Counterintelligence in the Kingdom and the States Ch. 5

Chapter 5: Summary and Conclusion In the second chapter, the founding and early operation of the FBI and MI5 were examined for the sake of answering the first part of the overarching question (why were they established and maintained?) and to lay the groundwork for answering the second part (what are the counterintelligence benefits and detriments of each trajectory?). The treatment of the Service and Bureau through the two World Wars in the third chapter served to test the initial tendencies and early conclusions at the end of the second chapter in the early years of their operation. The issue of counter-terrorism in the fourth chapter speaks directly to the secondary question of this thesis: whether or not one counterintelligence system should be considered superior to the other. Chapter 2 demonstrated that the respective initial constructions of MI5 and the FBI could not have been more dissimilar. The US was concerned with domestic law enforcement while the UK worried about potential conflict on an unprecedented international scale. The establishment of the FBI and MI5, therefore, filled different gaps in US and UK security: the FBI a gap in law enforcement and MI5 a gap in intelligence. Their founding mandates reflected these concerns, which in turn shaped their early requirements and actions to meet those requirements. The FBI promptly sought to increase its domestic jurisdiction to improve US law enforcement while MI5 busied itself detecting foreign spies. Necessarily, then, the Bureau cultivated its internal orientation (lacking an external mandate at the time) and MI5 focused on the international arena of espionage. While MI5 was prepared for the second war and the Bureau was not, this fact stems mostly from their original intended purpose, not their operational activities alone (though MI5’s pre-war round-up of spies was certainly impressive). Chapter 3, at length, showed the already-established preferences of each organization in action and outlined how each chosen path had costs and benefits. The FBI entered World War I as a political powerhouse without significant counterintelligence experience. The US did not need to rely on the Bureau to the extent that the UK needed MI5 to protect it from spies, which allowed the Bureau to slip back into solely domestic work after the war’s end. MI5, on the other hand, had had tremendous success against German espionage in the First World War, but its penchant for secrecy (an undisputable asset for counterintelligence) had allowed others to take credit for its successes. This ushered in an extremely uncertain period for the Service after the war while the Bureau faced no serious bureaucratic challenges even after blatantly interfering in US politics in the Teapot Dome Scandal and violating civil rights in the Palmer Raids. FBI visibility had protected it from MI5’s obscurity while contributing nothing to the Bureau’s ability to catch spies. Additionally, MI5 continued to monitor foreign threats in the interwar period while the Bureau retreated inward. At the onset of World War II, the Bureau was logistically prepared, but operationally unprepared, to protect the US from espionage. Under President Roosevelt, the FBI never lacked for resources and its visibility and political connectedness only increased, but this only served to confirm its preference for operating in the domestic sphere without an eye to foreign threats. MI5 was operationally prepared, but it was significantly undercut by poor logistics in terms of budget and manpower. Therefore, the Service’s counterintelligence success in the Second World War should be all the more impressive. The wartime experience of the Service also demonstrates that MI5, while distracted by many tasks apart from counter-espionage, had already developed solid counterintelligence tradecraft and only needed a strong leader (David Petrie) to succeed. The Bureau also achieved great success in the war catching spies and pushing itself to become more externally oriented, especially in the case of its SIS in South America. The FBI, however, might have been able to perform even better if it had not neglected counterintelligence in the interwar period, which made significant reorientation inevitable once the war began. After the war’s end, the Bureau experienced political backlash on account of its extensive political dealings and interference in domestic affairs. Its political involvement, which had generally served it well thus far, reached a breaking point for the American people and US politicians. Such discontent led to the decision to force the Bureau to relinquish its SIS operations to the newly-created CIA. The bitterness in the aftermath of this chastisement poisoned the atmosphere in the new USIC in a highly visible manner, severely hampering US counterintelligence and nascent foreign intelligence. MI5, facing a new Labour government that was largely ignorant of the Service’s wartime feats, also faced some domestic backlash though mostly in the public and not the operational sphere (no other UK security organization threatened to absorb the Service, which had proven itself to those civil and political leaders who had been aware of the Double-Cross System). Thus, MI5 largely stayed the counterintelligence course even though it was headed for rough waters in the wake of the revelations that it had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence. The Bureau reversed course away from counterintelligence and back toward domestic law enforcement. Up until this point (and for most of the twentieth century), MI5 and the FBI