9 ms·

Why spies never discover anything useful

83 points by sdoering 13y ago

tlear 13y ago
USSR point of view: 1. Elimination of opposition abroad, Trotzkyi assassination and many others. 2. Discovery that Japan will not enter war. Results in transfer of Siberian divisions to Moscow that play decisive role in war 3. Plans for operation Citadel. Key point in war in the east 4. Nuclear bomb, author discounts 1-3 years.. that had huge effect on politics around the world Invasion of USSR failure, one of the reason for lack of reaction was that NKVD had apparently established set of citeria that would tell them that Germany of planning an attack. Winter uniforms production, non-freezing oil production and some others.. since none of those were crossed, detailed and very good humint they were getting was discounted. Also he forgets that Nazis also broke a lot of allied codes. If I remember correctly one of the allowed them to know most of the convoy routes through atlantic Also forget that Battle of Midway was basically won because of sigint. Generating believable crap is not that easy.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Stalin actually had really good intel that Germany was going to invade, he just refused to believe it and had people executed for spreading "disinformation".
  - tlear 13y ago
    There are many stories on that.. honestly I think a lot of stuff about Stalin disbelief are pure propaganda aimed at providing an explanation at how bad Soviet army did initially. In reality I think it was a combination of Soviet Army just being really bad initially compared to Germans(remember Germans destroyed French and British without breaking a sweat just a year before) and legitimate conflicting assessments of German army no preparing for war in Russia. This lack of preparation is what cost them in December 1941, if your tank oil freezes.. well you are not going anywhere
    - philwelch 13y ago
      The British evacuated Dunkirk but their Air Force and navy did very well against their German counterparts.
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      Winston Churchill talks about how the Brits sent info to Stalin at the very highest diplomatic levels that he was going to be invaded. And later when Winston met Stalin, Stalin said that he thought he had to do everything to avoid provoking the Germans as they had started their previous war by pretending to have been attacked by the Poles. Stalin said that he hoped he had more time. So its easy to read into this account that Stalin knew well that he was probably going to be attacked, and rather than 'not wanting to believe it' in a wishful way, rather balanced doing nothing to provoke Germany with taking defensive steps and decided on the former course rationally.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        Something I've read a lot of places but is hard to track down--apparently there was one incident where a German communist actually defected to the USSR, warned them that Germany was preparing to invade, and was literally executed for spreading disinformation. He also disappeared to his dacha and reportedly seemed to have an emotional breakdown when the invasion did happen. The fact that Stalin tried to play this off to Churchill doesn't really refute anything. You don't become a legendary dictator and erect statues and portraits of yourself everywhere without being a little prideful.
    - memracom 13y ago
      I just watched a Soviet film called Gosudarstvennaya Granitsa (State Borders) which showed various events in the evolution of the Soviet Border Patrol, and in the 5th film, about a few days around the invasion. In it they showed border guards doing a lot of dumb things including being woefully unprepared. So even the Soviets acknowledged that there was a lot of military incompetence around the German invasion. Later on, they got a lot more serious about competence in their military forces, and won the war while the victorious Germans, gloating about overcoming their enemy and having captured such an astounding amount of territory, let down their guard and paid the price.
cstross 13y ago
Misleading title: the article is really about why spies never discover anything useful about other nations. They're really, really good at infiltrating internal dissident groups and spy (or terrorist) hunts serve as a great pretext for domestic repression ...
- 7schlaefer 13y ago
  [...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks]
- 7schlaefer 13y ago
  [...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks]
- 7schlaefer 13y ago
  [...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks etc.], because that is the implied reason for having spys.
- 7schlaefer 13y ago
  [...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks etc.], because that is the implied reason for having spys.
walshemj 13y ago
Author doesn't seem to know what the difference between a sigint organization NSA/GCHQ and a Humint one is or even what the difference between an officer and a spy is. Both GCHQ and NSA can point to successes as can all the major players in the spy game would Stalin have got the bomb so quickly without spies. Or the success of the XX committee. Or from the other side the Cambridge 5 where certainly effective. And do you think binladen would not have been found and killed if it wasn't for spies run by CIA officers?
- C13slam 13y ago
  Thoughtful article but I agree with walshemj. Saying 'spy' is like saying 'engineer'. Who/what exactly do you mean? The NSA is but 1 of 16 US spy agencies. (Now that is an article worth writing...16 spy agencies...)
