What Happened to MI1 -- MI4? Submitted by Will Chabun

What happened to MI1 - MI4? 

MI5 was founded as the Home Section of the Secret Service Bureau. It was part of the War Office in the First World War, between 1916 and 1918. During this time it was renamed MI5, referring to its status as the fifth branch of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (see the FAQ "Where does the name "MI5" come from and why is this name still used?"). In the Second World War, MI5 was independent of the War Office, though it worked closely with it. 

There were a number of MI (Military Intelligence) sections within the War Office's Directorate of Military Intelligence during both the First and Second World Wars. There were eventually ten MI sections during the First World War and seventeen by the end of the Second World War. The number of MI sections and their precise functions varied considerably as the demands of the war effort changed. 

Few had anything to do with secret intelligence. For instance, MI4 during the First World War was responsible for supplying military maps, while MI9 during the Second World War helped Allied troops to evade and escape from behind enemy lines. 

All of these sections, with the exception of our colleagues in the SIS (MI6), were later discontinued or absorbed into other organizations. 

Source: https://www.mi5.gov.uk/faq 

MI2, the British Military Intelligence Section 2, was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. It was originally set up to handle geographic information. MI2a handled the Americas (excluding Canada), Spain, Portugal, Italy, Liberia, Tangier, and the Balkans. MI2b handled the Ottoman Empire, Trans-Caucasus, Arabia, Sinai, Abyssinia, North Africa excluding French and Spanish possessions, Egypt, and the Sudan.

After the First World War, its role was changed to handle Russian and Scandinavian intelligence. These functions were absorbed into MI3 in 1941. 

MI4 was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, Section 4, part of the War Office. It was responsible for aerial reconnaissance and interpretation. It developed into the JARIC intelligence agency. The present day successor agency to MI4 is the Defence Intelligence Fusion Centre.[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI7 - propaganda and laison with British news media 

MI8, or Military Intelligence, Section 8 was a British Military Intelligence group responsible for signals intelligence and was created in 1914. It originally consisted of four sections: MI8(a), which dealt with wireless policy; MI8(b), based at the General Post Office, dealt with commercial and trade cables; MI8(c) dealt with the distribution of intelligence derived from censorship; and MI8(d), which liaised with the cable companies. During World War I MI8 officers were posted to the cable terminals at Poldhu Point and Mullion in Cornwall and Clifden in County Galway, continued until 1917 when the work was taken over by the Admiralty. In WW2, MI8 was responsible for the extensive War Office Y Group and briefly, for the Radio Security Service. 

MI9, the British Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 9, was a department of the War Office between 1939 and 1945. During World War II it was tasked with supporting available European Resistance networks and making use of them to assist Allied airmen shot down over Europe in returning to Britain. MI-9 infiltrated agents, usually by parachute, into occupied Europe. These agents would link up with a Resistance cell and organize escape-and-evasion efforts in a particular area, usually after being notified by the Resistance of the presence of downed airmen. The agents brought false papers, money and maps to assist the downed airmen.

MOSCOW RULES -- a book review by Will Chabun

 

Anthony “Tony” Mendez was close to a legend in CIA circles. He spent several decades in the agency’s technical services arm, specializing in forgeries and then in disguises.

He quarterbacked the exfiltration (love that word!) of six American diplomats from Tehran (q.v. “the Canadian caper”) in February 1980.

He also spent more than a little time in Moscow.

All through the decades, he also had a front-row seat to the developments in tradecraft (the mechanics of spying, notably how you meet with agents).

Moscow is rightly regarded as the toughest place in the world to practice the intelligence craft — a “denied area”, in spyspeak.

Soviet counterespionage (the KGB or Committee for State Security) had thousands of officers there that it could assign to surveillance work, and it did not need to fret about a subject’s legal rights either.

No surprise, then, that for many years, American spy efforts in Moscow were modest.

