[This is the first 25K of a total text of over 200K. For a full copy of this report, please send an email request to intelligence-adi@wanadoo.fr] ANALYSIS OF THE MAIN DEVELOPMENTS IN THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES OF THE CSCE COUNTRIES AND JAPAN by Peter Klerks1 Contents 1 Introduction 2 Threats 2.1 Espionage 2.2 Terrorism 2.3 Proliferation 2.4 Clandestine arms trafficking 2.5 Migration 2.6 Domestic subversion from the left 2.7 Extreme right; racism 2.8 Islamic fundamentalism 2.9 Vulnerability of high-tech societies 2.10 Cults and sects 2.11 Environmental problems 2.12 Secessionist movements 3 Organized crime and corruption 3.1 The Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe 3.2 Western Europe 3.3 Drug trafficking 3.4 A Converging of law enforcement and intelligence objectives and methods? 4 Financial intelligence 5 Military intelligence 5.1 Innovations in intelligence-related warfare 5.2 Peace-keeping and peace-enforcing operations 6 Interests and activities on other continents 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The Middle East 6.3 Africa 7 Intelligence cooperation 7.1 The European dimension 7.2 NATO 7.3 Eastern Europe and former Soviet states 8 Open sources intelligence 9 Non-governmental intelligence 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Economic intelligence 9.3 Corporate intelligence 9.4 Intelligence buccaneers 9.5 Intelligence activities by insurgent groups and criminals 9.6 Intelligence and academic institutes 10 Reorganizations and trends "This, gentlemen, is espionage a middle-class activity that depends on stability, money, large doses of hypocrisy on both sides, insurance plans, grievances, underlying loyalty, constant inclinations toward treachery, and an immersion in white-collar work. See you next week. Before too long, we will come to more damnable stuff counterespionage. That is where we say farewell to white-collar mentality." (Harlot teaching CIA neophytes) Norman Mailer - Harlot's ghost. 1 INTRODUCTION Analyzing a phenomenon as wide and diverse as the current state and future trends of security and intelligence services in Europe, the former USSR, the Northamerican continent and Japan seems too ambitious. The problems besetting a commander of a military intelligence service in Croatia can hardly be discussed in the same chapter as those of, say, an official responsible for patents research in a Japanese ministry. It is unrealistic to assess developments even in a single government bureaucracy if one is not thoroughly familiar with the context of local customs and traditions, the power structure, recent political history and relevant legislation. Furthermore, the previous chapters demonstrate that in looking at a country's intelligence structure, it should not be assumed that they all work as a unified, coherent ensemble toward an unequivocal common goal. Rather, in most countries we can expect to find several rivaling players, sometimes with little if any overall coherence or allegiance to the policies of the ruling government. With all that in mind, this analytical chapter has been written in an awareness of modesty, perhaps even futility, but it has been written all the same. Armed with the information assembled in the previous chapters and looking at current events in the global political arena, at crime trends, at military situations and economic trends, one can distinguish certain possibilities and probabilities that together may shed some light on the agendas of today's intelligence executives. 2 THREATS 2.1 Espionage When speaking of counterintelligence, operators normally differentiate between security as the passive and counterespionage as the offensive dimension. We will argue here that the security dimension has become increasingly dominant over the last five years. Judging on statements made in public, for most security services counterterrorism has surpassed counterintelligence on the priorities list, with economic espionage ranking a close second.2 In daily routine however the classic mission of security agencies, catching spies, is often still dominant. The difference is that nowadays, the spy to look out for probably no longer works for the Russians. The breakdown of the Soviet empire and the East European regimes ended the formal existence of nearly a dozen very professional, powerful and determined espionage agencies. Together they had run many thousands of spies who had penetrated all levels of the western societies, including governments, banks, and intelligence agencies.The number of spies has decreased immensely; most of the remaining spies no longer operate under the control and doctrines of Moscow, and the East-West confrontation is no longer the alpha and omega of the spy business. But there's nothing new to the nature and missions of many other players in the field. 'Friendly' spies have always been active trying to catch the ally's secrets, and 'communist' spies have never had a monopoly on industrial and scientific espionage. Industrial corporations, professional intelligence brokers, Asian Tigers and criminal organizations are all interested in resourceful R&D departments. Information technology has thoroughly changed the way industries and bureaucracies function. Advanced organizations depend on their information being directly accessible from any desk in the building, or even from outside through computer networks. Access control therefore is no longer a matter of locking the secrets in the vault and checking the windows. Spies relying on their Minox camera have become relics of the past. The consequences of all this remain unclear. Money and blackmail have always been the prime motives for spying, that doesn't really change. A slight ease of tension could be expected within the security services themselves, assuming that senior intelligence personnel is now less likely to come under suspicion of working for the other side. Constant paranoia must have caused considerable