The New Spymasters

by Stephen Grey

  The use of spies by the secret services, army or police to fight terrorism is hardly new. And perhaps no country, with the possible exception of France, has more experience of this than Britain. In the UK, units to gather counterterrorism intelligence were established years before any other secret service agency. What used to be Scotland Yard’s intelligence wing, Special Branch, was created in March 1883 to combat terrorist plots by Irish Republicans – Fenians as they were then called – and later also anarchists. That was more than twenty years before the Secret Service Bureau (the forerunner of MI5 and SIS) was founded to combat the German threat.

  After the Second World War, as her empire began to crumble, Britain’s secret services worked closely with police in fighting ‘insurgencies’ by rebel groups, some of whom used both assassinations and attacks on civilians among their tactics. These included the pro-Zionist Irgun and Stern Gang in Palestine, EOKA in Cyprus, the Malayan communists and the Mau Mau in Kenya.

  With Britain showing no intention of relinquishing Northern Ireland (which had been formed from six out of the nine counties of the old Irish province of Ulster), the threat of Irish terrorism remained high. In 1968, the Troubles began with protests about discrimination against the Catholic population. When British troops were sent to Ulster a year later and conflict with the IRA began, British intelligence gathering was makeshift. In the early days, however, the task was made easier by the open character of the IRA. Its members were all well known in the working-class Catholic communities where it recruited.

  The British Army brought over the tactics it had employed to quash colonial rebellions. Extensive use was made of casual torture such as sleep deprivation, beating and putting prisoners in stress positions – measures later judged to be torture by the European Court of Human Rights. As one former British intelligence operative told me, IRA prisoners were even taken up in helicopters and threatened with being pushed out. (Sometimes they actually were, but the trick was to hover just above the ground.) It was effective in making people talk.

  But by the late 1970s both the army and the IRA had become more sophisticated. A turning point was a 1977 decision by the Provisional leadership in Ulster to break away from control by Dublin and establish a Northern Command. At the same time, much tighter security was imposed, including the creation of cell-like Active Service Units (ASUs). The IRA had gone underground.

  Arrayed against the IRA were multiple British intelligence units. First, there was the province’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), whose Special Branch handled the recruitment of informers. Next there was the regular army, whose regiments each had intelligence officers, in addition to a specialized intelligence corps that was attached to headquarters and handled multiple sources. Finally, there were the secret services, MI5 and SIS. As Northern Ireland was designated a home territory – that is, part of the United Kingdom – MI5 had prime responsibility there, but due to its more extensive experience, particularly in agent recruitment, SIS had been drafted in at an early stage to handle sensitive sources, primarily in the Irish Republic to the south, but also in the north. All these British units clashed constantly, even after ‘police primacy’ – putting the RUC in command – was instituted to restore some order.

  The field of spying was already crowded, but the British decided to respond to the IRA’s heightened security by, among other things, creating a new elite squad to recruit spies: the Force Research Unit or FRU (pronounced ‘Frooh’). Although its activities later became controversial, it was also one of the most successful intelligence organizations ever, recruiting some of Britain’s highest-placed sources in Northern Ireland.

  The FRU focused on detail. They built up a picture of the IRA’s command structure and then worked out how to recruit an agent to gain access to it. ‘The success rate was very small, but when you had got someone it was worth the effort,’ said one former member of the FRU. One of their first conclusions was that an ideal agent was someone very close to an ASU but not actually a member. Any agent who was given a place in an ASU needed to be extracted or helped to change roles quickly. Such men were dangerous because it was legally and morally too problematic. ‘It was not going to last. He was just too close to the physical end and, one way or another, he could get killed or get someone else killed.’

  About 40 per cent of the FRU’s paid-up sources had no connection at all to the terrorists. They were what are often called access agents (as opposed to penetration agents), easily acquired ‘eyes and ears’ sources who picked up mood music from the street and pointed to interesting figures. The former FRU member recalled, ‘The IRA was such a big deal in certain parts of the province that just by sitting in a pub you could pick up a lot.’ Another FRU insider added, ‘When we started, many in the RUC scoffed at the number of sources we had who had almost no connection to PIRA. That changed when they proved their value.’ The pursuit of a top-level agent could be accelerated, he said, by having many lower-level agents.

  The ideal source was the confidant, someone who was told everything but did very little. In the early days, that might have been the wives or mistresses. But as the male-dominated IRA tightened its security, it also began to shut out its womenfolk. One of the best early agents was a driver for an ASU commander. Officially, he had no access at all, except that the commander had what the Irish call the ‘blarney’. He never stopped talking, so much so in fact that the agent heard almost everything.

  It is no surprise that, when identifying recruitment targets, the FRU looked out for an individual with a weakness. As Pierre Lethier, a former officer with French foreign intelligence, put it memorably, ‘We live off weakness; until we spot weakness we just sit around smoking cigars and reading the Financial Times.’3

  In general, the FRU looked for the usual diseases – greed, jealousy, anger, lust, envy – as motivating factors for recruitment prospects. In order to avoid being tricked, they liked traits or weaknesses that could be corroborated. An IRA member was sleeping with another man’s wife? That could be verified. And the target would undoubtedly be jealous and angry – ripe for an approach. That was one reason, said one recruiter, why they had little time for political beliefs as a motivation. ‘Ideological motivations are the worst because you can’t prove them. You can’t prove what someone really believes. And the political situation can change and so the reason he is working for you may disappear.’

