Spy Book - The Encyclopedia of Espionage

664 Pages·1997·82.82 MB·English

by  Norman Polmar, Thomas B. Allen

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Beginning with ^
the Biblical story of Jose Ph...

...from the earliest use of the word ‘‘spy’’ to the
latest revelations of the Aldrich Ames case and
the post-Cold War reorganization of Russian
intelligence apparatus, SPY BOOK provides the
most comprehensive single volume ever published,
covering intelligence, espionage, and cryptography.
More than 2,000 entries on people, agencies,
operations, tradecraft, and tools uncover the
secrets of this underground world.

Here is just a small sample of the candid, often
wry, appraisals that pepper the pages:

In discussing P. G. Wodehouse, “the British
novelist who wrote humorously about the upper
class,” Pol mar and Allen point out that “his writings
influenced German intelligence officers, who took
Wodehouses comedy seriously. Agents being sent to
England were told that Wodehouse s hilarious put-
downs of the aristocracy were true. One captured
agent was parachuted into England wearing spats.”

Of Donald Maclean, a member of the infamous
Cambridge Spy Ring and “among history’s most suc¬
cessful spies,” the authors write, “When he applied
for the diplomatic service, he told interrogators that
he had had communist leanings while a student and
had never completely abandoned them. His clever
candor helped ease his way into a Foreign Office
where pedigree was considered sufficient grounds for
patriotism and a fling at communism was considered
a mere youthful indiscretion.”

The entries include 27 starred (*) “master entries”
that cover major spy rings, articles about major
countries outlining national intelligence services
and activities, and all categories of tradecraft. For
example, the entry ^Cambridge Spy Ring is cross
referenced with entries on the five members of
the ring, their principal Soviet handler, and the
principal British mole hunter.

There are also over 60 illustrations, many pub¬
lished for the first time.

For Reference

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SPY BOOK

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ESPIONAGE

Norman Polmar •• Thomas B. Allen

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ESPIONAGE

RANDOM HOUSE MB NEW YORK

Copyright © 1997 by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Reference &
Information Publishing, Random House, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, NY 10022. Published
in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Ltd, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Polmar, Norman.

Spy book: the encyclopedia of espionage / Norman Polmar, Thomas B. Allen,
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-679-42514-4 (he)
1. Espionage—Encyclopedias. 2. Secret service—Encyclopedias.
3. Secret service—Encyclopedias I. Allen, Thomas B. II. Title.

JF1525. I6P65 1996
327.12'03—dc20 96-34737

CIP

Random House Web address http://www.randomhouse.com/

Designed by REM Studio, Inc.
Typeset and Printed in the United States of America
987654321
First Edition
New York Toronto London Sydney Auckland

Dedicated

the many people of the secret world

who helped us—including

those who cannot be named.

CHERRY PICKER

TRAILERS

MISSILE ERECTOR

A PERSPECTIVE ON SPYING

CHRONOLOGY xiii

USING THIS BOOK xvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi:

ENCYCLOPEDIA: A-Z 1

RECOMMENDED READING 617

INDEX OF PERSONALITIES 623

CREDITS
633

Long ago spying was labeled as the second oldest
profession, after prostitution. Spying shares several
of the characteristics of prostitution: Money, secrecy,
sex, great public interest, and people’s reputations—
or lack thereof—are involved in both professions.
Indeed, sex and spying have often driven the same
person: Joshua’s biblical spies became involved with
the harlot Rahab. Later, of course, there was Mata
Hari and then the Profumo affair—a sex-and-spies
drama that brought down a British government—
and the seduction of U.S. Marine Corporal Clayton
Lonetree by a swallow, a beautiful young woman
employed by the Soviet KGB to entrap Marine
guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

How old is spying? Walter L. Pforzheimer, a vet¬
eran of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, has
traced espionage to the Garden of Eden. As he tells
it, the satanic serpent was an enemy agent operat¬
ing under the cover of a reptile, who enlisted Eve
as an intelligence asset to destabilize the relation¬
ship between God and the Garden of Eden.

Even before there were states there were spies.
Joseph accused his brothers of being spies when
they came into Egypt and failed to recognize the
pharaoh’s first minister as their sibling. And after
the Jews had left Egypt and were wandering in the
Sinai Desert, Moses sent a man from each of the
12 tribes to spy out the Promised Land.

Archaeologists have unearthed a sunbaked clay
tablet in Syria, written in the 18th Century B.C.,
that shows how old is the idea of using spies as
pawns. The inscription, from one ruler of a city-
state to another, complains that spies have been
released for ransom but that payment has not come.
The ultimate fate of those spies is not known.

