot.
Apart from the Fenian campaign, there were not many incidents in Britain. A French anarchist who blew himself up while attempting to destroy the Royal Observatory at Greenwich simply provided the writer Joseph Conrad with material for his novel, The Secret Agent.
The Beginnings of the Bolsheviks
The Okhrana infiltrated the Bolsheviks, who had originally been formed in 1903, when Malinovsky was one of six Bolsheviks who became deputies in the Duma in 1912. Lenin became his greatest supporter. However, by 1914 when it was thought that heavy drinking would be his undoing, he was given 6,000 roubles and told to disappear.
The Okhrana’s surveillance on Stalin filled over 100 volumes, which Stalin eventually obtained after he came to power, subsequently spending time going through it and writing notes on it. Conversely, the Okhrana did not spend too much time on Lenin for the simple reason that he spent the vast majority of his time outside Russia.
The Beginnings of MI5 and MI6
In Britain, there was a certain amount of public hysteria that significant numbers of German agents were in the country, preparing for an invasion. In part, this frenzy resulted from William Le Queux’s spy novel The Invasion of 1910 which was published in 1906. It was serialised in the Daily Mail (increasing its circulation by 80,000 in the process), and was part-marketed by getting actors to walk down Regent Street dressed as German soldiers.
After an enquiry in 1908 which dismissed the hysteria about an invasion, it was decided to set up the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, although it was only staffed by two full-time officers initially. They were Vernon Kell and Mansfield Cumming, the former subsequently becoming head of the Security Service (MI5 although initially called MO5) and the latter the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). MI5 was not officially acknowledged until 1972 and MI6 not until 1994.
There was in fact a small German agent network in Britain at the time, although it was solely concentrating on the activities of the Royal Navy.
Turf Wars
Turf wars and the general lack of communication between security service departments had begun to surface, as with the Sûreté (National Police) and Quai D’Orsay (diplomatic) in France. The Section du Chiffre took over codebreaking from both organisations in 1912, decrypting German and British traffic.
In Russia, cryptanalysis skills were as good as ever, while foreign agents continued to be successful. Alfred Redl who became head of counter-intelligence in the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian army was spying for the Russians. As in France, the main problem in Russia was the lack of coordination between diplomatic and military intelligence organisations.
Use of New Technology
In the 1880s the cipher telegram became the norm for diplomatic communication.
The onset of World War I led to the introduction of aerial reconnaissance and naval intelligence via the use of radio, the first transatlantic radio message having been sent back in 1901.
Observation balloons dated back to 1794 when they were used in the French Revolutionary Wars, and they were also deployed by both sides in the American Civil War. The appearance of airplanes using cameras first appeared in World War I. This aerial intelligence was somewhat variable initially, in the sense that weather conditions, aircraft vibration and camera technology could be mitigating factors. It did not prove effective for trench warfare, witness the fact that 782 aircraft and 576 pilots were lost during the Battle of the Somme. Conversely, it was useful to T.E. Lawrence, providing input to his plans to take the important port of Aqaba (in modern day Jordan).
Finally, work on sonar technology, driven by the need to counter German submarines, led to the first implementation of an operational system in the later stages of World War I.
World War I
Blinker Hall was the director of Naval Intelligence from 1915 to 1919. Room 40, its cryptanalysis section, was run by Alfred Ewing, while Dilly Knox was arguably its most effective codebreaker.
Room 40 also covered diplomatic communications, and in January 1917 it decrypted a message that was sent from Berlin to Mexico City via the German Embassy in Washington, known as the Zimmermann telegram. It contained a German offer to help Mexico to regain the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if it sided with Germany in any conflict with the United States. Hall sat on this information for three weeks while he sought to get the same information from Mexico City, which he managed to do after Germany declared unrestricted U-boat warfare and President Wilson broke off diplomatic relations. He did this via the British Embassy in Mexico City and a source in the local telegraph office when he asked for copies of all recent telegrams that had been sent between the German embassies in Mexico City and Washington. This was done so that the Germans would not realise that the British had decrypted the Zimmerman telegram. This information became a major factor behind the American decision to join the war in 1917.
Meanwhile, the Germans managed to get Russia out of the war by assisting Lenin and the Bolsheviks, first in getting him from Switzerland to Russia, via Germany and Finland, and then by helping the Bolshevik cause. After the Russian Revolution, Germany and Russia signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918. This allowed Germany to move troops in the east to the western front. La Dame Blanche, an agent network based in Belgium, supplied the British with important information on German troop movements at this time, helping to ensure that the German threefold offensive in the spring of 1918, known as Kaiserschlacht, was repulsed.
The sheer size of the US forces that arrived in 1918 was the ultimate game-changer in World War I. Close relations were established between the Americans and the British, primarily between Colonel House, advisor to president Woodrow Wilson and William Wiseman, the head of the British Intelligence mission in Washington.
The Americans continued to lack a specific foreign espionage agency although the size of both naval and military intelligence increased. Unsurprisingly, there was ongoing jealousy between the Secret Service and the Bureau of Investigation, later known as the FBI.
1919 to the end of World War II
While the Soviets continued to pay great attention to intelligence work after World War I, the Western powers slackened off. However, the threat of World War II and the conflict itself saw concentrated efforts in the fields of codebreaking and deception.
The Inter-war Years
After the Russian Revolution, the Cheka was quickly formed, the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organisations. It had great powers, particularly during the period of civil war between the Reds (the Bolsheviks) and the Whites (a loose confederation of anti-Communist forces) which dragged on until 1923.
