ONDON
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.
...Intelligence web sites