Counterintelligence in the Kingdom and the States Ch. 3-4

Chapter 3: Two World Wars, the Interwar Years, and the Early Cold War Much like the wider world, MI5 and the FBI would undergo significant changes in the period of 1914-1950. Both were called upon to defend their countries from new foreign and domestic threats, requiring them to adapt quickly to the rapidly changing governmental perception of threats to national security. Both the FBI and MI5 rose to the occasions in creative and diverse ways that both confirmed existing qualities (discussed in the previous chapter) and pioneered new areas of operation that would become standard throughout the rest of their histories. These organizations were primarily shaped by the shifting requirements of their encompassing governments and political leaders but secondarily shaped according to public perception of their contributions to national security and society. Ultimately, the FBI changed much more than MI5 during this time – the new wartime and interwar responsibilities of MI5 were, for the most part, extensions of its existing counterintelligence mandate. The FBI, on the other hand, was called to fulfill essentially the same tasks while retaining a bureaucratic predisposition toward domestic law enforcement. Other prominent continuing themes from chapter 1 are the relative visibility and political involvement of the FBI compared to MI5, qualities that would eventually pose different various challenges for each organization. The massive timeframe of 1914 through the late 1940s will be subdivided into four small sections for each organization: World War I, the interwar period, World War II, and the early post-war period. By the end of this chapter, we should have a solid picture of how these organizations have and would continue to approach the task of counterintelligence for the majority of the twentieth century. The FBI in World War I: Testing the Waters of Counterintelligence As mentioned above in chapter 2, the FBI was not prepared for protecting US interests and security from threats that would follow the 1914 outbreak of World War I in Europe. Indeed, after the war had begun, US Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory argued that he did not even have jurisdiction to monitor or arrest the German agents who were freely operating throughout the country.102 While this attitude betrayed the primary interest of DOJ officials in enforcing US law instead of preventing foreign influence, the Attorney General had a point: US law was not adequate to ensure the protection from espionage, sabotage, and subversion.103 Unfortunately, it would take a high profile disaster to shock US leaders into realizing that its counterintelligence capabilities were woefully deficient. On July 30, 1916, German agents detonated two million tons of munitions at the Black Tom train yard, killing four and sending shrapnel and shock waves flying over near-by New York City.104 The German sabotage operation was executed to prevent the war materials from being sent to the embattled U.K.105 The FBI, lacking jurisdiction, took up role supporting the Secret Service and New York Police Department investigations. It later became apparent that German Captain Franz von Rintelen had masterminded the plot.106 The incident had the effect of convincing many US citizens that their nation’s counterintelligence system needed reworking.107 In the wake of Black Tom and several other events that heightened fears of internal threats, Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917, and the Selective Service Act, Sedition Act, and Immigration Act all in 1918.108 These legislative initiatives collectively gave the FBI the 102 Jeffreys-Jones, 66. FBI, “Centennial History,” 8. 104 Ibid., 10. 105 Ibid. 106 Jeffreys-Jones, 69. 107 Ibid. 108 Theoharis, 21-22. 103 counterintelligence and counter-subversion mandate that would manifest in its monitoring of enemy foreign nationals following the criminalization of spreading opinions that opposed or undermined the US government’s wartime policies.109 Armed with this new jurisdiction to protect the US against foreign and foreign-influenced threats, the FBI promptly focused on the domestic side of the equation. While it is true that German sabotage operations like Black Tom were not replicated following this expansion of FBI powers, the FBI overwhelmingly targeted individuals and groups with controversial opinions as opposed to groups and agents who were being controlled by foreign forces.110 In the heat of World War I, it is unsurprising that the FBI had difficulty telling the difference between the intent to subvert the government and opinions contrary to those of the government. The latter was easy to locate and intimidate, the former was much more elusive and required intelligence tradecraft. The targeting of political opinions inevitably further entrenched the political nature of the FBI and raised its visibility in US society, neither of which is desirable from an un-biased intelligence standpoint. The FBI did, however, take the first steps in establishing a trend that would continue through its history – the ability to apply exceptional intelligence tradecraft in isolated instances. In 1917, after the US had formally entered the war, the FBI received intelligence that the German embassy had hidden sensitive documents in the Swiss Consulate, which was located in New York City.111 The NYC Special Agent in Charge then tasked a small unit to acquire the documents. The unit set up an office nearby for surveillance, quickly determined where the documents were being hidden, obtained access regularly, and covered their tracks effectively.112 109 Ibid. Ibid., 22. 111 FBI, “Centennial History,” 11. 112 Ibid. 110 Quietly, they would send their haul off to the DOJ for exploitation without leaving a paper trail of the transit.113 The payoff was thousands of pages of secret German documents concerning intelligence methodology, logs of activities inside the US, and information on Von Rintelen’s espionage and sabotage network.114 This highly successful operation challenges the notion that the FBI was incapable of performing strong counterintelligence tradecraft, but such a case represents the exception, not the rule. The Interwar Period for the FBI: Politics, Fame, and Preeminence If the FBI’s wartime experience had forced it to at least consider foreign threats more seriously, the return to peacetime meant that the FBI retreated to its primary mandate of investigating violations of federal law without fostering the counterintelligence lessons of the First World War.115 Two events in the early 1920s show that the FBI was significantly overreaching in internal US politics without even attempting to countering foreign threats. First, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched an infamous set of raids against suspected anarchists that violated the civil liberties of thousands of people.116 The Bureau’s involvement in the “Palmer Raids” earned it significant public ire. Second, in 1923 the FBI cooperated with a request from President Warren G. Harding’s administration to monitor Congress members who opposed the President’s policies in what became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal.117 These events marked a significant breach of trust between the US public and the Bureau. Indeed, after the Teapot Dome Scandal had become public knowledge, it was suggested that the FBI be 113 Ibid. Ibid. 115 FBI, “Short History,” 3. 116 FBI, “Centennial History,” 12. 117 Ibid., 16-17. 114 subordinated to the Secret Service.118 However, there was no formal campaign or attempt to abolish the Bureau, demonstrating how fundamental the FBI had become to the US government.119 It fell to J. Edgar Hoover to revitalize the FBI, repair its reputation, increase its efficiency, and retrieve it from political scandal. Indeed, Hoover ushered in dramatic FBI success against gangsters in the later 1920s and cultivated a highly positive reputation for the Bureau for the remainder of the interwar period.120 Public perception factored heavily into Hoover’s recipe for success. His 1925 remarks to the Attorney General encapsulate his thinking on the matter: “the real problem of law enforcement is in trying to obtain the cooperation and sympathy of the public and… they [special agents] cannot hope to get such cooperation until they themselves merit the respect of the public.”121 This line of thinking culminated in two of Hoover’s most ingenious innovations – a public list of “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” and the identification of a “Public Enemy Number One.”122 Through these programs, the FBI published identifying information about prominent criminals in the hope that the public could assist in his location and arrest. It was widely successful and had the added effect of uniting the public in nationalistic sentiment.123 Hoover’s impact on the Bureau brought it new life and new status in American society. However, since all of his key initiatives and reforms were focused specifically on domestic law enforcement, the FBI staunchly retrenched itself in its internal focus at the expense of maintaining the capability to defend against foreign threats. 118 Kessler, 16-17. Theoharis, 32. 120 Kessler, 32-40. 121 For quote: FBI, “Short History,” 4. 122 Kessler, 41-42; Jeffreys-Jones, 90-91. 123 Ibid. 119 The Great Depression had resounding effects on US society in the 1930s and brought about an environment of desperation and uncertainty that provided a fertile breeding ground for subversive, radical, and anti-government organizations.124 Worried about the increasing number of such groups, President Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly and unilaterally authorized the FBI to investigate such groups.125 This was the first of several presidential directives by which President Roosevelt expanded the FBI’s powers before and during World War II. Eventually, the president elevated the FBI to the undisputed lead position in the US to meet the challenges of subversion, espionage, and sabotage.126 The FBI had thus achieved the formal status of primary US counterintelligence organization before the advent of the Second World War, which made sure that the US was much more prepared now than before entering World War I from a counterintelligence standpoint. This expansion of FBI power did not come politically free, however. Political activities of the FBI under Hoover had not entirely disappeared and many still remembered its involvement in the Palmer Raids and the Teapot Dome Scandal. The problem was that, in the public eye, more counterintelligence power for the FBI had the potential to translate into more political surveillance and overreach.127 The FBI did have one counterintelligence success before the war that had particularly moved President Roosevelt to increase the FBI’s intelligence mandate mentioned above.128 This demonstrated that the FBI had significantly improved upon its rather modest intelligence tradecraft in World War I regardless of its political dealings. The success was the disruption of the Rumrich spy ring, a German military intelligence operation in New York City.129 While the 124 FBI, “Short History,” 5; FBI, “Centennial History,” 34. Theoharis, 44-46. 126 Theoharis, 48-49, 58-64. 127 Jeffreys-Jones, 103. 128 Theoharis, 49-50. 129 Jeffreys-Jones, 101-102. 