The Federal Circle

New world of spying creates challenges for intelligence-gathering services

By Wesley Wark, Special To The Vancouver Sun

The summer of 2010 will be remembered as the hottest on record. It might also surpass previous records as a silly season for federal government spending.

But there is another accolade in the offing — the summer of spies. At home, our spy chief, Richard Fadden, popped up on TV to warn about agents of influence at their insidious work in provincial cabinets and B.C. municipal politics. The United States and Russia swapped a bag of spies, with the U.S. ridding itself of 10 not-very-successful Russian agents and springing some valuable pros from Russian jails in return.

An Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, undetected to his native country in a murky episode that reveals little more than the CIA’s desperate need to acquire sources of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iran and the Iranian government’s relish in doling out anti-American propaganda.

Not to be outdone, the British services fear that the efforts of a young MI-6 recruit, Daniel Houghton, who attempted to sell secrets he “borrowed” while working for the sister service MI-5, including lists of names of agents and sensitive technological data, to Dutch intelligence for a cool $1.45 million, may be only the tip of a security iceberg.

A little further from the headlines, other remarkable stories have boiled up in the summer of spies. The U.S. Justice Department recently released a list of the names of more than 40 Chinese and U.S. citizens who have been convicted of espionage-related charges in the past two years.

Across the pond, a coroner’s inquest opened in Britain to explore the death of a famous one-time Mossad agent, an Egyptian named Ashraf Marwan.

Marwan, who was long retired from spy work, was found dead outside his London home in June 2007. In his heyday he was no ordinary spy. The husband of the daughter of Gamal Abdel Nasser, he moved in the inner circles of Egyptian politics and offered himself as a source to the Israelis on Egyptian plans to launch a surprise attack on the eve of the Yom Kippur, or October 1973 war.

He was a valuable source for the Israelis, but on this occasion his information was discounted and the Israeli government suffered a near-calamitous intelligence failure. His family believed he was assassinated by the Mossad amid allegations he was a double-agent.

Maybe it’s just the heat; maybe this is just an anomalous summer for spy stories that have nothing in common. But I doubt it. So, too, does the popular culture industry.

Angelina Jolie tries on the mantle of the female James Bond in the newly released Salt, with a plot that steps into the “wilderness of mirrors,” as Jolie’s character, a CIA analyst, finds herself accused of being something else altogether — a Russian sleeper agent. Nice timing, Hollywood.

A host of real spy stories and their fictional counterparts might be taken as a reminder the ancient art of espionage persists in the 21st century and continues to fascinate. That would be too easy. These stories should be read in a different light, as a warning that espionage is gathering new strength, poses new threats and is being practised in new ways by new actors.

New global powers, such as China, are emerging as the most aggressive practitioners of spying; dangerous non-state actors, such as transnational terrorist groups, increasingly recognize the need and value of spying on their enemies and counterintelligence. There are growing concerns about cyber aggression and cyber security. The question of loyalty to the state looks increasingly fluid; hence the concern about the Daniel Houghtons of this world.

It may be we are headed into a century of spies, in which some part of the peace and security of the globe will rest on the ability of intelligence services to do their jobs well. If so, we are in for a rough ride and will need to rethink our notions of espionage.

As the 21st century progresses, intelligence work is going to spread into unimaginable fields — protecting national and international information flows, monitoring climate change, watching out for environmental degradation, catching failing states before they turn into failed ones and worrying about the root causes of terrorism.

We will need to see new value in espionage. We have to get used to the frailties of intelligence: Spies operate in an imperfect and incomplete world of information, and their judgment is no better than the batting average of the rest of humanity — not all that good.

We will need to get used to the idea that even when intelligence services come up with good information, the political class might not like it, want it or understand it. We may need to come up with a new charter to accommodate both security needs and democratic rights in a world of increasingly active and vital intelligence gathering.

Wesley Wark is a visiting research professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and a past president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies.