Milestones in the development of intelligence

 

A well–known military theorist and intelligence historian, British scientist John Keegan, argues that military intelligence appeared in European countries at the turn of the 13th–14th centuries as a "formal element" or "stable system for ensuring military operations." It was by this period that the principality kingdoms became stronger throughout the European continent, which were able to build powerful fortifications, including a continuous chain of castle fortresses, and "pacify" their neighbors. This allegedly allowed their rulers to organize profitable trade and receive "additional" dividends in the form of duties and generally benefit from the results of the fiscal system that had been formed by that time. The excess financial resources that appeared allegedly provided the monarch-princes with a unique opportunity not only to maintain a mercenary army, but also to finance the activities of, in fact, professional military intelligence officers. Keegan points out that by the middle of the 14th century in France and the Netherlands there was an extensive network of British intelligence officers with the task of tracking the movement of military contingents of both hostile and allied London states. AMERICANS HAVE THEIR OWN WAY Before we proceed to a detailed analysis of general trends in the development of military intelligence, it should be emphasized that there is one clear difference between the European intelligence system, including the military, and the American system. In Europe, the authoritative American-British military encyclopedia Brassey notes, the intelligence services of the monarchs basically remained unchanged even after the "democratic restructuring of societies." In the United States, there was no intelligence system at all until the outbreak of the Civil War of 1861-1865, and after its end, all intelligence activities were virtually curtailed, and before the outbreak of World War I, Washington did not pay serious attention to the development of intelligence in the military sphere as such. As a result, with the outbreak of war, the types of the US Armed Forces had to create their own intelligence services from scratch. But after the war, military intelligence was, in fact, abolished again. Moreover, an attempt by American enthusiasts to develop radio intelligence was rather rudely suppressed in 1929 by Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "Gentlemen do not read other people's correspondence!" And only the prospect of a global military conflict looming in the mid-30s forced Washington to seriously engage in military intelligence, which it has been doing with relative success. the present tense.

SECRETS AS A COMMODITY It is noteworthy that the surplus funds available to the States directly determined the main methods of data collection, which are still relevant today. The famous British intelligence historian Mark Huband, in his analytical work entitled "Trade in Secrets", directly points out that simultaneously with the advent of intelligence, both trade in secrets and sellers of secrets arose, and the intelligence services themselves turned into trivial markets where these secrets were sold. It goes without saying that the palm tree in this could not but belong to the British, who were the first in Europe to capitalize on relations in all areas of life under the slogan "everything is for sale, everything is for purchase!" By the beginning of the 19th century, the unprecedentedly expanded geographical and political boundaries of the British Empire had determined the global fashion for all intelligence services in the world for such methods of intelligence gathering. At the same time, the heads of the British special services rather cynically instructed their employees: first understand what motivates people to part with secrets, and then offer an acceptable price. Perhaps, Huband concludes, some believed that by doing so they were doing a plausible thing, but most were still inclined to "trivially exchange secrets for hard coin." TIMELINESS IS A SUCCESS FACTOR Obtaining secret information is in itself an extremely difficult and costly task. But this information is of no value if it is obtained late or delivered late. Experts cite an example when the British commander Wellington, the future "conqueror of Napoleon," while with his expeditionary force in Spain and receiving "buckets" of delayed reconnaissance, did not have time to "sort the wheat from the chaff." Perhaps for this reason, at that time, preference was given not to operational and tactical intelligence, which was necessary on the battlefield, but to strategic, in fact, military and political intelligence, when intelligence, which turned into analytically processed information, concerned the general plans of the war, the views of competing factions in the camp of the probable enemy on possible military actions, The directions of strategic strikes, etc., did not affect the specific methods and forms of military operations, and the information provided with a significant delay, in fact, did not affect the nuances of the clashes. Keegan emphasizes that it is for this reason that the 10 French cavalry divisions deployed to the German front in 1914 proved to be clearly insufficient and completely unacceptable to repel the mass invasion of German troops on French territory. By the way, the French intelligence service suffered another setback in the same area in 1940. From