Since ancient times the rulers of China and
Japan have employed espionage as a tool of state¬
craft. Sometimes in the East spying had a special
twist, with deception becoming at least as impor¬
tant as intelligence gathering. Confucius, a funda¬
mental source of Chinese teaching since the 6th
Century B.C., said, “Confronting a foreign inva¬
sion, one should resort to deception, which may
suffice in repelling the enemy.”

Sun-Tzu, the renowned Chinese general, writing
Ping-fa (The Art of War) in the same century, saw
intelligence as a major weapon in war: “If you
know the enemy and know yourself, you need not
fear a hundred battles. If you know yourself and
not the enemy, for every victory you will suffer a
defeat. If you know neither yourself nor the
enemy, you are a fool and will meet defeat in every
battle.” (Sun-Tzu’s writings were still required
reading for Japanese military officers in 1941,
when their Navy was planning the sneak attack on
the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor.)

OO
IX

Perspective on Spying
OO x

Records of the Roman Empire relate that
Antonius, a Roman official, defected in 358 A.D.,
taking with him troop dispositions. A Roman sol¬
dier who deserted to the Persians soon returned to
the Roman Army—to spy for the Persians as a
double agent. The Byzantine Emperor Justin II,
given solid intelligence about the defenses of a
besieged city, ignored the information—a familiar
lament of intelligence officers today. He is said to
have fired his spies.

An Arab official, writing in the 11th Century,
observed that kings send ambassadors not only
for purposes of diplomacy but also for espionage,
to try secretly to learn about “the state of the
roads, mountain passes, rivers, and grazing
grounds . . . what is the size of the king’s army
and how well it is armed and equipped.” They
also seek out information about the king: whether
he drinks, whether he is “strict in religious mat¬
ters . . . and does he prefer boys or women.”

In Japan’s early history, intelligence gatherers
included astrologers, practitioners of numerology,
and experts in austromancy, divination through
study of the winds. By the 12th Century A.D.,
when warlords reigned in Japan, espionage relied
less on supernatural or occult means and more on
informers. The Japanese empire, wrote a Western
historian, “was one network of espionage. . . the
fundamental principle of that system of govern¬
ment was suspicion.” A spy drawn from the noble
samurai class was a ninja, “a samurai who mas¬
tered the art of making himself invisible through
some artifice and chiefly engaged in espionage.”

In England domestic spying evolved into for¬
eign espionage under Sir Francis Walsingham,
Secretary of State and adviser to Queen Elizabeth
I. Walsingham—whose motto was “Knowledge is
never too dear”—built up an extensive intelli¬
gence organization in England for activities aimed
mainly against Catholics.

Although acting with the backing of the Queen,
Walsingham financed his espionage operations
privately. In 1573 he began developing a foreign
intelligence organization that ran agents in
France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries,
Spain, and Turkey. He even penetrated some for¬
eign courts. Walsingham, like many of the agents
he recruited, was educated at Cambridge
University—where, centuries later, the NKVD
would also recruit what became known as the
Cambridge spy ring.

By the 1800s the major nations engaged in
international commerce began seeing the need for
official, permanent state intelligence agencies. In

France, Napoleon Bonaparte created a secret
police organization whose primary task was the
clandestine opening of mail. In Britain, where the
government had long opened domestic and for¬
eign mail, the Special Branch of the London
Metropolitan Police was set up to investigate
internal subversion and crimes committed by
domestic and foreign terrorists. In the United
States the Office of Naval Intelligence was estab¬
lished in 1882 as the first permanent U.S. agency
to collect information on the military affairs of
foreign governments.

In 1909, Britain’s Committee of Imperial
Defence established the Secret Service Bureau,
precursor to Britain’s Security Service (MI5) and
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Britain’s intelli¬
gence apparatus became the model for similar
organizations set up by other nations of the West.
As Queen Elizabeth I backed Walsingham’s intel¬
ligence activities when her crown was in danger,
so did a later British leader, Winston Churchill,
give unstinting support to the country’s intelli¬
gence and cryptologic agencies when the empire
was in danager, declaring in 1940: “The great
thing is to get the true picture, whatever it is.”

Each nation has its own policies related to the
operation of an intelligence system, but certain
elements of tradecraft are common to all.
Espionage is an old, conservative occupation,
handed down through the generations by spies
who “come in from the cold” to teach tradecraft
at spy schools. Techniques do not change that
much from decade to decade.

Most spying is prosaic, not romantic. There
have been few glamorous spies, such as the real
Mata Hari (who was more naive than danger¬
ous). Even in fiction, the characters who most
reflect reality are not Ian Fleming’s James Bond
but John le Carre’s George Smiley and Alec
Leamas. As le Carre wrote, “A man who, like
Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his
country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he
may never, never be noticed.”