  - talmand 13y ago
    Sixteen that we know of...
    - at-fates-hands 13y ago
      and plenty of others that have black budgets, have no "official" oversight and don't need congressional approval to do anything.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  Beyond Bin Laden: but figuring out the viability of attacking the Nuclear Arsenal of Iran, determining who is Friend / Foe in Syria vs Friend/Foe in Lybia (notice how we have decided that all parties in Syria are enemies: saving us considerable amounts of money. Also, that prevented the US from entering another war. Our only concern is the Chemical weapons that we have known about) Speaking of Syria: spies and so forth were who determined whether or not Syria even _used_ chemical weapons. http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/26/idf-intercept-shows-syrian-army-used-chemical-weapons/ http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/26/idf-intercept-shows-sy... It was a SIGINT Intercept. Spies are extrodinarily useful for figuring out the truth when international incidents occur. And knowing who is lying, why they're lying, what their motivations are, etc. etc. These are all important foreign-intelligence missions that Spies do their best to figure out for their country. -------------- Now of course, spies get it wrong sometimes. The famous Iraq situation was brought about because the CIA focused on one bit of evidence that turned out to be falsified. But nonetheless, the general "intelligence successes" strongly outweigh the "intelligence failures" in the past decades.
mathattack 13y ago
I think the key insight is if enough people provide misinformation, the real information is useless since it's hard to tell what is true. One could say that this over-feeding of information contributed to why folks didn't see 9/11 coming. Yes there were drops of clues, but they were lost in the firehose. I also believe that information needs to be acted on to be relevant. This is why corporate espionage isn't very helpful. You can throw a monkey wrench into a competitor's market trials, but IP is very hard to copy. Having a copy of somoene else's source code only gets you so far - you need people who actually understand it. Having blueprints to someone's plant only gives you clues - you actually need someone who understands it enough and can overcome Not Invented Here syndrome to make value judgments. I recall an anecdote from the 80s where an American car company was taking apart a Lexus. They concluded that their cars were superior in every way, and that all the design decisions were a result of poor Japanese design. Whoops!
- judk 13y ago
  The 9/11 attacks were in the President's daily briefing, meaning Bin Laden's gang was known as a more severe threat than some Irish rebel or whoever who might have wanted to cause trouble. It may have been improbable to find the specific attacking individuals before the attacks, but I have seen no evidence that they were known but buried in a haystack of extra noise.
squozzer 13y ago
Sun Tzu believed in spies. And what respectable HN groupie doesn't have a copy of The Art of War, next to a dog-eared copy of The Prince? Then there is the tale of the Lucy spy ring discovering the impending German attack at Kursk. Finally, the Bothans who sacrificed their lives to retrieve the plans for the Death Star.
- rustynails 13y ago
  You also had the Mongols, arguably the most successful nation in history, particularly with conflict. They relied heavily on spies and would often observe for years before the Mongols struck. Ever hear of the Khwarazmian empire? One of the largest middle eastern empires? Worth reading about. The Mongol's success depended largely on spies. Success in this instance means "wiping the empire from the face of the earth", which is obviously subjective.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    You also miss that the times have changed in last thousand years, and that its easier to fake information now, than back then.
- adestefan 13y ago
  Don't forget about Washington's spy ring in Boston and New York. The success of pigeon holing the British into New York and keeping them out of New England was partially due to the success of spying in New York City.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  Finally, the Bothans who sacrificed their lives to retrieve the plans for the Death Star. Oops, bad example! Remember, the Death Star was fully operational and the assault was a trap. Those Bothans died bringing false information.
munin 13y ago
this article has an active agenda and seems to overlook signals intelligence successes against militaries and governments. history is filled with (public) success stories where espionage delivers the goods, ENIGMA, purple, ivy bells, etc... espionage also played a very large role in deception and counterintelligence in concealing facts around d-day from the axis powers. to be fair, espionage and intelligence gets it wrong very often. the goal of intelligence, though, is to find some truth in an uncertain situation and the presence of active deception. this is hard enough when you're talking about figuring out another government. I think there's an interesting argument around whether or not a "traditional" government spy agency is "nimble" enough to analyze and understand modern organized crime and terrorist groups, but it's both an argument that I think intelligence professionals have been having for quite some time, and an argument the author of this blog is not interested in considering...
- willvarfar 13y ago