By the 1930s, the Soviets had the best codebreakers and arguably the best foreign agents, along with an extremely effective campaign which recruited the likes of the Cambridge Five and Ivy Leaguers such as Larry Duggan, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Duncan Lee. The main recruiter in the UK was Arnold Deutsch, a Viennese PhD living in Hampstead, who was acting as a graduate student at UCL.
The Soviets were particularly successful in penetrating the US embassy in Moscow and the British embassy in Rome. Despite this relative embarrassment of riches, the problem was Stalin’s use of foreign intelligence, or his inability to use it. In essence, he was preoccupied with internal conspiracies, which he saw everywhere. This paranoia was responsible for The Great Terror (1936 to 1938) when an estimated 700,000 Russians were killed.
Conversely, and somewhat predictably, the British, French and Americans all witnessed significant reductions in their intelligence workforces after World War I. For example, the US Military Intelligence Division (MID) fell from 1,441 at the time of the Armistice to 90 in 1922, while MI5 went from 844 down to 35 by 1925.
The Americans did set up their own Black Chamber in 1921, but president Herbert Hoover ordered that it be disbanded when he came to power in 1929.
Ernst Fetterlein, arguably the ablest of the Tsarist codebreakers, had escaped to Britain, where he became head of the Russian section at the interwar British SIGINT agency, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which was formed in 1919 by combining the wartime naval and military SIGINT units, Room 40 and MI1b. Initially headed by Alastair Denniston, it was renamed GCHQ in 1946.
Political leaders continued to be divided about intelligence. In Britain in the 1920s, Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, saw its value, whereas Ramsay McDonald, the Prime Minister, did not. This decade also provided continuing examples of leaders, such as Stanley Baldwin and Lord Curzon, who disclosed intelligence, either deliberately or inadvertently, thus indicating to other powers that their codes had been broken, much to the annoyance of the security services.
The Americans still had no official foreign intelligence agency. It did have The Room (later called The Club) which consisted of a number of “amateur spies”, well-to-do individuals who met once a month in New York and relayed information to the president.
BSC (British Security Coordination) was set up in New York in May 1940 to facilitate the “free” exchange of intelligence between the Americans and the British. The Brits observed that collaboration between the American navy, military and the FBI hardly existed.
The British were not much better. MI5 and MI6 hardly collaborated, and often had different views on individual subjects, such as Hitler’s intentions before World War II. The JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) was set up in 1936 to improve matters, but it was largely ignored until 1940 when Churchill made it responsible for producing intelligence appreciations. The JIS (Joint Intelligence Staff) was subsequently set up to deal with the large amounts of information that were being produced, in part because Churchill was extremely keen on digesting as much intelligence information as possible. He was a rare example of a leader who was arguably too interested in intelligence.
In the field of technology, both the British and the Germans made significant strides during the 1930s on radar.
Codebreaking
War, or the threat of war, saw renewed efforts to decipher signals. The Americans managed to break the Japanese RED and subsequently PURPLE ciphers, notwithstanding the bizarre arrangement where the navy dealt with traffic on even days and the army on odd days.
In Britain, work done at Bletchley Park by the British, Poles and the French gradually managed to decrypt signals from the German Enigma machines with the aid of an electro-mechanical device called The Bombe. Its original designer in the 1930s had been Marian Rejewski, a Polish crytographer. The British version was designed by Alan Turing, one of the forefathers of computer science who was based at Bletchley Park, and it was subsequently refined by Gordon Welchman. Luftwaffe traffic was cracked in May 1940, naval in Spring 1941, and the army a year later). Lorenz, a cipher for high level traffic between Hitler and his generals, was cracked with the help of Colossus, arguably the first computer. Intelligence from Enigma and Lorenz went under the title of ULTRA, which remained a secret until 1974.
Black Code, a cipher which America used for diplomatic and military communications, was broken by the Germans, Italians and the British. Although Churchill subtly tried to tell Roosevelt that it had probably been compromised, the Americans continued to use it, leading to Colonel Bonner Fellers, US military attaché in Cairo, inadvertently giving Rommel detailed information on troop movements in North Africa. This leaking of information ceased in July 1942 when Fellers returned to Washington and his successor stopped using Black Code.
Bletchley Park eventually discovered how Rommel had been receiving this information. ULTRA information helped Montgomery and the Eighth Army, although Monty was slow to accept it initially when ULTRA had been indicating that Rommel was weak after his defeat at El Alamein.
Cooperation improved among the Allies on SIGINT generally, and on codebreaking in particular. The U-boat variant of Enigma, which was introduced in February 1942, took until the end of that year to crack. Meanwhile, the Germans struggled from 1943, being unable to break any significant Allied ciphers.
Pearl Harbor
America was not prepared for Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt had little interest in Japanese naval signals. Although the traffic did not actually mention Pearl Harbor, there were enough indications that something was being planned. MAGIC intelligence information, as it was known, was haphazardly made available. For example, Admiral Husband Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was only receiving the information periodically, while General Walter Short, the army commander at Pearl Harbor, was not even on the circulation list. A shortage of cryptanalysts at the time also did not help.
After Pearl Harbor, increased numbers of cryptanalysts led to significant decrypting of Japanese traffic, helping to put the Japanese more on the defensive within six months. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was assassinated when the plane that he was travelling in was shot down after his movements were discovered from decrypted traffic.
