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List of Illustrations

Sir Francis Walsingham

Abraham de Wicquefort

Sir Ernest Satow in 1903: British scholar‑diplomat

Foreign military attachés with German escorts, Imperial manoeuvres 1904

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris: head of the Abwehr, 1940

Sir Mansfield Cumming: first head of SIS

Staff of British Embassy Moscow, Foreign Office List 1961

The Common Cuckoo

The Mitrokhin Archive

US Embassy compound in Somalia, evacuated 1991

Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the United States, 1962–86

DNI James Clapper briefing President Obama on N. Korea, November 2010

Prince Bandar bin Sultan meeting Russian president, Vladimir Putin, July 2008

Sir Richard Dearlove: head of SIS, 1999–2004

Moussa Koussa

Omar Suleiman: Director of Egyptian General Intelligence Service, 1993–2011

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Introduction

Intelligence officers working under diplomatic protection are rarely out of the news for long, and the last two years have been no exception. In August 2017, the Soviet consulate‑general in San Francisco was closed down on Washington’s insistence because the eavesdropping on Silicon Valley by its secret intelligence residency (rezidentura) had become intolerable. Less than a year later, in March 2018, Britain and other states expelled between them over 150 Russian diplomats alleged to be intelligence officers in retaliation for the attempt by two operatives of Russian military intelligence to murder the defector, Sergei Skripal, with the nerve agent Novichok, in Shrewsbury, England. It can safely be assumed that the equivalent number of diplomats expelled from Moscow in response to these actions also included intelligence officers. And on 2 October 2018 the dissident Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was duped into entering the Saudi Consulate‑General in Istanbul and there murdered in grisly fashion by a hit squad from Riyadh which included intelligence officers. Throughout this whole period strong circumstantial evidence was also accumulating that the President of the United States, no less, is an agent of influence for Russia whose cultivation began in 1986 and was assisted by intelligence officers in the Soviet/Russian missions in New York and Washington. The instances in the foregoing paragraph all show a continuing intimacy between the worlds of traditional diplomacy and secret intelligence in the twenty‑first century. But how did the relationship between diplomacy and secret intelligence come about? How did the role of ambassadors in the running of agents evolve? What was the impact on the relationship of the bureaucratization of secret intelligence that began in the late nineteenth century? Is diplomatic immunity, as is sometimes supposed, the only reason why intelligence officers cluster in embassies and consulates? What do their diplomatic landlords think about their secret tenants today and what if anything can the spooks do to repay the ambassadors for their lodgings? These are among the key questions this work will consider.

1 The Ambassador as Agent‑runner

Until well into the nineteenth century, the central figure in secret intelligence was usually the head of a diplomatic mission, whether the ambassador who ran an embassy or the minister in charge of the more lowly ranked – and much more numerous – legation.1 In the first centuries of the modern state, however, notwithstanding the fact that even then the diplomats’ role was significant, the chief responsibility for secret intelligence was sometimes assumed by an individual at home: a ‘spymaster’. Therefore, this chapter will begin by examining this species – so loved by television drama‑documentaries – before proceeding to look at the role of ambassadors as agent‑runners, together with the part played in their schemes by the lowly consul. The spymaster Until the eighteenth century, foreign intelligence operations – other than those conducted independently by armies and navies or by post office interceptions – were sometimes directed chiefly by an intimate of a ruler. Such a person created and ran a network of agents with whom his relationship was essentially personal. Among such well‑known ‘spymasters’ were Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), first minister of King Louis XIII of France; Axel Oxenstierna (1583–1654), lord high chancellor of Sweden; John Thurloe (1616–68), secretary of state during Cromwell’s English protectorate; and, most famous of all in the English‑speaking world, Sir Francis Walsingham (Box 1.1), who served the Protestant Queen of England, Elizabeth I, a monarch who faced periodic threats of invasion from Catholic Spain and lived in constant fear of assassination and Catholic rebellion at home. There were national variations but the kinds of agent employed in Walsingham’s network were fairly typical of those of other states. Some were employed in ‘special’ activities such as black propaganda, as well as in the acquisition of secrets by observation, eavesdropping, and theft of letters and other documents. Some spymasters were very successful but the scheme had serious dangers. For one thing, interpretation of the significance of the intelligence obtained was always likely to be weak because the prejudices of the spymaster – who was also a top policy‑maker – would go unchallenged, unless a rival for influence at court set up another network, as did the doomed Earl of Essex in competition with Robert Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I. For another, there was the risk that the intelligence would not be usefully distributed 1

For the sake of brevity, I shall henceforward follow the common practice of using the term ‘ambassa‑ dor’ for the head of any resident diplomatic mission.