All over the world, most “spies” are merely
intelligence agency employees who are looking
for very ordinary data. Most of the information
that Soviet master spy Rudolf Abel sent to
Moscow came from The New York Times and
Scientific American. British historian A. J. P.
Taylor once said that 90 percent of the informa¬
tion produced by intelligence agencies can be
found in public sources. Sherman Kent, an
American historian who became an intelligence
officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),

XI OO
Perspective on Spying

increased that estimate to possibly 95 percent for
U.S. information because of the openness of U.S.
society.

To prove his point, Kent once commissioned
five Yale historians to prepare a report on the U.S.
order of battle—military strength and units—
down to the division level, along with naval and
air strength and descriptions of military aircraft,
without using any classified sources. At the end of
a summer’s work, the scholars gave Kent several
hundred pages of information, accompanied by a
30-page summary. Kent estimated that the report
was about 90 percent accurate. (The CIA placed
in secure files all copies of what became known as
the Yale Report.)

Governments seek secret information to elimi¬
nate uncertainty in the conducting of foreign affairs
or to gain an advantage over other countries. By
cracking the Japanese diplomatic code, the United
States could deal more certainly with Japan, espe¬
cially in negotiating the Washington Naval Treaty
of 1922. By using a spy under diplomatic cover in
Hawaii, Japanese naval officers could learn what
U.S. Navy ships were in Pearl Harbor as they devel¬
oped their plan for a sneak attack.

But codebreaking and spying can never reveal
all. The U.S. government, with virtually full
access to Japanese diplomatic ciphers, did not
know that the Japanese were going to launch the
sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, while the Japanese
did not know that there were no aircraft carri¬
ers—the most important naval targets—in Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941. Raw information
is never enough, and it is often wrong, especially
when taken out of context.

Countries must not only collect information,
they must also collate and evaluate it—which
makes it intelligence—and then they must know
not only how to use it but whether to use it at all.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin believed the report
of his master spy Richard Sorge that the Japanese
would not attack the Soviet Union in 1941. And
this crucial intelligence permitted Stalin to move
some divisions from the Far East to fight the
German Army when Germany invaded the Soviet
Union on June 22, 1941. But when Sorge—and
other intelligence sources—warned of that inva¬
sion two months before it occurred, Stalin dis¬
missed the warning. Why? Because Stalin believed
that warnings from the British were really provo¬
cations to force him into a war with Germany.
And he distrusted his own intelligence officers
(several hundred of whose colleagues he had mur¬
dered during the previous few years). National

leaders, particularly dictators, usually place ulti¬
mate trust in their own judgment and not that of
their spies and intelligence chiefs, unless these
intelligence evaluations happen to coincide with
their own preconceptions.

Sometimes, too, intelligence does not get to the
right place at the right time. U.S. intelligence col¬
lected in Bosnia in the summer of 1995 showed
that the Bosnian Serbs had recently installed sur¬
face-to-air missiles in an area where U.S. aircraft
were flying patrols. But that intelligence was not
speedily passed on to the U.S. air commanders
who were planning those patrols. Thus, when U.S.
Air Force Captain Scott F. O’Grady flew an F-16
fighter over the area, he was not accompanied by
specialized aircraft that could detect and jam the
missile guidance radars. A totally unexpected mis¬
sile struck O’Grady’s aircraft. He survived and,
after his daring rescue, became a hero. But he had
almost been killed because intelligence was not
delivered to the right place at the right time.

Spy Book seeks to describe spies, their trade-
craft, the agencies they work for, and the acts of
espionage that they have performed. In the almost
4,000 years since the first mention of spies in the
Old Testament, many thousands of men and
women have spied and worked at breaking into
others’ communications; many hundreds of spy-
masters and case officers have directed their
efforts; and scores of intelligence agencies have
served dozens of nations. From this multitude we
have chosen those we believe have had the most
influence on world events, as well as those we felt
were the most interesting.

Thus, our entries range from the very well
known spymasters Moses and General George
Washington to the virtually unknown “Cookie
Lady” of Saigon and the Dog Skin Report from a
French agent. From the short-lived Bureau of
Information in the American Civil War to the
enduring U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. From
the scytale, the secret writing used by the
Spartans, to today’s spy satellites. From Mata
Hari, who is not known to have ever garnered
any useful bits of intelligence, to Soviet Colonel
Oleg Penkovsky, whose reports had a critical
impact on President Kennedy’s actions during
both the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962, the two occasions when
the United States and Soviet Union came close to
nuclear conflict.

In preparing the manuscript for Spy Book, we
also had to make some difficult decisions about
what not to include. Only a few “special forces”