  The article mentions both enigma and purple. And can you elaborate in which way was ivy bells catch useful?
  - munin 13y ago
    the article states: > was helped by the Poles who had stolen a machine before the outbreak of war, which is false! the poles actually built an ENIGMA after analyzing encrypted traffic, see this book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      So you are saying that the small credit he gave humint in the enigma matter may in fact not be deserved? Surely this makes your argument weaker than ever? Slightly off topic, but you may enjoy this on my blog: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19946053957/enigma-spreadsheet http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19946053957/enigm...
Spooky23 13y ago
This is really naive. Cherrypicking things like Pearl Harbor where the ball was dropped is really the exception proving the rule. The spying that organizations like the NSA against foreign countries, even allies give key insight into what the leadership there is thinking. If you think that there haven't been big wins in diplomatic and other areas from this data, I find that hard to believe. In warfare, there are all sorts of examples that come to mind where spying saved the day. How about the utter destruction of the WW2 U-Boat campaign via interception of communications? Or Patton's "ghost army" of inflatable tanks that combined with double agents misdirected the German defense of Europe?
jleyank 13y ago
Hmm… I would think history suggests spies were pretty successful bootstrapping the Soviet nuclear program towards the end of WW II. I also recall reading how various rocket data/details were obtained from foreign countries post-WW II and there's been a lively, two-sided game of spies for things like submarine operations and control. And unless we're only talking about spies working for a government, industrial espionage has been successful in the tech period. As others have already posted, I assume the original author ignores SIGINT (as there's a long, colorful history of its success) and other "collection" based methods.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  Oh come back and comment when you've read the whole article! There are paragraphs assessing the claims you repeat, even! Geesh.
  - wmil 13y ago
    The problem is that he simply states 1-2 years more quickly as if it's an indisputable fact. The USSR's first nuclear test was in 1949. The UK had access to some Manhattan Project data and didn't detonate a test bomb until 1952. France didn't test a bomb until 1960, and that was arguably the first repeat of the Manhattan Project without data and designs from the project. It's entirely reasonable to assume that the USSR wouldn't have had the bomb until 1964 or so without it's spy network. That would have changed the cold war dramatically.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      The UK had fewer resources and many more important things to do. They built the NHS while we built the military industrial complex.
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      Britain was bankrupt after ww2 and focused on domestic issues and the giving up of empire. France was even more dire and reconstructing. But, whilst Russia was shattered, it diverted far bigger resources to gaining some sense of parity with the US after the war than other countries. The USSR looked to the west as a threat; the Brits and the French didn't fear their ally the US, and didn't need to get a bomb of their own with such urgency (until the USSR got the bomb, that is. Suddenly also having the bomb was strategically important.)
shin_lao 13y ago
Successes are kept secret otherwise you tell your enemies that you can decipher their communications, which will probably make them switch to a new system you may not be able to decrypt. Saying spies never discover anything useful mainly displays a total ignorance for the topic. The most famous counter-example is the breaking of Enigma, to give a SIGINT example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma). In addition, I think the author mixes up the notions of SIGINT and HUMINT. I think we can all come up with at least one example in History where HUMINT was key to victory.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  He does mention the enigma in the article. You read it all? Can you come up with a few humint key to victory examples?
  - shin_lao 13y ago
    The allied intoxicated the axis to make them believe they would land somewhere else (sorry it's another WWII example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard There are many examples during the Cold War, but I'm not sure it can be said "key to victory", if there is any victory to be considered in the first place.
    - weichi 13y ago
      Please read the article. This example actually supports his thesis that "as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct."
      - shin_lao 13y ago
        It's like saying: "it's useless to have a sword, because my enemy will have a shield".
aeonsky 13y ago
I don't know, Richard Sorge pretty much prevented the downfall of the USSR during World War II and shaped the current world.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
asgard1024 13y ago
I have to say, I also don't believe in much of ability of spies (and domestic spying) in actually protecting the nation. In case of war or copying other technology, they may have a lot of merit, as many commenters have said. But if you actually look at the world, most of the small nations do just fine without Internet snooping. If survival of a nation would require to snoop the Internet, all of the small nations (and some are really really small) would be dead. So it's probably a case that someone wants to be a bully, so they need the counterspies to handle all the blowback.
