[Spooks] ny times article

[reverend pak-a-la-ka]

This article from NYTimes.com 
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The Spook Awards

July 11, 2002
By WILLIAM SAFIRE 




 

LONDON 

How fare the espionage agencies? Who's hot and who's
not?
Most agents and spymasters resolutely refuse to talk
about
their own agencies, but cheerfully rat on each other's
intelligence gathering, evaluation and tradecraft.
Time now
for the Golden Cloak & Dagger Awards, based on
professional
assessments by a half-dozen of my spooky sources
around the
world. 

America's C.I.A.-N.S.A. combine is rated by its peers
as
unrivaled in elint (electronic intelligence),
shorthanded
in humint (human ears in foreign ministries or
terrorist
organizations) and sometimes fatally weak on timely
evaluation of data. Although it has some of the best
analysts in the field, they rarely get out in the
field and
tend to skew their evaluations to the wishes of our
director of central intelligence. 

Russia's impoverished spies, their morale bolstered by
one
of their own, Vladimir Putin, at the top in the
Kremlin,
have worked out a way to finance their operations:
using
the old Primakov network in Iraq, they take fat
commissions
on illegal oil deals. This enables them to carry out
their
primary mission - stealing technology from the West -
though Russian operatives are babes in the woods
compared
with those in the vast international Chinese network,
peer-reviewed as best in the world at filching arms
production know-how. Russia still excels at using U.N.
cover, often through Scandinavian penetrations. 

Most-improved agency in Europe is Dutch intelligence,
stunning others with its technical sophistication. In
France, intelligence agents who leaked embarrassing
data
about Jacques Chirac must now cover their tracks after
his
re-election triumph. Germany, despite its failure to
penetrate cells of Hamburg terrorists, is well
regarded for
its cold-war ability to triple double agents.
Britain's
agency, the one most trusted by the data-overwhelmed
C.I.A., shines in the field of analysis. 

The growing terror networks in the Far East are
getting
fair attention from South Korea's K.C.I.A., which
cooperated with Singapore in uprooting a Hezbollah
operation misidentified publicly as exclusively Al
Qaeda.
Indonesia's spymaster impressed his hosts at a
Langley,
Va., meeting recently with his Elvis Presley haircut,
but
has yet to get a handle on Islamic groups based in his
far-flung country. 

In the Middle East, individual Spook of the Year is
Gen.
Saeb Khier of Jordan, though no panel member is
willing to
say why. Israel's Mossad, making a comeback after a
slump
in the past decade, is admired by fellow professionals
for
its recent wetwork. The well-heeled gumshoes of the
Saudi
network, their loyalties riven by royal family
dissension,
are no longer at the top of the Arab field. Egyptian
intelligence is more effective, thanks largely to
interrogation techniques that some other agencies envy
but
cannot stomach. 

Syria, say members of the peer-review panel, is
runner-up
for the Golden Cloak & Dagger for its post-Sept.-11
strategic coup. Damascus is said to have made a deal
with
the C.I.A.: We'll help you track down Al Qaeda, saving
American lives, if you don't give us a hard time on
Hezbollah based in Syrian-occupied Lebanon, which
costs
only Israeli lives. As a result, even though the U.S.
solemnly tut-tuts at active Syrian support of these
terrorists, Syria was not included in President Bush's
"axis of evil." 

This unverified account goes further: in return for a
promise of secret U.S. use of Syrian territory near
Iraq in
the next attack on Saddam Hussein, as took place when
Syria
joined the allied coalition in Gulf War I, the U.S.
has
turned a blind eye to Syria's payment in oil from Iraq
for
being the conduit of Russian replacement parts for
Saddam's
aging MIG-29 planes and T-62 tanks. 

Practitioners of espionage everywhere salute Bashar
al-Assad. The eye doctor, who succeeded his father as
dictator, is taking excellent instruction in duplicity
from
his experienced spymaster. 

Push the envelope, please: 

The non-judgmental Golden Cloak & Dagger Award this
year
goes to Iran, guardian of the heritage of takia, "the
need
to conceal," for sponsorship of its covert arm,
Hezbollah,
now spreading throughout the Shiite diaspora
worldwide,
from Lebanon to Indonesia. While Al Qaeda gets the
publicity as designated global villain, the quietly
metastasizing cells of Iran's Hezbollah get the
intelligence insiders' acclaim. 

Copyright 2002 N.Y. Times 

=====
"Quand on est dans la merde jusqu'au cou, il ne reste plus qu'a chanter."
                                                                      -- Samuel Beckett

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