Milestones of intelligence development
The well-known military theorist and historian of intelligence British scientist John Keegan asserts that military intelligence as a “decorated element” or “stable security system for military operations” appeared in European states at the turn of the XIII – XIV centuries. It was to this period that kingdoms-princedoms strengthened throughout the European continent, which were able to build powerful fortifications, including a continuous chain of fortresses-castles, and “pacify” their neighbors.This supposedly allowed their rulers to organize a profitable trade and receive “additional” dividends in the form of duties and generally use the results of the fiscal system that had been formed by that time. The surplus financial funds that appeared appeared to give the monarchs-princes a unique opportunity not only to maintain a mercenary army, but also to finance the activities of, in fact, military intelligence agents-professionals.
Keegan points out that by the middle of the 14th century, an extensive network of British intelligence officers existed in France and the Netherlands with the task of tracking the movement of military contingents of both hostile and allied states to London.
AMERICANS HAVE YOUR WAY
Before we proceed to a detailed analysis of the general trends in the development of military intelligence, it should be emphasized that there is one clear difference between the European intelligence system, including military, and the American one.
In Europe, according to the authoritative US-British military encyclopedia Brasseus, the intelligence services of the monarchs basically remained unchanged even after the “democratic reorganization of societies”. In the United States, there was no intelligence system at all before the start of the 1861 – 1865 Civil War, and after it ended, all intelligence activities were virtually curtailed, and before the start of the First World War, Washington did not pay serious attention to the development of intelligence in the military sphere.
As a result, with the beginning of the war, the US armed forces had to create their own intelligence services from virtually nothing. But after the war, military intelligence, in fact, was again abolished. Moreover, the attempt of American enthusiasts to develop radio intelligence in their home was rudely stopped in 1929 by Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “Gentlemen do not read someone else's correspondence!” And only the prospect of the beginning of the global military conflict that was approaching from the middle of the 30 years caused Washington to seriously engage in reconciliation in wartime sphere that he is doing with relative success to the present.
SECRETS AS A GOODS
It is noteworthy that the emerging surplus funds from the states directly determined the main, up-to-date methods of data collection. The well-known British intelligence historian Mark Hyuband in his analytical work titled “Trade in Secrets” directly indicates that simultaneously with the advent of intelligence, 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 in this could not but belong to the British, the first in Europe to capitalize relations in all areas of life under the slogan "everything is for sale, everything is bought!". Already by the beginning of the 19th century, the unprecedentedly expanded geographic and political borders of the British Empire determined the global fashion for all the intelligence agencies of the world for such intelligence collection methods. At the same time, the leaders of the British special services quite cynically instructed their employees: first understand what motivates people to part with the secrets, and then offer a reasonable price. Perhaps, concludes Hyuband, some thought that by doing so they were doing a specious thing, but most were still inclined to "trivially exchange secrets for the coin".
TIMELESS - SUCCESS FACTOR
Get secret information - in itself is extremely difficult and also expensive. But this information does not represent any value, if they are mined late or delivered late. Experts give an example when the British commander Wellington, the future "winner of Napoleon", being with his expeditionary corps in Spain and receiving intelligence with "buckets" with a delay, did not have time to "sort the wheat from the chaff."
Maybe it was for this reason that in that period they began to give preference not to operational-tactical, necessary on the battlefield, but to strategic, in fact, military-political intelligence, when intelligence, turning into analytically processed information, concerned the general plans of war, views of competing factions in the camp of a potential enemy for possible military actions, areas of strategic strikes, etc. At the same time, specific methods and forms of military actions were not affected, but information that was presented with a significant delay did not, in fact, affect the nuances of the armed clashes.
Keegan stresses that it was for this reason that the 10 of the French cavalry divisions, thrown on the German front in 1914, were clearly insufficient and completely unacceptable to repel the mass invasion of German troops into French territory. By the way, the French intelligence service suffered another failure in the same area in 1940.
From all this, it can be concluded that real-time intelligence gathering requires, first of all, that the commander has access to communications, which are much faster than the enemy’s movement both by land and by sea and air, and in modern conditions in outer space. The phenomenon of surprise has always been associated with this. If in medieval Europe, the suddenness of the attack was quite common (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 difficult to achieve victory.
BREAKTHROUGH IN DEVELOPMENT
The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was marked by an unprecedented breakthrough in the activities of the special services, especially military intelligence, due to the massive use of the achievements of the technical revolution. Perhaps the greatest influence on the development of intelligence was the introduction to the troops on the eve and during the First World War concrete results of research in technical areas that resulted in the creation of various radio equipment, radars, and acoustic, photo equipment, etc. All these innovations were already in the interwar period. massively provided units and units of military intelligence of the most militarily advanced states of the world.