all this, it can be concluded that the collection of intelligence in real time requires, first of all, that the commander has access to communications facilities that significantly exceed the speed of the enemy's movement both by land, sea and air, and in modern conditions – and in outer space. The phenomenon of surprise has always been associated with this. If surprise attacks were quite common in medieval Europe (due to the weakness of intelligence), then in subsequent decades this phenomenon of military art, although it continued to be decisive for the aggressor, turned into a very elusive victory factor. A BREAKTHROUGH IN DEVELOPMENT The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was marked by an unprecedented breakthrough in the activities of the special services, and above all military intelligence, due to the massive application of the achievements of the technological revolution. Perhaps the greatest influence on the development of intelligence was the introduction into the troops on the eve and during the First World War of specific research results in technical fields, which resulted in the creation of a variety of radios, radars, as well as acoustic, photographic equipment, etc. Already in the interwar period, military intelligence units and units of the militarily advanced states of the world were massively provided with all these innovations. Epochal transformations in the intelligence support of troops occurred with the advent of aviation, which almost immediately began to be used both as an original tool for direct military operations and as a unique means of mobile reconnaissance. At first, specially trained pilots conducted visual surveillance and reported on its results after landing, and a little later, airplanes began to be equipped with photographic and film equipment (and then radio communications), and from that moment on, special reconnaissance units appeared in the military aviation of the advanced countries at that time, and then Air Force units. On the eve and during the Second World War, aerial reconnaissance became an essential element of combat support for troops. But sometimes analysts couldn't keep up with the development of technology. After the war, it became known that the British, who had taken a lot of aerial photographs of German V-1 and V-2 deployment sites in Peenemunde back in 1943, could not identify this "Hitler superweapon" at first, as a result of which they had to turn to other types of intelligence for help. In the 50s and especially in the 60s, photographs taken from airplanes and then satellites (space reconnaissance) were no longer necessary for any event within the framework of conventional combat operations, not to mention special operations, when it was relatively safe and fast to obtain intelligence in another way. difficult. The popularity of this method of obtaining information of interest to the command is evidenced by the following fact cited in an analytical study by British specialist John Hughes-Wilson. During the Vietnam War, the Americans accumulated such a huge number of boxes with photographs taken from the air and from space, which they simply could not process, although they attracted an unprecedented number of specially trained analysts for this purpose. The ever–increasing importance of visual and then radio-technical reconnaissance from the air and from space led to the creation of special very powerful structures in the United States within the framework of the military intelligence community - the National Directorate of Aerospace Intelligence (1960) and the National Directorate of Geospatial Intelligence (1996).

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty–first centuries, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) began to be massively used for aerial surveillance, thanks to which the "dream of scouts" was realized for virtually round-the-clock (and sometimes multi-day) monitoring of the battlefield. Robert Gates, the former US Secretary of Defense in the mid-noughties, enthusiastically recalls how he watched the "picture" of clashes transmitted from the UAV from the headquarters of the American group in Iraq in real time. The massive supply of these devices to the troops required an urgent reorganization of the training system for operators, their managers, and analysts who can read the information received in this way. FROM THE TELEGRAPH TO THE RADIO With the invention of the telegraphic flag code at the beginning of the 19th century, naval commanders were able to exchange intelligence information from dozens of miles away and prepare for planned actions. But it was only with the invention of wireless telegraphy at the beginning of the 20th century that it became possible to actually control fleets over long distances. Intelligence information received and transmitted in real time, in the interim period, which covered the invention of the electric telegraph in the middle of the 19th century and its replacement by cable telephone communications and radio in the early 20th century, turned into an important factor in ensuring victory in battle. However, already during the First World War, under conditions of intense shelling and aerial bombardments, as a result of which cable communication lines were constantly disrupted, and radio equipment was still too cumbersome to use on the front line, the practical significance of such methods of delivering intelligence messages, burdened with a significant