To begin with, the U.S. did not have a permanent foreign intelligence service until 1947, decades after the British and Soviet agencies had begun. The elderly apartment building that had become the American embassy in 1935 was honeycombed with listening devices and the local staff the Soviets forced the Americans to use were all informers.

As a result, Mendez says the CIA throughout the 1950s had no human sources in Russia – not a single one. That is why so much emphasis was put on the U-2 spyplane program and electronic listening stations on the edge of the Soviet empire. So bad was the spying situation that when a Russian GRU officer came forward with information on Soviet intentions during the Cuban missile crisis, the Americans had to ask the British intelligence service (MI6) to meet him in Moscow and take his information.

The CIA director of counterespionage, the paranoid James Angleton, was convinced that every Soviet “walk-in” was a “dangle” sent by the KGB to trick the Americans with false information.

In the face of all that, the aging Ivy League preppies who ran the CIA 60 years ago decided that running agents in Moscow was not worth the danger and political risk.

What turned things around was the retirement of the wartime generation of operations officers and managers. Angleton was pushed out. A new chief of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe section did some research and found the KGB had so little trust in its own officers that it had never “dangled“ one of them to the CIA – apparently fearing they would give away priceless information, then leave the country.

A new generation of CIA case officers -- the people who deal with sources -- began pushing for more aggressive action. A CIA officer in Prague learned from experience that the local counterespionage types were creatures of habit, so he began developing “the brush pass” – an ultradiscreeet handoff to get a small package from a source to a handler.

“If the right techniques were used, anything was possible,” Mendez writes.

The CIA got its first female operations officer and sent her to Moscow, where she operated successfully, picking up information from a KGB officer who’d been recruited in Columbia. She continued this for several years before being caught and (as a diplomat) expelled — the cost of doing business.

One of the products of this era were “the Moscow rules” a checklist of attitudes and practical tips to make the intelligence officers handler’s life easier and safer. (See below)

Mendez entered this world in the mid-1960s, hired out of a job as a technical illustrator for a defense
contractor. He became the CIA chief of disguise in 1974 and soon found himself picking the brain of a legendary Hollywood make up artist, and also those of a magician, to teach young agents how to use deception and distraction to do their jobs. CIA technicians between jobs in Bangkok came up with the idea of a “jack in the box” that could be opened in a car in seconds, giving the impression a person was still occupying a seat vacated by a human agent.

Other CIA technicians in Washington came up with the Discus: a handheld device using a stylus to compose messages that could be beamed a few hundred metres to another one.

But the second half of the 1980s saw the pendulum of spying swing back toward the Soviets.

An eccentric American ambassador removed the few curbs on Russian civilian staff in the American embassy. Marine Corps guards were seduced to get into the few secured areas in the building. The KGB started bombarding the embassy and apartments the apartments of American diplomats with low intensity microwaves designed to make personnel sick.

Key loggers were found in the electric typewriters in the embassy and cameras in the photocopiers.

When American diplomats were on holidays at work or on holidays, KGB agents would break into their apartments, steal goods and even kill pets, Mendez says.

Worse, the Soviets succeeded having several agents in the very heart of American intelligence.

This brings us to the topic of MICE, the acronym explaining why people commit espionage: take the first letters of the words money, ideology, coercion and ego -- the latter being a sense that one’s talents were being overlooked and that “I’ll show them!”

That was typified by Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who thought he was undervalued.

Money was the motivator for Aldrich Ames, an undistinguished CIA middle manager who, with his spendthrift wife, ran up huge bills.

By the time they were caught and jailed, the Soviet Union had collapsed and transformed into the Confederation of Independent States and then Russia. The feared KGB was divided into the Federal Security Bureau and the SVR, the new foreign intelligence service, which operated in competition with the GRU, or military intelligence.

The first few years under new management was chaotic and saw the release of archival documents proving that the Soviets had hundreds of agents in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, though virtually all of them had been caught or expelled by the time Senator Joe McCarthy started his ferocious witch hunt in 1950.