125 FBI investigation revealed many spies and obtained a great deal of valuable information on German intelligence, failure to coordinate and too much publicity led to the escape of all but four of the spies.130 While the Bureau should be faulted for failing to maximize US gains on the plot’s exposure, it is important to note that the FBI successfully disrupted a professional foreign intelligence operation. The part of the story that makes this case less impressive, however, is the fact that MI5 had done most of the work in identifying the ring in the first place.131 This case will be analyzed further in the comparative analysis section of this chapter below. The FBI in World War II: Strides in Organization and Action FBI activities during the Second World War could fill many books, but here I will only examine counterintelligence highlights and organizational changes that are germane to the current inquiry. The most important structural change that came for the FBI in the arena of counterintelligence was the creation of its Special Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1940 in the face of increasing Axis influence in South America.132 It mission was to gather intelligence on Axis power activities in South America, protect South American allies of the US from Axis political intrigue, and expose Axis networks.133 By the end of the war, SIS had 369 agents spread across Central and South America.134 According to the FBI, SIS had revealed “887 Axis spies, 281 propaganda agents, 222 agents smuggling strategic war materials, 30 saboteurs, and 97 other agents” in addition to providing a wealth of useful intelligence.135 130 Ibid., 102; Theoharis, 50. Jeffreys-Jones, 100-101. 132 FBI, “Short History,” 9. 133 Ibid; FBI, “Centennial History,” 35. 134 Jeffreys-Jones, 117. 135 FBI, “Centennial History,” 35. 131 The FBI’s SIS was an active and externally focused counterintelligence initiative that pioneered new territory for the Bureau. In a very short time span, the internally oriented FBI rose to the international occasion of the Second World War to develop US counterintelligence efforts in foreign territory. In order to have achieved such success outside of the US homeland, it can be concluded that the FBI demonstrated a slightly more cosmopolitan outlook than it ever had before. It is important to note, however, that the US had considered South America to be its sphere of influence for decades by the Second World War, and it had taken military measures to make sure that the European and Pacific theaters did not spread to the Western Hemisphere.136 Thus, while SIS represented a significant step toward active counterintelligence practice apart from the FBI’s primary law enforcement mission, this is tempered by the fact that US power had made South America a hard target for Axis espionage and a relatively easy assignment for the FBI. The cultural and linguistic differences between the US and South America are also, arguably, less dramatic than those between the US and some of the European combatants. It is likely that it would have been far more difficult for FBI agents to achieve a measure of counterintelligence success in, say, liberated Western Europe or conquered Japanese territory. There are two FBI counterintelligence cases from the Second World War that the Bureau holds as great successes and that illustrate the nature of FBI counterintelligence.137 The first case (which actually ended the month that the US entered the war) is that of William Sebold. Sebold was a naturalized US citizen who had emigrated from Germany and who had been approached by German intelligence officers durring a visit to his homeland in 1939.138 Sebold worked in US 136 Conn, Stetson, and Byron Fairchild. "United States Army in World War II: The Western Hemisphere: The Framework of Hemispheric Defense." US Army Center of Military History. http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/004/4-1/CMH_Pub_4-1.pdf (accessed March 27, 2014). 137 FBI, “Centennial History,” 44; FBI, “Short History,” 8. 138 FBI, ‘Centennial History,” 44. industrial plants, and was an ideal candidate for espionage and sabotage.139 While still in Germany, Sebold accepted the offer to spy but then immediately offered his services to the FBI.140 Upon returning to his home in New York City, the FBI ran him as a double agent for sixteen months.141 The FBI proved quite adept at handling his exploits and certainly capitalized on the intelligence that he provided. The fruits of this operation were many, including lists of German intelligence requirements and specific instructions to the Fritz Duquesne spy ring that the Bureau had penetrated through Sebold.142 The Bureau only ceased the operation when it had positively identified all 33 members of the ring.143 On June 29, 1941, the FBI successfully arrested them all, not letting a single spy escape as it had in the Rumrich case.144 19 of those arrested pled guilty, while the other 14 were convicted in December of that year in a resounding counterintelligence (and law enforcement) success.145 In terms of neutralizing the Duquesne network, this case represents an absolute victory. The vigilant counterintelligence expert might be tempted to ask: was there more that the FBI could have gotten from the Sebold operation? Could it have turned any of those 33 spies into double-agents, leading toward a greater misinformation campaign to completely confuse the central German intelligence system? Such questions are not meant to belittle the success of this operation, but rather to suggest that the FBI, very eager to present a solid victory to the public, may have closed the case before realizing its full intelligence potential. The Duquesne ring was one outfit in a larger intelligence war. Perhaps the FBI could have learned more, but sixteen 139 Ibid. Ibid. 141 Jeffreys-Jones, 105. 142 Ibid. 143 Theoharis, 51. 144 Jeffreys-Jones, 105. 145 Theoharis, 51. 140 months is certainly a long time and this demonstrates a step toward the patience required for long-term and big picture counterintelligence strategy. One final note on this case: Sebold was a walk-in and the FBI, while it proved proficient at handling him, had not set out to recruit him in the first place. The second case is that of George Dasch. In mid-1942, two German submarines carrying eight sabotage agents (including Dasch) dropped them off on Long Island.146 Some accounts claim that Dasch decided to defect after the haphazard landing; he claims in his book that he had planned to defect all along.147 Either way, Dasch turned himself into the authorities and assisted the FBI in rounding up the other seven saboteurs before any sabotage could be accomplished. J. Edgar Hoover conveniently omitted the fact that Dasch had turned himself in when he informed the president of the success.148 It also does not reflect particularly well on the FBI that Dasch’s first attempts at defection did not garner more attention – he was initially shrugged off as a fake.149 This detail and the fact that Dasch was a walk-in aside, the FBI did learn from this experience to the point where, when two more German agents were similarly dropped off in 1944 in Maine, the Bureau arrested them quite promptly.150 The fact that Dasch and Sebold were walk-ins should not diminish their value as agents to the US – some of the greatest spies of the twentieth century were walk-ins.151 This does not change the fact, however, that it takes a greater counterintelligence capability and effort to locate and turn agents into double agents than it does to recognize their potential and run them once they have defected. On the whole, the FBI was very effective in protecting the US from the 146 FBI, “Short History,” 8. FBI, “Centennial History,” 38; Dasch, George John. Eight Spies Against America. New York: R.M. McBride Co., 1959. 77, 83, 90. 148 Kessler, 67. 149 Ibid., 66. 150 Ibid., 69. 151 For example, Oleg Penkovsky, Adolf Tolkachev, and Aldrich Ames were all walk-ins. 147 foreign threats of subversion, sabotage, and espionage in World War II. The successful Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 obviously marked a low point in US intelligence history, but the FBI had effectively played no part in the failure to read the intelligence signs pointing toward that event. The Bureau had overcome its predisposition toward wholly domestic work when called upon to lead counterintelligence in South America through SIS. Indeed, it appears to have excelled in this area of operation. At the end of the war, the FBI had made significant strides toward greater counterintelligence responsibility, but politics and perception of FBI excess would primarily shape the early post-war future of the Bureau. The FBI After the War: Domestic Backlash, Loss of Empire, and Rejection of Intelligence As mentioned above, Hoover’s FBI had a leading counterintelligence role in the US when the world was plunged into war. Despite SIS success, however, the US entry into war and the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942 had the effect of restricting FBI intelligence work to the Western Hemisphere and generally removing it from central planning of US intelligence in the war.152 Nonetheless, after President Roosevelt’s death, President Truman duly abolished the OSS after the war’s end and lent credence to Hoover’s belief that the FBI was positioned to become a “world-wide intelligence service.”153 The stumbling block for this vision of the FBI’s future proved to be chiefly political, not based on the FBI’s moderately strong counterintelligence record. In the mid-1920s, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone had appointed Hoover to be the Bureau director partially to pull the 152 153 Jeffreys-Jones, 111. Ibid., 118-119; for quote: Ibid., 118. FBI out of US politics.154 While Hoover certainly brought the Bureau increased fame and public support, he had definitely not kept the Bureau out of politics through the rest of the 1920s and 1930s.155 The arrival of President Roosevelt’s presidency and the national security concerns of the US leading up to World War II ushered in an unprecedented increase in the FBI’s political dealings.156 Hoover led the political espionage campaign of President Roosevelt against his opponents, especially those politicians who opposed the Lend-Lease Act and the US entry into the war.157 Politicians were hardly the only ones who experienced the FBI’s overreach into US society – many individuals were targeted for their political views who were not directly involved in the US political process.158 The end of the war and the disappearance of publicly perceived worldwide threats meant that all of the FBI’s more murky dealings would be brought to light in public discourse. This was especially the case as the US public became aware of the extreme authoritarianism of the Nazi regime in Germany, especially the atrocities of the Gestapo, the Nazi Secret Police.159 The comparison of the politically involved FBI to the murderous Gestapo was hardly a reasonable one, but it did not help that Hoover had become a highly visible and feared personality in Washington.160 Very conscious of these public perceptions of the FBI, President Truman realized that expanding the Bureau’s powers as a peacetime intelligence agency was untenable.161 To meet the growing military and espionage threat of the Soviet Union, therefore, 154 Ibid., 84. Ibid., 121-123. 156 Kessler, 55-57; Theoharis, 44-64. 157 Jeffreys-Jones, 127-129. 158 Ibid., 130-136. 159 Ibid., 137-138. 160 Ibid., 10-11. 161 Ibid., 137-138. 155 Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 that created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).162 The most important outcome of the act for the present inquiry was that the CIA was given the mandate of foreign intelligence while the FBI was restricted to domestic operation.163 The most immediate consequence of this rearrangement of the USIC was that the FBI was forced to abandon its South American SIS operations and hand over such operations and attendant facilities to the CIA.164 Needless to say, Hoover was furious, and his ensuing bitterness unfortunately played a significant role in shaping the mutual mistrust between the Agency and the Bureau.165 Even more unfortunate for the emerging US Cold War intelligence posture was Hoover’s conscious rejection of the FBI’s reduced but still important mission of counterintelligence. He unilaterally hampered USIC establishment and early coordination by refusing the attend the Intelligence Advisory Committee (that was chaired by the Director of Central Intelligence), pulling the FBI out of the Interdepartmental Committee on International Communism, and abandoning the task of vetting potential CIA personnel in the critical early months of its operation.166 Clearly, the early Cold War years witnessed a USIC that was in a state of flux. This did not mean, however, that US authorities failed to appreciate the threat from the Soviet Union. Before the CIA had been formed and the intelligence waters muddied by internal politics, the FBI was aware that the Soviet Union had engaged a concerted espionage effort throughout the US. This was thanks to the timely defections of Igor Gouzenko in Canada and Elizabeth Bentley 162 Ibid. Ibid., 137. 