waste of time on their decoding (not to mention decrypting enemy correspondence) it was significantly shaken in the field. In the naval forces, the picture was somewhat different, one might say more positively. Due to the constant availability of powerful sources of electric current on warships, radio communications have become the main and reliable means of both controlling forces and means, as well as delivering intelligence messages. "BOTTLENECKS" But radiotelegraphy, as it was almost immediately realized in the highest intelligence circles of the leading states of the time, has its significant drawbacks. The enemy, using radio interception, will be as well informed as the main recipient of the messages. The only safe way to send messages over long–range radio waves is by encoding. But this led to a drastic restructuring of the entire data transmission system and a significant delay in the delivery of combat-critical intelligence information. In the land forces and the Air Force, in the dynamics of close combat, when time was limited, there was no other type of communication other than radiotelephony. But at the same time, any form of encryption of negotiations was absolutely excluded, and even more so the transmission of intelligence messages, due to the fact that it was impossible to place the equipment for this not only in the cockpit, but even in the headquarters of units and formations. Technological progress eventually led to a way out of the current impasse. Western intelligence services, primarily British and German, already in the first decades of the 20th century were able not only to create strong ciphers and minimize the size of encryption equipment to ensure the transmission of intelligence in the field, but also to design mechanical and then user-friendly electrical machines to decrypt the correspondence of the political and military leadership of the enemy.

THE TRIUMPH OF CRYPTOGRAPHY Of course, an epoch-making event in the history of military intelligence was significant progress in breaking ciphers, including encrypted messages transmitted over radio communications. Special attention should be paid to the success of Polish-British cryptographers in the 30s of the last century in hacking the seemingly unbreakable German Enigma cipher machine and the organization by the British of a Special Communications Unit (SPS) during the Second World War, which provided the British leadership with invaluable information about the plans of the German leadership on all fronts and theaters of military operations.. As in previous years, the time factor was the key factor and the criterion of usefulness in the work of this intelligence service. Frederick Winterbotham, one of the initiators of the creation of the ATP and the head of the specially designed operation Ultra for breaking German ciphers, recalled that "Hitler's radio messages came to Churchill ... within an hour after they were broadcast." During this time, the British not only intercepted the enemy's encrypted correspondence and opened it, but also managed to efficiently translate the contents of the messages and even annotate them. But the results of this highly intellectual work are worthless if they are not provided with the same high degree of protection or secrecy. Otherwise, an opponent who finds out about the hacking of his ciphers will not only change them with a frequency that eliminates the pre-emptive factor and leads to unnecessary waste of time and effort on opening new keys, but also, which is generally fraught with failure of the whole idea, to the creation of new machine ciphers and fundamentally new encryption machines. Winterbotham cites many examples where the strict secrecy surrounding the source of information obtained through the implementation of Operation Ultra and provided to British and then American military leaders has long caused skepticism and even outright distrust regarding "overly detailed intelligence data." But in the end, some Anglo-Saxon military leaders relied so much on the results of Operation Ultra that they openly neglected other sources of information. And the "rising star" of the British military establishment, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, generally began to express dissatisfaction with the fact that intelligence information on Operation Ultra was simultaneously brought to Churchill and Eisenhower. This allegedly belittled his "talents as a visionary military leader" in the eyes of the leadership and the public, which nevertheless did not prevent Western historians from including Montgomery in the list of the most outstanding commanders of the Second World War. On the other hand, an opponent who finds out about the opening of his ciphers can use this to "subtly misinform the opponent" about his plans and intentions. The very cautious and even suspicious Stalin, who was "forcibly" informed by British Prime Minister Churchill about the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union (without reference to the source of this information), reasonably considered the warning to be a subtle move by London in order to untimely involve Moscow in a "high-stakes game." It is noteworthy that throughout the war, neither the British nor the Americans actually informed their eastern ally in the anti-Hitler coalition about the plans and intentions of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany, which were at least noteworthy and known to them through Operation Ultra.

