Forsyth wrote "Day of of the Jackal," a favorite of mine, and "The Fist of God" is one of the all time best. From WSJ.com
AT WAR
America Needs an MI5
Your spies could be more like our spies.
BY FREDERICK FORSYTH
Saturday, December 14, 2002 12:01 a.m.
HERTFORD, England--For students of that arcane world called covert intelligence gathering, the FBI has always been a bit of an enigma.
Its fame, its glamour, the basis of a thousand movies and TV thrillers, whether fact- or fiction-based, has always rested on its crime-fighting role. Indeed, it was founded to tackle the burgeoning gang-crime spawned by the Prohibition era and that appears still to be its primary function.
Then it appears someone tossed in a kind of afterthought. The bureau also handles national counterintelligence, the task of keeping the U.S. safe from foreign spies and hostile espionage. That is the enigma. So far as I know, there is no other country that corrals these two utterly different disciplines under one roof.
Did J. Edgar Hoover, whose name is still synonymous with the bureau, struggle for this extra responsibility? Were John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson not enough for him? Certainly in the corridors of power the old cross-dresser was pretty insatiable. The problem was, he knew jack-diddly about counterespionage but thought he did--the worst of all combinations.
America was fortunate in this sense: During the 1930s the rise of fascism and Nazism was far enough away as not to concern the young and idealistic generation. In Europe, Hitler's horrors harvested a crop of young men who thought communism was the antidote. That is how we got our Philby, Burgess, Maclean; starting as idealistic youths, ending up as traitors. There were few such, west of Long Island.
In the post-1945 Cold War the U.S. came up against a seriously professional, experienced, skilled and ruthless enemy in the Soviet NKVD, later KGB. And frankly, to start with, Moscow Center ran rings round the bureau.
The reaction was overreaction: McCarthy, Hoover. It was said at one point there were so many G-men infiltrated into the American Communist Party that it was only their membership fees that kept the ACP alive at all.
After the British MI6 disgraced itself in 1951 with Philby & Co., the too-complacent presumption arose that all the U.S. intelligence agencies were "clean," inasmuch as ideological traitors were such a rarity. With hindsight, we now know the U.S. hosted an awesome litany of foreign spies and traitors, mostly seduced by money, not principle. Even at the very end, the dying U.S.S.R. probably had the last laugh with Aldrich Ames inside the CIA and Robert Hanssen beavering away in the bureau.
Now the world map has changed radically. Yesterday's enemy may be our Muscovite pal. New monsters loom: proliferation of high-tech, megadanger weaponry; narcotics and gangsterdom reaching planet-destabilizing levels; nuclear creep; religion-based terror networks. How do we cope?
The wish-list way would be to draw neat lines separating the various dangers and have one agency to cope with each. It is not that easy. Narcotics, weapons, currency swindles, terror bombs--all are, or can be, linked to each other.
The Drug Enforcement Agency will specialize in narcotics, but may well turn up a major arms deal in the process; money laundering in the Caribbean, of interest to the Treasury, could be funding a training camp in the Pakistani mountains, of keen concern to the CIA.
The U.S. has at least 13 major intelligence-gathering agencies plus the FBI's counterintelligence role. Ah, but other agencies like the CIA also do a bit of their own counterintelligence, and the bureau has 38 legal attaches abroad, who are in the intelligence-gathering business too. It's a patchwork quilt.
What went wrong before Sept. 11 was not that nobody knew anything; it was that various agencies knew (or suspected) bits of something looming but could not put the jigsaw together alone, and had no in-place mechanism for cross-indexing what they had.
Since then the whole West has been on a huge learning curve, a catching-up exercise. Enormous progress has been achieved. Our technology is almost science fiction. The space-ears of the National Security Agency can almost hear them break wind in the Tora Bora mountains. Six bad guys were recently blown away in the Yemeni wilderness by a rocket-toting Predator, all watched in real time on screen in Tampa, Fla.
We are getting on top of their funding, perfecting interrogation, expanding the lists of names and faces, locating the bank accounts, gathering defectors. There are two things missing.
Counterintelligence is based on knowing the enemy, who he is, where he is, what he plans and when. That means penetration. With Islam-based terror that is hard. Surveillance alone will never be enough. But a penetrator cannot be a WASP; he has to be raised Muslim, look the part, act the part, speak the part. Or we just subvert and "turn" existing terrorists, not to defect, but to stay in place.
The other thing we have to learn is to abandon turf wars, jealousies, rivalries between agencies. I know many senior U.S. intelligence veterans look with approval at the British Joint Intelligence Committee, where a trusted mandarin can convene the Secret Intelligence Service, the Security Service (inland counterintelligence). Government Communications headquarters (the listeners) and Scotland Yard's Special Branch round one table. They trust each other just enough to cross-index what they have and share knowledge. It helps comprehension and prevents damaging duplication. I think the U.S. has to go the same road.
There is talk of yet another agency for counterterrorism. There are enough agencies. What lacks is a clear recognition that they exist solely to fight America's enemies, not each other.
Mr. Forsyth is a novelist, the author of "The Day of the Jackal" and, most recently, of "The Veteran: Five Heart-Stopping Stories" (St. Martin's Press, 2001). |