164 Ibid., 142. 165 Ibid., 142-148. Hoover is not the sole reason for the cultural mistrust between the two organizations. It is likely that bureaucratic rivalry would have developed between the two organizations without Hoover’s open hostility solely on account of taking responsibilities from one (the FBI) and giving them to another (the CIA). 166 Ibid., 143-145. 163 in New York City in 1945.167 In some ways, however, this makes Hoover’s anti-intelligence posturing post-1947 all the more inexcusable because he and the Bureau could not feign ignorance of the real threat of foreign espionage. Also, since both Bentley and Gouzenko had been walk-ins, this knowledge had been more a result of fortuitousness than inevitability brought about by solid counterintelligence tradecraft, which should have alerted policy makers to the Bureau’s resurfacing reluctance toward intelligence work.168 In summary, the FBI’s history of intelligence practice in this period of 1914 through the late 1940s is one of expansion and contraction, moving through threats du jour, political involvement, and exceptional breakthroughs. Overall, however, its progress lacked the requisite institutionalization to give the FBI’s intelligence-related mandates significant staying power. The FBI dabbled in counterintelligence in the First World War but then, like the rest of American society, retreated back into isolation from the wider world. In the interwar period, the Bureau focused primarily on domestic law enforcement and only revitalized its counterintelligence capabilities when US leaders perceived the growth of external threats in the later 1930s. The culmination of Bureau’s the best counterintelligence practice was to be found during World War II, when the FBI handled sophisticated double-agent operations and managed a foreign based counterintelligence apparatus (SIS) to great effect. Unfortunately, for political reasons, the Bureau was never given a chance to improve upon the lessons it had learned in the Second World War after its end. If Hoover's FBI had steered clear of political involvement and political squabbles (as Attorney General Stone had hoped), the US might have had a very different intelligence community today. 167 168 FBI, “Centennial History,” 41. Theoharis, 70. MI5 in World War I: Great Success but Low Visibility As mentioned in the last chapter, MI5’s registry and pre-war activity had made the UK a hard target for espionage before the UK had even entered the fray of the First World War. In terms of combating German espionage, MI5’s actions in World War I were a resounding success. According to German archives, MI5 apprehended more than half of the spies that Germany sent to the UK throughout the war and there is little evidence that those spies not apprehended were able to provide any significant intelligence.169 With the backing of key government leaders, MI5’s authority to clandestinely open the mail of suspected spies was further expanded and contributed to this long-term counter-espionage success.170 Proficiency at identifying and catching spies was not the only skill that Kell’s MI5 developed in wartime – it also charted new counterintelligence territory by using apprehended foreign agents to spread disinformation and confuse enemy intelligence organizations. Aided by mail-opening procedures and a fortunate tip, MI5 had Karl Müller arrested in 1915.171 Showing the poor state of German intelligence in the UK by the second year of the war, German intelligence was not aware that Müller had been arrested.172 Knowing his communication methods with his handlers, MI5 officers were able to impersonate him, fooling German intelligence into relying on their fake reports and sending them requested funds.173 This charade lasted several months after his arrest, largely thanks to government prevention of media coverage 169 Andrew, Christopher. "MI5 in World War I." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5s-earlyyears/mi5-in-world-war-i.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 170 Andrew, Defend, 63-64. 171 Ibid., 67. 172 Ibid., 68. 173 Ibid., 68-69. following Müller’s arrest.174 The Service only gave it up after Müller’s German handlers, probably suspicious, attempted to recall him.175 The war also required MI5 to step into missions outside the strictly counter-spy business. MI5 was called upon to implement government policy on foreign nationals, assist in securing industrial areas, and lead the coordination of counterintelligence throughout the British Commonwealth.176 As MI5’s efforts rendered the German espionage threat to the mainland less and less severe, the Service focused on countering subversion within the Empire but outside of the mainland.177 Germany specifically targeted Irish and Indian restlessness under continued British rule.178 To counter these efforts, MI5 swiftly worked to cement informational ties throughout the Empire.179 These expansions of MI5 operation granted the organization a particularly worldly quality and increasingly forced it to stay active and externally oriented in its practice of counterintelligence. Two factors, however, proved to be a double-edged sword for the future of the Service. The first is that MI5’s very success against German espionage meant that the UK government was less concerned with the direct threat from Germany by the second half of the war.180 Thus, MI5’s primary mission of counterintelligence started to play second fiddle to concerns about domestic subversion, an area where Basil Thomson’s Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) had increasingly taken the lead in 1914-1915.181 The second factor complicating domestic appreciation of MI5’s work stemmed from a quality that was essential to MI5’s 174 Ibid. Ibid. 176 Northcott, Chris. "The Role, Organization, And Methods Of MI5." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 20, no. 3 (2007): 453-479. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08850600701249758 (accessed March 26, 2014). 454. 177 Andrew, Defend, 85-86. 178 Ibid., 86-93. 179 Ibid., 93. 180 Ibid., 83. 181 Ibid., 81-83. 175 success: secrecy. The Service actively attempted to maintain a low profile in British society and completely relied on the UK’s various police agencies to carry out arrests that MI5 had worked to bring about.182 Unfortunately, this meant that MI5 could not take credit for the arrests, leaving Thomson and the MPSB as the visible face of UK counter-espionage success.183 Indeed, even before the war had ended, Thomson had used his influence in the wider UK government to secure his organization’s leading role in intelligence, effectively sidelining MI5.184 Proof of Thomson’s rapidly increasing status in UK policy circles can be found in the fact that, once the Russian Revolution began, UK leaders turned to Thomson and the MPSB, not Kell’s MI5.185 Had the Service been led by a politically savvy and solicitous leader at this time, it might have been spared the heated bureaucratic rivalry and the chaos of its early post-war years. Vernon Kell, unfortunately, did not exude those qualities.186 MI5 Between the Wars: Fighting for Survival and Regaining Prestige Once the war was over, MI5’s rivals and various top-level government officials sensed weakness in the Service, which lead to challenges to MI5’s very survival as an independent service.187 In 1919 MI5’s budget was slashed down to a third of its wartime level and its staff, totaling 844 by the end of the war, was cut to 151 by 1920.188 Further cuts left MI5 with only 35 personnel and its capabilities had, consequently, seriously atrophied.189 National security policy makers had even debated merging MI5 and MI6 after the war, citing a failure of coordination 182 West, Nigel. MI5: British Security Service Operations, 1909-1945. New York: Stein and Day, 1981., 40. Andrew, Defend, 82. 184 Ibid., 82-83. 185 Ibid., 98. 186 Ibid., 82-83. 187 Ibid., 115-116. 188 Ibid., 117. 189 Ibid., 122. 183 (this suggestion did not sit well with either organization).190 Basil Thomson had managed to steal the leading counter-subversion mandate from the Service in a dramatic if short-lived UKIC reorganization, but the MPSB still kept this role after the other organizational changes collapsed.191 Hugh Sinclair, Mansfield Cumming’s successor as MI6 Chief, attempted to absorb MI5 outright in 1923 claiming that there was insufficient difference between their missions to justify having separate organizations.192 Until this period of the mid-1920s, MI5’s secrecy, low profile, and lack of political influence had kept the Service on the political straight and narrow. In 1924, however, MI5 was involved in what would later be considered a first and major case of politicization of intelligence in the UK.193 In the fall of 1924, the UKIC intercepted (among much real traffic) one critical forgery of a letter ostensibly sent from the Comintern Executive Committee that implicated the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Labour Party in a plot to foment a communist-inspired revolution.194 The Zinoviev Letter (named after the Comintern president, Grigori Zinoviev) was apparently forged by anti-Bolshevik exiles but was accepted uncritically by UKIC leaders, including Kell.195 Public revelation of the letter consequently proved to be politically catastrophic for the sitting Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald.196 MI5’s part in the distribution of the forgery extended to circulation in the military, but further willful involvement in its propagation by the Service is unclear.197 Christopher Andrew, with 190 Ibid., 115-116. Andrew, Christopher. "The Inter-War Years." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5-between-thewars/the-inter-war-years.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 192 Ibid. 193 Bar-Joseph, Uri. "The Politicization of Intelligence: A Comparative Study." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 26, no. 2 (2013): 347-369. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08850607.2013.758000 (accessed March 27, 2014). 353-354. 194 Andrew, Defend, 148-149. 195 Ibid., 149; West, 51-52. 196 West, 50-51. 197 Andrew, Defend, 149-150. 191 unprecedented access to MI5’s archives, concludes that the dissemination of the letter certainly reflected interests of certain UKIC leaders (Kell not included) to remove a government that was, in their view, too conciliatory to the communist threat.198 Regardless of the seemingly limited extent of the Service’s involvement in this episode of UK politics, future Labour ministers would remain suspicious of supposed political machinations of MI5 long after the letter’s impact on the MacDonald government.199 An attentive observer, however, would have realized that the Security Service was not a leading force in the UKIC at this time and that its responsibility for the Zinoviev Letter was shared across other, more powerful organizations. Recall that MI5 had been restricted to countering subversion only within the military as a result of Basil Thomson’s politically connected MPSB. In 1929, however, the Service exposed two Soviet agents within the MPSB, significantly boosting MI5’s prestige in the UK government.200 Consequently, the UK’s intelligence-governing Secret Service Committee decided in 1931 to return the mandate for all counter-subversion to the Service and formally transferred it to an independent and fully civilian status, in which it no longer reported to the War Office.201 This timely boost to MI5’s responsibilities and mission assured that the Service could make great progress in the critical years preceding the Second World War. Through the 1920s and early 1930s MI5 focused primarily on the threat of Communism, particularly manifested in the Communist Part of Great Britain.202 Indeed, between 1933 and 1937, the rise of Nazi Germany went from very low to the very top of MI5’s priorities.203 Unfortunately for the 198 Ibid., 150. Ibid., 321. 