pressures in the traditional spy business: consider once again that the heads of the West German, Swedish and Canadian counterintelligence services, among others, have all been convicted or forced into retirement because of 'mole' allegations. Nowadays, most of the 'other sides' probably couldn't mount such delicate operations over any period of time for lack of institutional resources and professionalism. On the other hand, the amicability of many senior intelligence people with corporate executives raises questions of integrity and suggests some influence of old boys' networks on the functioning of government intelligence services. Under new management, the Ruskies are still in business and deserve attention: Ames proved a case in point. But could any western intelligence service afford to miss the opportunity of having an asset in the top of their neighbor's intelligence service? Would they risk the embarrassment and damage of walking into a sting operation? And would they be as aggressive and convincing in actively recruiting a prospective agent-in-place as the KGB once was? In the end it's still business as usual. The country reports in this book illustrate that all national security agencies still go around classifying materials and identifying weak spots; some have explicitly turned to the business community to advertise these services. Nothing much really seems to change, except that (offensive) counterespionage has become more difficult given the diffuse character of the adversaries. The old anti-communist orientation has given way to a more common conservative and often nationalist attitude. The emphasis is now more on protecting the family jewels: identifying and reducing vulnerabilities and protecting potential targets against threats, no matter where these come from. This also explains why the old security vetting systems are usually still in place, and are even expanded to new areas and functions such as information technology services (network operators, database managers, and both inhouse and third-party computer consultants). Instead of reducing the number of security posts, governments and corporations are in fact increasing the number of jobs that require screening on political, criminal and other (e.g., drug use) background and habits. The increased orientation on fostering defenses tends to bring more sophistication into both government and private security operations. There is an increasing awareness of technical and organizational aspects of active security countermeasures outside traditional military and intelligence agencies.3 In law enforcement operations for example, the concept of operations security (OPSEC) is gaining ground outside the DEA and similar sophisticated outfits. OPSEC involves the protecting of generally unclassified evidence of the planning and execution of sensitive activities. This includes the attempted disguise or concealment of indicators which, when pieced together or interpreted, may betray critical information. Indicators often occur in support functions like travel, finance and logistics; sometimes what gives the game away is a sudden stereotyped pattern of activities, or just the opposite, a departure from normal patterns. A well-known example is the intelligence service headquarters where on an identified floor, shortly before an operation breaks all the lights burn all night. The countermeasure actually taken in this case was to have the janitor switch the lights on and off throughout the building in a random pattern. More elaborate examples include the use of phony bank accounts and safehouses.4 2.2 Terrorism Although many of the notorious names of the 1970s and 1980s such as Carlos, the RAF, Action Directe, and the Brigate Rosse have been moved from the active to the archive files, political violence remains a phenomenon to be reckoned with.5 The PIRA and the ETA continue to operate at the time of writing, albeit on a lower level, and other groups such as the various fundamentalist Muslim factions (discussed below) seem to be gaining in militancy and strength. In some cases, foreign state forces appear to be responsible for planning, funding or executing terrorist incidents in Europe and elsewhere. Intelligence services play a crucial role in antiterrorist operations, both in the warning and the investigation phases: experts estimate that between 70 and 80 per cent of the relevant information relating to terrorism comes from clandestine sources. Many debates have centered around the proper definition of terrorism. Researchers Schmid and Jongman of Leiden University have analyzed all the varieties used in academic literature and came up with a one-page compromize.6 Although some 'enlightened' security services will concede that political activists using violence against objects are not necessarily terrorists, this seems to put few if any restrictions to the measures applied to track them down. In Holland for example, people suspected by the BVD to have been engaged in such activities have been harrassed, intimidated and their houses have been bugged.7 Other West European countries such as Germany, the UK and Belgium present roughly the same picture. One of the conflicts being fought over in Europe today is the struggle for autonomy of the Turkish Kurds. The guerrilla struggle in East Turkey is mainly fought by Kurds organized in the Patiya Karkeren Kurdistan (the Kurdish Workers Party or PKK), which is both an armed freedom movement and a political party with a stalinist program. The PKK appears to be representing the majority of the Kurdish population both in Turkey and in the rest of Europe, although reliable estimates cannot be made. Both the Kurds and the Turkish government face the dilemma of having to fight a dirty civil war while maintaining a 'civilized' image in the rest of Europe. The Kurds are not too good at it: while they obviously suffer under fierce repression, they appear to resort to raising money in European