Mythic transformations in the reconnaissance of troops occurred with the advent of aviation, which almost immediately began to be used both as an original tool for the direct conduct of hostilities, and as a unique means of mobile intelligence. First, specially trained pilots conducted visual observation and reported on its results after landing, and a little later, the airplanes began to be equipped with photo 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 parts of the air force. On the eve and during World War II, aerial reconnaissance became an essential element in the combat support of troops. But the development of technology is sometimes not kept up with analysts. Already after the war, it became known that the British, who had taken a lot of air photographs of German installations deploying the V-1943 and V-1 in Peenemuende back in 2, could not at first identify this “Hitler’s superweapon,” as a result of which they had to apply for help to other types of intelligence.
In 50, and especially in 60, without a photograph taken from aircraft and then satellites (space intelligence), not a single event in the framework of conventional combat operations, not to mention special operations, when to get intelligence in another way and, most importantly, relatively safely and quickly seemed difficult. The following fact indicates the popularity of such a method of obtaining information of interest to the command information given in the analytical study of the British specialist John Hughes-Wilson.
During the Vietnam War, Americans had accumulated such a huge number of boxes of photographs taken from the air and from space that they simply could not handle, although they attracted an unprecedented number of specially trained analysts for this. The ever-increasing importance of visual and then radio reconnaissance from the air and from space led to the creation in the US of the military intelligence community of special highly powerful structures - the National Aerospace Intelligence Agency (1960) and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (1996).
At the turn of the XX – XXI centuries, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) began to be used to observe from the air, thanks to which the “dream of scouts” was realized through the actual round-the-clock (and sometimes multi-hour) monitoring of the battlefield. Robert Gates, who was US Secretary of Defense in the mid-2000s, recalls with delight how he was watching a "picture" of clashes transmitted from the UAV in real time from the headquarters of the American group in Iraq. The massive deliveries 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 thus obtained.
FROM TELEGRAPH TO RADIO
With the invention of the telegraph flag code at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, naval commanders were given the opportunity to exchange intelligence and prepare for planned actions tens of miles away. But only with the invention at the beginning of the XNUMXth century of a wireless telegraph did it become possible to really control fleets over long distances.
Intelligence, received and transmitted virtually in real time, in the interim period, which covered the invention of the electric telegraph in the middle of the XIX century and its replacement by cable telephone communications and radio in the beginning of the XX century, has become a major factor in ensuring victory in battle.
However, already during the First World War, in conditions of intense shelling and aerial bombardment, as a result of which cable lines were constantly broken, and the radio equipment was still too cumbersome to use at the forefront, the practical importance of such methods of delivering intelligence messages, burdened by a considerable amount of time for them decoding (not to mention deciphering the correspondence of the enemy) in the field was significantly shaken.
In the naval forces, the picture took shape somewhat differently, one can say more positively. Due to the constant availability of powerful sources of electric current on warships, radio communication has become the main and reliable means of controlling forces and means as well as delivering intelligence messages.
"NARROW PLACES
But radio telegraphy, as almost immediately realized in the highest intelligence circles of the leading states of the time, has its own significant drawbacks. The enemy, using radio interception, will be as well informed as the main recipient of the messages. The only secure way to send messages over long distances over the air is encoding. But this led to a radical restructuring of the entire data transmission system and a significant delay in the delivery of critical intelligence information in battle. In the Army and Air Force in the dynamics of close combat, when time is limited, there was no other type of communication other than radio telephony. But at the same time, any form of encryption of negotiations, and especially transmission of intelligence messages, was completely excluded, since it was impossible to accommodate equipment for this purpose not only in the pilot’s cabin, but even in the headquarters of units and formations.
Technical progress eventually led to a way out of the current impasse. In the first decades of the 20th century, Western intelligence services, primarily British and German, could not only create strong ciphers and minimize the size of cipher equipment to ensure the transmission of intelligence data in the field, but also construct mechanical, and then easy-to-use, electric machines for decrypting political correspondence. and the military leadership of the enemy.
TRIUMPH OF CRYPTOGRAPHYCertainly a landmark event in stories military intelligence was significant progress in the opening of ciphers, including encrypted messages transmitted by radio communications. The success of the Polish-British cryptographers in the 30 of the last century deserves special attention in breaking into the seemingly unbreakable German Enigma encryption machine and organizing by the British during the Second World War the Special Communication Division (SPS), which provided the UK leadership with invaluable information about plans of the German leadership on all fronts and theaters of war.