Stalin’s Paranoia
Stalin did not believe the available intelligence that Hitler was going to invade Russia. So many individuals had been purged during the Terror, resulting in staff shortages, notably in foreign residences, that corroborative evidence which may have helped to change his opinion was lacking. Even the Cambridge Five came under suspicion in 1939.
After the German invasion, Stalin became somewhat more circumspect. However, he remained particularly paranoid about Trotsky and his followers, the latter even after Trotsky’s murder in 1940, although the plots were mostly (if not all) imaginary.
Start of the Soviet Offensive
In Operation MARS at the end of 1942, the Soviet objective was to dissuade the Germans from moving from their positions west of Moscow to aid its Sixth army in the siege of Leningrad which had first started in September, 1941. Alexander Demyanov, a communications officer at HQ in Moscow fed disinformation to the Abwehr. Although successful in its objective, the Soviets lost 70,000 men during this German offensive around Moscow. Leningrad was partially relieved in early 1943 when a land corridor was established to the city, but it was to be January 1944 before the siege could be considered to be totally lifted.
The Soviets triumphed at the major tank battle of Kursk in 1943, obtaining advance information from John Cairncross, the English spy, and from Lucy, an anti-Nazi spy ring in Switzerland.
The Double Cross System and Deception.
The Double Cross or XX system (Roman numerals for twenty) was a successful counter-espionage operation to identify German spies in Britain and, where appropriate, to turn them.
It then switched its attention to deception, notably: Operation Mincemeat to convince the Germans that the first Allied invasion of Europe was to be via a landing in Greece, as opposed to Sicily; and Operation Fortitude to convince them that the D-Day landings would come at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. Summaries of both operations can be found in the Odds & Sods section.
Spying on the Manhattan Project
Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs each independently gave the Soviet NKGB the plans for the first plutonium atomic bomb which was successfully tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945. However, the plans did not provide everything that Soviet scientists needed to replicate the American bomb. They needed to understand the manufacturing process, particularly the use of the polonium ‘initiator’. That crucial intelligence was provided by George Koval, an American engineer. In June 1945 he had been transferred from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to a top-secret facility in Dayton, Ohio, where the polonium-based initiator went into production. Koval’s key role in atomic espionage was not revealed by the Russian GRU until after his death in 2006 at the age of ninety-three.
The Cold War
The post-war period was principally dominated by political battles, democracy on one side versus communism on the other.
America – After the War
A number of organisational changes took place:
- The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) was formed in 1947. It was responsible for both overt and covert HUMINT. The Church Committee report in the 1970s stated that the CIA was responsible for around 900 covert actions in the period from 1951 to 1975. Dirty Tricks is a phrase that is used to describe actions such as sabotage, regime change and assassination. The Bay of Pigs invasion was one of its notable interventions
- The NSC (National Security Council) was also formed in 1947 to advise the president
- The NSA (National Security Agency, whimsically known as No Such Agency to those on the inside!) was formed in 1952 with responsibility for Global SIGINT.
Finally, the Venona project, which ran from 1943 through to 1980, was an American counterintelligence programme to decrypt messages sent by the Soviet intelligence services. It has shown that the USA, Britain, and other nations were the targets of Soviet espionage from at least 1942. Various individuals working for the Soviets were identified, including among others: Hall and Fuchs at Los Alamos, Donald Maclean (member of the Cambridge 5), Julius Rosenberg who had worked in the Army Signal Corp and his wife Ethel, plus Alger Hiss, a government official.
Alliances and Liaisons
The British–American SIGINT accords of March 1946 and June 1948, the latter known as the UKUSA agreement, also involved Australia, Canada and New Zealand. These five intelligence allies became known as the ‘Five Eyes’.
Another marriage of convenience was between Israeli intelligence and French intelligence from 1946 to the mid-1960s, which centred on a common dislike of the British and a shared interest in the Arab world.
Science & Technology
IMINT (imagery intelligence) became important from the mid to late 1950s with the advent of the U-2 spy plane and the deployment of spy satellites.
The Soviets had much to learn from the West, the majority from the Americans who they heavily targeted. It is claimed that they had 77 agents and 42 “confidential contacts” engaged in this area by 1975.
The Americans and the British combined to tap into Soviet military communications in Berlin by building a tunnel which started in the American sector and ended approximately 300 metres inside the Soviet sector. It took around twelve months to construct and was operational from May 1955 to May 1956 when the Soviets “accidently stumbled upon” this Berlin spy tunnel. In fact, they had known about it since the planning stages thanks to information which had been supplied by George Blake, the British double-agent. It is thought that the KGB had let it run to protect Blake’s identity.
Walk-ins
From the 1960s there were instances of walk-ins, that is individuals offering to provide intelligence for money. They included: Robert Lipka who was responsible for shredding documents at the NSA in the 1960s; John Walker who was responsible for setting keys for naval ciphers in 1967, and who periodically continued spying until his arrest in 1985; and Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence case officer who provided information from 1985 until his arrest in 1994.
Spying for the other side
The Cambridge 5 spied for the Soviets on ideological grounds from the 1930s through to the early 1950s (at least). Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess both fled to Moscow in 1951, after which Kim Philby came under suspicion. However, he managed to survive until 1963 when he too fled to Moscow. Anthony Blunt confessed in 1964 after he was promised immunity from prosecution. He was publicly named by Mrs Thatcher in 1979. John Cairncross, the fifth member, was named by a KGB defector in 1990. There is speculation that there were actually more than five agents.
In the US, Aldrich Ames and Harold James Nicholson, both CIA officers, along with Robert Hanssen from the FBI, all spied for the Russians.
