Category Archives: Espionage

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War

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Author Lynne Olson drew a standing-room-only crowd at the Princeton Public Library this week to hear her discuss her latest book, a biography of a mostly unheralded Frenchwoman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. Fourcade ran a loose network of 3,000 spies within Vichy France during the Nazi occupation, and Olson calls it the most influential organization spying on the Nazis in the war.

Born in 1909 to wealthy parents and raised in Shanghai, she married a military intelligence officer at age twenty, and ultimately had three children. During the war, she sent the children to Switzerland for safety and did not see them for years at a time. Sometime in there, Olson says, she had an affair with pilot hero and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince, et al.) She survived the war and many harrowing experiences and died in Paris in 1989.

The French Resistance movement, uncoordinated and spotty though it was, came in three flavors. Two have received considerable attention in films. First, sabotage—blowing up train tracks and the like (the Sebastian Faulks novel and film Charlotte Gray depict this nicely). Then there were the heroic efforts to help downed British and American pilots escape. The third, less cinematic job of the Resistance was intelligence gathering. Where are the troops headed, the armaments stored, the ships docked? This is the kind of information the Allies badly needed and Fourcade’s huge network collected and passed on.

You’ll recall that de Gaulle was in London during the war, but when Fourcade’s brother traveled there to offer the network’s services, characteristically, he would not cooperate. But MI6 would, not realizing for quite a while that the group’s leader, code name “Hedgehog,” was a woman. She was arrested several times and escaped twice. After D-Day, she was again captured, but that night she stripped down, held her dress between her teeth and wriggled through the bars of her cell, put her dress back on, and walked away.

She and one notable young woman who worked for her were able to get the information they did from unsuspecting Germans because, for the most part, no one took her seriously because she was a woman. She’s nearly forgotten today, Olson believes, for the same reason. After the war, de Gaulle created an organization to honor the war’s heroes—1032 of its 1038 members were men.

Olson’s conclusion is reinforced by the experience of another unheralded WWII spy, American Virginia Hall. One of the several new books (movies in the making!) about her is titled A Woman of No Importance.

****The Fourth Courier

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By Timothy Jay Smith – Take a walk back in time to Warsaw, 1992, with Timothy Jay Smith’s new crime thriller. The Cold War has recently ended, but average citizens struggle to figure out the new economic realities. Nothing quite works yet, and the gray concrete dullness of Soviet brutalist architecture is made even harsher by the dismal April weather. Politically, old relationships are unraveling, and chaos in the former Soviet Union and some of its satellites raises an important question, who’s watching the nukes?

Warsaw police, meanwhile, are dealing with a baffling series of murders. Over just a few weeks, three unidentified young men have been shot to death, their bodies abandoned on the banks of the Vistula River, one cheek slit open, all labels expertly cut from their clothing. Now they’ve found a fourth victim, older this time. By chance, the forensic pathologist noticed the third victim’s hands bore traces of radiation. Whatever he’d been smuggling, Poland’s new Solidarity government wants help to stop it.

American aid comes to them from the FBI in the person of Jay Porter, who in turn calls on the expertise of the local CIA officer—a gay black man named Kurt Crawford—and the genial Ambassador. There are good interactions and good humor among the three Americans. They all want to put an end to what seems to be nuclear material being spirited out of the former Soviet Union—but each has a totally different way of going about it.

Porter meets an attractive Polish woman, Lilka, who, he learns, is divorced from her abusive husband, but the apartments in Poland are so few and so small, so they still live together. The American starts seeing Lilka, which gives author Smith a vehicle for introducing realistic aspects of everyday Polish life—the shortages, the cranky cars, the small indulgences, and the stresses immediately post-communism—one of the most interesting aspects of the book, in fact.

Perhaps there are a couple too many plot coincidences and intersections among the cast of characters. All of them remain distinctive and interesting, though, even the minor ones. Smith’s well described settings put you right in the scene, whether it’s the drably elegant hotel favored by a Yugoslav general, a seedy bar in the bowels of the train station, or the riverside wasteland where the corpses keep washing up.

Photo: “Soviet buttons” by seitbijakaspars, creative commons license.