had stayed true to their initial preferences. MI5 was never tasked with law enforcement or any other substantial distraction from its central mission of counterintelligence, so it continued to hone its abilities in that area. The Bureau, when the US became concerned over foreign threats in the First and Second World Wars, was charged with a task that it never had preferred or held equal to law enforcement. Regardless, the FBI did succeed in several instances while displaying strong counterintelligence tradecraft as had been shown above. Also mentioned above, however, is that throughout the FBI’s history, these instances and wartime initiatives were the exception and not the rule. Neither the UK nor the US was really prepared for the onset of terrorism in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each had to experience loss (or near loss in the case of the UK cabinet) firsthand before charging MI5 and the FBI with the task of preventing terrorism above all other missions. The fourth chapter, however, answered the question of which system for counterintelligence has been shown to be superior by testing both the Service and the Bureau with the modern day task of counter-terrorism. Counterintelligence and counter-terrorism tradecraft have been recognized as cut from the same cloth by both US and UK leaders and by the choices they have made to elevate these tasks. It is clear that MI5, which had never significantly strayed from its counterintelligence mission, was far more prepared to adapt to this new threat compared to the FBI, which has experienced something of a crisis of culture in the post-9/11 world. The Bureau and FBI Director Mueller have openly acknowledged this. Because counter-terrorism must be preventative, MI5 has been better positioned for this task and to continue its counterintelligence mandate on account of its bountiful historical experience working to prevent espionage and damage to the UK through deception and misdirection. Conclusion What can this analysis tell us and the FBI about the practice of counterintelligence? Apart from the general conclusion that counterintelligence must be maintained in war and peace in order to be maximally effective, there are three key qualities that have been revealed above. The first is, not surprisingly, secrecy. MI5’s secretive founding, early operations, and wartime operations were all accomplished with the utmost secrecy and it is unlikely that the Service would have been capable of any lofty successes without it. Imagine, for instance, a single leak of the pre-World War I round-up of German spies or the Double-Cross system to German intelligence. Even a small piece of this UK intelligence picture lost to Germany might have foiled the plots altogether. To be sure, MI5’s secrecy exposed it to political problems, but its secrecy was always an asset to its mission. The FBI had, from its foundation, been a highly visible and politically charged organization. This hindered its expansion into counterintelligence by causing political fears that such a mandate might be abused. In the end, the politically high profile of the FBI has done wonders for its rise to law enforcement prominence, but it has largely held it back from intelligence success. High visibility is not a desirable trait when trying to beat secretive individuals and groups at their own game. The second quality that should be part of the culture of every counterintelligence organization is external orientation. Domestic law enforcement organizations are primed to identify purely domestic threats, but counterintelligence functions must look abroad for the next threats to a country’s security. This is especially the case when foreign intelligence organizations adopt offensive postures (as the Chinese intelligence services have recently) and when international terrorism is a prominent threat. In today’s globalized environment, it is all the more pressing to cover every foreign base in threat perception and prevention. MI5 has always maintained a strong external orientation throughout its history, having fixed all of its resources at one time or another on German espionage, Russian espionage, and international terrorism. The focus of the FBI has been consistently internal. This is evidenced by its preference for law enforcement over intelligence practices for most of its history. The third quality essential to counterintelligence operation is a preventive disposition. As Christopher Andrew has noted, a counterintelligence organization may be better evaluated by preventing spies from gaining any foothold than by the number of spies caught.343 MI5 has always aimed to prevent threats from materializing. This is most evident in the Service’s penchant for running double agents in general and in the Double Cross System in specific. Having double agents in place within target organizations can prevent any success on the part of that organization and the strategic deception on D-Day obviated the bulk of Nazi forces and prevented countless allied casualties. The FBI’s most notable cases of preventive counterintelligence or counter-terrorism operation are more recent, particularly after Director Mueller’s concerted drive to push the Bureau in this direction.344 The Bureau’s rise to the challenge posed by terrorism will absolutely require it to become more preventive because the FBI cannot wait for terrorists to be successful before they apprehend them. In conclusion, the US and the UK adopted and maintained different counterintelligence systems because they wanted very different things from each organization at the outset. The Bureau and the Service then took on