Meanwhile, Vasili Mitrokhin, an archivist in the Russian foreign intelligence agency who made copious handwritten copies of KGB files, defected to the West in 1992. It is claimed that 25,000 pages were retrieved by the British from his property; Oleg Gordievsky, a lieutenant-colonel in the KGB spied for MI6 between 1974 and 1985 and was eventually exfiltrated; and Vladimir Vetrov of the KGB, an ideological spy, passed information to the French and to NATO in 1981-1982 on Russian attempts to obtain Western data on science, industrial and technical, along with the names of the individuals involved. He was executed in 1985.
1960s Onwards
While the Cold War continued, new threats appeared, notably religious fundamentalism, the advent of the Internet and terrorism.
Religion
While the East and the West were concentrating on each other, driven mainly by political ideology, neither saw the advent of Islamic fundamentalism which was heralded by the Shia-led overthrow of the Shah in Iran (1979) and the rise of the Sunni-based Al-Qaeda (1988).
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer and thinker, is regarded as the Father of Salafi Jihadism, which advocates a global caliphate that will in part be brought about by military attacks on Muslim and non-Muslim targets. He was hanged in 1966 after he was charged with plots against Nasser and the Egyptian state, and he is regarded as a martyr.
Sayyid Qutb influenced Khomeini and other Shia intellectuals in the period leading up to the Iranian Revolution, although his ideas gradually tended to fall from grace after Khomeini’s death.
Muhammad, Sayyid’s brother, subsequently moved to Saudi Arabia where he promoted his work. Ayman al-Zawahari became one of his followers, and he in turn became a mentor to Osama bin Laden.
Mossad
Mossad, part of Israel’s intelligence service, is responsible for external intelligence. It gained a reputation for covert actions, including: Adolf Eichmann’s extraction from Argentina; and the rescue of terrorist captives in Uganda. It obtained intelligence before the 1967 war through spies in Egypt (Wolfgang Lotz) and Syria (Eli Cohen).
Cyber Spying and Crime
Digital spying arrived with the age of the Internet, with the first instances possibly dating back to 1996. Here are three examples of malware that were subsequently identified in the period 2010 to 2013.
Stuxnet was a computer worm which was reputedly developed by the US and Israel. It infiltrated SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition systems). Identified in 2010, it is thought to have damaged the Iranian nuclear programme, delaying it by at least 12 months.
Flame was identified in 2012. It ran on machines with the Windows operating system and was used for targeted cyber espionage in Middle Eastern countries.
Red October (Rocra) was identified in January 2013, although it may possibly have already been active for at least five years. It infected systems running Microsoft Office products, and it targeted diplomatic and government agencies.
The first documented case of Ransomware appeared in 1989 when Joseph L. Popp, an American biologist, sent 20,000 infected diskettes labelled “AIDS Information – Introductory Diskette” to attendees at a World Health Organisation conference on AIDS. After 90 reboots of a victim’s PC the directories were hidden and the file names were encrypted, and the victim was asked to send $189 to an address in Panama. Ransomware over the Internet became more sophisticated and more prolific from around 2011 when it could have political backing or overtones.
Whistleblowing
The advent of digital computing introduced the ability to store and access large volumes of intelligence information, and with it the birth of whistleblowers in the espionage world. This led to Wikileaks, which was started by Julian Assange in 2006 to publish classified documents and other media which have been provided by anonymous sources. Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst who was assigned to an American Army unit in Iraq, sent over 700,000 classified or sensitive documents to Wikileaks in 2009.
Edward Snowden, an American computer consultant who was working for the NSA, provided thousands of classified documents to several journalists, including information about software that can be used to access data and messages belonging to individuals or organisations that are stored on the systems of Tech giants and other ISPs. Software that has been mentioned includes PRISM, Tempura and Xkeyscore.
Further Assassinations
Relatively recent assassinations or attempted assassinations include:
- Mossad being ordered to kill the perpetrators of the Munich massacre in 1972 and leading scientists who were involved in the nuclear weapons programmes in Syria and Iran
- The US killing of Osama bin Laden and multiple unsuccessful attempts which were made on the life of Fidel Castro
- Putin pursuing perceived traitors such as Litvinenko and Skripal
- and Jamal Khasshogi murdered in 2018 at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.
Terrorism
The word “terror” originated during the French Revolution with the Jacobins, a republican movement that was largely responsible for the deaths of over 10,000 individuals. It is a term which has a large array of meanings. Wikipedia calls it a charged term, that is a vague term used rhetorically with the intention of producing an emotional response. Acts of terror were principally related to nationalist causes, but while such acts continue, religious overtones have been more prominent in recent times.
Governments have paid significantly more attention to them since the 9/11 attack, setting up counterterrorism units within internal security services to combat them. While the ideal may be to infiltrate organisations, this can become extremely difficult when terrorists (or would-be terrorists) are acting individually. The Manchester Arena suicide bombing may be a case in point, where the plot was seemingly only known to Salman Ramadan Abedi, the bomber, and his younger brother Hashem. It is claimed that MI5 had intelligence that may have led to Abedi being put under investigation, but this information was not passed to the counterterrorism police.
The US, Britain, Russia and Israel are countries where pre-emptive measures such as capturing and killing, as well as interrogation techniques which may include sleep deprivation and the use of drugs are all considered to be legitimate strategies. Many Western European states do not consider them to be so.