200 Andrew, “Inter-War Years.” 201 Andrew, Defend, 129-130. 202 Ibid., 139-185. 203 Andrew, Defend, 188, 195. 199 Service, the greater prestige it had gained through the UKIC reorganization in 1931 did not translate into more staff until the later 1930s, very close to the outbreak of war.204 This lack of personnel was one factor that contributed to the difficulties that MI5 faced as it attempted to counter German espionage in the war.205 MI5’s pre-war political intelligence on the Nazi regime in Germany proved to more valuable than its efforts to protect the UK from espionage. Its best source in the mid-1930s was a German diplomat posted to the German embassy in the UK, Wolfgang zu Putlitz.206 As an agent who found the Nazi regime utterly repugnant, Putlitz was happy to provide copious amounts of intelligence to inform UK foreign policy handling the increasingly belligerent Hitler.207 Putlitz’s intelligence persuaded Kell and his officers to be more and more skeptical of the prospects for negotiation.208 Accordingly, MI5 was possibly the first organ of the British government to warn against appeasement of Hitler (warnings that went unheeded all the way to Munich and back again).209 The Security Service, therefore, may have been the British organization that was most mentally prepared for a war with Germany. Logistically, however, MI5 was very much unprepared. The problem of limited personnel was compounded in 1938 when the Service was charged with the monuments task of screening Continental refugees from Nazi aggression – at the time the UK government failed to realize the damage this would do to MI5 efficiency without a proportional increase in staff.210 Kell wanted very much to replicate his pre-World War I success against Germany espionage, but his lack of a substantial workforce and the waves of 204 Deacon, 261. Northcott, 455. 206 Andrew, Defend, 195. 207 Ibid., 196. 208 Another asset to MI5’s calculations was the General Baron Geyr von Schweppenburg, Germany’s military attaché a the London embassy. Ibid., 201. 209 Ibid., 198-205. 210 Deacon, 262 205 refugees fleeing Continental Europe made this goal practically infeasible.211 In addition to logistical constraints, the extent of MI5’s operational understanding of Nazi intelligence was poor compared to its grasp of Hitler’s political intentions.212 MI5 in World War II: Strategic Deception and New Heights of Counterintelligence The explosion of pre-war and early war responsibilities for MI5 (specifically regarding foreign aliens) without a proportional increase in staff meant that the Service’s counterespionage mission suffered greatly in the first two years of the Second World War.213 Indeed, by a senior MI5 officer’s own admission, the Service had fallen into a “chaotic” state.214 The blame for this general confusion within the Service was placed on Kell.215 This situation and various other incidents led to his dismissal from MI5 in 1940.216 After the brief and uncomfortable tenure of Jasper Harker, David Petrie became MI5 director in 1941.217 MI5 took to Petrie extremely quickly as he promptly engaged in organizational and personnel reforms to subordinate the various missions of MI5 to the primary task of counterintelligence and counterespionage.218 Armed with a strong leader who was bent on revitalizing the counter-spy work of the Service, MI5 had the organizational and leadership backing to achieve unprecedented success in the remainder of the war. Before Petrie had taken over as MI5 director, however, MI5 officers had already begun to efficiently counter the Nazi espionage threat. In the early fall of 1940, the Nazi intelligence 211 Ibid., 269. Andrew, Defend, 210. 213 Ibid., 220-222; Andrew, Christopher. "World War II." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/worldwar-ii.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 214 For quote: Andrew, Defend, 227. 215 Ibid. 216 Ibid.; Deacon, 270; West, 152-153. 217 West, 156. 218 Andrew, Defend, 237; Andrew, “World War II.” 212 service, Abwehr, had launched an espionage campaign whereby it would parachute its agents into the UK.219 Two agents, eventually codenamed TATE and SUMMER by MI5, were caught in succession soon after landing, thanks to a bit of luck and watchful British citizens.220 SUMMER had been deployed and apprehended first, and MI5 quickly decided that he was a devoted Nazi ideologue.221 However, the Service very quickly was able to persuade him to become a double agent in return for a promise to spare the life of TATE, his fellow spy who would be dropped into the UK two weeks later.222 Having injured himself upon landing, TATE was very easy to identify and capture.223 MI5 interrogators used information that SUMMER had willing offered them to support a lie to TATE that his friend, SUMMER, had actually betrayed him.224 Furious at this perceived abandonment, TATE abruptly and fully began to cooperate with the Service, eventually becoming one of the most long-term and successful of MI5’s double agents in the war.225 While the Service had certainly been lucky to catch these two agents in the first place, MI5 showed remarkable counter-espionage ability because it had effectively turned two enemy spies into double agents who had not intended to spy for the UK previously. This case should be distinguished from the situation in which a spy will offer his services initially and then solid counterintelligence tradecraft would consist in vetting and running the “walk-in” agent. TATE and SUMMER were only two of a hundred-plus double agent network, known as the Double-Cross System.226 This network easily represents MI5’s greatest World War II achievement and, arguably, one of the greatest cases of strategic deception of all time. Initially, 219 Andrew, Defend, 251. Ibid. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid., 252. 225 Ibid. 226 Ibid., 252-253. 220 the double agents that the Security Service collected were used primarily to frustrate enemy espionage and learn all there was to know about it. By 1942, however, the network had become thoroughly institutionalized in the Twenty Committee, which was composed of members from across the UKIC and governing bodies but was led by MI5.227 This highly coordinated initiative was brought together for the sake of totally deceiving the enemy central command, not just Abwehr intelligence leaders or tactical decision-makers.228 Therefore, this was a purely active and centrally planned counterintelligence mission.229 Signals intelligence (SIGINT) proved to be invaluable to this effort because the deceiver needs to know that the target has effectively been fooled after a deception is planted.230 The fruits of the Double-Cross system are easily demonstrable. The initial hope of the Allied powers was that the Double-Cross deception leading up to the famous D-Day landing would divert Axis forces for the Normandy location for a minimum of ten days.231 The deception was so complete that the German forces in question were still waiting for a non-existent Allied offensive in the wrong location several weeks after the Allies had made their historic landing on June 6, 1944.232 Additionally, a German map had been obtained later that same year showing that Nazi leaders had thoroughly been deceived in terms of the location of Allied forces stationed in the UK before the Normandy landing.233 A somewhat less known and more defensive case of MI5’s successful deception operations in the Second World War was the Service’s role in countering the German bombing of London. Shortly after the D-Day landing, German forces began bombarding the city with 227 Ibid., 255. Ibid., 281. 229 West, 170. 230 Andrew, Defend, 299, 308-309. 231 Ibid., 308. 232 Ibid., 309. 233 Ibid., 305-306. 228 small pilotless flying bombs (V-1s and V-2s).234 The campaign targeted central London for the sake of maximizing damage and casualties.235 MI5 was duly tasked with redirecting the bombs by feeding the Germans false intelligence to throw off their targeting.236 However, UK strategic planners knew that they could not redirect the bombers two far from the center of the city, or else they would incur German suspicion.237 The choice was, therefore, between allowing further massive casualties in the heart of London or redirecting the damage to less populated areas that were not likely to have been threatened otherwise.238 The Service put a highly successful double agent on this mission, Eddie Chapman¸ and successfully brought about the redirection of the bombing.239 In the end, while this strategy meant that many would be injured and die who might otherwise have survived, the UK government found that this effort had reduced British casualties overall.240 The Security Service achieved remarkable success in the areas of counter-espionage itself and counter-espionage for the sake of building a strategic deception in World War II. While MI5 had entered the war at a distinct disadvantage, it had certainly risen to the occasion and resoundingly defeated German espionage.241 While MI5’s small staff had certainly posed a problem for its operation in the first two years of the war, the Services’ low visibility and continued secrecy had served as a protective shield around its more offensive operations like running of the Double-Cross System. After the war, the Service acquired a German intelligence publication that had managed to craft a strong evaluation of the UK’s SIS, but the authors noted 234 Thomas, Gordon. Inside British Intelligence: 100 Years of MI5 and MI6. London: JR, 2009. 102; Andrew, Defend, 311. 235 Ibid. 236 Gordon, 102-103. 237 Ibid., 103. 238 Ibid. 239 Ibid., 104. 240 Andrew, Defend, 316. 241 Deacon, 271. extreme difficulty in learning about MI5.242 It would not be unreasonable to suggest that MI5’s unique secrecy in the UKIC, therefore, had played a critical role in the Service’s success in the war against the Axis powers. The one flaw in MI5’s operation during the Second World War, however, was its failure to look beyond Nazi Germany to the much more pervasive and longer term intelligence threat from the Soviet Union.243 MI5 After the War: New Threats and Slow Adaptation Unlike the early post-World War I years for the Security Service, the years closely following the Second World War saw no substantive attempts to abolish, subordinate, or take over MI5.244 This stemmed from the fact that most other security organizations had witnessed first-hand the Service’s significant strides in deception and counterintelligence surrounding the Double-Cross System.245 Thus, MI5’s continued low visibility after the war did not tempt its colleagues in national security to attempt power grabs, but its general secrecy (and the secrecy of the Double-Cross operations) meant that the Service was still open to political scrutiny. The numerous Labour ministers who were elected the year the war ended still remembered the Zinoview Letter and were uninformed of MI5’s wartime successes.246 Acting on this political perception, the new Prime Minister Clement Attlee appointed the Chief Constable of Kent, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to be the new Director General (DG) of the service.247 Making a career policeman the head of an intelligence organization, however, ruffled more than a few feathers at MI5 and his tenure as DG was marked more by discomfort on both sides than for any particular 242 West, 106. Andrew, 273, 318, 341. 