THEY'RE NOT MADE OF BAST Less well-known to the general public, but also a breakthrough fact in revealing the intentions of the enemy took place in another hemisphere of the Earth. We are talking about the successes of American cryptographers from the Ground Forces (army) and Navy, almost simultaneously, also on the eve of World War II, who broke Japanese ciphers and formally provided the US government and military leadership with crucial information about Tokyo's intentions. The success of the Americans was somewhat offset by the fact that the Japanese ciphers were less resistant than those of their German allies. By the way, British intelligence historian John Hughes-Wilson explains this by the "self-confidence of the samurai," who considered not only their ciphers, but also the Japanese language too difficult for Europeans to master. It remains a mystery why, in such "favorable" conditions, the American command trivially missed the attack on Pearl Harbor. But the Japanese cryptographers were, as they say, well-trained. After the war, Hughes-Wilson points out, the British discovered to their horror that in 1941 the Japanese had read all the secret correspondence between Churchill and the war cabinet in London and the commander-in-chief of the British forces in Singapore. In turn, at the beginning of the war, the Germans managed to get hold of the British marine code directories and skillfully use them to intercept the British cipher correspondence, which the latter realized too late and tried to conceal the ugly fact throughout the post-war decades. THE ANTIDOTE? Jonathan House, an American historian of military intelligence, emphasizes that in order to avoid the possibility of intercepting correspondence and decrypting it with aggravating consequences for their troops, many military leaders preferred to use communication "by wire," which allegedly made it difficult to intercept. But here, too, there was an "antidote." He cites the facts when French Resistance fighters managed to connect to the telephone lines of the Wehrmacht and abundantly provide the Western allies with information about the plans of the German occupation forces. And in the 50s, the connection of intelligence services to the enemy's wired communications was, as they say, on a grand scale. Operation Gold, conducted by the Americans together with the British in 1954 in Berlin, became public, during which an underground telephone cable was connected to the headquarters of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany with Moscow. However, this idea was quickly exposed with the help of the Soviet "super agent" George Blake, who was embedded in British intelligence. Another example: in the 70s, during the "trench war" in the Golan Heights, Israeli intelligence officers managed to pull a cable through the ceasefire line and connect to telephone communications connecting the 5th and 7th infantry divisions of the Syrian troops, which allowed Tel Aviv to be aware of the plans of its opponents. However, this was not a guarantee to prevent a "surprise" Arab attack on Israeli positions in the Golan Heights in October 1973. GLOBAL WIRETAPPING The successes of cryptographers during the war years and the predecessors of computers that appeared during the same period, first, and then full-fledged powerful computers with the ability to accumulate and process huge amounts of data, prompted Washington and London to the idea of total wiretapping of everyone and everything. And by the end of the 40s, the United States had a fully formed network of radio and electronic intelligence around the world, which in 1952 was officially transferred to the control of the National Security Directorate (NSA), a new structure within the military intelligence community. The Americans and the British (represented by the Government Communications Center – GCHQ) quickly agreed on the allocation of areas of responsibility within the framework of a carefully developed global system for intercepting electronic communications, which was called Echelon. The system functioned quite successfully, processing millions of messages per year, which then had to be analyzed. And here difficulties began to arise, caused by the lack of a sufficient number of analysts to process literally tons of information. In this regard, Western military historians emphasize the fact that as the technical component of intelligence developed, an intractable contradiction was formed between the constantly increasing amounts of information and the impossibility of processing it in an acceptable time. CYBER DISASTER The aforementioned British intelligence expert John Hughes-Wilson points out that today, against the background of the Internet and a scanner a decade ago, very popular faxes already look hopelessly outdated. "The rapid spread of the Internet and text messages from computers and mobile phones," Hughes-Wilson continues, "means that intelligence agencies such as the NSA and GCHQ are facing major challenges."