Mass Surveillance
At the time of writing, this is an area that is difficult to summarise. Technically, it is feasible to capture large amounts of raw information. For example, there are software products in use that can scrape social media accounts. More problematic is the (quick) analysis of this data. It is claimed that AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools can be employed to perform sentiment analysis in attempts to identify possible areas of unrest among sections of the population.
There are various reports, usually from freedom organisations and journalists, which indicate widespread use of currently available mass surveillance tools by authoritarian regimes, while in democracies there are examples of their use by national and local law enforcement agencies.
Conclusion
Up as far as 1945, it may be reasonable to say that, while there were steady ongoing improvements in all forms of intelligence-related technology, people remained people. That is to say, decisionmakers varied from those who used any available information wisely, through to those who tried hard to ignore it, and of course all shades in between.
After World War II, the field of intelligence became more professional. There was no longer any place for the naysayers. However, we now find leaders who will twist intelligence, which is often not clearcut, to suit their political purposes. A prime example was the campaign, led by the US and UK, to promote the invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) which, it turned out, he did not.
Rapid advances in computing technology from the 1960s, coupled with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, has had a marked effect in the field of intelligence. It has resulted in the field of (Cyber) Threat Intelligence, a term which appeared around 2004 although work had plainly been going on in this area before that date. The aim is to identify present and future threats, and to deal with them, identifying and minimising any risks.
Space Threat Assessment is one area of work. For example, satellites can be targeted in various ways: direct hit by a ballistic missile; use of lasers and microwaves to disrupt or stop operation; jamming devices; and cyber-attacks to monitor, transmit or corrupt information.
Globalisation in its various forms, including trade and the movement of students and other individuals, presents challenges where intelligence on current and future threats is important.
In fact, any significant area of change that affects humanity, notably competition for resources, will require intelligence. Climate change and the possible scarcity of water, along with the mass migration of peoples, is perhaps the obvious example here on Earth, while scrambling for extra-terrestrial resources, starting with the Moon, is another.
Odds and Sods
Elizabethan Spymasters
William Cecil, the chief advisor to Elizabeth I, uncovered the Ridolfi plot. Ridolfi was an international Florentine banker who came up with a plan to free Mary Stuart who would then marry the Duke of Norfolk and replace Elizabeth on the throne. Bailly, a papal agent and a servant of Mary, was found in possession of incriminating evidence at Dover, leading to Norfolk’s execution in 1572. It appears that Ridolfi was, it is now thought, a double agent as he was eventually freed.
Francis Walsingham effectively took over as spymaster in 1573 when he became Secretary of State, a role which he filled until his death in 1590. He was a committed Protestant whose zeal to overcome the Catholics was increased after he had witnessed the St. Bartholomew Day massacre of 2,000 Protestants in Paris while he was ambassador in that city.
Apart from his various agents, Walsingham employed Thomas Phelippes, a successful cryptanalyst and forger, along with Arthur Gregory, a counterfeiter. One of Gregory’s skills was the ability to break a seal and to subsequently reseal it without detection.
Priests who were being taught at Rheims seminary were subsequently posted to England to minister secretly to the Catholics. Charles Sledd, who acted as a humble courier at the seminary, was extremely effective at relaying information to Walsingham as to the individuals who were being sent to England. Edmund Campion was one of these Jesuit priests. He became public enemy number one after he succeeded in publishing a pamphlet entitled Ten Reasons (why the Anglican Church is not valid). Having arrived in June 1580, disguised as a jewel merchant from Dublin, he managed to evade capture until July 1581. He was hung, drawn and quartered on Dec 1st 1581 after being found guilty of treason. Immediately recognised as a martyr by the Catholic Church, Campion was beatified in 1886 and canonised in 1970.
The objective of the Throckmorton plot was for the Duke of Guise to lead an invasion of England, assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with Mary Stuart. Francis Throckmorton was a young English Catholic gentleman who was arrested in Nov 1583, being the conveyor of letters sent between Mary and De Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador. The correspondence was actually routed via the French embassy where Mary was able to use their diplomatic bag to communicate with her supporters. A priest in the embassy, known as ‘Henri Fagot’ wrote to Walsingham to tell him that Throckmorton and Lord Henry Howard were bringing Mary’s correspondence to the embassy. It was arranged that Laurent Ferot, the ambassador’s secretary, would give Walsingham access to the diplomatic bag. Throckmorton eventually confessed: (a) to the use of the diplomatic bag; and (b) that he also carried letters to/from the Spanish Ambassador in London. Throckmorton was hung, drawn and quartered, Howard imprisoned, and De Mendoza expelled.
In the Babington plot, Gilbert Gifford, an English Catholic who had studied at Rheims and at the English College in Rome, acted as a courier between Thomas Morgan, Mary’s agent in Paris, Baron de Châteauneuf who was the new French ambassador in London, and Mary herself. However, he was a double agent, acting for Walsingham. Robert Poley, a former undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, got into Babington’s entourage. He was also acting for Walsingham. Correspondence was smuggled into Mary by a brewer in the bung hole of beer casks that were delivered to Chartley, where she was currently being kept. The brewer was also in Walsingham’s pay. Babington, a young English Catholic gentleman, wrote to Mary in 1586, proposing: to assassinate Elizabeth; forces from Catholic Europe to invade England; and Mary to be rescued. Mary did not consent to the plan, but nor did she turn it down. She asked for more information, which was to be her downfall. Babington and his co-conspirators were arrested, tried, convicted and executed, as eventually was Mary.