244 Ibid., 321-323. 245 Ibid., 321. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid. 243 innovation or change to the Service’s operation.248 This was the last time that the UK government would appoint an MI5 DG with a police background, which had grated against MI5’s intelligence and somewhat intellectual culture.249 The first major espionage case in the post-war period was that of Igor Gouzenko, a Russian cipher operator posted to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada.250 In the fall of 1945, Gouzenko defected to Canadian authorities, taking numerous classified documents with him.251 Subsequently, Gouzenko provided the first real evidence of strong Russian espionage networks festering within the Canadian, US, and UK governments (most importantly relating to British and American atomic weapons programs).252 Gouzenko had thus exposed the great extent of Russian penetration of its former wartime allies, giving the Western powers a first look into the spy wars soon to be waged against Moscow throughout the Cold War. Particularly relevant to the present inquiry, however, was Gouzenko’s explicit revelation that MI5 had been penetrated in the early 1940s and might still be compromised.253 It would take many years after Gouzenko’s defection and his attempted warning before MI5 realized the full extent of Soviet penetration in the shape of the Cambridge Five spies, who had successfully compromised the UK Foreign Office, Treasury, and MI6 in addition to the Security Service.254 Regardless, at the time it had become clear to MI5 that the espionage theater of the Cold War had begun, and the 248 Ibid., 321-324. Ibid., 322. For the backgrounds of later DGs, see: MI5. "Former Directors General." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/about-us/who-we-are/staff-and-management/former-dgs.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 250 Deacon, 376. 251 Andrew, 341. 252 Deacon, 377. 253 Ibid. 254 Andrew, 341, 438-441. 249 Service seemed to be starting a disadvantage given its lack of any useful agents in the Soviet Union that could have shed further light on Gouzenko’s revelations.255 While the threat of the Soviet Union would quickly color the entire post-war period, the immediate threat to the UK was from Middle Eastern terrorism.256 Zionist groups, such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, applied terrorist tactics against the UK and its administration in the Palestine mandate that it had acquired in 1922.257 The most serious terrorist attack occurred in July 1946 when Irgun detonated a bomb in the King David Hotel, targeting the section that encompassed the central British administration authorities.258 At the time, MI5 lacked a specialized counter-terrorist unit, but the service quickly moved to counter the threat by gathering intelligence throughout Palestine and by reaching out to more moderate Zionist organizations that did not share the Irgun and Stern Gang’s preference for violence.259 These militant groups failed to pull off a significant attack on the UK mainland, though not for lack of trying – on April 15, 1947 the only thing that prevented a bomb from destroying the Colonial Office in central London was a faulty timer.260 Blind luck, not MI5 counter-terrorism, had prevented this catastrophe. Although the Service’s record in countering Zionist terrorism is not entirely positive, MI5 had gained significant experience countering sub-national terrorist groups embedded in a culture that was significantly different from its own. After the end of the Cold War, such counter-terrorism experience would become invaluable. In summary, the history of MI5 from 1914 to the late 1940s is characterized chiefly by more counterintelligence successes than failure, expansion and contraction brought on by low 255 Ibid., 341. Andrew, Christopher. "The British Empire and Commonwealth." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5history/the-cold-war/the-british-empire-and-commonwealth.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 257 Ibid. Andrew, Defend, 352. 258 Ibid., 353. 259 Ibid., 356. 260 Ibid., 361, 357. 256 visibility, challenges to its very existence and autonomy, little political involvement, and a high capacity to cooperate with other UKIC members in large-scale counterintelligence missions (such as the D-Day deception). When the Service did distinguish itself, it was never chiefly via political channels, as witnessed by the general ignorance of MI5’s greatest successes after the Second World War. Instead, the Service survived by the success of its counterintelligence and counter-espionage actions, especially the 1929 exposure of MPSB’s penetration by Soviet agents, and by the external political support of Winston Churchill. The nature of counterintelligence, however, is such that resting on one’s laurels is almost always a recipe for a hidden enemy’s success. MI5 and the UK government had felt confident that the success of the Double-Cross could be replicated against the Soviet Union.261 As we had seen, there was little reason for such optimism by the early Cold War years. Comparative Analysis There are many important similarities and differences between the FBI and MI5 experience during World War I. First of all, the Service had prepared for the war, resulting in great success (as discussed in chapter 1) and the Bureau, following the rest of American society, had to react to it, which meant that there were hard lessons to be learned before the US was adequately protected from espionage, subversion, and sabotage (such as the explosion at Black Tom). Second, both organizations were charged with counter-subversion and counter-espionage, but MI5 only focused on counter-subversion after it had effectively neutered German espionage, while the FBI promptly focused on the domestic side while neglecting the foreign side of this equation. Third, stemming from the second point is the fact that the war increased MI5’s attention to external threats to the UK while the Bureau, late to the counterintelligence game, 261 Ibid., 318. attended primarily to the internal manifestations of foreign threats without attempting to compromise enemy intelligence from within. Fourth, the Bureau’s highly visible operation and political connections meant that it was able to take credit for its successes and stave off political rivalries, while the exact opposite was true of MI5 (as evidenced by Basil Thomson’s successful sidelining of the Service even before the war was even over). Fifth and finally, the Bureau and the Service both proved themselves capable of sound counterintelligence tradecraft though in different ways. The FBI demonstrated patience and stealth in its clandestine intelligence collection operation against Germany in the Swiss Embassy. MI5 displayed the ability to catch spies but also the capacity to take advantage of an apprehended agent for the purpose of tactically misleading an enemy organization via calculated disinformation. At the end of the First World War, the Bureau was primed for continued political success and could have maintained its anti-spy capabilities. The Service was prepared to continue successful operation in the counterintelligence arena but was sure to be challenged by its lack of public and political visibility. The dawn of the interwar period saw dramatic losses for MI5’s mandate and capabilities, which meant that its capability to stay externally focused and abreast of foreign threats was degraded. The Bureau also turned further inward during this period, but it did so according to its preference for domestic law enforcement, not for logistical reasons. Both organizations withdrew from the world to a certain degree. The Service, because of its low visibility, had to fight for its survival for several years after the war unlike the FBI, which faced no real challenges to its existence even after the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Palmer Raids. The Service’s brush with political scandal with the Zinoviev Letter was nothing compared to the level of the FBI’s complicity in the Palmer Raids and Teapot Dome Scandal, yet MI5 still faced serious ramifications later on (in the shape of Labour party mistrust in the post-war period). MI5 busied itself with targeting the CPGB, which allowed it to continue its somewhat external outlook since the CPGB was certainly taking its orders from Moscow.262 The FBI, on the other hand, engaged in major rebranding and publicity under Hoover, achieved striking success against mobsters in the 1920s, and only in the later 1930s returned to take up the counterintelligence mantle in the face of increasing foreign threats. The Service and the Bureau, therefore, further cultivated their primary missions and predispositions – MI5 in the business of foreign-based threats and the FBI in the purely domestic arena. In some ways, the Bureau was more prepared to defend the US from foreign threats before the Second World War than the Service was prepared to protect the UK, but this estimation involves many factors such as MI5’s limited staff, increased responsibilities, and the UK’s proximity to Germany. MI5’s general external orientation, however, leant it a deep understanding of the political intentions of the UK’s future enemies, which contributed to its understanding of foreign threats before they materialized. The Bureau had no such worldly insight, which probably limited its options when running pre-war counterintelligence operations such as in the Rumrich case. The Service’s secretive nature might also have enabled it to handle the case better than the Bureau had it occurred on British soil. The Bureau and the Service both performed admirably in the Second World War, certainly at the height of both of their respective counterintelligence trajectories and externally oriented operations. The FBI’s SIS institutionalized Bureau counterintelligence in foreign countries throughout the Western Hemisphere and achieved remarkable success in the area of catching spies and preventing subversion. This would have been impossible without numerous FBI special agents seriously attempting to grasp the nature of such external situations and the 262 Ibid., 135. external threats posed to them. SIS was largely defensive, however, not yielding much in the way of strategic deception or the running of double agents. This contrasts with the MI5’s building and operation of the Double-Cross System which required the long-term running of agents, each coordinated with one another to deceive the enemy at the strategic level. Similarly, while the FBI’s running of Sebold as a double agent and the successful rounding up of the eight Long Island saboteurs demonstrates solid counterintelligence tradecraft, it must be noted that both Sebold and Dasch were walk-ins. Without their defections, the hypothetical results of either operation are open to debate. In support of the Double-Cross System, MI5 actively turned enemy agents into double agents without the agents’ prior intent to defect in the case of SUMMER and TATE. To be sure, MI5 (along with every other intelligence organization in the world) has benefited from walk-ins, but transforming enemy agents into double agents showcases counterintelligence capabilities that were on an entirely different level compared to those of the FBI. Overall, the entrenched internal focus of the FBI did not prevent it from counterintelligence success in the Second World War – just from the lofty heights of strategic deception and the manipulation of the enemy accomplished by MI5. Soon after the end of the Second World War, the Bureau and the Service faced varying degrees of political backlash. MI5 faced no professional problems (such as take-over