  The FRU also came to reject any form of volunteer or ‘walk-in’, a luxury that most secret services could not afford. ‘Walk-ins are absolutely the worst kind of agent. You have absolutely no reason to know who they are. It was often a test [by the enemy] to find out what we knew or see how we worked, or to feed us false information.’

  The collection of intelligence on Gerry Adams, who ended up on the Provisional IRA’s four-man Army Council, as well as later leading Sinn Féin, illustrated their methodology. His family, they discovered, had a major weakness: his father, the revered Gerry Adams Senior, was a paedophile.4 It later emerged that the IRA leader’s brother was too and that he had abused his own daughter.5 The details of the extensive covert operation to exploit that weakness in the Adams family will probably become public at some point, but not here. Suffice it to say, the extent of cooperation with the British from a few immediate members of the Adams family has been a well-kept, long-term secret.

  Steak Knife’s weakness ‘was his desire for revenge’, according to someone involved. He felt slighted. After losing his position as the Belfast Brigade commander, he was disappointed and bitter – even if, for old times’ sake, he retained friendly social contact with both Adams and many of the IRA’s most senior leaders.

  Turning Steak Knife was a deliberate operation and it began not too long after the FRU was formed. In 1978 he was arrested on a pretext and brought to a police station. FRU members remember him then as short and muscular, with ‘the physique of a miner’. Over the course of many hours, they played on his emotions, telling him, ‘You are a better man than they
think you are.’ There was a hint too that he had grown disaffected. ‘He had lost faith in the cause. He was no longer a believer.’ They chatted for many hours without agreement. And then Steak Knife was released.

  Initial contact was one thing. The seed of betrayal could be planted. ‘He carried on being a PIRA man, but there was something inside him telling him that what he was doing was wrong,’ said one person involved. In this case it worked. He began to have doubts. But could he be run as an active agent?

  Over the coming months, FRU recruiters found excuses to come across Steak Knife. Still a source on trial, he crossed the line towards being a fully fledged agent when he agreed to meet up with them, usually just for drinks in ordinary pubs. But it was a long process.

  As a venue for espionage, the advantage of Northern Ireland over, say, Moscow or Prague was always access. Former officers in the CIA or SIS have explained, the reason Soviets were so hard to recruit was that it was almost impossible to meet them. The CIA’s Milton Bearden told me it was impressive that they had been able to handle agents at all in Moscow, considering ‘all the huge resources they [the KGB] put on to our people there’. In contrast, the British in Northern Ireland had multiple ways of meeting their enemy. Targets for recruitment could be arrested on a pretext and questioned at a police station or army barracks; meetings could also be arranged in cafés and pubs. If necessary, they could rendezvous in safe houses in rural areas, for example.

  ‘There were always plenty of places to meet,’ said one handler. In the north of the province, ‘really you just had to get out of west Belfast [the stronghold of the IRA]. And even there you could walk and talk – there was plenty of through traffic.’ The centre of Belfast was neutral and east Belfast was safe. The countryside was usually fine, except for South Armagh, which was known as ‘bandit country’. There, there were ‘only natives and strangers’. Everyone was noticed and ‘it was hands on your weapons at all times’. In that case, the only safe way to talk to someone was to arrest them.

  Just meeting the FRU was enough to compromise someone like Steak Knife. When recruiting a source, said handlers, there was no need to ram the point home. As the colonial saying goes, ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey.’

  One recruiter said, ‘You basically have to be a good listener. You have to come at what you want at a tangent. To talk away normally and then throw something into the hat. You have to lead them down the path.’ Though a study of weaknesses would be useful to identify a source and develop a strategy, they would not necessarily be exploited overtly; sometimes they were never discussed. You had to be subtle. ‘You even don’t want them to say, “I want to work for you.” You want them to see it’s a natural path. Once they agree to meet you away from their routine, then you are halfway there. They understand the consequences. And you don’t want to remind them what they are doing.’

  Implicit blackmail or outright bribery was for the low-rent end of spy recruitment. The FRU tried to pride itself on paying out almost derisory low sums: ‘If someone has a weakness, you want to come as their saviour; you are their new best friend who can help them overcome it. We don’t say to them, “You should do this because of this and that.” There is a lot of subtext; there is a lot of they know you know they know … but it’s never discussed.’

  Ultimately, things probably worked out because Steak Knife and his handlers just clicked. As someone well informed said, ‘They have to like you. Steak Knife liked football; he liked drinking; he liked music. His handlers liked football, drinking and music too.’

  * * *

  What makes a good recruitment? No two cases were alike with either recruits or agents. But in the course of interviews conducted over more than two decades I did come to see that the image of how people became spies was frequently mistaken. Fiction has the spymaster as a cold and pitiless creature, but the recruiters from secret services I have met – and who have had, in the view of their peers, the most success – were quite the reverse. And many of them insisted that the best spies signed up for the sake of a simple thing: friendship.