Cybersecurity: What the Experts Say

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cyberspace

If only I were as clever as Brad Parks who took his outrage over the pass given to Wachovia and Wells Fargo Bank execs who laundered many millions of dollars for a Mexican drug cartel (and they’re still at it) and turned it into a fantastic new thriller, The Last Act (my review here). What you’ll read below has the seeds of innumerable great and terrifying stories, but when I read it, I start spitting. These quotes were a handout for my Great Decisions group, a discussion program sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association

 “Our adversaries and strategic competitors will increasingly use cyber capabilities—including cyber espionage, attack, and influence—to seek political, economic, and military advantage over the United States and its allies and partners. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cyber operations to threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.” Daniel R. Coats, Director of National Intelligence statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as he presented the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of worldwide threats, 29 Jan 2019.

“Few Americans realize the extent to which foreign intelligence services are stealing our most important secrets.” And “China is without question the number one counterintelligence threat facing the United States.” James Olson, former CIA Chief of Counterintelligence

“The Russian intelligence services, the inheritors of the legacy of their Soviet forebears, are our inexorable adversaries. They have at one time or another penetrated every significant organization and agency in the U.S. Government and, as evidenced by their recent efforts to undermine American democracy, are the most professionally proficient intelligence adversaries we confront.” Mark Kelton, former CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence

“Foreign cyber criminals will continue to conduct for-profit, cyber-enabled theft and extortion against U.S. networks.” And “Terrorists could obtain and disclose compromising or personally identifiable information through cyber operations, and they may use such disclosures to coerce, extort, or to inspire and enable physical attacks against their victims.” Daniel R. Coats

“The sheer acceleration in the number of attacks, and their rapidly changing goals, is one of several warning signs that we all are living through a revolution, playing out at digital speed.” David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon

“We cannot afford to protect everything to the maximum degree, so we’d better figure out what cannot fail.” Thomas Donahue, Senior Analyst, Center for Cyber Intelligence

Read More

I highly recommend Sanger’s The Perfect Weapon, P.W. Singer’s Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media, and if a well-constructed fictional scenario holds more appeal, P.W. Singer and August Cole’s 2015 near-future thriller, Ghost Fleet.

Photo: openDemocracy, creative commons license

****A Long Night in Paris

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Written by Dov Alfon, translated by Daniella Zamir – Lots of action is packed into Dov Alfon’s debut novel, A Long Night in Paris, Israel’s bestselling book of 2016-2017, now available in English. It’s hard to believe so much can happen in little more than twenty-four hours!

The story begins one morning when a gregarious Israeli software engineer disappears from the arrivals hall of Charles de Gaulle Airport. An irrepressible flirt, he peels off from a group of colleagues to link up with a beautiful blonde before the two seemingly disappear into thin air.

Police Commissaire Jules Léger grudgingly organizes an investigation, predictably hampered by too many cooks: airport security, the Israeli police representative for Europe, a mysterious Israeli security colonel named Zeev Abadi, and, most uncooperative of all, El Al security.

Abadi is a Tunisian Jew raised in the Paris suburbs. Not until midnight does he assume his official role as the new head of Israeli intelligence’s SIGINT unit. Temporarily in charge of the unit back in Tel Aviv, with minuscule bureaucratic power, is Lieutenant Oriana Talmor.

At the airport, Abadi uncovers footage showing the hapless Israeli attacked by a pair of Chinese thugs and thrown into a sewer pit where survival is impossible. Abadi soon realizes the attack was a case of mistaken identity. He must figure out who was the actual intended victim and calls on Talmor her team back in Israel for help. Separated by more than two thousand miles, the two try to uncover the identity of the intended victim, his current location, and the reasons he’s a murder target.

Although most of the short chapters are written from the point of view of Abadi, Talmor, or Léger, some are from clueless higher-ups in the Israeli and French governments, the various criminal operatives involved, and the real quarry of the killers, a young man named Vladislav Yerminski. What you mostly learn about him is that he’s checked into an expensive hotel with a suitcase full of electronic gadgetry. (I forget how that bag got through Tel Aviv’s airport security, if I ever knew.)

It’s a multinational cast of characters and you’re well along before you realize what game Yerminski is playing and who’s behind the mysterious gang of Chinese pursuing him. All the bureaucrats are busy trying to spin the first victim’s undignified death in a way that masks the shortcomings and errors in their own intelligence work. Even though I couldn’t quite believe in the criminal mastermind whose Chinese assassins murdered the wrong man, I totally believed that they work in a rogue system that does not tolerate error.

Alfon came to the writing of this book with the perfect resume. He knows Paris, having been born and raised there. He is himself a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200, which is responsible for signals intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption. His political acumen was honed as a former cultural observer and editor in chief of Israel’s major newspaper, Ha’aretz, and he served as an editor for Israel’s largest publishing house. The translation flows smoothly as well.

Cyberthreats: Coming to a Company Near You

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The absurdity of a Seth Rogen movie precipitating an international incident may have obscured that episode’s significance as a bellwether in international cyberterrorism. Companies around the world have experienced massive thefts of intellectual property and disruption to their operations. Yet there’s no clear way forward for them. Three dramatic episodes illustrate.

Destruction of a Target’s Network

Remember Sony’s 2014 dust-up with North Korea? Given the reviews, The Interview would likely have quickly sunk into obscurity had The Hermit Kingdom not made an escalating series of threats, saying release of the film would be considered an act of terrorism. While the U.S. State Department was telling Sony it wasn’t in the business of censoring movies, North Korean hackers were penetrating Sony’s computer system top-to-bottom.

Our government was clueless about the company’s peril. Says David Sanger, “hackers working from laptops somewhere in Asia were not the kind of security threat [the NSA] was established to detect. And movie studios weren’t the targets the American intelligence community was focused on protecting.” The result was a worldwide takedown of the company’s computer systems.

Proliferating Malware

The NotPetya code, the malicious product of Russian military hackers, ultimately hit two thousand targets worldwide and cost companies an estimated $10 billion. Among the worst affected were the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck, FedEx’s European subsidiary, a French construction company, and Danish shipping company Maersk. Maersk, which lost some $300 million, salvaged its business only because a domain controller in Ghana already had been knocked offline when the malware struck.

Corporate Espionage

You’re probably familiar with how three Chinese hackers stole some 630,000 computer files related to the development and design of Boeing’s C-17 military transport plane, saving the Chinese government decades and billions in R&D. When the Chinese plane—the Xian Y-20—debuted at a Zhuhai air show, parked near the American C-17, the similarity between the two planes was inescapable. A gift to the Chinese from U.S. taxpayers.

According to a recent Wired article by Garrett M. Graff, “China’s extended campaign of commercial espionage has raided almost every highly developed economy, but far and away its biggest targets have been the military secrets of the United States.” He says many American companies were aware of the hacking, but have kept quiet to keep the huge China market.

What Next?

Such intrusions demonstrate that it isn’t enough to assume every company can (or will) sufficiently protect its own networks. “An individual company simply doesn’t have the resources or the capabilities to defend against a committed nation state attacker,” said Jamil Jaffer, founder of George Mason University’s National Security Institute in a recent Cipher Brief interview. Yet, for a host of reasons, government can’t do protect every business either.

Jaffer believes companies in key industries must start sharing threat data with each other. Though that’s against the grain, in a small way, it’s beginning to happen. Government may have a role, too, in some cases, depending on the target, the severity of the threat, and applicable law. But this strategy will take time, and as all these complex relationships and responsibilities are being debated and worked out, the hackers hurtle full speed ahead.

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*****LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media

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In David Sanger’s chilling book about the dangers of cyberweapons, reviewed here last week, he includes the impact of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, but P.W. Singer and Emerson T Brooking focus laserlike on them in LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. If you want to know chapter and verse about the barrage of efforts to manipulate American opinion in the election of 2016—and risk of even more in future—this is the book for you.

Singer and Brooking’s book, like Sanger’s, pulls together in one place the various threads of information about cyberthreats from the last few years, weaving them into a coherent, memorable, and understandable(!) whole. All these authors provide exhaustive lists of sources. It’s incumbent on responsible people to understand the tactics of information warfare, because, “[recent Senate hearings] showed that our leaders had little grasp on the greatest existential threat to American democracy,” said Leigh Giangreco in the Washington Post.

These ill-intentioned manipulators understand the human brain is hard-wired for certain reactions: to believe in conspiracy theories (“Obama isn’t an American”); to be gratified when we receive approval (“likes”!); to be drawn to views we agree with (“confirmation bias”). If we feel compelled to weigh in on some bit of propaganda or false information, social media algorithms see this attention and elevate the issue—“trending!”—so that our complaints only add to the virality of disinformation and lies. “Just as the internet has reshaped war, war is now radically reshaping the internet,” the authors say.

Contrary to the optimism of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who saw social media as a positive, democratizing force, this new technology is being used to destructive effect at many levels of society. At a local scale, for example, it bolsters gang violence in Chicago; at a national scale, it contributed to the election of fringe politicians; at a regional scale, it facilitated the emergence of ISIS; and at an international scale, it undergirds the reemergence of repressive political movements in many countries.

How to be a responsible citizen in this chaos? Like it or not, “we’re all part of this war,” the authors say, “and which side succeeds depends in large part on how much the rest of us learn to recognize this new warfare for what it is” and how ready we are for what comes next. Start by reading one—or both—of these important books.

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Our Biggest Threats Keep Growing

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In The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger talks about nations’ pervasive and growing uses of spyware and malware to achieve their ends. According to Paul Pillar’s review in the Times, Sanger’s book is “an encyclopedic account of policy-relevant happenings in the cyberworld (that) stays firmly grounded in real events.”

It’s not a question of keeping the stuff out of our electric grid, the controls of our nuclear plants, our military establishment, our government. It’s already here. And a piece of spyware in our systems—watching, waiting—can turn instantly destructive on command.

While U.S. companies, utilities, and some government agencies would like to reveal how much they know about these intrusions—“hey, we’re looking at you, too, so watch it!”—the clandestine services argue against it, because they don’t want others to know that we know and what our detection capabilities are, much less guess our offensive capacity. If you were suspicious of that improbable string of fizzling North Korean missiles last year and wondered “could it really be . . ?” you were right.

Sanger’s riveting journalism covers the woes Russia has inflicted on Ukraine, especially its power grid, a seeming test-bed for attacks on the West; it reviews the Stuxnet virus developed by the U.S. and Israel, which exceeded its mission of damaging Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to emerge in the wild; he covers the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations; and he describes more recent threats. Across at least three Administrations in Washington, the responses to the size and potential scope of this threat have been paltry. “The clock cannot be turned back,” he says, and it’s up to all of us to hear the ticking.

****The Cypher Bureau

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Enigma machine

PX Here, creative commons license

By Eilidh McGinness – This fictionalized history of the breaking of the Germans’ Enigma code methods in World War II is as tense as any thriller and more consequential, based, as it is, on true events.

Although readers around the world are familiar with the accomplishments of Alan Turing and the British code-breaking team at Bletchley Park—most recently popularized in the Benedict Cumberbatch movie, The Imitation Game—the substantial contribution of youthful Polish mathematicians to the unraveling of the Nazis’ coding system is less well known. This novelization of the life of Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and his colleagues attempts to fill this historical blank spot.

As children, Rejewski and his two friends and fellow mathematics stars, Henry Zygalski and Jerzy Rozycki, lived through the German occupation and depredations of the First World War. Now, on the cusp of completing their university studies, war clouds are once again amassing on their country’s western border, and the Polish authorities are desperate to expose the Germans’ secrets and help foil their plans.

Rejewski, Zygalski, and Rozycki are successfully recruited to work for the Cypher Bureau, although, as invasion approaches, the danger of such work grows by the by day. They have successfully solved numerous important decryption problems, yet Rejewski longs for a chance to try cracking the Enigma—the coding machine the Germans considered unbreakable. Finally, he gets this super-secret assignment. Thanks to documents obtained by French intelligence and the lucky acquisition of an Enigma machine, he is able to reconstruct its internal wiring. Once that is accomplished, the method for determining the master key for a given day is the remaining challenge.

The insight that allows his breakthrough is not mathematical or technical, it is psychological. Having had German tutors in his youth, Rejewski knows how they think. As the author of the book on which The Imitation Game was based wrote about the Poles, “They had not broken the machine, they had beaten the system.”

Once Germany invades Poland, the code-breaking team flees, working its way across Europe, stopping briefly here and there to decode messages, deal with Germany’s efforts to make Enigma increasingly complex, and making hair’s-breadth escapes from the enemy. Although this book aims to be a true account and the writing style is never hyperbolic, its substance is akin to an action thriller.

The bravery and intellectual contributions of the Polish mathematicians and their team is clear. Equally so is the commitment of a great many people in Poland and elsewhere to keeping the secret of their accomplishments. Not one person ever revealed this information throughout the long years of the war, and the Germans never knew they’d been hacked. This in itself is an astonishing feat!

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The Catcher Was a Spy

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The Catcher Was a SpyIt might almost be worth seeing the new movie Gotti with a sneering John Travolta in the lead, simply because it has received a (surprisingly) rare “0” rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics. Unanimity about a movie’s goodness or apparent awfulness is so rarely achieved that this may be a cinematic low-water-mark. A filmic Sahara. A future cult classic.

Last weekend, I went to another movie most critics have panned, because it is crammed with components I like: spies! history! Nazis! baseball! Based on a book by Nicholas Dawidoff, it recounts a bit of the true story of Red Sox catcher Moe Berg and was directed by Ben Lewin (who gets most of the blame), with a good script by Robert Rodat (trailer).

It wasn’t perfect, and maybe it’s slow for action film devotees, but the acting was superior. Paul Rudd played Berg, a man who loved baseball and had a great smile, but was hard to know. Through his Princeton connections, he was recruited to the fledgling OSS by its head Wild Bill Donovan (Jeff Daniels), mostly because of his facility with languages and despite his somewhat ambiguous sexuality. He has a girlfriend in Boston (Sienna Miller) for much of the film, but that’s an on-again, off-again thing, first with his baseball travel schedule, then his work in Washington and overseas.

Finally he gets the kind of assignment he craves: the U.S. has the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon, and the Allies believe the Germans are attempting this too, led by Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong). But they can’t be certain (sorry). Berg is teamed up with a military man (Guy Pearce) and a physicist (excellent work by Paul Giamatti) to find out. If these suspicions are correct, Berg is to assassinate him. Unlike so many celluloid spies, Rudd’s Berg seems actually to weigh the significance of this assignment.

In a key scene early in the film, Berg signals the pitcher, but the pitcher waves him off. The opponent on first tries to steal second, but Berg manages to get the ball there in time to throw him out, ending the inning. Walking back to the dugout, he says to the pitcher, “Never ignore my signal when a man’s going to try to steal second.” Pitcher: “How’d you know he’d try?” “I just knew.” Berg’s skill in sizing up people was perfect for the OSS.

Rex Reed in the New York Observer said, it’s “a juicy story told blandly,” but still a movie worth seeing, and I agree. Maybe Gotti should get a second look.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 32%; audiences 67%.

****Beside the Syrian Sea

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Beirut, street, watcher

photo: Jonhy Blaze, creative commons license

By James Wolff – When reading this British spy thriller, you may feel that, like the protagonist, you’ve gone for a stroll in a dangerous section of town and found yourself in over your head.

Jonas’s father, part of a church delegation visiting Syria, has been kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists, who demand a $100 million ransom for the 75-year-old cleric. Father and son have been a bit at odds, but despite that—or because of it—Jonas has vowed to rescue him.

Jonas did work for the MI6, yes, but in a desk job. His tradecraft is thin and contacts are few. Thus does Wolff put Jonas and his exploits in the realm of the doable. He makes decisions and takes actions an ordinary person, as opposed to an espionage superhero, might—a believable, somewhat erratic, and doubt-ridden character, easy to identify with and root for.

The story starts in a seedy Beirut bar, where Jonas seeks the help of the middle-aged former priest Tobias, who has previously negotiated the release of terrorist-held hostages. Jonas doesn’t tell him everything, wondering “how it had come to pass unnoticed that deceit had been worn into him like grooves in a record until all he could play were false notes.” Tobias is reluctant to get involved, but he has an interest in a woman named Maryam also stuck in Syria. Jonas says, if he helps, “we’ll get her out.” We?

Because this shaky rescue mission has no official standing, he’s unlikely to deliver on this promise, or on any of the commitments he ultimately makes with Hezbollah representatives, the espionage establishment, and anyone else he thinks can help him. You feel you’re mounting a wobbly tower made of playing cards, a fragile edifice that may collapse at any moment.

MI6 sends the tennis-playing Desmond Naseby to befriend and spy on Jonas and persuade him to give up his efforts. Naseby is quickly followed by CIA case office Harvey Deng. Deng is all business, aggressive and profane, but Jonas and Naseby banter amusingly. Says Naseby, “You can’t stand to be cooped up. Smell of the sea, bustle of the bazaars.” “Thwack of the tennis racket,” responds Jonas.

Edward Snowden taints the narrative like a malevolent spirit when it dawns on MI6 higher-ups that Jonas may have availed himself of some of the secret reports he’s been reading at his desk all those years. When it appears he is trying to trade a USB drive for his father, they give his case the operational name LEAKY PIPE and, well, panic sets in.

What keeps the pages turning in this highly entertaining tale, is that, like Jonas’s MI6 and CIA opponents, you can never be quite sure how much he really knows, what his strategy really is, or even if he has one. As a result, the outcome of his dangerous mission might succeed or, as seems much more likely, go disastrously wrong.