attempts by rival UKIC agencies as it had after the First World War) but still encountered mild political backlash for its role in distributing the Zinoviev Letter two decades earlier. The Bureau’s highly visible and well-known political machinations under the leadership J. Edgar Hoover leant the FBI to inflated comparisons with the extremely repressive German Gestapo. Here, MI5’s secrecy and aversion to politics protected it from similar accusations.263 These differing public perceptions in the US and UK helped to shape the subsequent actions of their governmental 263 West, 17. leaders. In the US, Truman knew that it was untenable to further institutionalize the FBI’s overseas power in SIS, so he forced the Bureau to relinquish control to the CIA. Conversely, MI5 was called upon to increase the reach of its mission to protect UK citizens in semi-foreign areas as in the Palestine mandate. This ensured that MI5’s culture of external threat perception would continue throughout the Cold War, while Hoover’s bitterness over the loss of SIS poisoned the atmosphere of US intelligence at the same time. Once again, the FBI returned to its domestic focus at the expense of counterintelligence, forsaking the truly impressive strides it had made during the war. This unfortunate turn of events in the US was chiefly a result of the overly politically sensitive Hoover. MI5’s major challenge at the start of the Cold War was the fact that it had been penetrated by Soviet Intelligence at the critical time of the early 1940s and the UKIC continued to be compromised in striking ways after the dawn of the Cold War.264 Therefore, both the US and the UK entered the Cold War at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Soviet Intelligence – the UK because MI5 and other government offices had been compromised and the US because the long-serving FBI director willfully rejected anything mission related to intelligence after the National Security Act of 1947. 264 Andrew, Defend, 245, 341. Chapter 4: The Shift to Countering Terrorism Throughout the Cold War, MI5 and the FBI acted according to their established predispositions – the FBI focused on law enforcement and MI5 on counter-espionage. Because the Cold War never threw the world into the kind of sustained turmoil that had existed during the World Wars, the Bureau was relatively free to focus on fighting domestic crime while the CIA acted as the primary adversary of the Russian KGB in the international arena.265 MI5, however, was one of the key players in those Cold War espionage battles. In this period, the Service had experienced many successes and failures in the realm of intelligence. The Service failed to the detect the Cambridge Five before it was too late, which resulted in massive damage to the Service’s credibility, particularly on account of the conspiracy theorists that followed in the wake of this revelation.266 On the other hand, Operation FOOT was an extremely successful operation, in which the mass expulsion of suspected Russian agents crippled Russian intelligence in the UK for the rest of the Cold War.267 The most notable intelligence-related development for the FBI came as a result of the highly critical Church Committee in 1975 and the subsequent enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, both of which rightfully sought to put stronger protections on civil liberties, although they also unintentionally steered the Bureau further away from intelligence work in general.268 The Cold War experiences of the Service and the Bureau were extremely different, but similar in the sense that each confirmed itself in law enforcement or counterintelligence respectively. For the present inquiry, it does not make sense to cover this period in detail, since there were no great challenges or changes to either organization’s manner or primary target of 265 The Bureau returned to targeting domestic communist groups, the KKK, the mafia, and white collar crime among other threats. FBI, “Centennial History,” 50-54, 57-61, 64-66, 68-71. 266 Andrew, Defend, for Cambridge Five: 420-441, for conspiracy theories: 503-521. 267 Ibid., 565-575. 268 FBI, “Centennial History,” 70. operation. The next great challenge to rear its head was the threat from domestic and international terrorism, which provides us with the final topic of comparison. This chapter should not be seen as a departure from the counterintelligence focus of the previous two. Instead, it should be considered a test of every quality of the Bureau and the Service that have been established so far. Barring a few key distinctions, counter-terrorism and counterintelligence rely on very similar principles, a fact which provides a measure of continuity between the previous two chapters and this one.269 We should expect the organization with a firmer grasp on counterintelligence to have adapted sooner to the challenge posed by terrorism. The following sections will outline the structural changes and efforts that MI5 and the FBI have undertaken to meet this new threat, obstacles they have encountered, and the fruits of their labor. The FBI and Counter-Terrorism: Overcoming Predisposition The story of the Bureau’s rise to the counter-terrorism mission is characterized primarily (though no entirely) by reactions to successful terrorist actions against the US. Following the 1983 terrorist attacks in Lebanon against the US embassy and Marine Corps barracks, the FBI set up a section dedicated to counter-terrorism under its Criminal Investigative Division.270 In response to two high-profile terrorist attacks that occurred on American soil – the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing – the Bureau created a new Counterterrorism Center and transferred its existing counter-terrorism section to its National Security Division.271 After additional terrorist attacks on the US Kenyan and Tanzanian 269 Masse, Todd, and William Krouse. "The FBI: Past, Present, and Future." Congressional Research Service. 23. http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32095.pdf (accessed March 27, 2014). 270 Ibid., 20. 271 Ibid., 20-21. embassies in 1998, the FBI elevated that section to the Counterterrorism Division.272 Finally, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI Director Robert Mueller III (who had taken office just days before the attacks) set out to fundamentally change how the Bureau approached counterintelligence and counter-terrorism.273 Mueller primarily wanted the FBI to focus more on preventing attacks and, consequently, to turn more seriously toward the work of intelligence. Indeed, he fundamentally reoriented Bureau priorities by putting terrorism prevention at the top of the list, which was immediately followed by the mission of counterintelligence (which appeared to be a great departure from the FBI’s long-standing preference for law enforcement).274 To be sure, the FBI had been successful in disrupting and preventing many terrorist attacks that are frequently forgotten among the more negative cases.275 And, as has been examined in the above chapter, the Bureau had proven itself capable of performing sound counterintelligence tradecraft before. It is should be stressed, therefore, that the Bureau was certainly not building its counter-terrorism capabilities from scratch by the time the dust had settled after 9/11. Nonetheless, Director Mueller recognized that serious changes were required if the Bureau was to be capable of systematically preventing terrorist attacks.276 On some levels, this required a cultural shift, not merely organizational changes and bureaucratic initiatives.277 Few would argue that, before the post-9/11 reforms, FBI culture was primarily geared toward anything but law enforcement.278 The above analysis and preceding chapters support this assertion. However, this statement is considerably vague – the term “culture” should be 272 Ibid., 20. FBI, “Centennial History,” 98-104. 274 Ibid., 100. 275 Ibid., 85. 276 Ibid., 100. 277 Feldstein, Martin S. "Designing Institutions to Deal with Terrorism in the United States." National Bureau of Economic Research. 6. http://www.nber.org/papers/w13729.pdf?new_window=1 (accessed March 26, 2014). 278 Masse and Krouse, 14. 273 grounded in specific qualities. First, “investigations” and “discrete cases” have made up the bread and butter of FBI crime-fighting.279 This case-by-case approach has discouraged the development of long-term analysis in the Bureau for the sake of countering sustained and nonisolated threats like terrorism, which Director Mueller has recognized.280 Second, the promotion of FBI special agents had traditionally been determined by strictly law enforcement standards such as the number of arrests, indictments, or prosecutions that an FBI agent had accomplished.281 As a consequence, counter-terrorism and counterintelligence had not been seen as particularly beneficial to career advancement because these endeavors necessarily focused on more general intelligence products and assessments, not immediate arrests or prosecutions.282 Third, as a consequence of the mid-1970s reforms to Bureau operation, there had effectively been a “wall” between intelligence and criminal investigations, which led to little information sharing across this divide.283 Fourth, further displaying a penchant for law enforcement over other missions, the FBI field offices had diverted counter-terrorism personnel from that mission to law enforcement support roles in the years preceding the 9/11 attacks.284 This showed that, even when FBI headquarters had attempted to push for more of a counterterrorism focus, there had been significant resistance from the lower levels of the bureaucracy. This was doubly troubling because, before 9/11, FBI field offices had significant autonomy in counter-terrorism initiatives and were free to make this decision without significant oversight.285 279 Ibid., 15; Bjelopera, Jerome P. "The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Terrorism Investigations." Congressional Research Service. 11. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/R41780.pdf (accessed March 27, 2014). 280 FBI, “Centennial History,” 100. 281 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. "Law Enforcement, Counterterrorism, and Intelligence Collection in the United States Prior to 9/11." National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States . 3. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/staff_statements/staff_statement_9.pdf (accessed March 27, 2014). 282 Masse and Krouse, 18. 283 Bjelopera 1; FBI, “Centennial History,” 104. 284 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “Law Enforcement,” 4. 285 Ibid., 3. These were the operational challenges (by now at least key parts of FBI culture) that Mueller faced in the early post-9/11 period. It is worth noting that these qualities prevented wholehearted FBI engagement not just in countering the threat du jour of terrorism, but also the more permanent but less immediate threat posed by foreign intelligence agencies. To address these problems and the cultural challenge they posed to the FBI, Director Mueller enacted a series of reforms within the Bureau. First, to address the center-local problem hindering the counter-terrorism mission, the director centralized the coordination of FBI counterterrorism in FBI headquarters by merging all previous counter-terrorism initiatives into the National Security Branch (NSB) in 2005.286 Second, the director moved to develop a capable analytical force within the new NSB Directorate of Intelligence for the sake of unifying Bureau analysis of threats.287 By 2011, FBI analysts numbered over 3,000.288 Third, realizing that terrorism represented a fundamentally decentralized threat, Mueller established Field Intelligence Groups (FIG)s in every FBI field office throughout the country in the hope that this would build robust FBI counter-terrorism, counterintelligence, and investigative missions by assigning linguists, analysts, and other specialists to all of these operations.289 At the field level, then, the FIGs were intended to push FBI operations into a more preventative posture.290 Fourth, operational guidelines for FBI investigation were loosened to allow agents to pursue cases without worrying about probable cause or the likelihood that a crime had been or was about to be committed.291 Fifth, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assisted altered FBI operation from the ground up by publishing guidelines for the Bureau that charged its analysts 286 FBI, “Centennial History,” 102. Ibid.; Bjelopera, 2. 