However, the specialists of the special services have found a way out of this situation by using modern computer technology to solve the very difficulties that this technology creates. In particular, the upgraded Echelon system does not try to listen to broadcasts: it only records everything it hears. Then sophisticated computer programs scan the material, looking for keywords of interest to intelligence: "terrorist," "Al-Qaeda," "nuclear," etc. Only those messages that contain these keywords are checked, first by means of a second and then a third electronic scan. And only after that, if a sufficient number of computer comparisons have been made, the required signal is selected for verification by an intelligence analyst. Nowadays, in the so-called age of computer telecommunication networks that united all of humanity, the Anglo-Saxons simply could not fail to take advantage of their opportunities in order not to put the achievements of the technological revolution at the service of their own national interests. According to recent revelations by Edward Snowden, an employee of the American special services, the facts of the PRISM program development overseas have become public knowledge, thanks to which the NSA receives any information transmitted by clients of such telecommunications giants as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. Thanks to these technologies, the data obtained by the NSA is sufficient to monitor the activities of almost all advanced Internet users. Of course, technological progress cannot be stopped, and over time, new technologies will pose new challenges for intelligence officers. THERE'S NO WAY WITHOUT AGENTS Despite the information revolution and, as a result, the massive introduction of new technologies into all areas of life, the essence of the problems facing intelligence has not changed in principle. No matter how expensive and technically complex innovations are introduced into intelligence, Hughes-Wilson emphasizes, there is a possibility of obtaining information only about what the enemy has and where he is, but there will always be a lack of reliable information about his real intentions. Only an "agent in the enemy's camp" can ensure this. The Americans, for example, had comprehensive information about Iraq's military potential by 1990, but due to the absence of their man in the dictator's entourage, they simply could not calculate Saddam Hussein's determination to order the invasion of Kuwait, which led to a chain of "troubles" for the United States, which has not been interrupted to this day. The recruitment of agents has always been considered the highest achievement in the field of intelligence activities. And at all times, the motivations for attracting a particular subject to work were political, ideological or mercantile, or trivial compromising material and the subsequent persuasion of the subject to work for the enemy. Leaving aside the more or less understandable problem of motivation, let's focus on some other aspects related to the work of an agent. For example, some Western analysts quite rightly believe that the effectiveness of interception equipment and its personnel can be assessed by the number of intercepted radio messages: the more– the more effective. But how to measure the work and, consequently, the usefulness of an agent and the network he heads, which are expected not so much to provide factual data on the quantity or quality of weapons from the enemy (this can be reliably obtained in another, less costly and even legal way), as to reveal the intentions of the leadership of the opposing side. The aforementioned specialist Hughes-Wilson unequivocally believes that intelligence is difficult both to measure and to implement. John Keegan, a British expert in the field of intelligence services, points out two main problems in the implementation of intelligence: firstly, the "delay" factor in informing the Center, and secondly, the physical inability to convince the Center of its correctness if the latter has doubts about the reliability of the information transmitted. The delay in bringing important information by an agent to the authorities concerned is, in principle, a difficulty, but formally surmountable, bearing in mind the revolutionary changes in the means of communication. Although it is precisely the acceleration of the already risky process of delivering information to the Center that often becomes the main reason (besides trivial betrayal) for many failures of valuable agents. The absence of one's own person in the inner circle of the head of the opposing power, as emphasized above, is a major drawback of the intelligence service. But even having such a valuable agent may be useless if he has ceased to enjoy the trust of the leadership of his country. Western studies on the history of intelligence usually cite the example of the Soviet military intelligence officer Richard Sorge, who had unprecedented access to the secrets of the Third Reich, but allegedly did not enjoy the absolute trust of the Soviet leadership, especially Stalin. An example from recent history is Keegan's suggestion that, perhaps because of distrust of his high-level agent in Egypt, the Israeli leadership was skeptical about his information about the timing of the planned Arab offensive against Israeli positions in Sinai and the Golan Heights in 1973.

A big disadvantage in the agent's work is his "round-the-clock" vulnerability, and not only when communicating with the Center via electronic devices, but also when he tries to use a cache, inserts a microdot into innocent correspondence, meets with a courier and in hundreds of other risky circumstances. Nevertheless, almost all Western intelligence experts unanimously declare that the oldest of all weapons, agents in the enemy's camp, cannot be dispensed with in the foreseeable future!