lives of their own, more and less political, more and less visible, and more and less preventive in their work. A mixture of these organizational preferences and external considerations allowed both to prioritize their chosen mission – the Bureau with law enforcement and MI5 with counterintelligence. This situation in each country remained constant until the challenge of terrorism forced each organization and each country to change their existing arrangements by the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In terms of counterintelligence alone, the UK’s choice of MI5 has always been superior to the US reliance on the FBI. However, this superiority was not predestined from the beginning of the UKIC. MI5 relies on other organizations (especially police organizations) to a far greater extent than the FBI. It is clear that tensions between MI5 and those other British 343 Andrew, “MI5 in World War I.” In addition to the examples of the aborted Libyan and Lebanese terrorism above, see FBI, “Centennial History,” 114-115. 344 organizations have challenged the Service’s very existence and independence at one time or another, but these bureaucratic battles could have been even worse on account of potential rivalry between intelligence and police functions. The combining of these functions in the FBI has presented different challenges, some that the Bureau still struggles with today. In short, MI5’s success has always depended on external assistance and cooperation. When other UK organizations do cooperate, this system has proved extremely efficient. More important than having a dedicated counterintelligence service, then, might be ensuring that such a service (even a subordinate part of the FBI such as the NSB) communicates well with its partners in national security. Looking Forward Can the FBI perform the mission of counterintelligence at the standard of MI5? The answer is that Bureau absolutely has done so in isolated instances and that, if it had not been for political problems, FBI counterintelligence may have started to resemble MI5 counterintelligence in the aftermath of World War II. Sound counterintelligence practices, however, have never been institutionalized in the Bureau. The greatest and most concentrated push to do so has been the US post-9/11 FBI counter-terrorism campaign. The question then becomes: can the Bureau morph itself into a successful counterintelligence organization despite its historical preferences? Given that this development is so recent, it is certainly difficult to say. Looking at the qualities identified above, however, allows some measure of optimism on this matter. The Bureau certainly cannot become less visible in its entirety, but perhaps its counterintelligence offices or its National Security Branch could. A law enforcement organization must be visible to deter crime and make the public feel safe, but that does not mean that all of its functions need to be open to public view. The FBI could also become more externally focused and it has made significant progress in this area as evidenced by its counterterrorism successes mentioned in chapter 4. As long as special agents who prefer domestic law enforcement are not given too much control over the Bureau’s national security functions, there does not seem to be any significant institutional blockage for progress in this area. Finally, and most crucially, the Bureau must become more preventive and proactive in contrast to its established preference for reactive law enforcement.345 This quality is at the heart of counterintelligence and counter-terrorism and will absolutely be the most difficult change for the Bureau. If the FBI can make this cultural shift, it will be able to prevent and counter intelligence and terrorist threats just as well as any other organization, including MI5. A final note on intelligence and law enforcement organization is in order. The FBI has always had a more complicated mission than MI5 – it is charged with the sometimes contradictory missions of law enforcement, counterintelligence, and counter-terrorism while MI5 is free to focus on counterintelligence and counter-terrorism. As mentioned above, this means that the Security Service must coordinate extremely closely with the UK’s police organizations, while this gap theoretically does not exist in the Bureau since it houses all three missions. This arrangement certainly has its benefits, as evidenced by the sometimes hostile and rivalry-ridden situations that have arisen between MI5 and police organizations. This indicates, perhaps, that the US system is better positioned to quickly apprehend and disrupt terrorist networks as compared to the British system. The immediacy of terrorist threats might also lend itself to the Bureau’s established style of seeking to make arrests quickly instead of waiting to see what happens. However, no organization can prevent terrorist activities if it does not first identify and 345 By reactive, I only mean taking action after a crime has been committed. I am not belittling the necessity of this police function, but rather arguing that both are necessary for national security through law enforcement and intelligence. penetrate them, practices more concretely cemented in the Security Service. In short, there are certainly benefits to each system in countering the modern threat of terrorism even if the UK counterintelligence system has always been superior otherwise. Each organization should take lessons from the history of the other, though it is certainly more pressing for the Bureau to attend to the precedents set by the Security Service in the realm of counterintelligence.