The ambassador as agent‑runner

because it was regarded as personal property and vital to the spymaster’s influence with his sovereign. The most serious limitation of this system, however, was that because the spymaster tended to be focussed on a specific problem as well as holding his agents only by personal loyalty, the risk was always high that the network would dissolve with the abatement of the problem or his death or political eclipse. It was perhaps in part for these reasons – especially the last – that, although the system lingered at least to the end of the eighteenth century,2 it began to give way to the resident mission after this institution became the fulcrum upon which diplomacy turned in the course of the sixteenth century and the obvious point for the regular, official collection of secret intelligence. Box 1.1 Sir Francis Walsingham: Spymaster of Elizabeth I Sir Francis Walsingham (c.1532–1590), previously a successful diplomat, was appointed a principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1573. Building on the secret intelligence work of his master, William Cecil (Lord Burghley after 1571), and in order to supplement the reports he received from English ambassadors, in the early 1570s Walsingham expanded both the number and distribution of intelligence‑gatherers in the English network. (His responsibilities also included counter‑intelligence at home.) Assisted by the fluency in French and Italian and many foreign contacts acquired in the five years he spent abroad during the reign of the previous English monarch (a Catholic), he is said by his admiring late nineteenth century biographer to have ‘had in his pay fifty‑three private agents in foreign courts, besides eighteen spies who performed functions that could not be officially defined’ (Lee, ‘Walsingham’). They were found in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and even in the Ottoman Empire. His network consisted chiefly of: • ‘intelligencers’, freelancers who sold information to the highest bidder • couriers, whose day job required not only courage and resourcefulness but also some knowledge of foreign lands and languages • English merchants at home and abroad, who not only supplied intelligence but also served as go‑betweens to pay the intelligencers and handle communications with them, and • disaffected Catholics, including captured priests, who could sometimes be ‘turned’ as the price of release from imprisonment and torture, and planted in exile communities, Catholic seminaries abroad, and so on At his London home, Walsingham had a personal secretariat, the members of which helped him to run his agents and were sometimes themselves sent abroad for this purpose. They also helped him to analyse their product, intercept and read correspondence without alerting the addressee, create and break codes, plan what would now be called ‘covert actions’; for example, kidnapping the papal legate to France, black propaganda and forged documents. Sometimes, members of his staff also undertook missions of secret reconnaissance abroad and sensitive diplomatic missions. The costs of Walsingham’s operation were met chiefly (but grudgingly) by the Queen and were particularly heavy as the threat increased from Spain, but he had to bear a significant portion of the expenses himself. His network had many successes but his crowning achievement was the advance intelligence it supplied on the size and armaments of the Spanish Armada, which contributed to its defeat in 1588. Dying in 1590, Walsingham pre‑deceased Burghley, whose son Robert subsequently became Elizabeth’s chief spymaster. 2

There is a strong whiff of Walsingham about the agent‑running of Adam de Cardonnel, chief clerk at the British War Office and secretary to the Duke of Marlborough while on campaign in the War of the Span‑ ish Succession, Rule, ‘Review of Espions et Ambassadeurs’, p. 739; as also about the network run in the 1770s by William Eden, under‑secretary in the Foreign Office’s Northern Department (which included American‑born British subjects working as double agents) against the American mission in Paris during the War of American Independence, Bemis, ‘British secret service and the French‑American alliance’.

