Espionage in the Shadows: From the Old Cold War to the New
Introduction
Undoubtedly, we are currently in the midst of a new Cold War. For those unfamiliar with the previous Cold War, this article will elucidate its methods and the ongoing rivalry between old rivals.
During my recent visit to Berlin, Germany, the epicentre of espionage and spies, I witnessed the ongoing, intensifying, and direct nature of the Cold War.
The Cold War’s enduring motif was espionage.
Throughout this period, stories of spies, agents, and assassins going into hiding and living double lives in order to infiltrate adversarial regimes or civilizations abound.
Despite the sometimes-overstated scope of espionage, both the United States and the Soviet Union undoubtedly spent a significant amount of money on hiring, preparing, and deploying spies and agents during the Cold War.
The reason behind espionage
During the Cold War, gathering intelligence and information about the enemy, particularly about their military and technological prowess, was the primary goal of espionage.
This information comes from a variety of sources, including paid informants, double agents, stolen documents, intercepted communications, “bugs” (eavesdropping devices), and other surveillance techniques.
Agents’ destructive operations included sabotage, as well as the kidnapping or murder of politicians or other hostile operatives.
Cold War spies typically lacked the flashy James Bond personas depicted in novels and films.
Their ability to appear and act like regular people in society was typically essential to the accomplishment of their tasks and, in fact, to their survival.
Agencies
There was at least one government organisation devoted to espionage and intelligence gathering in each of the main Cold War powers.
CIA
This was the duty of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States.
During World War II, the military arm known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) carried out clandestine operations and espionage before becoming the CIA.
In 1947, the OSS underwent restructuring and received a new name, the CIA. The Cold War impacted the CIA’s goals, structure, and operations.
An early directive in 1948 authorized the CIA to conduct covert activities “against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups” with the goal of “making the responsibility of the United States government therefor not apparent to unauthorised persons.”
Other departments of the US government also provided assistance to the CIA. Established in 1952, the National Security Agency (NSA) gathered data through signal and radio communication surveillance, interception, and decryption.
Espionage, sedition, and other acts of treason were among the domestic criminal activities that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, founded in 1908, was in charge of looking into.
During the Cold War, the CIA engaged in a variety of illicit operations, including killings and human experiments, in addition to conducting general surveillance on potential foreign agents and sending its own agents abroad.
Additionally, the CIA enhanced US foreign policy by arming, funding, and assisting anti-communist politicians and organisations overseas.
In 1948, one of the CIA’s first significant assignments was to assist non-communist political parties in Italy.
The CIA actively assisted in the execution of a number of Cold War coups and attempted coups, including the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile.
CIA operatives recruited and trained 1,500 Cuban exiles between 1959 and 1961. The group of Cubans planned to topple Fidel Castro by landing on his island, known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which took place in April 1961.
Over Soviet and Cuban territory, CIA pilots conducted U-2 flights to gather intelligence on military installations, armaments, and troop movements.
Project Azorian, a mission to retrieve nuclear technology and coded papers from a wrecked Soviet submarine submerged under 16,000 feet of water in the Pacific Ocean, cost the CIA more than $800 million in 1974.
The CIA occasionally collaborated with the Department of Defence to conduct research on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their effects on humans.
Methods of interrogation and mental control
One of these research projects was Project MK-ULTRA, which received over $10 million in funding and ran from 1953 to the late 1960s.
MK-ULTRA was primarily interested in hypnosis and mind-altering substances, with the goal of utilizing them for Cold War objectives.
Many people have raised doubts about MK-ULTRA and the immoral nature of its study. Without their informed consent, hundreds of Americans—the majority of them military personnel—were the subjects of drug tests and experiments.
It is thought that the MK-ULTRA trials were involved in a number of deaths, including those of Frank Olson and Harold Blauer, who passed away in 1953 following a hallucinogenic chemical injection.
Other clandestine CIA initiatives include:
- Project Resistance is responsible for collecting information about radical student organizations.
- Operation Mockingbird (promoting positive media coverage);
- Operation Chaos involves the dismantling of left-wing and anti-war American organisations.
The Stargate CIA experiment even investigated the possibility of using psychic skills for intelligence purposes.
FBI
The CIA was not allowed to conduct domestic operations by US law, yet this prohibition was frequently broken during the Cold War.
The FBI is in charge of looking into and punishing alleged spies inside US borders.
Edgar Hoover, a vicious political operator and fervent anti-communist, directed the FBI from 1935 until 1972.
