GENERAL

SPY VERSUS SPY

Great Britain’s fascination with the spy tradecraft has not diminished, as is evident in the latest media stories on a likely Chinese spy at the highest echelons of the government.

Maj. Gen. Ajay Sah is the CIO at Synergia Foundation, with experience in conflict resolution, peacekeeping & counter-terrorism.

Great Britain has been an eager participant in the great game of spying since its heydays as the ‘Empire on which the sun never set’. Then it was the Tsarist Russian Empire spreading its wings across Central Asia into the guts of the British Empire - India, which Rudyard made legendary in his books on the ‘Great Game’. The four decades of the cold war was the apogee of the espionage duel when both sides let loose a bevvy of domestic and foreign agents to mine information. Many such shady personalities have today become subjects of legends perpetuated by popular fiction and Hollywood.

Therefore, the delight of the British press was not at all surprising when the contents of a drably worded ‘security services interference alert’ (SSIA) issued by counter-intelligence agency MI5 was leaked to the press. The SSIA drew attention to one Christine Lee working for the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘seeking to covertly interfere in UK politics through establishing links with established and aspiring parliamentarians across the political spectrum.’ The name of Labour MPs started making the rounds, and it was alleged that the Labour party had been the benefactor of funds donated by the UFWD. Reportedly, Ms. Lee has been a long-term Labour funder, especially of its MP, Mr. Barry Gardiner and over half a million pounds have been allegedly transferred to the Labour party since 2005.

SPIES AND POLITICIANS

The UK political scene has been a hotbed of sleazy scandals involving politicians and spies with dazzling beauties thrown in for good measure. Blind political belief based on idealism, bitter disillusionment with their own political system, greed and the allure of glamour and romance have been cited as obvious motivations for spies to turn against their country. Cold war Britain appeared riddled with moles, many of whom were exposed, some fled to USSR, and many obviously remained undetected.

The Cambridge Five (Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Harold “Kim” Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross) are the most famous. Three Cambridge undergraduates were recruited by the Soviets in 1934 through their Cambridge professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, and two more joined them later. With their redoubtable Cambridge degrees, they were able to infiltrate the British government and intelligence agencies during World War 2 and after it with little effort during the Cold War. Maclean, Burgess and Philby fled to the USSR, while Blunt and Cairncross were not detected till 1970 and 1990, respectively. None of them were ever prosecuted; Blunt working for the Royal household, was stripped of his knighthood.

Blind political belief based on idealism, bitter disillusionment with their own political system, greed and the allure of glamour and romance have been cited as obvious motivations for spies to turn against their country.

with MI 6 and almost became the head of MI, till he defected to the USSR before he could be jailed. He is also a bestselling author of a book narrating his exploits as a master spy.

Another notorious sleeper agent was Alan Nunn May, a Cambridge educated nuclear physicist working with UK’s nuclear weapons programme in the 1940s. Nun was a closet communist and secretly sent data and samples from the developing nuclear programme. He is credited for enabling the USSR to catch up with the west in nuclear weapons within a short span of time after WW2. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1946.

Yet another famous case was that of the ‘MicroDot Five’ which included Gordon Lonsdale (a Soviet agent named Konon Molody) , Henry Houghton (a civil servant) and his girlfriend Ethel Gee and an American couple (Ethel and Peter Kroger) who used photographic equipment hidden in their house to convert information provided by Houghton and his girlfriend into microdots for easy transfer to their Soviet handlers. All five were arrested and imprisoned, although Molody was later sent back to the USSR in a prisoner exchange swap. He quickly became a national hero with his face immortalised in a commemorative postage stamp in Russia.

Perhaps the spy scandal which gained the most notoriety was the Profumo affair. John Profumo, an upcoming British politician and Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillian’s conservative government of the 1960s, was exposed for an extramarital affair with a model and glamour girl Christine Keeler. Incidentally, Keeler was also romantically linked to Captain Yevgeny Ivanov working as a Naval Attache in the Soviet Embassy in London but known to be an intelligence agent. The Macmillian government collapsed as a result of the scandal when Harold Macmillian was forced to resign in 1963, followed by an electoral debacle in the 1964 general elections.

A famous Russian spy who worked for the West was Oleg Penkovvskiy, a military hero. In 1950, disillusioned by the excesses of Stalin and his successors, he became a western agent providing strategic intelligence on Soviet missiles and military plans to a British handler. Exposed, he was put through a swift trial and a prompt execution by a firing squad.

TECHNOLOGY REPLACES HUMINT

Western spies were exposed in Russia also, although the frequency in modern times has drastically reduced as spy satellites and electronic intelligence collection superseded human intelligence. Today, a surveillance satellite can collect more strategic information in one of its sweeps than years of laborious efforts by a deep sleeper agent. In 2006, FSB, the Russian counter-intelligence agency, accused four employees of the British Embassy in Moscow of collecting intelligence using high tech listening devices and financing NGOs for anti-Russian activities. In fact, the Russian claimed that the British were using a ‘fake rock’ for video surveillance in Moscow, a claim which earned a lot of derision in the western press but years later was accepted as true.

Technology started replacing all other types of spycraft once the Americans had gained expertise in space. Most successful were the Key Hole series of satellites whose single frame could cover a swathe of territory over 680 km. In the early days, the exposed films were ejected and collected in mid-air by aircraft or by submarines. As the U.S. spent a huge amount in upgrading its surveillance satellite constellations, the Soviets started falling back, lacking the funds to stay in the game. By the 1980s, Moscow was virtually out of the league in space surveillance.

Today, Imagery Intelligence (IMINT) dominates not only the battlefield but every aspect of our lives from space and through autonomous drones capable of long-duration flights. There is no place to hide from their sharp sensors and no secret too deep to remain so.

THE RISING CHINESE PHOBIA

The issuance of the alert by MI5 and its release in the public domain was most unusual for the British counter-intelligence agency. It is clear that it was not an offhand gesture but a calculated move at the end of a thorough investigation.

While Russian influence operations have been grabbing headlines both in the UK and across the Atlantic, China has now become the top priority for British sleuths. Since there was no effort to collect state secrets but merely to covertly gain influence over lawmakers in the instant case, the agency thought it prudent to make public its findings to disrupt any risk that the Chinese interference may entail in the short term.

Following the cue of its larger ally, the U.S., UK’s relations with China have steadily been on the downslide, especially after the chaos in Hong Kong since 2019. Last year, MI5 had issued public warnings, asking vigilance on the part of British citizens as it regarded spying efforts by Russia, China and Iran at par with terror plots. In fact, in Feb 2021, a report in the Daily Telegraph reported the deporting of three alleged Chinese spies posted as journalists in the UK.

In an article written in December 2020, the British newspaper The Mail reported that a significant number of diehard CCP members had infiltrated western governments and corporations dealing with sensitive military technology. The report claimed that over 100 members of the CCP are employed by vaccine giants Pfizer, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithCline.

Even larger numbers, some putting it in hundreds, hold sensitive appointments in Boeing, Airbus and Rolls Royce. Many have wiggled their way through to sensitive research establishments and western universities where they have access to the latest research.

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is on record calling Beijing the “greatest threat to freedom” since World War II seeking to “dominate the planet economically, militarily and technologically.” Thus one can rest assured that the classical cloak and dagger battle has only just begun.