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This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that? > Th
by bscphil 6y ago
This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that?
> The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history.
The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and claims that their sole purpose is defensive, to catch spies, and not to spy on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5?
I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example), and also as the article states, that suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence.
But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything about this question, it makes me think that they typically were.
So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted.
- duxup 6y ago>So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted. I feel like this is a trend. More and more articles and titles are only connected in the most general ways. Like you can expect most of the keywords to be there but not the meaning.
- coderintherye 6y agoThey may have done well to source from "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" which provides more factual evidence to support the hypothesis.
- ciarannolan 6y agoIs that one worth a read? I know it had mixed reviews.
- coderintherye 6y agoI found it interesting, but reading a thorough synopsis is probably almost as effective as reading through the book itself.
- shigawire 6y agoI thought it was comprehensive and fascinating.
- glandium 6y agoAFAIK, MI5 is the domestic spy agency, and MI6 is the foreign spy agency.
- mhh__ 6y agoYup. MI6 is officially known as SIS these days. You can see the difference in attitude in their careers websites - MI5 could just be another government agency almost whereas the SIS website (note the conspicuous gap in their history section!) are clearly recruiting spies and "experienced business(etc) leaders" (to manage high level assets presumably)
- mhh__ 6y agoBy the end of the cold war British intelligence were pretty good (PIMLICO was an absolute mockery of the KGB) but in the 60s and early they were so paralyzed by the Cambridge five that they didn't investigate a few people because it would be too embarrassing. Then add in the allegations that Roger Hollis was a GRU asset and you've got a pretty grim picture.
- fatbird 6y agoSorry, what is PIMLICO? Googling it comes up with a lot about the location in London.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoPIMLICO was one of the code names for Oleg Gordievsky - who copies large amounts of KGB secret files in his position as KGB "Librarian" and handed them over to the British. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky
- mhh__ 6y agoI was referring to the extraction operation to get him out. I don't think it has a proper Wikipedia page but it is absolutely ridiculous.
- mhh__ 6y agoOperation PIMLICO was MI6's ridiculously ballsy scheme to exfiltrate Oleg Gordievsky from directly under the nose of the KGB after he was compromised in Moscow. It is literally straight out of a spy novel, mainly because they weren't expecting to have to use it. A quick summary: "We have literally no idea what you look like, but if you hold a British supermarket bag by a bakery on a Tuesday - a man eating a Mars bar or a Kit Kat will walk by. That's the code for you to scramble to the Finnish border, upon which point some MI6 officers will drug you and shove you in the boot of a car. They will then drive (while stuck in between 3 KGB cars - only outrunning them because of soviet engines), through almost 10 diplomatic checkpoints with some absolutely ridiculously excuse about a Dentist appointment in Finland. If you get through those, we will play Finlandia on the radio and you're not quite safe but out of the USSR". Not only did this plan work, Oleg Gordievsky is still alive! Very brave man - he was betrayed by Aldrich Ames after the CIA got jealous and went spy hunting because how dare an ally keep their assets secret. He was invited home from London for a "promotion" (read: execution a la Tolkachev or Penkovsky); he chose to return. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uc5BxrWU_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uc5BxrWU_Q Watch this, and then buy Ben Macintyre's book for a quid (it's brilliant)
- chrisseaton 6y ago> they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example Many people believe that MI5 had serious worries that Harold Wilson was a soviet spy.
- mhh__ 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theor... It's a very murky, embarrassing, and oleaginously classified hole to go down. When you factor in the alleged practice coup at Heathrow it gets very very murky. Michael Foot was almost definitely an extremely naive soviet cooperator - but not a spy, which is what was alleged (He successfully sued on that particular allegation but a civil case is almost literally meaningless when you take into account that SIS have no declassification policy other than no and MI5 wait decades)
- n4r9 6y ago> Michael Foot was almost definitely an extremely naive soviet cooperator Is there evidence of this beyond Gordievsky's claims?
- arethuza 6y agoThe accounts I have read make it sound pretty harmless - Foot apparently met someone from the Soviet embassy a few times, had discussions about things like the roles of unions in the UK but didn't share anything remotely secret or indeed, and critically in my view, know that the person he was speaking to was KGB. I don't think he was even close to being "recruited". I seem to remember that one of Gordievsky's own points was that the KGB at that point tended to greatly overstate how important their contacts were to make them look better to Moscow.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> met someone from the Soviet embassy a few times ... but didn't ... know that the person he was speaking to was KGB Come on.... just a friendly chat about union politics with a man from the communist superpower? Was there anyone at the Soviet embassy at the time who was not likely working for the KGB to some extent? Embassies are still to this date I believe a key way intelligence agencies get people into a country. Assume anyone you meet and everything you do in an embassy of an adversary you're in a cold war against are going to be working against you.
- secfirstmd 6y agoThere is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games during the Cold War. But it's also possible to go a bit far in judging them purely on that basis. If you (allow me to remove the civil liberties issues for a second) look more towards Northern Ireland and assess its success (from a UK gov point of view), along with RUC SB (the most important UK org in the conflict), SIS and the FRU, then it's a slightly different assessment you'd have to take. Of course interpretation depends on your viewpoint and how you patch the pieces of the story together. Considering the amount of Islamic radicialisation in the UK, it and CTC/SB have arguably been fairly successful. A similar sort of assessment could probably be made about the Communist Party in the UK - it was effectively going no where and well infiltrated. Though there were blips around miners and bits of the Labour Party, MI5 and Special Branch had such a tight hold of them post 1950 to the point where they were actually chasing their tail and seeing conspiracies where none existed. I think reading the various bits of information to come out since the Cold War about the CIA in Russia can also probably show how little they really achieved there in the spy game. There is a whole genre of similar sorts of stories waffling away about disguises and technology but recently there was are challenges to the orthodoxy around that. Essentially successes were pretty minimal, dangles were swallowed all the time etc. Worth reading this on that topic "Fictitious Spies and Fake History" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.1668247?journalCode=ujic20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.16...
- ciarannolan 6y ago>There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games during the Cold War. This is not even remotely true. At one point they knew of every single KGB spy in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky
- TallGuyShort 6y agoYou're confusing MI5 with MI6. One is domestically focused, the other is internationally focused.
- 6y ago
- walshemj 6y agoMI5 had identified and at the start of WW1 rounded up the German spies active in the UK And aside from Philby which was facilitated by his mates and inter service rivalry plenty of other spies have been caught.
- arethuza 6y agoThe MI5 vs MI6 rivalry did sound pretty nasty - MI6 regarded MI5 as boring stupid plods and MI5 regarded MI6 as out of control rule breaking toffs!
- ineedasername 6y ago>they didn't become head of MI5 No, they saved that for MI6 and the CIA (well, not the heads of those organizations) where Kim Philby (MI6) and Aldrich Ames (CIA) leaked information about an extremely high portion of their operations back to Russia. Indeed, Ames exposed countless CIA operations and was directly responsible for at least 10 Russian executions of US spies. Then more recently there was Robert Hanson in the FBI who leaked an enormous amount of counter intelligence data along with other sensitive information. So I really don't think it's accurate to imply the Russians didn't infiltrate these organizations at a pretty high level-- not the top spot maybe, but high enough to severely impair their efforts and cripple countless operations.
- malux85 6y agoI'm very curious and have no knowledge in this field, so forgive my basic questions ... Was the information leakage (from either or both parties) deliberate through malice, or was it some form of accidental / incompetence? Or something else?
- pmorici 6y agoAll those cited examples were unquestionably deliberate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
- pjc50 6y agoWith Ames and Philby it was definitely intentional, they were "turned". Ames for money, Philby for ideology.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoHanssen was more of a psychological / power / control sort of thing. Ames was just gettin that $$$. Dude made it through like 2+ lie detector tests, too, which goes to show how useful they are.
- baddox 6y agoWell, I guess if you consider something to be a zero-sum game, it’s tough to say whether humans are good or bad at that game. Are we as a species better at chess, or tennis, or underwater hockey, or paper-rock-scissors?
- DougBTX 6y agoYou could use Elo rating[0] range to rank them. Basic idea is that if player A has 100 points more than player B, then you could expect player A to win 64% of the time. In rock-paper-scissors, everyone wins 50% of the time, so everyone has the same Elo rating, so the Elo range is zero. For chess, a beginner might have a rating of 400, while the best in the world might have a rating of 2700. So you could imagine a line of 23 people, each of which can beat the one behind them 64% of the time. It seems fair to say that the person at the front of the line, representing the best that humanity has to offer, is much better at chess than the best rock-paper-scissors player is at rock-paper-scissors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
- dTal 6y ago>In rock-paper-scissors, everyone wins 50% of the time, so everyone has the same Elo rating, so the Elo range is zero. You would be surprised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20073703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20073703