Diplomacy and Secret Service Langbart, David A., ‘Five Months in Petrograd in 1918: Robert W. Imbrie and the US Search for Information in Russia’, Studies in Intelligence (CIA), vol. 52 (1), March 2008, Web Supplement, esp. Document II, in which the vice‑consul (Imbrie) describes his agent network, available here Lockhart, R. H. Bruce, Memoirs of a British Agent (Putnam: London and New York, 1932), Books II and III, available here

2 Arrival of the Secret Service

By the end of the nineteenth century, the ambassador had become a reluctant agent‑runner. But while foreign ministries might have shared the diplomats’ prejudices about secret intelligence personnel and methods, they were less inclined to agree that there was no need for them. Even in the deeply conservative higher commands of armies and navies the need for intelligence on potential enemies – if only for reliable maps of their coastlines and topography – began to be felt with gathering urgency. This was a consequence of developments that made strategic surprise a much greater risk, among them the electric telegraph, which made it possible to transmit military communications more quickly, and the advancing railway networks, which greatly increased the speed with which troops could be mobilized and deployed. The disasters suffered by the French army in the Franco‑Prussian War in 1870–1 were only too clearly exacerbated by poor intelligence. It was, therefore, with a collective sigh of relief that, in response to this new situation, diplomats witnessed two innovations that promised to extend even further their arm’s length relationship with the ‘dirty’ world of secret intelligence. The first innovation was the regular appearance in the embassy of the military attaché, the herald of the military intelligence services; and the second was the emergence of the separate civilian foreign intelligence agency, or secret service, which in its bureaucratic permanence and formal detachment from policy‑making was a creature ‘far removed’ from the spymaster system of earlier centuries.14 This chapter will examine these changes, glance at the concept of the intelligence community, and reflect briefly on the significance for diplomacy of the secret political power of the secret service. Military attachés As early as 1680, the great scholar‑diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort (Box 1.2) had shown concern at the tendency of some princes to require ambassadors to accompany them on military expeditions, since this implied that the ambassador’s own prince endorsed the campaign, which might not have been the case. This would be avoided, he suggested, if embassies were to have a military officer attached to them, for he would not only be a natural substitute for the ambassador but also be more ‘capable of judging of martial actions.’15

14 15

Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War, p. 34. Wicquefort, The Embassador and His Functions, p. 297, col. 2.

Diplomacy and Secret Service Born, Hans and Ian Leigh, ‘Democratic accountability of intelligence services’, Policy Paper 19 (Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2007). Succinct and authoritative but now a little dated, available here Caparini, M., ‘Controlling and overseeing intelligence services in democratic states’, in Caparini, M. and H. Born (eds.), Democratic Control of Intelligence Services: Containing rogue elephants (Routledge: London, 2007)

3 Cuckoos in the Nest?

In 1883 the Czarist secret police, the Okhrana, installed the headquarters of its Foreign Bureau in the consular section of the Russian Embassy in Paris, from which it liaised with agenturas in Berlin, Sofia and elsewhere. And in 1919, the British Secret Intelligence Service secured the reluctant agreement of the Foreign Office to give its officers cover as vice‑consuls with responsibility for passport control work (Box 3.1). But it was not until after the Second World War, by which time secret services were more well established, that it became the norm for states to give legal cover in diplomatic and consular missions to the greater proportion of their intelligence officers abroad; such cover is now also provided by appointments in permanent missions and secretariats attached to international organizations such as the United Nations. Large numbers of intelligence officers still populate diplomatic missions despite the serious threat posed to Humint by the dramatic advances made in the technical means of intelligence‑gathering since the middle of the last century. For example, if MI5 had correctly identified them, there were at least 23 ‘undeclared’ intelligence officers in the Russian Embassy in London in March 2018 because this was the number expelled in response to the Skripal poisoning. Box 3.1 SIS and Passport Control Officer cover Prior to the Second World War, the Foreign Office refused to give SIS officers any cover in its overseas posts other than that of Passport Control Officer (PCO). But in addition to the disguise provided, the position had two other advantages: first, it gave immediate access to information on individuals of interest passing through border controls; and second, the pay for the work provided a useful supplement to the parliament‑voted Secret Service budget. The trouble was that it tied SIS representation to those countries with which the UK had visa agreements and, because the cover was restricted to one position only, it soon became widely known that all PCOs were in reality SIS officers. This being the case, concluded an official report in 1944, ‘little extra harm would have been done by affixing a brass plate “British Secret Service” to the door of their office.’ Despite this, when the US State Department agreed in 1946 to give diplomatic cover to operatives of the new Central Intelligence Group (later CIA), it ’sugar coated’ the news for chiefs of mission by emphasising not only that the intelligence officers would answer to them but also be concerned chiefly with ‘security intelligence’ or helping missions by undertaking the clerical work of file‑checks on applicants for visas and passports. Either because old habits die hard or because it was thought to be a clever double bluff, when Ruari Chisholm was made chief of the SIS station in the British embassy in Moscow in 1960 he was given cover as ‘2nd Secretary (Head of Visa Section)’.