The initial plan for the Spanish Armada was seen by Walsingham only a matter of days after Philip II of Spain had read it. Antony Standen, an English Catholic émigré in Florence was Walsingham’s agent. He developed a relationship with Giovanni Figliazzi, the Tuscan ambassador in Madrid who had a good understanding of Spanish policy towards England. Standen also bought the services of the brother of a trusted servant of the Marquis of Santa Cruz (whose invasion plan it was). He sent letters to Standen from Lisbon via the Spanish diplomatic bag. Information from Standen led to “the Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard”, which started with Francis Drake’s attacks in 1587 on Spanish ships that were moored at Cadiz. It is estimated that the damage caused as a result of this and other related naval actions delayed the Armada by 12 months. Standen travelled to Spain in April 1588, from where he was able to report to Walsingham directly. Another important agent was Richard Powle in Venice who correctly predicted that the Armada would set sail in May 1588. Walsingham also received SIGINT which related to the Armada that was decrypted by Phelippes.
Robert Cecil, the son of William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, unofficially took over after Walsingham’s death in 1590. He was confirmed in the position in 1596.
Double XX Deceptions
Operation Mincemeat was carried out in the spring of 1943 to get the Germans to think that the first Allied invasion of Europe would come via Greece and Sardinia, as opposed to Sicily which was going to be the actual location.
The corpse of a tramp who had died of rat poisoning was obtained from a London hospital, and it was dressed in the uniform of a staff officer of the Chief of Combined Operations, Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. A briefcase containing fake personal letters, along with fake documents and plans, was attached to the body. Finally, the corpse, disguised as the fictitious acting major William Martin, was dropped off the Spanish coast by submarine, and subsequently found by a Spanish fisherman.
In theory, Spain was neutral, but it shared the contents of the briefcase with the Abwehr before returning the body and the briefcase to the British. ULTRA decrypts confirmed that the Germans had seemingly accepted the corpse and the documents as being genuine.
The objective of Operation Bodyguard was to deceive the Germans as to the location and timing of the D-Day invasion via the use of various deceptions, including Operation Fortitude which aimed to convince the Germans that it would occur in the Pas-de-Calais. Deceptions included a sizeable military force stationed near Dover, along with dummy planes and inflatable tanks. However, the work of agent Garbo was a key factor.
Juan Pujol was a Spaniard who, after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, disliked both fascists and communists. He had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to offer his services to the British, and he ended up acting as some sort of independent spy, managing to become a German agent who eventually recruited 27 entirely fictitious agents around Britain. He also got the Germans to waste time looking for a non-existent convoy. Having failed to interest the British, he tried the Americans. They also rejected him, but they did pass on his name to the British, who by this time had seen ULTRA messages which indicated that somebody was misinforming the Germans.
Pujol, or Garbo as he became known in a tribute to his star quality, working with his MI5 case officer Tomás Harris in early 1944, sent more than 500 messages to the Abwehr station in Madrid, which, as ULTRA revealed, forwarded them to Berlin, many marked ‘Urgent’. He informed them that the invasion would happen in the Pas-de-Calais. To maintain his cover, it was arranged that the Germans would be informed of the Normandy landings, albeit too late for them to do anything about it. Garbo stated that the Normandy landings were in fact a feint, and that the real invasion was still to come through Calais. The Germans’ belief in this intelligence led to Rommel’s request for troops in the Pas-de-Calais to be moved to Normandy being turned down. There were in fact more troops around Calais in August than there had been at the time of the Normandy landings in June.
Pujol received decorations from both sides: the Iron Cross Second Class as Alaric (his German agent name); and the MBE as Garbo.
Envoys, Ambassadors and Embassies
Originally, envoys were sent to other kingdoms to carry out negotiations on a specific subject, returning once they had been completed. The first resident ambassadors appeared in the Italian city-states around the 13th and 14th centuries, and had subsequently spread to other European powers by the 16th century.
Consuls appeared around the same time, often in major ports where they supported merchants. They could be merchants themselves or they could be, and increasingly became, government officials. They could be responsible for gathering intelligence. For example, Chasteau-Martin, consul to the English merchants in La Rochelle in the 1580s, was able to provide information on the Spanish before the Armada, assisted by an agent that he had in place in Madrid.
Up to the early 19th century, the ambassador was responsible for intelligence although the work might be offloaded to a secretary, or similar. Military attachés gradually began to appear in embassies during the course of the 19th century. In part, the need for this role was brought about by the introductions of the telegraph and the railway, and hence the requirement for quicker intelligence. As naval and air attachés eventually appeared, they could be known collectively as service or defence attachés.
Intelligence agencies began to appear within embassies, e.g. the Okhrana within the Russian embassy in Paris in 1883, while the SIS had vice-consuls. After World War II there was a move towards giving legal status to a greater number of overseas agents. They were disguised, e.g. as a vice-consul with responsibility for passport control work. Twenty-three embassy staff who were identified as agents were expelled from the Russian embassy in London in 2018 after the Skripal poisoning.
Agencies within an embassy are sometimes called stations, and occasionally the head of the embassy may also be the head of station. There are inevitably tensions between intelligence people and diplomats within an embassy, not least because the former can cause problems for the latter, witness the hacking of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone around 2013, but they can also help by supplying useful intelligence information to the diplomats.
Spooks can act as diplomats, possibly called special envoys, who typically have a fixed scope of work and a finite amount of time to complete their task. They often involve dealings with hostile states, e.g. joint CIA / SIS task with the Libyans in 2003, prior to Gaddafi giving up WMD. Communication can be with organisations, as opposed to states, e.g. the CIA with the PLO and SIS with the Provisional IRA.