Very quickly, though, the Russian SVR and GRU was back in business. Remember the dozen agents caught in New York, trying to cozy up to the city’s movers and shakers? And the assassination plots (one successful, one not) against Russian defectors in the UK?

Can’t forget the recent hacks at US government agencies, a digital raid attributed to the Russians by just about everybody -- except Donald Trump. Hmmmmm.

 

MOSCOW RULES

 

•  Murphy is right.

•  Never go against your gut.

•  Everyone is potentially under opposition control.

•  Don't look back; you are never completely alone.

•  Go with the flow; use the terrain.

•  Take the natural break of traffic.

•  Maintain a natural pace.

•  Establish a distinctive and dynamic profile and pattern.

•  Stay consistent over time.

•  Vary your pattern and stay within your profile.

•  Be nonthreatening; keep them relaxed. Mesmerize!

•  Lull them into a sense of complacency.

•  Know the opposition and their terrain intimately.

•  Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.

•  Don't harass the opposition.

•  Make sure they can anticipate your destination.

•  Pick the time and the place for action.

•  Any operation can be aborted; if it feels wrong, then it is

wrong.

•  Keep your options open.

•  If your gut says to act, overwhelm their senses.

•  Use misdirection, illusion, and deception.

•  Hide small operative motions in larger nonthreatening motions.

•  Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.

•  When free, in obscura (IO – literally, in the dark and masked from enemy surveillance), immediately change direction and leave the area.

•  Break your trail, and blend into the local scene.

•  Execute a surveillance-detection run designed to draw them out over time.

•  Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is an enemy action.

•  Avoid static lookouts; stay away from choke points where they can reacquire you.

•  Select an IO (in obscura) or meeting site so you can overlook the scene.

•  Keep any asset separated from you by time and distance until it is time.

•  If the asset has surveillance, then the operation has gone bad.

•  Only approach the site when you are sure it is clean.

•  After the IO meeting or act is done, close the loop at a logical cover destination.

•  Be aware of surveillance's time tolerance so they aren't forced to raise an alert.

•  If an alert is issued, they must pay a price, and so must you.

•  Let them believe they lost you; act innocent.

•  There is no limit to a human being's ability to rationalize the truth.

•  Technology will always let you down.

•  Never fall in love with your agent.

•  Betrayal may come from within. 

 

Review: Agents of Influence – A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II, by Henry Hemming/Will Chabun

 

Agents of Influence/Henry Hemming

A world turned topsy-turvy, a hotly contested presidential election, an isolationist demagogue and murky rumours of interference by foreign intelligence services.

Sound familiar?

 

It was the summer of 1940.

At the core of this book is a Prairie kid named Bill Stephenson. Life in Winnipeg had been rough. His father died when he was four and his hard-pressed mother, with two other children, decided the boy would best be raised by friends, as was common in their mutual Icelandic tradition. His new family was kind, but young Stephenson was clearly affected by this.

He joined the Canadian army during the First World War before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. He served with distinction until he was shot down and sent to a German prisoner of war camp, where he swiped a locally made can opener and mused about patenting it outside Germany.

When he returned to Winnipeg, Stephenson’s war record brought entrée to many circles but all this was dashed when one of his business ventures collapsed in 1922. He moved to Britain; his only asset was that little can opener, which he patented under his own name. This gave the capital to launch more business ventures, ones that did well enough to make him wealthy even as the depression of the 1930s went on.

To protect his enterprises, he organized an informal commercial intelligence network across Europe. Through this, he encountered British MP Winston Churchill, who was impressed by Stephenson’s grasp of the threat from resurgent Nazi Germany. Stephenson drifted into the orbit of MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. After Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he was sent to New York as what could be called the regional manager for all British security services in North and South America -- areas that so far in the war had very low priority for Britain.

That changed in June 1940, as France collapsed and the British Expeditionary Force was chased off the European continent at Dunkirk. Suddenly, getting money and arms from the United States became top priority for Britain -- and for Stephenson.