mbq 13y ago
Poles did not stole some single Enigma and smuggled to UK but were successfully breaking the code (Germans weren't stupid and were improving the machine so deciphering its cryptograms was a moving target). The whole project was disclosed and moved to UK when Poland fell under German-Russian occupation.
milliams 13y ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER makes for relevant reading too.
if_by_whisky 13y ago
Didn't the soviet union develop a nuke alarmingly quickly after the U.S.? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
NN88 13y ago
The best spies are the ones you don't hear about so...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
robterrell 13y ago
Just gonna add one more to the pile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
grugq 13y ago
Arguably WWII was won due to the information provided by a spy, Sorge[1]. His timely info to Stalin informing him that the Japanese would not invade Russia allowed Stalin to pull most of his eastern armies back to Moscow. Combined with the Russian winter, the sudden influx of new troops halted and reversed the German advance. This was only possible because the Soviet policy makers understood the __intent__ of the Japanese government. That knowledge was provided by a spy. The purpose of a spy is not to "defeat the enemy", but rather to provide the leadership apparatus with a clear understanding of the capabilities and intents of the other actors in the game. (This is the theory anyway). Usually this is referred to as "reducing uncertainty". The intelligence agencies collect raw information, process it (e.g. determine its veracity, probability for accuracy, etc.) and combine it with existing knowledge to produce "product"... the intelligence output that provides the political leadership with the "best estimate" of what the other actors are capable of doing, and what they plan on doing. (capability and intent). The author appears to have confused SIGINT, HUMINT and covert action (and also doesn't seem to have a clear idea on how spies actually operate). SIGINT is considered particularly useful because it is not subject to the whims, calculations and forgetfulness of a human agent. HUMINT is much more useful in the long run, and this is something that the Russians knew from at least the days of the Okhrana. The Russians wrote the book on HUMINT and have forgotten more about it than the West will ever know. (See "Technophilic Hubris and Espionage Styles During the Cold War" [2]) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge [2] http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/653104.pdf http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/653104.pdf
- TrainedMonkey 13y ago
  Arguably Russian Winter by itself won the war. I do not know if Japanese actually understood that attacking Russia from their front was futile at that time due to several reasons. 1. Russia is big, very big. Traversing Siberia would have taken a long time. Something that they would have to do without any naval support. Can you imagine trying to establish supply lines through Siberia? 2. Add continental winter on top of that and you get no go on Japanese invading USSR. (Temperatures of 15-20 degrees centigrade colder than people living near the ocean are used to). 3. Because China would obviously sit very still, when large portion of Japanese ground forces would be absent. 4. Remember no naval support? Attacking Russia would effectively split Japanese fleet and ground army. I do not know if Japanese understood those simple facts, but Russians sure did. European front was way higher priority than Siberia. An if Japanese did attack, an order of magnitude smaller, more mobile force would had been enough to harass supply lines and stall any progress. It is not only winter time that would have been problematic, when snow melts things are worse for a while due to all the mud. Similar story with Germans, it is not that Russians in monumental effort stopped the advance. They merely stalled German blitzkrieg (while taking heavy losses), and continental winter stopped it. I am not trying to take away from monumental effort thrown by soviets to stop the advance, but ultimately all it came down to: Germans could not advance and adequately deliver supplies and Russians could due to intact railroads. * I am not saying those were only reasons, but people tend to underestimate importance of supply lines and role of winter.
PeterWhittaker 13y ago
Huh. Perhaps true. But completely ignorant of the impact, of the size, of the value of what a single "spy" (read also traitor") can discover (read also "reveal"). Spies and traitors tend to discover/reveal HUGE secrets, e.g., how to make a nuclear weapon, how to crack air defense, exact plans and order of operations for critical engagements, etc. Terrorism doesn't even enter onto the same radar screen as those sorts of things, because all of the terrorism in all of the 20th C amounts to what, the effects of one atomic bomb? (Back of the envelope, not terribly accurate, but gives relevant context.) I'll stipulate that the vast majority of spies never discover anything useful. I'll further stipulate that "vast majority" involves several decimal points, i.e., 99.999% or higher. And I'll assert that it is still worthwhile having spies for what the 0.001% or 0.0001% discover - because they don't go for the low hanging fruit, they go for and get the game changers.