cities through extortion rackets and, according to some sources, profiting from money gained in the heroin trade. PKK supporters have been accused of levying 'revolutionary taxes' in Germany, Holland and Belgium. In Holland PKK members received prison sentences on such charges for the first time in 1994.8 In Germany, where the largest population of European Kurds reside including an estimated 3,800 PKK members, the government has outlawed the PKK and related organizations in November 1993.9 To make matters more complicated, a number of terrorist attacks and assassinations in European countries have reportedly been carried out by the covert arm of the Turkish government. In Turkey itself political killings from all sides are almost routine, with 11,000 deaths since the outbreak of the Kurdish conflict in 1984. But in Western European countries political refugees are also threatened and killed. The problem for outsiders and police investigators is that it is often impossible to distinguish between operations carried out by forces connected to the Turkish government and violence resulting from internecine conflicts between e.g. different Kurdish factions or drug-related killings. PKK representatives have repeatedly accused the Iraqi Kurdish Democratic Party of collaborating with Turkish intelligence. The PKK also blamed the killing of prominent Kurds living in exile such as Imdat Yilmaz, chair of the Kurdistan Committee in Copenhagen, on the Turkish intelligence service MIT. The PKK on the other hand has a stated policy of attacking Turkish government installations throughout Europe.10 The measures taken to protect political refugees against physical attacks by their country's intelligence services vary considerably from country to country. For example, whereas in Germany certain Iranian dissident leaders are protected by armed escorts, the Dutch authorities most often limit themselves to advising to keep a low profile and passing on unspecified threat alerts. Which after all is still better than the French, who may simply extradict 'troublemakers' back to the gallows in their homeland. Apart from the operational need to keep in touch with the Turkish police for cooperation in criminal (mainly narcotics) cases and with the MIT to try and prevent or solve terrorist attacks, European services cannot afford to spoil their relations with the MIT since it is uniquely placed to supply much-wanted information on activities by the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), which reportedly also runs terrorist networks in Europe. Added to this comes the obvious status of Turkey as a member of NATO and its strategic key position in monitoring developments in the southern republics of the former Soviet Union. The considerable Turkish appetite for military hardware is an additional stimulus for countries with an arms industry in need of export orders. Repeated Iranian death squad activities have been reported by refugees living in Europe. Yet many governments, including the German authorities, seem to ignore such signals and prefer to continue the relationship with Iran.11 The BfV however is fully aware of the very real threats posed by the Iranians, as their largest intelligence station in Europe, estimated at some two dozen staff, is situated at the Iranian embassy in Bonn. According to press sources citing confidential BfV reports, the Verfassungsschutz is convinced that the Iranians assassinated four Kurd leaders in Berlin on 17 September 1992.12 In a parallel development, the British government has recently accused Iran of plotting with the Provisional IRA to supply guns and money in turn for murdering Iranian dissidents in Europe. The Provos apparently turned down the offer.13 That anti-terrorist intelligence operations can lead to serious collisions with 'friendly' governments was illustrated in a recent case when Irish Garda Special Branch and G2 army intelligence officers uncovered a massive British Security Service network in Ireland.14 The Irish police investigators have suggested that the spies in this network not only kept alleged PIRA members under surveillance, but that any individual with political, military or commercial influence was regarded as a "desirable target" by MI5. The Garda police service was also concerned that a number of its officers had been compromized by MI5 as part of a "dirty tricks" campaign. 2.3 Proliferation U.S. government reports have identified as the most serious risk to America's national security today the global proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as the spread of conventional armaments.15 About a dozen states are believed to be seeking to obtain or develop nuclear capabilities.16 The exact status of their nuclear programs remains unknown. Apart from the 'Big Five', the Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Israel, South Africa, India and Pakistan already have nuclear weapons.17 Chemical weapons are thought to be acquired by about twenty countries, many of which also have ballistic missiles to deliver the chemical warheads. All this sets the stage for possible future high-intensity conflicts. The CIA has estimated that within a decade, at least one Third World country would be able to combine nuclear warheads with missiles capable of striking the United States. Apart from the Korean peninsula, the area with the highest risk of a nuclear conflict seems to be the Indian subcontinent, where India and Pakistan have been involved in a permanent state of conflict since the independence and partition 1947. This has brought three wars in 1947, 1965 and 1971, and observers fear that the unstable situation in Kashmir, where the Pakistani government is supporting Islamic fundamentalist seccesionists, could lead to new war. With both countries almost certainly posessing nuclear weapons, this could become an unprecendented disaster. U.S. journalists Bill Burrows and Bob Windrem have described how the two countries were on the brink of exactly such a nuclear conflict in 1990, when U.S. intelligence agencies received alarming indications of Pakistani preparations for an imminent nuclear first strike.18 An urgent mission to the area by National Security Advisor Robert Gates apparently resulted in a cooling down of the tensions, but a senior CIA official later told top journalist Seymour Hersh the world had never before been so close to a nuclear war. On 17 May 1994, the International Herald Tribune wrote that reliable Pakistani military sources had said Pakistan had suspended active support for the insurgency in Indian Kashmir the year before when the U.S. threatened to add it to the list of countries sponsoring terrorism. Such a move would have required automatic severing of U.S.