Industrial Espionage
This section deals with corporate espionage, although on occasions there may be some state involvement. Here is a selection of examples:
- Chinese porcelain. In 1712 Father Francois Xavier D’Entrecolles, a French Jesuit priest, began collecting information on the processes that were involved in making porcelain with the help of Chinese Catholic converts. He brought this information back to Europe
- Chinese tea. In 1848 Robert Fortune, a botanist, recorded the tea-making process, and smuggled seeds and leaves out on behalf of the East India company, who then began to grow it in India, eventually overtaking China as the premier tea-growing country
- France was intent on learning from the British during the Industrial Revolution. It hired British individuals and sent apprentices to Britain to be trained, notably in the iron and steelmaking industries
- Englishman Samuel Slater took British textile technology secrets to America in 1789. The US government subsequently encouraged the acquisition of industrial secrets, wherever it was possible to obtain them, to help their young country to grow
- Soviet agents obtained information on Concorde’s electronic systems which was used in the development of Russia’s own supersonic airliner, the Tupolev TU-144
- Denial of Service attacks flood a computer system with requests that it cannot handle, thus disrupting a business. It is thought that the first victim was Panix, an American ISP company, in 1996. Google eventually admitted that its Cloud services had received a peak volume of 2.54 Tb/second in 2017
- Edward Snowden claimed that the US spies on foreign companies. It has indeed occasionally admitted spying on some companies as part of US foreign policy
- In the world of information technology, there have been many instances of infringing intellectual property rights which may well include the stealing of program code, sometimes obtained by hiring individuals from the target company who then brought the code with them.
Cryptography
Simple substitution, sometimes called Caesar’s alphabet, involved shifting a letter a specified number of places. For example, with a shift of 5 the letter “a” is converted to “f”.
al-Kindi, the 9th century polymath, introduced frequency analysis as a technique to aid the deciphering of coded messages that used simple substitution. The Wikipedia article on Frequency Analysis outlines some of the basic concepts, using the English Language to provide the following examples:
- the most common letters are E, T, A and O
- the least common are Z, Q, J and X
- the most common groups of letters include TH, ER, ON and AN
- most repeated letters are SS, EE, TT and FF.
Polyalphabet alters the shift on a letter-by-letter basis. This can be done by using a key. For example, the first letter of plain text is shifted n places, dictated by the value of the first letter of the key, the second letter of plain text by the value of the second letter of the key, and so on.
The German Enigma machine was in essence a version of a polyalphabetic cipher, albeit a sophisticated one. Each time a key is pressed the rotors move, and so if the same key is pressed again it will produce a different cipher letter. For example, “AA” may be coded as “PL”. The security of this system depended on the operators at each end changing the machine setup each day according to pre-arranged information. This was typically done by use of a plugboard.
The one-time pad is theoretically unbreakable. It involves the use of a pre-shared key which is only used once, and where the key is as long as, or longer than, the message.
There are two types of computer encryption, symmetric and asymmetric. With symmetric, both the sender and receiver need access to the same key. With asymmetric, two keys are used, a public key and a private key which are linked. One is used for encryption and the other for decryption. There are various encryption algorithms, including: AES (the Advanced Encryption Standard which is used by the US government and others); RSA (the standard which uses asymmetric keys to transmit messages across the Internet); and Triple DES (the successor to the original Data Encryption Standard) which can be used to encrypt passwords and PINs.
Names of Russian and Soviet Intelligence Agencies
Links to information on Russian and Soviet Intelligence agencies.
britannica.com – Russian and Soviet Intelligence Agencies
Wikipedia – Foreign Intelligence Service (Russia)
Bibliography and Further Reading
The book references are ordered with the primary source first.
Andrew, C.M., The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, Penguin Books, 2018, ebook available
Volkman, E., The History of Espionage, Carlton Books, 2019, ebook available
Alford, S., The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, Allen Lane, 2012, ebook available
Berridge, G., Diplomacy and Secret Service, DiPLO, 2019, issuu.com
Wright, J., The Ambassadors: from Ancient Greece to the Nation State, HarperPress, 2006, ebook available
Web Links
The problem with providing links is understanding how long they may be in existence. Apart from simply disappearing, a site may be reorganised, possibly due to the use of different software to create and maintain it, and so the individual URLs may change. It is for this reason that I tend to stick with well-known sites such as Wikipedia where there is a choice on a given topic.