83 points by sdoering 13y ago

tlear 13y ago

USSR point of view: 1. Elimination of opposition abroad, Trotzkyi assassination and many others. 2. Discovery that Japan will not enter war. Results in transfer of Siberian divisions to Moscow that play decisive role in war 3. Plans for operation Citadel. Key point in war in the east 4. Nuclear bomb, author discounts 1-3 years.. that had huge effect on politics around the world Invasion of USSR failure, one of the reason for lack of reaction was that NKVD had apparently established set of citeria that would tell them that Germany of planning an attack. Winter uniforms production, non-freezing oil production and some others.. since none of those were crossed, detailed and very good humint they were getting was discounted. Also he forgets that Nazis also broke a lot of allied codes. If I remember correctly one of the allowed them to know most of the convoy routes through atlantic Also forget that Battle of Midway was basically won because of sigint. Generating believable crap is not that easy.

philwelch 13y ago
Stalin actually had really good intel that Germany was going to invade, he just refused to believe it and had people executed for spreading "disinformation".
- tlear 13y ago
  There are many stories on that.. honestly I think a lot of stuff about Stalin disbelief are pure propaganda aimed at providing an explanation at how bad Soviet army did initially. In reality I think it was a combination of Soviet Army just being really bad initially compared to Germans(remember Germans destroyed French and British without breaking a sweat just a year before) and legitimate conflicting assessments of German army no preparing for war in Russia. This lack of preparation is what cost them in December 1941, if your tank oil freezes.. well you are not going anywhere
  - philwelch 13y ago
    The British evacuated Dunkirk but their Air Force and navy did very well against their German counterparts.
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    Winston Churchill talks about how the Brits sent info to Stalin at the very highest diplomatic levels that he was going to be invaded. And later when Winston met Stalin, Stalin said that he thought he had to do everything to avoid provoking the Germans as they had started their previous war by pretending to have been attacked by the Poles. Stalin said that he hoped he had more time. So its easy to read into this account that Stalin knew well that he was probably going to be attacked, and rather than 'not wanting to believe it' in a wishful way, rather balanced doing nothing to provoke Germany with taking defensive steps and decided on the former course rationally.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      Something I've read a lot of places but is hard to track down--apparently there was one incident where a German communist actually defected to the USSR, warned them that Germany was preparing to invade, and was literally executed for spreading disinformation. He also disappeared to his dacha and reportedly seemed to have an emotional breakdown when the invasion did happen. The fact that Stalin tried to play this off to Churchill doesn't really refute anything. You don't become a legendary dictator and erect statues and portraits of yourself everywhere without being a little prideful.
  - memracom 13y ago
    I just watched a Soviet film called Gosudarstvennaya Granitsa (State Borders) which showed various events in the evolution of the Soviet Border Patrol, and in the 5th film, about a few days around the invasion. In it they showed border guards doing a lot of dumb things including being woefully unprepared. So even the Soviets acknowledged that there was a lot of military incompetence around the German invasion. Later on, they got a lot more serious about competence in their military forces, and won the war while the victorious Germans, gloating about overcoming their enemy and having captured such an astounding amount of territory, let down their guard and paid the price.

cstross 13y ago

Misleading title: the article is really about why spies never discover anything useful about other nations. They're really, really good at infiltrating internal dissident groups and spy (or terrorist) hunts serve as a great pretext for domestic repression ...

7schlaefer 13y ago
[...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks]
7schlaefer 13y ago
[...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks]
7schlaefer 13y ago
[...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks etc.], because that is the implied reason for having spys.
7schlaefer 13y ago
[...] useful [to prevent terrorist attacks etc.], because that is the implied reason for having spys.

walshemj 13y ago

Author doesn't seem to know what the difference between a sigint organization NSA/GCHQ and a Humint one is or even what the difference between an officer and a spy is. Both GCHQ and NSA can point to successes as can all the major players in the spy game would Stalin have got the bomb so quickly without spies. Or the success of the XX committee. Or from the other side the Cambridge 5 where certainly effective. And do you think binladen would not have been found and killed if it wasn't for spies run by CIA officers?