-Pakistani aid and business ties. During the hiatus, Pakistan apparently "privatized" its Kashmir operations, funneling support to the militants through nongovernmental organizations that were often run by retired army and intelligence officials. After the U.S. decided not to add Pakistan to the terrorist list, however, the army in early 1994 resumed its active Kashmir operations, although at a much reduced level. Pakistani political and government officials denied any active role in arming or training militants in Kashmir, saying their support was limited to aiding the insurgents through political diplomatic initiatives.19 Among the more worrying expectations of European securocrats is the crisis scenario of Libyan missiles armed with nuclear or chemical warheads and pointed at European capitals, most of which would be within their range. In anticipation of such a risk the British Defence Ministry is studying a limited anti-ballistic missile system, and France is discussing building its own anti- tactical ballistic missile system.20 Battlefield experience during the second Gulf war has shown how difficult it is even with the best intelligence capabilities available to track down and destroy mobile missile launchers. In launching their Scuds, the Iraqi's skipped most of the usual calibration procedures and arrived, launched and were vanished again in no time. Also U.S. intelligence had great trouble identifying and pinpointing elements of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program that could be moved and concealed.21 The Libyans reportedly depend to some extent on clandestine German connections for keeping their German- supplied installations for producing chemical warfare agents running. Little wonder that German intelligence and security services count Libya among their many operational targets, as was once again illustrated when Mr Silvan Becker, one of the Verfassungsschutzes' senior terrorism experts, was abducted from Egypt and killed in Libya. Mr Becker was believed to have been collecting intelligence on Libyan chemical plants and intelligence capabilities.22 CIA top officals have recently warned that North Korea would be planning to sell nuclear warheads plus delivery systems to countries such as Iran, Syria and Libya.23 With a range of about 1300 kilometers, North-Korean Nodong missiles currently under development would thus be able to hit large parts of Southern Europe.24 CIA analysts reportedly estimated the current North-Korean nuclear arsenal at two warheads, with the capacity to grow to about ten warheads in the next five years. It remained unclear to what extent such reports where part of the psychological warfare resulting from the Korean crisis in the summer of 1994.25 Undoubtedly, intelligence services around the world will be spending an increasing amount of money and resources on counterproliferation in the coming years. In the U.S., the DCI has created the Nonproliferation Center to coordinate all intelligence efforts related to proliferation, and all branches of the intelligence community are boosting their research and collection efforts. So far, there has been a strong emphasis on the collection and interpretation of technical intelligence, but experts are now urging for more HUMINT input. Only human observers on the scene are likely to pick up valuable information on e.g. opposition in government circles or the army, budget arguments or policy considerations that may influence decision-making regarding unconventional arms programs.26 The most serious, or at least the most sizeable problem is presented by the former Soviet nonconventional arms arsenal and nuclear installations. Soviet nuclear warheads are supposedly guarded by the army and protected against accidental or unauthorized use through a socalled Permissive Action Link.27 However, the smaller Russian tactical weapons such as 152 mm artillery shells do not have such protective devices and are thus no more difficult to detonate than a conventional shell or missile warhead. U.S. estimates say some 15,000 tactical warheads are now in Russia, among them many old and primitive systems protected by little more than a padlocked cover. In the summer of 1994, tensions were building up over alleged smuggling of nuclear materials orginating from the former Soviet Union. In June Mr Bernd Schmidbauer, swashbuckling coordinator of the German intelligence services and nicknamed '008', claimed to have information indicating that Russian criminal organizations possessed the materials that would enable them to produce nuclear weapons.28 Some days later, on his 10-day trip to Russia and other East European nations in June and July 1994 FBI Director Louis Freeh declared that "the greatest longterm threat to the security of the United States" is the possibility that organized criminals will steal a nuclear weapon or materials to make one from the former Soviet Union and sell it to terrorists." However, Mr Freeh said he had no indications that organized criminals had actually gotten access to nuclear weapons.29 [This is the first 25K of a total text of over 200K. For a full copy of this report, please send an email request to intelligence-adi@wanadoo.fr] *