In 1943, the FBI received an anonymous letter prompting them to start looking into Soviet espionage. The FBI more than doubled in size to roughly 13,000 agents in just two years.
Elizabeth Bentley, who was also feeding intelligence to Moscow, provided the FBI with a wealth of information regarding Soviet espionage in late 1945.
Bentley confessed to the FBI in a 112-page document, naming 80 individuals as paid informants or Moscow-affiliated spies.
Bentley’s defection fuelled the American Anti-Communist frenzy of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Hoover approved the Counterintelligence Programme, or COINTELPRO, in 1956. COINTELPRO was a longer-term operation that targeted domestic political organisations.
FBI operatives infiltrated a wide range of organisations throughout a fifteen-year period, including labour unions, radical student organisations, civil rights groups, left-wing political parties, the anti-war movement, local militias, and hate groups based on race, including the Ku Klux Klan.
In addition to providing information to the FBI, these agents periodically intervened inside these groups to cause disruptions.
USSR
The Soviet Union has a far longer history of collecting intelligence and conducting espionage.
Beginning with the Okhrana in the late 1800s, the Russian secret police agencies included Stalin’s NKVD (1934–54), the OGPU (1922–34), and the Communist Cheka (1917–22).
Each employed clandestine techniques to obtain data on political opponents and possible “enemies of the state.”
KGB
Following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the KGB (Komitet of Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or “Committee for National Security”) replaced the NKVD.
The KGB’s purview included both international intelligence and internal security.
The Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) was another institution that gathered intelligence for the Soviet military.
The Soviet Union possessed a definite “advantage” in this field due to its decades of espionage experience, as well as its agents and relationships in Western nations.
Moscow gave top priority to breaking into the United States’ nuclear weapons research programme, the Manhattan Project, during World War II.
It was remarkably simple for Soviet spies to gather and disseminate technical information, including blueprints, regarding this initiative.
Stalin was more informed than most American leaders about the catastrophic new weapon when the United States unleashed its first atomic bomb on Japan in August 1945.
The most well-known instance of Cold War espionage may have resulted from the sharing of US nuclear secrets.
FBI investigations in the late 1940s uncovered an organization of Soviet spies and paid informants operating inside US borders.
The Rosenberg case
I’ll summarize what I’ve already written about this case: the FBI started looking into Julius Rosenberg, a civilian engineer who had worked for the US Army, in 1950.
Rosenberg was detained in 1950 on suspicion of providing information to a Russian agent while he was affiliated with an American communist organization.
Following his refusal to confess or provide investigators with additional names, the FBI began pursuing his spouse, Ethel.
Eventually, both faced charges under the Espionage Act. In court, they refuted the accusations and declined to identify their companions or provide a statement.
In April 1951, a jury found the Rosenbergs guilty and sentenced them to death in the electric chair. This decision sparked incredulity and fury both domestically and abroad.
Some held the belief that the Rosenbergs were innocent, while others argued that their role as middlemen justified their execution. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg suffered an electrocution in New York.
During the Cold War, they were the only Americans put to death for espionage.
In the United States, the question of Soviet espionage became a national concern.
To uncover the Communists, legislative committees fought each other.
The executive branch aimed to remove government officials who were not loyal.
Courts struggled to strike a balance between social self-preservation and constitutional rights.
Most people agreed that American Communists supported the Soviet Union, that Soviet spying was a major problem, and that several prominent officials had betrayed the country.
Soviet spies not only penetrated the United States but also other Cold War nations.
The Soviet Union also conducted espionage against Britain, especially through the Cambridge Five spy network. I also wrote about the Cambridge Five in 1963.
Kim Philby, a British journalist, vanished from Lebanon. Philby served as a senior intelligence officer for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) until resigning in 1951.
As a double agent, Philby had been providing Moscow with information since the middle of the 1930s. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of Philby’s coworkers, defected to the USSR and lived there until their deaths.
The 1963 revelation that cabinet member Donald Profumo had a mistress who was a known Soviet spy severely weakened the British administration.
Soviet diplomat and KGB colonel Vladimir Petrov fled to Australia in 1954. Petrov provided the Australian government with information about Soviet agents working there.
The Petrov Affair caused Australia and the USSR to cut diplomatic ties for five years.
Global surveillance techniques have evolved to reflect the changing context in which they are utilised, but the essence has stayed constant.
Even today, the world’s intelligence agencies spend a significant amount of time attempting to obtain other people’s secrets, preserving their own secrets, and engaging in clandestine actions, all of which rely heavily on technology.
This post was written by Mario Bekes