C13slam 13y ago
Thoughtful article but I agree with walshemj. Saying 'spy' is like saying 'engineer'. Who/what exactly do you mean? The NSA is but 1 of 16 US spy agencies. (Now that is an article worth writing...16 spy agencies...)
- talmand 13y ago
  Sixteen that we know of...
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    and plenty of others that have black budgets, have no "official" oversight and don't need congressional approval to do anything.
dragontamer 13y ago
Beyond Bin Laden: but figuring out the viability of attacking the Nuclear Arsenal of Iran, determining who is Friend / Foe in Syria vs Friend/Foe in Lybia (notice how we have decided that all parties in Syria are enemies: saving us considerable amounts of money. Also, that prevented the US from entering another war. Our only concern is the Chemical weapons that we have known about) Speaking of Syria: spies and so forth were who determined whether or not Syria even _used_ chemical weapons. http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/26/idf-intercept-shows-syrian-army-used-chemical-weapons/ http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/26/idf-intercept-shows-sy... It was a SIGINT Intercept. Spies are extrodinarily useful for figuring out the truth when international incidents occur. And knowing who is lying, why they're lying, what their motivations are, etc. etc. These are all important foreign-intelligence missions that Spies do their best to figure out for their country. -------------- Now of course, spies get it wrong sometimes. The famous Iraq situation was brought about because the CIA focused on one bit of evidence that turned out to be falsified. But nonetheless, the general "intelligence successes" strongly outweigh the "intelligence failures" in the past decades.

mathattack 13y ago

I think the key insight is if enough people provide misinformation, the real information is useless since it's hard to tell what is true. One could say that this over-feeding of information contributed to why folks didn't see 9/11 coming. Yes there were drops of clues, but they were lost in the firehose. I also believe that information needs to be acted on to be relevant. This is why corporate espionage isn't very helpful. You can throw a monkey wrench into a competitor's market trials, but IP is very hard to copy. Having a copy of somoene else's source code only gets you so far - you need people who actually understand it. Having blueprints to someone's plant only gives you clues - you actually need someone who understands it enough and can overcome Not Invented Here syndrome to make value judgments. I recall an anecdote from the 80s where an American car company was taking apart a Lexus. They concluded that their cars were superior in every way, and that all the design decisions were a result of poor Japanese design. Whoops!

judk 13y ago
The 9/11 attacks were in the President's daily briefing, meaning Bin Laden's gang was known as a more severe threat than some Irish rebel or whoever who might have wanted to cause trouble. It may have been improbable to find the specific attacking individuals before the attacks, but I have seen no evidence that they were known but buried in a haystack of extra noise.

squozzer 13y ago

Sun Tzu believed in spies. And what respectable HN groupie doesn't have a copy of The Art of War, next to a dog-eared copy of The Prince? Then there is the tale of the Lucy spy ring discovering the impending German attack at Kursk. Finally, the Bothans who sacrificed their lives to retrieve the plans for the Death Star.

rustynails 13y ago
You also had the Mongols, arguably the most successful nation in history, particularly with conflict. They relied heavily on spies and would often observe for years before the Mongols struck. Ever hear of the Khwarazmian empire? One of the largest middle eastern empires? Worth reading about. The Mongol's success depended largely on spies. Success in this instance means "wiping the empire from the face of the earth", which is obviously subjective.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  You also miss that the times have changed in last thousand years, and that its easier to fake information now, than back then.
adestefan 13y ago
Don't forget about Washington's spy ring in Boston and New York. The success of pigeon holing the British into New York and keeping them out of New England was partially due to the success of spying in New York City.
Zimahl 13y ago
Finally, the Bothans who sacrificed their lives to retrieve the plans for the Death Star. Oops, bad example! Remember, the Death Star was fully operational and the assault was a trap. Those Bothans died bringing false information.

munin 13y ago

this article has an active agenda and seems to overlook signals intelligence successes against militaries and governments. history is filled with (public) success stories where espionage delivers the goods, ENIGMA, purple, ivy bells, etc... espionage also played a very large role in deception and counterintelligence in concealing facts around d-day from the axis powers. to be fair, espionage and intelligence gets it wrong very often. the goal of intelligence, though, is to find some truth in an uncertain situation and the presence of active deception. this is hard enough when you're talking about figuring out another government. I think there's an interesting argument around whether or not a "traditional" government spy agency is "nimble" enough to analyze and understand modern organized crime and terrorist groups, but it's both an argument that I think intelligence professionals have been having for quite some time, and an argument the author of this blog is not interested in considering...

willvarfar 13y ago
The article mentions both enigma and purple. And can you elaborate in which way was ivy bells catch useful?
- munin 13y ago
  the article states: > was helped by the Poles who had stolen a machine before the outbreak of war, which is false! the poles actually built an ENIGMA after analyzing encrypted traffic, see this book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743217349
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    So you are saying that the small credit he gave humint in the enigma matter may in fact not be deserved? Surely this makes your argument weaker than ever? Slightly off topic, but you may enjoy this on my blog: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19946053957/enigma-spreadsheet http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/19946053957/enigm...

