Cultures of spying.

• Author: Sherr, James

IN THE UNITED States, spying has often been regarded as necessary, at times even as vital. But it has never been regarded as a normal peacetime pursuit. During the Second World War, the CIA'S precursor, the oss, mounted a vast cryptographic effort against Germany and Japan, thanks in part to the support of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. Yet Stimson was also the man who, as Secretary of State in 1929, closed up the State Department's cryptographic section with the famous quip that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." With its post-Victorian overtones, that quip now has the resonance of a bygone age. Not so, however, the assumption that lies behind it: Spying has no place in a "normal" world.

The "clash of civilizations," often debated in these pages, has an analogue in the clash of intelligence services and of intelligence cultures. Centuries before Clausewitz wrote his treatise On War, many countries inside and outside Europe regarded peace and war as complementary, rather than opposite, poles of activity. Many still do. In these countries, spying, like war, has been regarded as the continuation of policy by other means. The same has been true for other activities that intelligence services have been known to conduct: subversion, sabotage, disinformation, and assassination. So, too, for the reverse side of intelligence: counter-intelligence, and the need to maintain good spies at home. In the Clausewitzian tradition, or for that matter the tradition of Sun Tzu, any peacetime activity--be it spying, negotiation, or commerce--may signify friendship, but just as often its purpose may be winning without fighting.

The surprising thing is not that the United States does not share this tradition, but that in spite of two great wars and a cold war in this century, it has been so little affected by it. The intertwining of "CIA" and "Cold War"--not only in the public mind but in historical fact--demonstrates the point rather than refutes it. To the supporters of what became the U.S. intelligence community, there could be no serious doubt that the Soviet Union was an enemy, an enemy with secrets, indeed an enemy who regarded secrecy as one of its most potent weapons. Moreover, even in those menacing climes, the intelligence services had their critics--not merely professional critics who felt that they were doing a poor job, but principled critics who took issue with the job itself. Such critics could also be found in other Western democracies, but with a difference. There, these critics, overwhelmingly of the Left, saw their intelligence services as servants of an ideology they mistrusted or abhorred. American critics mistrusted the CIA not because it was the faithful servant, but because it threatened to slip the leash of the master; not because it advanced American values, but because it stood in contradiction to them.

To a significant degree, these are the values of Enlightenment liberalism. Respect for what is rational and provable, the conviction that the national interest lies not simply in advancing interests but in placing international relations on a higher plane, the association of peace with cooperation, the belief that interdependence not only demands tolerance but breeds it, the notion that markets are a solvent amongst nations and a liberator of peoples: all of these ideas fell into place by the mid-eighteenth century. In the following century, all of them were challenged by ideologies of the Left and Right: ideologies that equated peace with struggle, interdependence with friction, markets with rivalry--and in many cases elevated will over reason.

If the Enlightenment's more extreme Darwinian foes can be said to have lost their bids for power, it can not be said that the Enlightenment has won. Even in Western Europe, a judicious grain of realpolitik is respected, and conservative skepticism carries considerable weight. Even in the British foreign policy establishment, many who hold Enlightenment values hide them, and many who pay lip service to them tend not to hold them. But in the United States, these values remain firmly in the grammar of thinking and discourse, and whilst they can be questioned, one ignores them at one's peril. They neither rule spying out nor rule it in. But they have an effect on how the United States conducts intelligence activity and just as much of an effect on how the U.S. expects others to conduct it.

We Have The Technology

ON THE FACE of it, there is nothing peculiarly American about the desire for high technology intelligence. Most intelligence services, given the choice, would prefer to have technologically advanced tools at their disposal rather than primitive ones. But Americans do seem peculiarly prone to equate intelligence technology with intelligence effectiveness. As a case in point, last July former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner argued that separating CIA analysts from spies would "make the CIA's spies face up to today's seminal trend in the collection of human intelligence--the role of technology."(1) But if U.S. intelligence services have not faced up to this role over all of these years, then which intelligence service has: China's? Syria's? Russia's? Israel's? By any standard, the United States has an intelligence community that is technologically minded; by some standards, technologically obsessed. It does not follow that U.S. intelligence...