  One of my first such lessons came from a surprising quarter: East Germany’s state security ministry, the Stasi. Despite its oppressive and blunt efforts at domestic surveillance, the Stasi had a nimble and efficient foreign service, the HVA, which was led by a man with the justified reputation as a master spy, Markus Wolf.

  My experience of Wolf’s service started in 2000 when, as a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, I was working in Berlin with a colleague and friend, an American writer called John Goetz. We were trying to identify the people behind a list of 100 code names we had received of those who spied for the Stasi in Britain.6 We laboured over our detective puzzle, working through intelligence reports marked ‘Streng Geheim’ (Top Secret) and plotting a matrix of which individuals could have gleaned such information. And by chatting to some of the former star performers of East German intelligence in summer beer gardens, we received a brief course in the art – or sales pitch – of betrayal.

  It was true that some spies were recruited through coercion. Indeed, Wolf was famous for his ‘Romeos’, the sex spies who lured their adversaries into compromising situations. It was true too that there were sad cases, like the lecturers at certain British universities who still bought into the ideology. But by and large, said the former recruiters, a spy was seduced by a long process which, at its core, was the simple act of making friends with someone.

  ‘I can think of no useful spy who was not the result of a genuine friendship,’ said one Stasi officer we met.

  He had identified the core issue about recruitment that concerns us. A country could always try to get spies by offering huge bags of money as a reward, and sometimes this did work, but such spies were intrinsically less reliable. But if this Stasi officer was right and friendship was the key, to establish that level of trust takes time. A recruiter would need to spend time with the would-be spy, creating bonds from shared experiences – a day drinking or visiting a show or taking a holiday together – which ultimately made him part of the other person’s life. And then, regardless of political views, human nature might just stoke up the empathy needed to persuade that person to help his friend by crossing the line and betraying his country.

  ‘The best way to recruit someone was through friendship, through a common understanding,’ said another old Stasi man, who was based in London and whose code name was Eckhart. ‘Recruitment is a process that takes a long time. Some people would slowly realize I was from the intelligence services. And if they continued contact with me, then I knew I could start the work.’

  I heard further echoes of this theory – and its implications for the spies that a democratic society needs – when I interviewed one of the CIA’s famed recruiters, a man well known in the business for having done that rare thing of convincing a Soviet diplomat to become a US agent. At first the CIA man was as tight as a clamshell. I provoked him by suggesting spying was mostly a failure and the CIA little more than an expensive programme to handle walk-ins. At this, he grew loquacious, while still insisting that his name should not be used. Let us call him ‘Frank’.

  ‘We had ways of working. It was a process and you couldn’t just walk up and make an offer to a guy.’ Patience with that long game seemed to be dying out, said Frank, and this is where his words carried weight. Spy agencies act on orders from political authority, and when the politicians lack statesmanship, not knowing when to act and when not to, they can handcuff the agencies. If, spurred on by pressure from a twenty-four-hour media for instant action, a government lacks strategic patience, its secret service loses tactical patience, the sort of patience required to make good recruitments. As Frank saw it, American politicians in the twenty-first century, particularly after the attacks of 11 September, had become unable to give the art of intelligence a chance. They grasped at immediate responses (such as invading Afghanistan) because they were in a rush, even if, as happened in Afghanistan, it took a decade to get out again.
<
br />   In the long game that worked, said Frank, he, the recruiter, had been the point man, handling the crucial one-on-one relationship. But, contrary to the popular image, this had been a team game, with tremendous research and support from his station (the local CIA team) and from headquarters in Virginia. ‘They might spot the nuances that you didn’t see.’ Even the most casual-looking moves were pre-planned. ‘I talked it over with my boss: is he leading me along? They did detailed homework.’

  Prospective spies were called ‘developmentals’. They were considered ‘projects’ and great effort was put into thinking about how to persuade them across the line and become recruits. Only a few very rare types in the CIA could recruit through ‘sheer force of will’, by sitting down with someone and persuading them with unassailable arguments that betrayal was the right option.

  A person needed a good reason to spy. ‘There has to be a hook,’ said Frank. Money worked, but ‘mainly as lubrication’. There were people persuaded by noble causes, where the spying was idealistic and the recruiter could even convince them that it was ‘all in the service of democracy’. But that was largely ‘bullshit’, he said. As another CIA veteran put it, ‘Ideology basically went out in the 1930s.’ What really worked was much simpler: having that ‘incredibly close personal relationship with someone’. Without the skills to make those friendships, ‘you are not going to succeed’.

  And then you had to twist the friendship, said Frank, which was perhaps the hardest thing to live with: your interest was rarely pure. Somehow, at that point, you needed to ‘pop the question’, to let the person realize that you had wanted him all along for a specific role: to be your spy. You also needed a cold place inside yourself to retreat to. You had to remain independent. It was a crime in the CIA to ‘fall in love’ with your source, to lose objectivity, to be the one who was being played. ‘At some point you have to be willing to manipulate a friendship. Not every guy can do this. It doesn’t make you a great person. It’s not necessarily going to make you the happiest person in the world.’