As in previous years, the time factor was a key factor and criterion for the benefits of the work of this intelligence service. Frederick Winterbotham, one of the initiators of the ATP and head of a specially developed Operation Ultra for opening German ciphers, recalled that "Hitler's radiograms came to Churchill ... within an hour after their broadcast." During this time, the British not only intercepted the enemy's encrypted correspondence and opened it, but also managed to translate the content of the messages qualitatively and even annotate them.
But the results of this highly intellectual work are worthless if it is not provided with the same high degree of protection or secrecy. Otherwise, the adversary who has learned about breaking his ciphers will not only change them with a frequency that eliminates the lead factor and leads to wasting time and effort on opening new keys, but also, which is fraught with failure of the whole undertaking, to the creation of new machine ciphers and fundamentally new encryption machines.
Winterbotham gives many examples where strict secrecy around the source of information obtained through the implementation of Operation Ultra and provided to British and then American military leaders for a long time caused skepticism and even frank mistrust regarding “too detailed information of intelligence”. But in the end, some of the military leaders of the Anglo-Saxons relied so much on the results of Operation Ultra that they began to openly neglect other sources of information. And the "rising star" of the British military establishment, field marshal Bernard Montgomery, in general, began to express dissatisfaction with the fact that intelligence information on the line of "Ultra" in parallel was brought to Churchill and Eisenhower. This allegedly diminished in the eyes of the leadership and the public his “talents of the commander-seer”, 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 adversary who has learned about the opening of his cipher can use this to “thinly misinform an opponent” about his plans and intentions. Very cautious and even suspicious, Stalin, “forcedly” informed by British Prime Minister Churchill about the upcoming German invasion of the Soviet Union (without reference to the source of this information), reasonably considered the warning for the refined move of London with the aim of untimely involvement of Moscow in the “game with high stakes” ". It is noteworthy that neither the British nor the Americans throughout the war virtually never informed their eastern ally in the anti-Hitler coalition about any noteworthy and known to them thanks to Operation Ultra plans and intentions of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany.
NOT BOWEDS
Less well known to the general public, but also a breakthrough fact in the matter of revealing the plans of the enemy took place in the other hemisphere of the Earth. We are talking about the successes of American cryptographers from the ground forces (army) and the Navy, almost simultaneously, also on the eve of World War II, who cracked the Japanese ciphers and formally provided the US government and military leadership with the most important information about Tokyo's intentions. The success of the Americans is somewhat leveled by the fact that the Japanese ciphers were less resistant than their German allies. By the way, the British intelligence historian John Hughes-Wilson explains this by the “self-confidence of the samurai,” who considered not only their ciphers, but also Japanese, 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 Japanese cryptographers were, as they say, not sewn up with bastards. After the war, says Hughes-Wilson, the British found out to their horror that in 1941, the Japanese were reading the entire secret correspondence between Churchill and the military office in London with the commander-in-chief of the British forces in Singapore. In turn, even at the beginning of the war, the Germans managed to take possession of the British maritime code directories and skillfully use them in intercepting the English cipher-correspondence, which the latter guessed too late and the unsightly fact they are trying to keep silent about throughout the postwar decades.
ANTIDOTE?
The American military intelligence historian Jonathan House stresses that in order to avoid the possibility of intercepting correspondence and decrypting it with aggravating consequences for its troops, many military leaders preferred to use a wire-to-wire connection, which allegedly made it difficult to intercept. But here there was an "antidote." He cites the facts when the French Resistance fighters managed to connect to the telephone lines of the Wehrmacht and more abundantly provide the Western allies with information about the plans of activities of the German occupying forces.
And in 50-e years, the connection of intelligence services to the wired communication of the enemy was put, as they say, on a grand scale. Publicity was the operation "Gold", carried out by the Americans together with the British in 1954 in Berlin, during which the connection was made to the underground telephone cable connecting the headquarters of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany with Moscow. This idea, however, was very quickly exposed with the help of the Soviet "super agent" George Blake, who was introduced to British intelligence.
Another example: in the 70s during the “trench warfare” on the Golan Heights, Israeli intelligence officers managed to stretch a cable through the ceasefire line and connect to the telephone lines connecting the 5 and 7 infantry divisions of the Syrian troops, which allowed Tel Aviv be aware of the plans of his opponents. However, this did not become a guarantee for preventing the "sudden" attack of the Arabs on the positions of Israelis on the same Golan Heights in October 1973.