288 Bjelopera, 2. 289 Ibid., 15. 290 Ibid. 291 Ibid., 1, 11. 287 with producing “assessments” that could be divorced from particular investigative cases.292 The benefit here was that it allowed FBI analysts to work on products that addressed less bounded and less certain threats that could materialize over a longer period of time. These assessments appear to have been successfully ingrained into FBI activities.293 Sixth, according to Mueller, the widely controversial PATRIOT Act had directly resulted in many post-9/11 FBI counterterrorism successes, while some have argued that the Bureau has used the act more for domestic law enforcement cases instead of terrorist investigations.294 Seventh, to correct for a primarily internally oriented operational culture (a problem for both counterintelligence and counterterrorism), the FBI has drawn upon its Legal Attachés and other international liaison efforts for the sake of countering terrorism in a proactive and not reactive manner that strives to understand the international context of the threat.295 The Bureau has had a mixed record of counter-terrorism in the years following these reform efforts. In November 2009, US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 and wounded 23 at Fort Hood, TX.296 The FBI was roundly criticized for failing to investigate Major Hasan in 2008 when emails between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni terrorist, surfaced and revealed Hasan’s radical and violent qualities.297 In a bipartisan 2011 report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, FBI progress toward integrating intelligence into its investigations was lauded, but the report concluded that this episode certainly raised questions about the extent to which the Bureau had successfully adopted intelligence 292 Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. 294 Ibid., 9; Theoharis, 162-163. 295 Masse and K rouse, 17; FBI, “Centennial History,” 85-86. 296 Baldor, Lolita C, and Eileen Sullivan. "Fort Hood Shooting: FBI Ignored Evidence Against Nidal Hasan For Political Correctness, Report Says." The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/19/fort-hoodshooting-fbi-nidal-hasan-political-correctness_n_1685653.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 297 Ibid. 293 methods in its overall approach to counter-terrorism.298 In a more recent case, the Bureau was accused of an “intelligence failure” when it was publicly revealed that the FBI had previously interviewed one of the terrorists who perpetrated the Boston Marathon Bombings in April 2013.299 The FBI had approached Tamerlan Tsarnaev on a tip from Russian intelligence but had found no evidence that he planned to engage in terrorist activity.300 More institutionalized intelligence practices may have driven and enabled FBI agents to pursue these two cases more aggressively before the terrorist acts had occurred, though it is impossible to conclude this definitively without knowing all the details (which the public is not currently privy to). There have also been strong cases of FBI success in preventing terrorism. After the US became militarily involved in Libya in 2011, the Bureau interviewed some 800 Libyans across the US to assess the potential for Libyan terrorism in retaliation.301 This extensive domestic intelligence operation had thus pre-empted a potential terrorist threat that might have been brought upon the US because of its foreign policy choices. This operation represents the kind of forward-thinking and proactive shift in FBI investigations that Mueller had sought at the outset of his reforms. In a second, slightly less recent case, the Bureau successfully disrupted a plot by Lebanese terrorists to bomb the New York City subway system.302 Crucial to the current assessment of FBI post-9/11 intelligence capabilities, this plot was apparently disrupted in the early planning stages before the plotters had even entered the US, which indicates that 298 Bjelopera, 16-17. Masters, Johnathan. "Domestic Intelligence and the Boston Bombings." Council on Foreign Relations. http://www.cfr.org/counterterrorism/domestic-intelligence-boston-bombings/p30557 (accessed March 27, 2014). 300 Waterman, Shaun. "Boston Bombing Investigation Reveals Intelligence Failures." Washington Times. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/23/boston-bombing-investigation-reveals-intelligence-/?page=all (accessed March 27, 2014). 301 Bjelopera, 18. 302 O'Neil, John. "New York Tunnel Plot Is Uncovered in Early Stage." New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/nyregion/07tunnel.html?_r=0 (accessed March 27, 2014). 299 intelligence and foreign liaison had played a key role in the operation.303 These two cases indicate that the Bureau has become (at least in some instances) more cosmopolitan and externally oriented in its fight against terrorist threats. Most observers and participants in this new shift in FBI focus toward counter-terrorism acknowledge that these efforts are currently ongoing and by no means complete.304 The mixture of successes and failures following these post-9/11 changes do not definitively support or diminish the notion that the Bureau can be morphed into a primarily intelligence-driven, counterterrorist organization. More time is needed to say for certain. One thing is clear, however: the FBI transition into preemptive and proactive counter-terrorism has not been easy and this is in part because the Bureau had never fully embraced active counterintelligence practices for a sustained period of its history. Law enforcement had always taken precedence over intelligence practices, as was apparent to Director Mueller as he attempted to shift the Bureau into its twentyfirst century counter-terrorism posture. MI5 and Counter-Terrorism: Drawing Upon An Existing Framework The Security Service had had substantially more experience fighting terrorist threats than the FBI by the rise of global Islamist terror at the end of the twentieth century. As discussed in chapter 2, the first MI5 encounter with sustained terrorism was from Zionist extremists in the later 1940s. In the 1960s, Palestinian and Irish terrorism threatened UK interests at home and abroad.305 In the 1980s, the main terrorist threat was from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.306 In the 303 Ibid. Mudd, Philip. Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 186; Bjelopera, 16-17. 305 Northcott, 457; Andrew, Defend, 600. 306 Andrew, Christopher. "The Terrorist Threat in the 1980s." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5today/the-terrorist-threat-in-the-1980s.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 304 1990s, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) threatened the UK in an unprecedented manner.307 This resurgence of Irish terrorism coincided with the end of the Cold War, which meant that the Service would need to focus less on countering espionage and much more on combating terrorism.308 Therefore, by the rise of international terrorism in the post-Cold War world, the UK was more prepared than most countries in terms of knowing what to expect and how to react. While MI5 was charged with defending the UK from international terrorism since 1972, it did not establish an independent counter-terrorism branch until 1984.309 This development was prompted by an upsurge of terrorist acts, especially the PIRA bombing of the Grand Hotel that killed five politicians and injured many more in an attempt to kill Prime Minister Margret Thatcher.310 Until that time, the Service had not viewed terrorism as a unique threat, preferring to treat it as a “violent” form of subversion.311 MI5 had been slow to adapt to countering this new threat not only because of its historical preference for counter-espionage and countersubversion (much like the FBI’s pre-counter-terrorism predilection for law enforcement) but also because counter-terrorism responsibilities were very confused across UK security organizations. The MPSB had been founded in 1883 specifically to counter Irish dissent, so it had retained the lead role against Irish terrorism against the British mainland.312 In Northern Ireland, the counterterrorism mission belonged to the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.313 MI5, as mentioned above, was only charged with preventing international terrorism, but this included 307 Andrew, Defend, 771. Ibid. 309 Ibid., 600. 310 Ibid., 705. 311 Ibid., 600. 312 Ibid., 5. 313 Ibid., 600. 308 PIRA attempts to acquire arms and munitions abroad.314 A 1991 PIRA mortar attack on the British cabinet that almost killed many cabinet members forced the UK government to reconsider this confused arrangement.315 Incidentally, the fact that MI5 had reinforced the targeted building with laminated glass probably contributed to the lack of casualties.316 Thus, in 1992, MI5 was granted the leading role against Irish terrorism internationally and domestically, in part because of its success against the PIRA abroad.317 Finally, in 2007, MI5 was charged with the last piece of the counter-terrorism mission found in the leading national security role in Northern Ireland.318 The obstacles that the Service had faced were primarily bureaucratic – it was hindered by its own historical preference for purely counter-espionage and counter-subversion work but more importantly by the confused and overlapping organizational responsibilities with regard to terrorism across the UKIC. One problem that MI5 did not have, however, was a crisis of tradecraft or culture.319 MI5’s greatest successes have involved human intelligence, or HUMINT, as evidenced chiefly by the Double-Cross System. MI5’s HUMINT had also always been supported by dedication to the practice of rigorous physical and electronic surveillance.320 These skills made up the backbone of MI5 intelligence tradecraft. When MI5 switched to countering Irish terrorism, it employed the same agent-recruitment and surveillance methods as it 314 Ibid., 622. Ibid., 771-772; Chalk, Peter, and William Rosenau. "Confronting the “Enemy Within:” Security Intelligence, the Police, and Counterterrorism in Four Democracies." RAND Corporation. 9. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG100.pdf (accessed March 26, 2014). 316 Andrew, Defend, 772. 317 Andrew, Christopher. "Since the Cold War." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5-today/sincethe-cold-war.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 318 Andrew, Christopher. "The Rise of the Islamist Terrorist Threat." MI5. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5history/mi5-today/the-rise-of-the-islamist-terrorist-threat.html (accessed March 27, 2014). 319 Feldstein, 3-4. 320 Ibid., 3. 