This book, written by a man whose grandfather was a close friend of Stephenson, describes the next 18 months in the life of Stephenson and the United States.

Among American voters, only one in 10 that summer thought the U.S. should aid Britain, and there was a growing “America First” neutrality movement getting money and encouragement from the German embassy. Working without pay, Stephenson spent his own money leasing and fitting out offices in central Manhattan, into which a steady stream of British intelligence officers, propagandists and public relations operatives came. (Mindful of the widespread American aversion to upper-class British accents, Stephenson hired plenty of Canadian secretaries. Local folklore holds that some of these women worked in the Saskatchewan civil service as late as the 1980s.)

American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1940 seeking his third term, was also worried by Hitler’s war machine but had to tread carefully because of the coming election, with the Republican party in the thrall of isolationists who wanted nothing to do with Europe and its rivalries. The GOP presidential candidate, businessman Wendell Wilkie, was also wary of Germany, but wanted to keep his party behind him. Still, FDR was able to arrange a deal to send 50 elderly destroyers to Britain (Canada got seven of them) and to create a draft (or conscription) system.

Britain’s fortunes looked worst around the end of 1940. Its economic situation was desperate and isolationists were riding high, thanks to the entry of Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero – and also the son of a fiercely isolationist Republican Congressman into the debate.

Lindbergh’s logic was that Germany’s armed forces were too powerful to be beaten. The best America could do would be to seek a peace deal in Europe. German atrocities? What atrocities?

Around the same time, Lord Lothian, Britain’s highly competent ambassador to the US, died of natural causes, and was replaced by a dud. The German embassy was already active in stoking the isolationist mood and had several “tame” congressmen speaking on this issue and even sending out pamphlets on it. (More on this later.)

The only good news (for Britain and Canada) was the re-election of Roosevelt, who began work on a “lend-lease” program. As he put it, imagine your neighbour’s house was on fire. You are a good neighbour, so you loan him your hose to put it out. You don’t want payment, only the return of the hose. Similarly, he proposed to ship weapons to Britain -- providing they someday be returned. Giving more aid to Britain improved America’s chance of staying out of the war, he argued.

Then, a dramatic development. Free from electoral politics, Wilkie appeared before a Senate committee to counter Lindbergh’s appeasement testimony, and also went on a fact-finding tour to Britain, where he met everybody from the king and queen to factory hands. He returned fired up for a fight.

Meanwhile, Stephenson’s people continued their work, setting up or bankrolling pro-British organizations and digging up dirt on German diplomats and isolationist politicians. More good news came when Roosevelt authorized American troops to set up a base in Greenland (hinting that Germany wanted to grab this Danish territory) and authorized the US Navy to carry out armed patrols in the western Atlantic. Conversations from that period indicate Roosevelt was secretly expecting for a German attack on American warships, thus bringing US public opinion to his side.

When isolationists, by now operating under the “America First” brand, held a rally in Manhattan in April 1941, Stephenson’s staff arranged for pro-British organizations to picket it. Fighting broke out and sympathetic newspapers devoted plenty of space to women protesters roughed up by America Firsters – the insinuation being they were Nazi brutes.

By now, support for Britain was at 20 per cent – and rising.

Stephenson’s workers got astrologers to predict bad fates for Nazi leaders. Lindbergh soared in influence, then came back down toward earth, his wings clipped by rumours and accusations planted by Stephenson’s men, and also by his own hubris: in one speech he went “off message” and lashed out at Jews for antagonizing the Nazis. Blame the victim.

Stephenson, meanwhile, played up stories of (rather rare) British military successes and invented others that could not possibly be checked out. British executives in two major polling companies, Gallup and Roper, occasionally planted softball questions that increased the apparent support for American intervention against the Nazis.