Spooky23 13y ago

This is really naive. Cherrypicking things like Pearl Harbor where the ball was dropped is really the exception proving the rule. The spying that organizations like the NSA against foreign countries, even allies give key insight into what the leadership there is thinking. If you think that there haven't been big wins in diplomatic and other areas from this data, I find that hard to believe. In warfare, there are all sorts of examples that come to mind where spying saved the day. How about the utter destruction of the WW2 U-Boat campaign via interception of communications? Or Patton's "ghost army" of inflatable tanks that combined with double agents misdirected the German defense of Europe?

jleyank 13y ago

Hmm… I would think history suggests spies were pretty successful bootstrapping the Soviet nuclear program towards the end of WW II. I also recall reading how various rocket data/details were obtained from foreign countries post-WW II and there's been a lively, two-sided game of spies for things like submarine operations and control. And unless we're only talking about spies working for a government, industrial espionage has been successful in the tech period. As others have already posted, I assume the original author ignores SIGINT (as there's a long, colorful history of its success) and other "collection" based methods.

willvarfar 13y ago
Oh come back and comment when you've read the whole article! There are paragraphs assessing the claims you repeat, even! Geesh.
- wmil 13y ago
  The problem is that he simply states 1-2 years more quickly as if it's an indisputable fact. The USSR's first nuclear test was in 1949. The UK had access to some Manhattan Project data and didn't detonate a test bomb until 1952. France didn't test a bomb until 1960, and that was arguably the first repeat of the Manhattan Project without data and designs from the project. It's entirely reasonable to assume that the USSR wouldn't have had the bomb until 1964 or so without it's spy network. That would have changed the cold war dramatically.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    The UK had fewer resources and many more important things to do. They built the NHS while we built the military industrial complex.
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    Britain was bankrupt after ww2 and focused on domestic issues and the giving up of empire. France was even more dire and reconstructing. But, whilst Russia was shattered, it diverted far bigger resources to gaining some sense of parity with the US after the war than other countries. The USSR looked to the west as a threat; the Brits and the French didn't fear their ally the US, and didn't need to get a bomb of their own with such urgency (until the USSR got the bomb, that is. Suddenly also having the bomb was strategically important.)

shin_lao 13y ago

Successes are kept secret otherwise you tell your enemies that you can decipher their communications, which will probably make them switch to a new system you may not be able to decrypt. Saying spies never discover anything useful mainly displays a total ignorance for the topic. The most famous counter-example is the breaking of Enigma, to give a SIGINT example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma). In addition, I think the author mixes up the notions of SIGINT and HUMINT. I think we can all come up with at least one example in History where HUMINT was key to victory.

willvarfar 13y ago
He does mention the enigma in the article. You read it all? Can you come up with a few humint key to victory examples?
- shin_lao 13y ago
  The allied intoxicated the axis to make them believe they would land somewhere else (sorry it's another WWII example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard There are many examples during the Cold War, but I'm not sure it can be said "key to victory", if there is any victory to be considered in the first place.
  - weichi 13y ago
    Please read the article. This example actually supports his thesis that "as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct."
    - shin_lao 13y ago
      It's like saying: "it's useless to have a sword, because my enemy will have a shield".

aeonsky 13y ago

I don't know, Richard Sorge pretty much prevented the downfall of the USSR during World War II and shaped the current world.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

asgard1024 13y ago

I have to say, I also don't believe in much of ability of spies (and domestic spying) in actually protecting the nation. In case of war or copying other technology, they may have a lot of merit, as many commenters have said. But if you actually look at the world, most of the small nations do just fine without Internet snooping. If survival of a nation would require to snoop the Internet, all of the small nations (and some are really really small) would be dead. So it's probably a case that someone wants to be a bully, so they need the counterspies to handle all the blowback.