GLOBAL LIST
The successes of cryptographers during the war years and the precursors of computers that appeared in the same period, and then full-fledged powerful computers, which had the capacity to accumulate and process huge amounts of data, prompted Washington and London to the idea of a total interception of everyone and everything. And by the end of 40, the United States had a fully formed network of radio and radio intelligence around the world, in 1952, officially transferred to the control of the new structure created for these purposes by the National Security Agency (UNB), the military intelligence community.
The Americans and the British (represented by the Center for Government Communications - DSP) quickly agreed on the distribution of areas of responsibility within the framework of a thoroughly developed global system for intercepting electronic messages, which was called Echelon. The system functioned quite successfully, collecting millions of messages a year for processing, which then had to be analyzed. And here difficulties began to arise due to 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 also emerged between constantly increasing volumes of information and the impossibility of processing it within a reasonable time frame.
CYBEREPHOHA
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 fax machines already look hopelessly outdated. “The rapid spread of the Internet and text messages from computers and mobile phones,” Hughes-Wilson continues, “means that intelligence services such as UNB and DSP have faced major challenges.”
However, experts of special services found a way out of the current situation by applying modern computer technology to solve the very difficulties that this technology creates. In particular, the upgraded Echelon system does not attempt to listen to the programs: it only records everything that it hears. Then the most complex computer programs scan the material, looking for keywords of interest for 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 the analyst of intelligence.
In our time, in the so-called age of computer telecommunication networks that united all of humanity, the Anglo-Saxons simply could not use their opportunities in order not to put the achievements of the technological revolution at the service of their own national interests. According to the recent revelations of US intelligence officer Edward Snowden, the facts of the development of the PRISM program overseas, thanks to which UNB receives any information transmitted by customers of telecommunications giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., become public knowledge of the world. UNB enough to control the activities of almost all advanced Internet users. Of course, technical progress will not be stopped, and over time, new technologies will set new tasks for intelligence officers.
NO AGENTURES NO
Despite the revolution in the field of information and, as a result, the massive introduction of new technologies in all areas of life, the essence of the problems facing intelligence has not changed in principle. No matter how expensive and technically sophisticated innovations are introduced into intelligence, Hughes-Wilson emphasizes, there is a probability of receiving 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. This can only be ensured by an “agent in the camp of the enemy”.
Americans, for example, by 1990 had exhaustive information about the military potential of Iraq, but due to the absence of their own people around the dictator, they simply could not calculate Saddam Hussein’s determination to order the invasion of Kuwait, which entailed a chain of “troubles” for the US which has not been interrupted to this day.
The recruitment of agents at all times was considered the highest achievement in the field of intelligence. And at all times the motivations for attracting one or another subject for work were political-ideological or mercantile or trivial compromising evidence and the subsequent inclination of the subject to work on the enemy. Leaving aside the more or less understandable problem of motivation, let us dwell on some other aspects related to the work of the agent.
For example, some Western analysts quite rightly believe that the effectiveness of the interception equipment and personnel serving it can be estimated by the number of intercepted radio messages: the more - the more effective. But how to measure the work and, accordingly, the utility of the agent and the network headed by him, from which they expect not so much actual data on the quantity or quality of weapons from the enemy (this can be quite reliably obtained by other, less costly and even legal means), as by opening the intentions of the opposing side . The aforementioned expert Hughes-Wilson unequivocally believes that the intelligence agency is difficult to measure and to implement.
British expert in the field of special services, John Keegan points out two, in his opinion, the main problems in the implementation of intelligence intelligence: firstly, the "lag" factor in informing the Center, and secondly, the physical inability to convince the Center that it’s right doubts arose about the accuracy of the information transmitted. The delay in bringing the important information by the agent to the interested authorities is in principle a difficulty, but is formally surmountable, bearing in mind the revolutionary changes in the means of communication. Although it is precisely the forcing of an already risky process with the delivery of information to the Center often becomes the main reason (besides trivial betrayal) of many failures of valuable agents.
The absence of one’s own person in the immediate environment of the leader of the opponent state, as emphasized above, is a major drawback of the intelligence service. But the presence of such a valuable agent may be useless if he has ceased to have the confidence of the leadership of his country.
Usually, in Western studies on intelligence history, an example is given of the Soviet military intelligence officer Richard Sorge, who had unprecedented access to the secrets of the Third Reich, but who allegedly did not enjoy the absolute confidence of the Soviet leadership, primarily Stalin. An example from recent history may be the assumption of the same Keegan that, perhaps because of a lack of confidence in his high-level agent in Egypt, the Israeli leadership was skeptical about his information about the timing of the planned Arabs ’attack on Sinai and Golan Heights. in 1973 year.
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 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: without the oldest of all types weapons - agents in the camp of the enemy - in the foreseeable future will not do!
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