History of espionage

It was a 'Textbook of Statecraft and Political Economy' that provides a detailed account of intelligence collection, processing, consumption, and covert operations, as indispensable means for maintaining and expanding the security and power of the state.

His staff included the cryptographer Thomas Phelippes, who was an expert in deciphering letters and forgery, and Arthur Gregory, who was skilled at breaking and repairing seals without detection.

[35][36] Even so, Britain reduced its clandestine operations following the 1802 Treaty of Amiens as it emphasized the development of commercial relations with the Continent and some members of Parliament questioned the use of secret service funds.

Besides espionage, they recruited soldiers, collected money, enforced the Continental System against imports from Britain, propagandized, policed border entry into France through passports, and protected the estates of the Napoleonic nobility.

To counter Russian ambitions in the region and the potential threat it posed to the British position in India, a system of surveillance, intelligence and counterintelligence was built up in the Indian Civil Service.

Although the techniques originally used were distinctly amateurish – British agents would often pose unconvincingly as botanists or archaeologists – more professional tactics and systems were slowly put in place.

Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Younger established a military intelligence unit, Abteilung (Section) IIIb, to the German General Staff in 1889 which steadily expanded its operations into France and Russia.

[57] As the Service was not authorized with police powers, Kell liaised extensively with the Special Branch of Scotland Yard (headed by Basil Thomson), and succeeded in disrupting the work of Indian revolutionaries collaborating with the Germans during the war.

At a time of widespread and growing anti-German feeling and fear, plans were drawn up for an extensive offensive intelligence system to be used as an instrument in the event of a European war.

Working under cover from a flat in London, Melville ran both counterintelligence and foreign-intelligence operations, capitalizing on the knowledge and foreign contacts he had accumulated during his years running Special Branch.

Due to its success, the Government Committee on Intelligence, with support from Richard Haldane (the Secretary of State for War) and from Winston Churchill (the President of the Board of Trade), established the Secret Service Bureau in 1909.

For the first time, the government had access to a peacetime, centralized independent intelligence bureaucracy with indexed registries and defined procedures, as opposed to the more ad hoc methods used previously.

[58] By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 all the major powers had highly sophisticated structures in place for the training and handling of spies and for the processing of the intelligence information obtained through espionage.

The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers defined the genre: the novel played on public fears of a German plan to invade Britain (an amateur spy uncovers the nefarious plot).

[61] In 1916 Walthère Dewé founded the Dame Blanche ("White Lady") network as an underground intelligence group which became the most effective Allied spy-ring in German-occupied Belgium.

The basis of Room 40 operations evolved around an Imperial German Navy codebook, the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM), and around maps (containing coded squares), which were obtained from three different sources in the early months of the war.

[72] Room 40 played an important role in several naval engagements during the war, notably in detecting major German sorties into the North Sea that led to the battles of Dogger Bank (1915) and Jutland (1916) when the British fleet was sent out to intercept them.

[76] Recruited personally by Mansfield Smith-Cumming to act as a secret agent in Imperial Russia, he set up elaborate plans to help prominent White Russians escape from Soviet prisons after the October Revolution and smuggled hundreds of them into Finland.

In the course of a few months in 1918-1919, Dukes, Hall, and Reilly succeeded in infiltrating Lenin's inner circle, and gaining access to the activities of the Cheka and the Communist International at the highest level.

Churchill, once again a member of the UK cabinet in this period, argued that intercepted communications were more useful "as a means of forming a true judgment of public policy than any other source of knowledge at the disposal of the State.

[90] The "Research and Analysis" branch of OSS brought together numerous academics and experts who proved especially useful in providing a highly detailed overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the German war effort.

The resistance group around the later executed priest Heinrich Maier, which provided much of this information, was then uncovered by a double spy who worked for the OSS, the German Abwehr and even the Sicherheitsdienst of the SS.

[97] Counterespionage included the use of turned Double Cross agents to misinform Nazi Germany of impact points during the Blitz and internment of Japanese in the US against "Japan's wartime spy program".

He was a senior KGB officer who was a double agent on behalf of Britain's MI6, providing a stream of high-grade intelligence that had an important influence on the thinking of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

According to Owen L. Sirrs, the 1967 War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, signalled a failure by Egyptian intelligence to adequately evaluate the military capabilities of their foes.

[141] In France, the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) engaged in counter-terrorism already in the 1980s in the context of active Basque and Corsican nationalist movements, as well as Middle Eastern Organisations such as the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

[143] Islamic Terrorism became the primary focus of the US Intelligence services after the 9/11 Attacks by Al-Qaeda, leading to the Invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and ultimately to the tracking and killing of Osama Ben Laden in 2011.

[152] On the 23rd of January 2011 more than 1600 pages of confidential documents from the peace negotiations between the Israeli government and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were leaked to news channel al-Jazeera.

[153] These documents contained "memos, emails, maps, minutes of private meetings, accounts of high-level exchanges, strategy papers, and Power Point presentations" that occurred as early as 1991.

[153][154] Topics include the Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, refugees and their right to return, the Goldstone Report, security cooperation, the Gaza Strip, and Hamas.