mbq 13y ago

Poles did not stole some single Enigma and smuggled to UK but were successfully breaking the code (Germans weren't stupid and were improving the machine so deciphering its cryptograms was a moving target). The whole project was disclosed and moved to UK when Poland fell under German-Russian occupation.

milliams 13y ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER makes for relevant reading too.

if_by_whisky 13y ago

Didn't the soviet union develop a nuke alarmingly quickly after the U.S.? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

NN88 13y ago

The best spies are the ones you don't hear about so...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

robterrell 13y ago

Just gonna add one more to the pile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram

grugq 13y ago

Arguably WWII was won due to the information provided by a spy, Sorge[1]. His timely info to Stalin informing him that the Japanese would not invade Russia allowed Stalin to pull most of his eastern armies back to Moscow. Combined with the Russian winter, the sudden influx of new troops halted and reversed the German advance. This was only possible because the Soviet policy makers understood the __intent__ of the Japanese government. That knowledge was provided by a spy. The purpose of a spy is not to "defeat the enemy", but rather to provide the leadership apparatus with a clear understanding of the capabilities and intents of the other actors in the game. (This is the theory anyway). Usually this is referred to as "reducing uncertainty". The intelligence agencies collect raw information, process it (e.g. determine its veracity, probability for accuracy, etc.) and combine it with existing knowledge to produce "product"... the intelligence output that provides the political leadership with the "best estimate" of what the other actors are capable of doing, and what they plan on doing. (capability and intent). The author appears to have confused SIGINT, HUMINT and covert action (and also doesn't seem to have a clear idea on how spies actually operate). SIGINT is considered particularly useful because it is not subject to the whims, calculations and forgetfulness of a human agent. HUMINT is much more useful in the long run, and this is something that the Russians knew from at least the days of the Okhrana. The Russians wrote the book on HUMINT and have forgotten more about it than the West will ever know. (See "Technophilic Hubris and Espionage Styles During the Cold War" [2]) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge [2] http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/653104.pdf http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/653104.pdf

TrainedMonkey 13y ago
Arguably Russian Winter by itself won the war. I do not know if Japanese actually understood that attacking Russia from their front was futile at that time due to several reasons. 1. Russia is big, very big. Traversing Siberia would have taken a long time. Something that they would have to do without any naval support. Can you imagine trying to establish supply lines through Siberia? 2. Add continental winter on top of that and you get no go on Japanese invading USSR. (Temperatures of 15-20 degrees centigrade colder than people living near the ocean are used to). 3. Because China would obviously sit very still, when large portion of Japanese ground forces would be absent. 4. Remember no naval support? Attacking Russia would effectively split Japanese fleet and ground army. I do not know if Japanese understood those simple facts, but Russians sure did. European front was way higher priority than Siberia. An if Japanese did attack, an order of magnitude smaller, more mobile force would had been enough to harass supply lines and stall any progress. It is not only winter time that would have been problematic, when snow melts things are worse for a while due to all the mud. Similar story with Germans, it is not that Russians in monumental effort stopped the advance. They merely stalled German blitzkrieg (while taking heavy losses), and continental winter stopped it. I am not trying to take away from monumental effort thrown by soviets to stop the advance, but ultimately all it came down to: Germans could not advance and adequately deliver supplies and Russians could due to intact railroads. * I am not saying those were only reasons, but people tend to underestimate importance of supply lines and role of winter.

PeterWhittaker 13y ago

Huh. Perhaps true. But completely ignorant of the impact, of the size, of the value of what a single "spy" (read also traitor") can discover (read also "reveal"). Spies and traitors tend to discover/reveal HUGE secrets, e.g., how to make a nuclear weapon, how to crack air defense, exact plans and order of operations for critical engagements, etc. Terrorism doesn't even enter onto the same radar screen as those sorts of things, because all of the terrorism in all of the 20th C amounts to what, the effects of one atomic bomb? (Back of the envelope, not terribly accurate, but gives relevant context.) I'll stipulate that the vast majority of spies never discover anything useful. I'll further stipulate that "vast majority" involves several decimal points, i.e., 99.999% or higher. And I'll assert that it is still worthwhile having spies for what the 0.001% or 0.0001% discover - because they don't go for the low hanging fruit, they go for and get the game changers.