Meanwhile, things were not going well for Lindbergh. He was accused of admiring Nazi Germany. And when the air conditioning failed as he spoke in a Philadelphia arena in May 1941 he impulsively suggested “Jews” had turned it off. Widespread outrage did not stop Lindbergh from talking about American’s “Jewish problem,” implying they were setting themselves up for a backlash by opposing Germany and backing Britain.

More problems were ahead. With help from Stephenson’s allies, a New York advertising specialist confirmed that the German embassy’s “tame” congressmen had been using their “franking” or mailing privileges to send out huge volumes of pro-German brochures. This went viral in New York, then across the rest of the country and prompted Roosevelt to close all German consulates.

Stephenson’s British Security Co-ordination then twisted in the knife by faking a letter indicating a German plan to stage coups in several South American countries. This British-Canadian forgery was blamed by Berlin on Roosevelt, who knew nothing of it and became enraged at the accusation. No connection, but Roosevelt announced in May 1941 that a national state of emergency existed and sent US Marines to garrison Iceland, and the US Navy to escort convoys originating in the US as far east as Iceland.

Mid-September saw a US destroyer drop four depth charges on a U-boat, which replied by firing two torpedoes. Nobody was hurt, but tension clearly was rising.

That same month, Lindbergh fatally overplayed his hand. In a speech carried nationwide by radio from Indianapolis, he spoke about “a Jewish conspiracy to bring the US into the war.” Stephenson’s allies had infiltrated the meeting and the radio audience heard not only Lindbergh’s remarks but frequent booing. The national response was near-total outrage at Lindbergh’s claims. There were even calls for his name to be removed from bridge and monuments.

FDR’s support now was up to 67 per cent.

The next month, the destroyer USS Kearny, operating in the Atlantic, was torpedoed by a U-boat. 115 American sailors were killed. Lindbergh left the America First movement and by November FDR’s support was up to 85 per cent.

Then came Japan’s Pearl Harbour attack. America rose up righteous anger. Germany, for whatever reason, declared war on the US a few days later, and the rest is history.

In an attempt to redeem himself, Lindbergh (too old for active military service) signed on as a technical representative with Lockheed Aircraft and went to the south Pacific in 1943 to tutor young pilots on setting their engines to get the best possible power and endurance. It is widely reported that Lindbergh unofficially flew in combat and unofficially shot down a few Japanese aircraft. But the taint lingered. Even today, there is a movement to get Lindbergh’s name taken off San Diego’s airport.

American author Philip Roth got a good novel out of a hypothetical situation: suppose Lindbergh had moved earlier and won the Republican presidential nomination in 1940, and then the presidency. It paints a picture of rising anti-semitism and even a plan to forcibly resettle American Jews into the American West and Southwest. Lindbergh disappears in 1942 and the ensuing chaos sees anti-Jewish riots and, out of the turmoil, the re-election of Roosevelt.)

Back to reality. A major theme of this book is how British intelligence helped get the US into the Second World War. Nobody complains about that. The carbon-copy Russian operation to embarrass and defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 is, by those who acknowledge it took place, shocking. So what’s the difference?

The answer, of course, is the end game. Stephenson and his crew were assigned to halt the Nazi war machine; Russia’s meddling was about defeating Clinton, a strong critic of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine and the Baltic states, and thus avoiding economic sanctions and travel bans for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and his henchmen. Can they even be compared?

“Both campaigns were probably approved by the respective leaders, Churchill and Putin, and were successful in the sense that the goal they had been working toward came to pass,” wrote author Hemming in his summary. “To what extent these covert operations were directly responsible for this is an open and contentious question. Cause and affect in the field of influence campaigns will always be hard to measure exactly. But a lack of precision is not the same as a lack of impact.”

-        By Will Chabun

Spies of No Country —Behind Enemy Lines at the Birth of the Israeli Secret Service by Matti Friedman. Submitted by Will Chabun

 

If you are looking for amazing tales of Israel’s highly professional Mossad secret intelligence agency, then you will be disappointed.