General
History of espionage – Wikipedia
Intelligence | Definition, History, Agencies, Examples, & Facts | Britannica
Espionage and Intelligence, Early Historical Foundations | Encyclopedia.com
Signals intelligence – Wikipedia
MI5 – Wikipedia
MI6 – Wikipedia
History of GCHQ
Signals intelligence in modern history – Wikipedia
Human intelligence (intelligence gathering) – Wikipedia
Historical Spy Cases | MI5 – The Security Service
The National Archives | Exhibitions & Learning online | First World War | Spotlights on history
Espionage | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1) (1914-1918-online.net)
Industrial espionage – Wikipedia
What Is Industrial Espionage? (techtarget.com)
The SPYSCAPE Glossary of Spy Terms
Guerrilla warfare – Wikipedia
Cryptography
Frequency Analysis – Wikipedia
Cipher disk – Wikipedia
Polyalphabetic cipher – Wikipedia
Great Cipher – Wikipedia
Cabinet noir – Wikipedia
Black Chamber | Encyclopedia.com
A Brief History of Cryptography (tennessee.edu)
Very Brief History of Cryptography Chapter_1 Crypto_24.pdf (neu.edu.tr)
Cryptographers
List of cryptographers – Wikipedia
The Hidden Professional Code Breakers of Renaissance Venice – Atlas Obscura
François Viète – Wikipedia
Thomas Phelippes – Wikipedia
Thomas Phelippes (spartacus-educational.com)
Rossignols – Wikipedia
François Leclerc du Tremblay – Wikipedia
John Wallis – Wikipedia
Thomas Scot – Wikipedia
John Thurloe – Wikipedia
Aphra Behn – Wikipedia
Joseph Williamson (English politician) – Wikipedia
The American Revolution’s One Man Security Agency
Pre-history
Espionage in Ancient Egypt, Further readings (jrank.org)
Assyria – Wikipedia
Alexander the Great – Wikipedia
Elizabethan and Stuart Period
Throckmorton Plot – Wikipedia
Babington Plot – Wikipedia
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – Medieval manuscripts blog (mentions Gregory)
Anthony Standen (spy) – Wikipedia
Gunpowder Plot – Wikipedia
The Secret Dept of the Post Office
Popish Plot – Wikipedia
Jean-Baptiste Colbert – Wikipedia
William Fuller (imposter) – Wikipedia
William Blencowe – Wikipedia
Edward Willes (bishop) – Wikipedia
18th Century
Christian Goldbach – Wikipedia
Waldegrave family – Wikipedia
Edward Bancroft – Wikipedia
James Lovell (politician) – Wikipedia
Alien Office – Wikipedia
London Corresponding Society – Wikipedia
Seditious Meetings Act 1795 – Wikipedia and Treason Act
19th Century
Joseph Fouché – Wikipedia
Anne Jean Marie René Savary – Wikipedia
George Scovell – Wikipedia
Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly – Wikipedia
Alexander Chernyshyov – Wikipedia
Peninsular War | National Army Museum (nam.ac.uk)
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord – Wikipedia
Robert Wilson (British Army officer, born 1777) – Wikipedia
Society of seasons – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chartism – Wikipedia
Revolutions of 1848 – Wikipedia
Bureau of Military Information – Wikipedia
Narodnaya Volya – Wikipedia
International Workingmen’s Association – Wikipedia
Anarchism
Okhrana – Wikipedia
Special Branch (Metropolitan Police) – Wikipedia
American Civil War spies – Wikipedia
Directorate of General Security – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
20th and 21st Century
United States Department of Homeland Security – Wikipedia
Federal Bureau of Investigation – Wikipedia
Dragutin Dimitrijević – Wikipedia .. Apis
Technical Intelligence and Military Secrets: The French Cipher in the First Months of the Great War | Cairn.info
Deuxième Bureau – Wikipedia
Quai d’Orsay – Wikipedia
Observation balloon – Wikipedia
Early Spies in the Skies | National Air and Space Museum
Étienne Bazeries – Wikipedia
GCHQ – The birth of signals intelligence
Reginald Hall – Wikipedia
Sir William Wiseman, 10th Baronet – Wikipedia
William F. Friedman – Wikipedia
William Bundy – Wikipedia
Operation Scherhorn – Wikipedia
NKVD – Wikipedia
Ultra – Wikipedia
Colossus computer – Wikipedia
Cambridge Five – Wikipedia
Double-Cross System – Wikipedia
Operation Mincemeat – Wikipedia
Operation Overlord – Wikipedia
History of the Central Intelligence Agency – Wikipedia
Venona project – Wikipedia
One-time pad – Wikipedia
Dead drop – Wikipedia
Vasili Mitrokhin – Wikipedia
Aldrich Ames – Wikipedia
Oleg Gordievsky – Wikipedia
Vladimir Vetrov – Wikipedia
Harold James Nicholson – Wikipedia
Edward Snowden – Wikipedia
PRISM – Wikipedia
Chelsea Manning – Wikipedia
WikiLeaks – Wikipedia
Flame (malware) – Wikipedia
Rocra | intelNews.org
Stuxnet – Wikipedia
Cyber spying – Wikipedia
A Brief History of Ransomware (varonis.com)
Terrorism – Wikipedia
Counterterrorism – Wikipedia
Social Media Surveillance
Government Social Media Spying Powers
What is Cyber Threat Intelligence? [Beginner’s Guide] (crowdstrike.com)
Space Threat Assessment 2023 (csis.org)
Odds and Sods
Order of Assassins – Wikipedia
Ambassador – Wikipedia
Terrorism – Wikipedia
History of Diplomacy – e Diplomat
Enigma Machine | Brilliant Math & Science Wiki
What Is Data Encryption: Algorithms, Methods and Techniques (simplilearn.com)
Acknowledgements
Peter Jackson and Janet King are veteran readers of my initial drafts, and once again I thank them both for taking the time to give me their feedback. All errors in this document are mine.
All images have been found on the Internet. The captions are links to the creators. Please contact me if you consider that I have infringed any copyright.
Version History
Version 0.1 – 19th December, 2023 – very drafty
Version 0.2 – 25th December, 2023 – slightly less drafty
Version 0.3 – 30th December, 2023 – JEK’s comments
Version 0.4 – 23rd January, 2024 – small amount of additional content
Version 0.5 – 31st January, 2024 – PJ’s comments
Version 1.0 – 1st February, 2024
Version 1.1 – some further info on the Bombe and Colossus.
BK .. This and That 
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