315 had throughout its counterintelligence history.321 When the Service switched from combating Irish terror to focusing on Islamist terrorism, the transition was a smooth one owing to the fact that the nature of the change was merely a shift in targets, not one of tradecraft or operational culture.322 It is important to note, however, that because MI5 lacks independent law enforcement powers, any success in the field of counter-terrorism belongs not just the Service but also to the UK’s various police organizations, especially their Special Branches. Success in the counterintelligence mission, therefore, has been strongly predicated on strong ties with British law enforcement organizations.323 This point will be discussed at length in the concluding chapter. Despite the relative ease of its transition to counter-terrorism from counterintelligence, the Security Service has not had a perfect record of prevention.324 In December 2001, Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber,” attempted to set off a bomb concealed in his shoes on an American Airlines flight.325 Fortunately, the other passengers were able to subdue Reid before he could detonate his device.326 In the previous year, MI5 had monitored phone calls between an Al Qaeda terrorist suspect and Reid but did not follow up on the connection.327 MI5 was criticized for this failure, which certainly could have ended in disaster had it not been for observant and willful airline passengers. MI5 was also greatly faulted for failing to prevent the 321 Chalk and Rosenau, 9; Northcott, 459. Feldstein, 4, 7. 323 Northcott, 471, 473. 324 Center for Democracy and Technology. "Domestic Intelligence Agencies: The Mixed Record of the UK’s MI5." Center for Democracy and Technology. https://www.cdt.org/security/usapatriot/030127mi5.pdf (accessed March 27, 2014). 325 CNN. "Shoe Bomber: Tale of Another Failed Terrorist Attack." CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/12/25/richard.reid.shoe.bomber/ (accessed March 27, 2014). 326 Ibid. 327 Chalk and Rosenau, 49; Walsh, Nick Palton, Kamal Ahmed, and Paul Harris. "MI5 Bunders Over Bomber." The Guardian: The Observer. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/30/terrorism.september11 (accessed March 27, 2014). 322 London subway suicide bombings on July 7, 2005 that left 52 dead.328 This was the first successful Islamist terrorist attack to occur within the UK.329 The Service quickly traced the responsibility for the attack to a Pakistan-based al Qaeda-linked terrorist, but it had been completely blind sighted by the attack and shared blame with police services for the failure.330 The Security Service also had its share of successes against the Islamist terror threat in the early post-9/11 years.331 In 2004, the al Qaeda 9/11 architect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had trained a British citizen, Dhiren Barot, to prepare a terrorist attack in the UK that would convert three limousines into car bombs for deployment across London.332 MI5 and the British police launched Operation RHYME to monitor him closely, hoping to gather enough evidence to convict him before even moving to make an arrest.333 Concern that he was getting too close to successfully enacting his plot led to his arrest earlier than some may have wanted, but post-arrest evidence gathering was so thorough that it compelled Barot to plead guilty to the charges brought against him.334 In the case of Operation OVERT, MI5 disrupted a plot that it had estimated to be potentially more damaging in terms of lives than even the 9/11 attacks against the US.335 The plotters in this case had developed sophisticated ways of smuggling explosives onto airplanes, which they intended to detonate in mid-flight hoping that the planes would then crash 328 Norton-Taylor, Richard. "MI5 and Police Failures Under Spotlight in London Bomb Inquests." The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/may/21/mi5-police-failures-london-bomb (accessed March 27, 2014). 329 Andrew, Defend, 821. 330 Ibid., 822-823; Norton-Taylor, “MI5 and Police Failures.” 331 Andrew, Defend, 828. 332 Ibid., 819. 333 Ibid., 820. 334 Ibid. 335 Gardham, Duncan and Gordon Rayner. "Airliner Bomb Trial: How MI5 Uncovered the Terror Plot." The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2709379/Airliner-bomb-trial-How-MI5-uncovered-the-terrorplot.html (accessed March 27, 2014). into US cities.336 MI5 electronic and physical surveillance was absolutely crucial to uncovering this plot, which was foiled by the arrest of the conspirators in August of 2006.337 It should be noted that public accounts of these two examples of MI5 successes credit Security Service surveillance but say nothing of HUMINT, the intelligence practice that, as has been argued in this paper, constitutes the primary operational difference between MI5 and the FBI. Unfortunately for those outside the secret world of spies and counter-espionage, HUMINT sources and operatives also happen to be the most closely guarded secrets of any intelligence service. The espionage accounts addressed in the previous two chapters were taken from the World Wars and the Cold War – both concluded conflicts whose espionage stories need not be kept completely secret any longer. International terrorism, on the other hand, is a current threat that is still extremely sensitive to intelligence and law enforcement organizations. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that MI5 or the UK government would reveal a human intelligence source that contributed to the above cases in the post-9/11 era. We cannot say with certainty, then, whether or not MI5’s human-led counterintelligence capability has uniquely and directly contributed to its counter-terrorism successes (or failures). However, it is still clear that the Security Service has had significant success against terrorist threats and that its general counterintelligence experience facilitated the shift to counter-terrorism in the 1990s. Comparative Analysis The US and the UK were both forced by successful terrorist attacks to recognize the new, post-Cold War threat of international terrorism – neither the US nor the UK governments were able to preempt this threat without experiencing loss first. The 9/11 attacks altered how both 336 337 Ibid. Ibid.; Andrew, Defend, 826. countries approached counter-terrorism significantly, but the UK had taken steps to elevate the counter-terrorism focus of MI5 in the early 1990s after almost losing half of its cabinet to a PIRA terrorist attack. At the turn of the century, MI5 was far more prepared than the FBI to counter Islamist terrorism in the next decade. As argued in this chapter, the FBI and MI5 faced significantly different challenges when each of them was called upon to lead a counter-terrorism effort. First, the Security Service’s consistent history of counterintelligence practice had prepared it to counter threats in a general preventive manner, which meant that MI5 did not need to significantly restructure its organization, reorient its mission focus, or reform its cultural preferences. The FBI, as Director Mueller and the FBI official Centennial History confirm, faced a fundamental challenge to the core of FBI operation over its entire history.338 Second, the nature of the terrorist challenge to both organizations was different not only from an operational standpoint, but also a bureaucratic one. The Bureau had had the lead counter-terrorism role in the US since the early 1980s, whereas MI5 received new counter-terrorism mandates successively through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The Service’s counter-terrorism practice, therefore, depended more on the UK government’s efforts to clarify competing domestic mandates in that mission while the Bureau’s practice depended more on the internal decision to alter its own law enforcement preferences. Third, the Bureau had to create new capabilities in the shape of a professional analytical corps under its new NSB. MI5 did not need to make such wide-reaching structural adjustments. Fourth, international terrorism necessarily required externally oriented organizations if prevention of such threats was to be possible. As has been demonstrated, MI5, though a domestic intelligence and counterintelligence service, had always maintained an externally oriented posture in meeting its goals since its inception. Thus, there was no required change on 338 FBI, “Centennial History,” 100. this front for the Service compared to the Bureau that had consistently focused on domestic law enforcement. The final point of divergence is on the matter of politics. The PATRIOT Act, briefly mentioned above, expanded the investigative and intelligence powers of the FBI, especially by breaking down the “wall” between its intelligence and law enforcement investigations. For those who have been skeptical of the FBI’s political machinations throughout its history, however, the PATRIOT Act was equated with an unpredicted invitation for the Bureau to disregard civil liberties in its quest for perfect security.339 It is possible, though, that the passage and continued force of the PATRIOT Act would have caused a stir among civil liberty and privacy advocates in the US regardless of the FBI’s history of political involvement. It is undeniable, however, that such historical precedence gave ammunition to those who would oppose such measures, allowing for a more robust political debate to develop. This fact also served to divert attention away from cool-headed analysis of capabilities and requirements ostensibly needed to combat terrorism. MI5 did not need to wade through similar political battles in order to rise to the nation’s call to counter-terrorism.340 However, the debate over the PATRIOT Act has cooled significantly and the FBI’s counter-terrorism successes and failures have chiefly been evaluated apart from politics (more akin to the criticism and praise that the Security Service receives in the UK). This trend has the potential to reveal an FBI in the near future that is perceived as less politically active, at least in the fields of counterintelligence and counter-terrorism. In conclusion, MI5’s consistent counterintelligence practice and focus had prepared it for an easier transition into counter-terrorism compared to the FBI, which faced many obstacles in pursuit of this change. It should be noted, however, that the Bureau has been required by the US 339 340 Theoharis, 162-163, 172. Andrew, Defend, 734-735, 771-773; Andrew, “Islamist Terrorist Threat.” to assume both a law enforcement mission and counterintelligence mission since its earliest days (though its focus on counterintelligence has been shown to be inconsistent). MI5 has only ever had the long-standing counterintelligence and later counter-terrorism missions that do not conflict with one another to the degree that law enforcement and intelligence differ. The Service has, therefore, always had a simpler mandate and a less contradictory mission than that of the Bureau. Additionally, this meant that the Service had always been required to maintain solid and institutionalized connections with UK police organizations for the sake of apprehending spies or terrorists. Philip Mudd, who served as the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center Deputy Director before becoming the FBI’s National Security Branch Deputy Director, holds that it is precisely because of this dual mission that the FBI will never be entirely driven by intelligence.341 As a law enforcement agency first and an intelligence organization second, the first question the Bureau must ask when taking up an investigation is whether or not that avenue will violate civil liberties.342 MI5, as a purely counterintelligence and counter-terrorist organization, has never needed to temper its investigations by this standard in the same systematic manner. As demonstrated in this paper, this distinction is not sufficient to account for the difference in the counterintelligence operation of the FBI and MI5. Many other factors contributed to the Service’s preference for intelligence and the Bureau’s penchant for law enforcement, as will be summarized in the concluding chapter. In this chapter, I have made no prediction concerning either organization’s potential for preventing terrorism in the future. It has been argued, however, that MI5 was prepared to perform preventative counter-terrorism by its history, while the FBI’s history up until this point was primarily shaped by after-the-fact law enforcement. 341 342 Mudd, 176. Ibid.