This book actually is about the origins of the Mossad, before it was anything but sophisticated.

Let us go back to 1941, when our side was losing the Second World War. German troops were in the western suburbs of Moscow and fighting a back-and-forth battle with British Empire troops in the North African desert. By the end of the year, Japan had entered the war, capturing huge chunks of territory in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma and threatening India.

Serious people feared the Germans would thrust south from the Black Sea and meet the Japanese in India.

Britain’s Special Operations Executive, fearing the worst, began organizing “stay behind” squads that would gather intelligence and commit sabotage in case Palestine was occupied. Having no love for the Nazis, young Jews – many of whom spoke fluent German -- there signed up.

Fast forward to 1947, when the Second World War was barely over and those European Jews who had survived the Nazis and their holocaust were trying desperately to get to a safe place. Palestine filled the bill as Jews had lived there since antiquity. But there were also many Muslims (who naturally were less than interested in sharing their barren land with outsiders) and the whole place had been run under a mandate given to Britain by the League of Nations after the collapse of the rickety Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Drained by the vast cost of the Second World War and the financial and human price of keeping Arabs and Jews from killing each other, the British in mid 1947 announced their intention to leave the troubled territory in several months. The new United Nations then decided to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews. No details. Run along and make nice, chaps.

There then followed a period when Palestine essentially had no government but much hostility between Arabs and Jews, the luckless British stuck in the middle. (If you watch the recent Australian TV series A Place To Call Home, you know that the core of its story is the prickly, sometimes violent, relationship between the wife of a Jewish physician jailed and tortured by the Nazis, and the widow of a British diplomat murdered by Jewish terrorists in Palestine.)

Soon the armies of five Arab states mobilized to attack Israel. Against them were several Jewish armed groups, ranging from the Palmach (made up of hardline socialists) to the Haganah, whose members drew their inspiration from the US and western Europe.

 

It was in this period that Jewish resistance leaders (including those trained by the SOE five years earlier) decided they needed not only a ragtag army but a ragtag intelligence service to discern the mood and intentions of the Arabs around them.

Jewish (remember that the state of Israel did not exist yet – hence the name of this book) resistance leaders had one advantage. The Jewish population in Palestine, then as now, was a mix of people from Europe and also from the Arab world. For centuries, there had been substantial Jewish communities in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq – Friedman says Baghdad was one-third Jewish in the early 1940s. These Jews could speak Arabic and local dialects and were familiar, sometimes very familiar, with Arab cultural practices. And by 1947, these same people were facing violent pressure to leave the Arab world. They provided a ready-made pool of recruits for the young intelligence service under the name “the Arab Section”.

Their training was minimal, their communication systems stunningly crude -- no more than letters, sometimes even written in code and mailed from places like Beirut. One recruit foolishly talked about his assignment with his stepmother – who quickly told everybody in their village. Another, a man of considerable talent as a spy, was able to extract a promise from his controller that he wouldn’t have to kill anybody. The Arab’s Section’s “headquarters” was a corner of a shack near Tel Aviv.

Author Friedman, got onto this story through a retired Mossad agent who said the section’s last member might be willing to talk about his adventures. He was indeed – and Friedman was able to find written and oral histories left by the spy’s colleagues in the section. He also found information in declassified files and in two histories of the Mossad written in Hebrew, but never circulated beyond Israel.

The author makes the points that casualties among these agents were quite high and there is no empirical way of assessing their effectiveness. (Friedman figures the high point of the Beirut agents’ work was getting a bomb aboard Hitler’s former yacht, being converted in Beirut into a warship. Their bomb went off late – so late that all manner of other, non-Jewish groups and factions were blamed for the blast.)

Assessing their contribution, Friedman says, “they were one of the ‘seeds’ of the Mossad. They were the ‘school’ that came up with Israeli intelligence doctrine – not by learning it from someone, but by trial and error.”

    -Will Chabun