It was certainly technical means – typified by the spy satellite – that was the main reason for the cloud hovering over Humint at the end of the last century but it was not helped by the reputation it had acquired with ‘users’ for providing information that was not only – in modern conditions – too slow to dig out and deliver but also difficult to judge for reliability when it arrived. On the other hand, aside from the fact that most 25

Diplomacy and Secret Service Macintyre, Ben, The Spy and the Traitor: The greatest espionage story of the Cold War (Viking: New York, 2018). The story of Oleg Gordievsky, the SIS agent in place in the KGB; authoritative and gripping Mazzetti, Mark, ‘How a single spy helped turn Pakistan against the United States’, The New York Times Magazine, 9 April 2013 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington D.C., 2004), available here Chs. 3 and 13 NBC News, ‘Meet the Press: Full Clapper’, 28 May, 2017, available here OSO [Office of Special Operations] FROM JULY, 1946 TO DECEMBER 1946, 8 May 1952, CREST, available here Porch, D., The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (Macmillan: London and Basingstoke, 1996) Sipher, John, ‘The Cipher Brief’ [website], available here Tenet, George, At the Center of the Storm: My years at the CIA (HarperCollins: New York, 2007), Ch. 21

4 Spooks as ‘Diplomats’

Intelligence officers in the higher ranks of their organizations frequently serve as ‘diplomats’ in two capacities: first, as special envoys to hostile states; and second, as builders and managers of international secret service alliances, together with less formal and more numerous ‘liaison’ relationships. As for the first role, why might they be given such tasks when it surely means ‘blowing’ their cover and when there are usually so many other officials to choose from, among them senior political advisers and even seasoned diplomats themselves? As for the second, at first glance it might be assumed that this role is accepted solely for the obvious advantages it carries for the secret services; so what, if any, are its broader diplomatic benefits, whether intended or unintended? Intelligence officers as special envoys Special envoys, otherwise known as the leaders of ‘special missions’, are sent abroad to conduct diplomacy with a limited purpose for a limited time, and are recognised in diplomatic law. They are a feature of normal diplomatic relationships but are particularly valuable to the diplomacy between states which are so hostile that they do not enjoy permanent missions. In such circumstances, special envoys are the next‑best alternative. They also provide great security for the secrecy of a message, which, in the circumstances, might be of considerable sensitivity. And their use to bear a message underlines the importance attached to it, thereby making it more likely that it will receive high‑level attention. When special missions are employed in diplomacy between hostile states, they are often despatched in secret, and almost always when contacts are at an early stage. The first reason for this is the need to minimise the risk of political sabotage. Public knowledge that a special mission to a hostile state is planned, especially if it is a high‑level one rumoured to be seeking a rapprochement, is likely to spread alarm among factions at home and allied governments abroad whose interests are locked into the status quo. Advance warning of what is afoot permits them time to marshal their forces and nip it in the bud. The second reason for secrecy is the need to guard prestige, which is seriously threatened by appearing as a supplicant at the seat of the rival’s power, especially if the mission is a failure. These were the main reasons for the intense secrecy cloaking the highly significant first mission to Beijing in July 1971 of US National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. 41