Intelligence Gathering and Espionage

Intelligence Gathering and Espionage. “Intelligence” is information gathered by a government or other institution to guide decisions and actions; “espionage” is the collection of intelligence through clandestine means. Deeply rooted in world history, both intelligence and espionage have figured in U.S. history from the earliest days of the republic. George Washington wrote: “There is nothing more necessary than good Intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy, & nothing that requires greater pains to obtain.” Benedict Arnold, an American general in the Revolutionary War, doomed himself to perpetual disgrace by secretly passing coded military intelligence to the British in 1779–1780.

Slow and uncertain modes of communication reduced the value of intelligence and its reputation in the early nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1914, however, with improved means of communication and administration, information was collected more rapidly and thoroughly and used to greater effect. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the Union Army's Bureau of Military Information was the world's leader in military intelligence, although it was quickly dismantled in the postwar period.

Intelligence gathering, once the province of diplomats and the military, gradually came to be handled by specialized bureaucracies that not only assessed information but increasingly conducted espionage. By 1914, most European states possessed small espionage and assessment bureaus, with American intelligence efforts lagging somewhat behind those of Great Britain. Intelligence proved more central in World War I than in any previous conflict. It now included technical sources like aircraft photography and signals intelligence (the interception and deciphering of another nation's communications by telegraph, radio, or other means). In one well‐known incident, British naval intelligence on 1 March 1917 intercepted a coded telegram from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to Germany's ambassador in Mexico. The telegram suggested that if Mexico joined Germany in war against the United States, it could regain its “lost territories” of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. Transmitted to Washington by the British, the Zimmermann telegram helped buttress President Woodrow Wilson's decision to call for a declaration of war against Germany.

Espionage had even greater value in World War II, with successes in code‐breaking hastening Allied victories in both Europe and the Pacific. U.S. Army intelligence broke the Japanese diplomatic code in 1940, providing invaluable information throughout the war. Despite the rise of new forms of espionage, a key to intelligence operations remained the secret agent who gained access to documents or other information of interest to his or her masters, such as the Soviet atomic spies of the 1940s who penetrated the Manhattan Project and supplied information to Moscow.

Building on the wartime Office of Strategic Services and the signals‐intelligence operations of the military services, the Cold War Era saw a vast expansion of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis. Signals intelligence was conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA), created in 1952 from a combination of army and navy signals‐intelligence programs; human intelligence by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and satellite imagery by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Some of the more celebrated moments of the Cold War involved the unmasking, defection, or exchange of intelligence agents by the superpowers. Supplementing the traditional use of agents were increasingly sophisticated forms of signals intelligence and imagery, including satellite photography, which proved vital for such tasks as estimating Soviet nuclear capacity. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1967: “Before we had the [satellite] photography our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. Because of the satellites I know how many missiles the enemy has.” The goal, in the words of Ray S. Cline, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence from 1962 to 1966, was to formulate “an evidence‐based description of the real world around us, with as much objectivity and accuracy as possible.”

The goal was not always realized, however. The process of gathering and analyzing intelligence was sometimes distorted by preconceptions and politicization. Since fragmentary and ambiguous data could be made to fit many explanations, analysts and politicians sometimes interpreted them to fit their preconceptions. While signals intelligence sometimes penetrated the deepest of foreign secrets, it could also be trivial in significance. One celebrated American code‐breaking operation of the Cold War, “Gamma Guppy,” essentially provided U.S. analysts with gossip by top Soviet leaders about their colleagues' sex lives. Aerial and satellite photography generated facts in such quantity as to overwhelm understanding. American intelligence agencies in the 1960s, clogged by millions of satellite images, most of which analysts could not examine for a year or more, missed evidence of such impending events as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Both the successes and failures of American intelligence decisively shaped U.S. history in the twentieth century, from the failure of U.S. intelligence to anticipate Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 to the CIA's detection of Soviet missiles and delivery systems in Cuba in 1962, which gave rise to the U.S.‐Soviet showdown known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Intelligence remained important at the end of the twentieth century, although several decades of controversy surrounding the CIA had diminished its standing and tarnished its reputation. With the end of the Cold War, as economic rivalries and trade competition came to shape relations among nations more and more, commercial and economic intelligence gathering and espionage became increasingly important.

In the aftermath of the catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, public attention focused on the gaps in U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis that had allowed the terrorists to enter the country, secure flight training, and otherwise plan and carry out the attack without detection. By 2004, as a bipartisan blue‐ribbon panel investigating 9/11 severely criticized both the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, major reforms in the nation's entire intelligence gathering operation seemed inevitable.

Bibliography

Walter Laqueur , A World of Secrets, 1985.
Michael Handel , War, Strategy, and Intelligence, 1989.
Michael Handel, ed., Intelligence and Military Operations, 1990.
Keith Neilson and and B.J.C. McKersher , Go Spy the Land: Military Intelligence in History, 1992.
Michael Herman , Intelligence and Power in Peace and War, 1996.

John Ferris

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer