Espionage

SIGNIFICANCE: Protecting data about the military and technological capabilities of the United States, and discovering the intentions and capabilities of enemies, are vital to defending the national security of the country.

Espionage, counterespionage, and secret political intervention overseas are distinct operations. One actively seeks to procure secret information, the second guards against procurement of secrets by enemies, and the third, comprising clandestine operations such as assassinations and sabotage, is actually a political-military intrusion. The three are often confused with one another, a tendency encouraged by the fact that organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may be concerned with all three, seeking data in foreign countries, carrying out paramilitary operations overseas, and trying to prevent attacks on the United States.

Espionage conducted by the CIA and other American government agencies against foreign powers is not a crime in the United States. Spying, sabotage, and terrorist attacks directed against the United States or its citizens are punishable crimes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seeks to discover and prevent as part of its national policing activity.

History of the Crime

Espionage has a lengthy genealogy. The Bible (Numbers 13) records that Moses sent agents to spy on the land of Canaan. The ancient Greeks and Romans devised ciphers to protect their communications from hostile eyes. George Washington, as commander of the American army during the Revolutionary War, employed numerous spies to keep him informed of British actions. The capture of British major John André, by alert American militiamen, with the plan of West Point in his boot and the subsequent flight of General Benedict Arnold have passed into legend, with Arnold’s name becoming a synonym for traitor.

Modern American espionage and counterespionage techniques and institutions came of age during and shortly after World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a variety of secret organizations, some of which reported directly to him. William J. Donovan, a personal representative of Roosevelt, went to England in 1940 to study British antisabotage techniques and evaluate the probabilities of that country’s surviving German air attacks. Donovan went on to head the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which carried out espionage and sabotage missions inside occupied Europe and Germany. The OSS served as model when the CIA was created in 1947.

The FBI identified several German spy networks in 1941, aided by an American citizen born in Germany who had been recruited by German military intelligence against his will. The FBI arrested and convicted thirty-three operatives, effectively shutting down most German covert activity in the United States. Two separate attempts to land German saboteurs from submarines in 1942 and 1945 ended with the swift capture of ten agents, the conviction of all, and the execution of eight. The FBI was less successful in detecting atomic espionage for the Soviet Union carried out by members and sympathizers of the American Communist Party, even though the FBI was convinced the party was controlled by Moscow and had planted informants within it.

The greatest intelligence successes of World War II were those of US cryptanalysts who deciphered Japanese diplomatic and naval codes; their example would inspire the creation of the even more technologically adept National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952.

Espionage in Fiction

The spy story has become a recognized literary genre, popular with readers and attractive to Hollywood, which regularly creates films based on successful novels. The characters rarely resemble real-life spies. The protagonist of one of the earliest spy novels, John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps (1915, adapted to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935), is an amateur who stumbles upon a scheme to provoke a European war, which he successfully prevents.

Other extremely popular spy stories are often unrealistic, catering to readers’ fantasies. Jack Ryan singlehandedly foils a terrorist attack on a member of the British royal family and ends up as a guest in Buckingham Palace in Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games (1987). Interestingly, Clancy’s Debt of Honor (1994) eerily prefigured the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, with its climactic description of a jumbo jet crashing into the United States Capitol. In films based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, the spectacular special effects became more and more fantastic as the series progressed. In contrast, novelist John le Carré effectively employed verisimilitude to express his disdain and disgust with Cold War espionage practices.

Espionage in the Twentieth Century

During World War II, Soviet spies within the United States were motivated by ideology, many being Communist Party members. Disillusionment with communism as an economic system and revelations of the excesses of Stalinism ended the ideological inspiration. Spies caught during the Cold War working for the Soviet Union were primarily motivated by cash, not idealism.

The Walker family spy ring operated for sixteen years, receiving money from the Soviet Union without showing any interest in ideology. John Walker Jr., a US Navy officer, began selling the Soviet Union cipher keys used by the Navy in 1968, as well as descriptions of cryptographic machines, enabling the Russians to decipher American messages using their own versions of the machines. When he retired from the Navy in 1976, Walker recruited his son, his older brother, and Walker’s best friend to steal data on secret American electronic systems, which they did until the spy ring’s members were arrested in 1985.

From 1985 to 1994, Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer, received more than $4 million from the Soviets for his services. He told the Russians of every active United States espionage and counterespionage operation involving the Soviet Union; the disclosures allowed the Russians to execute at least ten spies working for the United States. He revealed the names of American intelligence officers studying the Soviet Union and described techniques used by the CIA and FBI. By telling the Russians which areas the United States particularly wanted data regarding, Ames enabled them to offer false information that the CIA welcomed and presented to the president as fact.

Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who sold the Russians six thousand pages of secret FBI documents, claimed that he acted as a spy because of the psychological pleasure he felt in fooling his coworkers. However, he did not reject the $1.4 million dollars he was offered for his services from 1985 until he was finally apprehended in 2001.

Twenty-First-Century Cases

The continued employment of Hanssen by the Russian successor organization to the Soviet spy agency testified to the reality that espionage against the American government did not cease with the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Interest in acquiring military secrets and in penetrating the FBI and CIA continued. However, technological and economic espionage was of increasing importance in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Different countries used varying techniques in acquiring information. China focused on ethnic Chinese working for American companies and research institutes, appealing to pride in the resurgence of China to motivate the delivery of documents and data. In one case, a woman living in Michigan was sentenced in 2022 to fourteen years in prison for, in part, conspiring to commit economic espionage on behalf of both a foreign company and the Chinese government. Japan did not appear to have a government organization coordinating its economic espionage, but each company worked on its own to secure valuable information and patents from its competitors. France preferred using Cold War techniques, including bribery, wiretapping, thefts, and combing through trash. Russia still seemed most interested in military technology, but France, Israel, and Germany spread their efforts much wider. The International Business Machines company and Texas Instruments complained of attempts by foreign governments to steal their technology for the benefit of competitors. Corning found its fiber optics proprietary information under attack by France.

Foreign governments were not the only culprits. Domestic corporations employed espionage techniques against one another in the search for competitive advantage. A major scandal rocked the aerospace industry in July 2003, when the U.S. Air Force discovered that Boeing Corporation had stolen thousands of documents from Lockheed Martin when the two companies competed for a rocket launch contract.

Corporate espionage cases rarely involve criminal proceedings. Many instances never become public knowledge; companies involved often prefer to suffer losses rather than admit to security failures that might adversely affect their reputations and stock prices. If diplomats are implicated, the normal procedure is simply to declare the offenders personae non gratae and expel them. The Boeing-Lockheed affair was unique in that two accused employees were actually indicted under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act and faced trial for theft of trade secrets. The Air Force punished Boeing by withdrawing contracts worth $1 billion and awarding them to Lockheed. However, Boeing’s disgrace did not keep it from winning an even more valuable bid to build air tankers.

Counterespionage within the United States is formally part of the internal police work of the FBI, with the CIA responsible for overseas activity. Detection of espionage is difficult. Investigations can run for years without uncovering definitive answers, and success can hinge on accidental discovery of long-running penetrations of American security. Prosecution of spies sometimes becomes impossible, as the display of convincing evidence in open court conflicts with the need to avoid revealing sensitive information. Electronic counterespionage has become increasingly useful in the struggle against terrorism.

By the 2020s, the FBI had become increasingly concerned with the spy agencies of foreign countries, particularly China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, using advanced technology such as cyber hacking to access US security, technology, and business information in manners even more difficult to detect. While the US Department of Justice (DOJ) launched a program referred to as the "China Initiative" in 2018 aimed specifically at identifying and prosecuting cases of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets orchestrated by agents linked to the Chinese government, it garnered criticism of its investigations and targets over the years until its cessation in 2022.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, several cases of alleged espionage proved particularly high profile. A one-time contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden, was brought up on espionage charges in 2013 for his role in leaking documents pertaining to mass-surveillance programs. In a somewhat similar scenario, debates over the parameters of the First Amendment were sparked in 2019 when the DOJ indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on seventeen counts of Espionage Act violation. Some argued that Assange, who had seen himself and his website as a champion of government transparency upon leaking classified documents in 2010, had stepped over the line of journalism, including by putting people's lives at risk. In late 2023, it was announced that an undercover operation had turned up evidence that Manuel Rocha, who had served as an ambassador, had spied for Cuba's intelligence agency for decades in an infiltration of the US government experts considered one of the "most serious, highest-reaching" in US history. Following his 2023 indictment, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 2024.

Investigation

The successful Soviet penetration of American atomic bomb research was not discovered until after the war. Information about Soviet spies came from the defection in 1945 of Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet consular official in Canada, from the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers in 1946 and from the partial decipherment of intercepted Soviet diplomatic messages. American code breakers had begun working on Soviet communications during World War II, but it was not until the late 1940s that they had any success. Called the Venona archive, the dispatches revealed the existence of at least two Los Alamos security breaches—one involving the Rosenberg spy ring, the other the physicist Theodore Hall. Judith Coplon, identified as a Soviet spy in the Venona transcripts, was arrested with secret documents in her possession.

The activities of the US naval officers who made up the Walker family spy ring were not discovered by counterespionage detective work but were disclosed by John Walker’s estranged wife. Word of Hanssen’s betrayal came from a source within the Russian intelligence community. The openly flamboyant lifestyle of Ames provided the decisive clues to his treachery; however, critics wondered why it took the CIA nine years to question how one of its employees making less than $70,000 a year got the money to charge more than $20,000 a month on his credit cards and to buy a $450,000 suburban Washington house with cash.

Prosecution and Punishment

Use of illegal wiretaps, break-ins, and mail openings by the FBI under its director J. Edgar Hoover created difficulties in securing espionage convictions. Such evidence was inadmissible in court. Of more than one hundred people named by Bentley and Chambers, only two (William Remington and Alger Hiss) were indicted and convicted—of perjury, not espionage. The Rosenbergs were prosecuted when members of their ring agreed to testify against them. Hall was never indicted because he refused to confess, and there were no witnesses to his activity; both the FBI and military intelligence objected to use of the Venona decipherment, which was not publicly disclosed until 1995. Successful prosecution of the Walkers and Hanssen involved plea bargains.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage and executed by electrocution on June 19, 1953. David Greenglass and Harry Gold testified against the Rosenbergs; Greenglass was sentenced to fifteen years in jail, Gold to thirty. Judith Coplon escaped any jail time. Her conviction in June 1949 was overturned on appeal because of use of illegal wiretap evidence. The FBI opposed a retrial, which would reveal that its agents had not detected Coplon’s treason, instead learning of her spying through the Venona decodes.

John Walker agreed to plead guilty in exchange for lighter punishment for his son, Michael. Michael Walker received a sentence of twenty-five years and was paroled in February 2000, after fifteen years in prison. John Walker, his brother, and Walker’s friend Jerry Whitworth all received life sentences. Ames was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; his wife was jailed for five years for her share in his activity and deported in 1999. Hanssen hired a celebrity attorney who negotiated a plea bargain with the Department of Justice. In return for his wife’s receiving a widow’s pension of $38,000 a year, Hanssen agreed to accept a sentence of life without parole and take polygraph tests while describing all his transactions with the Soviets.

As intelligence security issues remained prevalent concerning the US and China into the 2020s, efforts continued to identify and prosecute anyone involved in espionage operations. In 2024, the DOJ announced an indictment of seven Chinese nationals accused of taking part in a widespread, years-long espionage operation targeting US officials and businesses.

Counterespionage activity designed to combat terrorism is even more difficult than traditional spy catching. The FBI successfully pursued and convicted those responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Detecting and preventing planned attacks is a much more challenging assignment, however, as the 9/11 Commission Report (2004) demonstrated. Solving that problem remained a major concern of American security and intelligence agencies in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

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