Clandestine kinship means that many of these seemingly new partners are, in reality, old friends. Despite periodic disputes over mutual penetration since the end of the Cold War, Russian agencies have worked well with both British and US agencies across substantial areas of mutual interest. Yet in 1990, respected US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) veterans held divergent views as to whether this cooperation would even be possible. Former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Ray Cline warned that all that awaited would-be fraternizers with the East was entrapment or deception. By contrast, former CIA Director William Colby was upbeat about the possibilities and personally traveled to meet many of his former opponents, seeking to build bridges on matters of common interest. The dividends of cooperation were not long in coming. For example, during the Gulf War, the Russians provided Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) with vital information on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s armory of Scud missiles and the nature of modifications that had been undertaken to enhance their performance.

Meanwhile, the United States has maintained a fruitful intelligence alliance with Beijing based on a mutual interest in Russian matters. In intelligence terms, China is also an old friend, with joint intelligence activities against Russia dating back to US President Richard Nixon’s normalization of relations in 1972. Some commentators have attributed the reluctance of successive US administrations to criticize human rights abuses in China to the continuing presence of two vital US-engineered listening stations inside China that are focused on Russia. The Sino-US intelligence relationship has grown recently owing to Beijing’s concerns with Islamic militancy in its western provinces. Against this background, the recent incident involving the Chinese detention of the US EP-3 spy plane on Hainan Island might be seen as a brief interruption of an awkward but nonetheless time-honored intelligence alliance.

Calculated Risks

Established intelligence alliances have never been severed because of economic espionage or intellectual property theft. But in 1995 some intelligence relationships were broken off when the CIA had to back away from unsavory sources and dubious services with records of murder and torture. That year, US lawyer Jennifer Harbury, campaigning for information on the fate of her dead husband, a captured Nicaraguan guerrilla, was able to show that his fate had been determined by a senior Nicaraguan military official who had twice been a student at the US Army School of the Americas. The official also turned out to be a CIA source who had received payments from the agency. After this case, new draconian guidelines were developed requiring scrutiny of all intelligence assets. These restrictions became known as the scrub order.

The CIA was required to cease contact with individuals who had a record of violence in their past. James Woolsey, whose term as director of central intelligence had ended shortly before the scrub order was introduced, worried that this would prevent intelligence gathering in those areas where it was needed most and protested that “political correctness and fighting terrorism often don’t work well together.” In 2000, the US Congress commissioned a report on counter-terrorism from diplomat L. Paul Bremer. His report, which presciently featured the World Trade Center on the cover, warned explicitly about the dangers of catastrophic terrorism striking the United States. It urged that the scrub order be abandoned because it effectively outlawed the recruitment of many people with inside information on terrorism. But Congress refused and the administration’s general message seemed to be that such risk-taking was not acceptable and perhaps no longer necessary.

The scrub order has now effectively been scrapped and these short-lived attempts to regulate the nature of clandestine kinship all but abandoned. Numerous other restrictions on operational activity have been relaxed or ignored. Relationships with agencies that were considered unsuitable in the mid-1990s no longer present a problem. In the words of US President George Bush on September 17, 2001, the war waged by terrorists is intrinsically unpleasant and the result is a contest in which “there’s no rules.”

Assertions that it is now time to throw away the rulebook and adopt the dirty tactics of one’s adversary have a deep resonance for historians of the CIA. In 1954, Major General James Doolittle, famous leader of the 1942 air raid on Tokyo, prepared a National Security Council study for US President Dwight Eisenhower arguing that the United States needed to abandon restraints in covert warfare in response to Soviet actions. By the 1960s, this road had led to 13 failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro using a range of unsavory allies, including the US mafia. In the 1970s the pendulum swung the other way, as the hearings of the US Senate’s Church Committee began to expose these activities. Agencies became cautious and restraints were imposed. Hugh Tovar, the CIA’s one-time covert action chief, lamented that his area was a “dying art form.” But the pendulum continued to oscillate, and by 1980 Ronald Reagan became US president after campaigning that it was time to “unleash” the CIA. Iran-Contra was just around the corner.

Some oscillation is inevitable, but violent oscillation is damaging and demoralizing for the agencies who rightly see themselves as victims of political fashion. A standard that recognizes the importance of the information at stake is needed to cover recruitment of dangerous sources and relations with dubious agencies. It must be straightforward enough to offer practical guidance to intelligence officers recruiting sources on the ground. It also needs to be sophisticated enough to allow agencies and governments to make reasoned judgements about just what kinds of threats require what sort of risky relationship. This is not too much to ask, since calculated risk-taking is the core business of agencies; the underlying logic will now have to become more explicit. The much derided scrub order of 1995 was intended to have some of this proportionality but proved too cumbersome. On the ground, the distinctions were lost and the general effect was to chill the recruitment of all risky and violent sources.

The real radical shift required here lies in the area of congressional or parliamentary oversight rather than regulation. Traditionally, intelligence alliances were a black box into which oversight bodies have rarely been allowed to look. Resistance to such oversight has a long history. In 1946 British signals intelligence personnel were forbidden to travel to the United States to give evidence to a US congressional inquiry into Pearl Harbor. In 1975 Britain’s SIS and the British Government Communications Headquarters were appalled by the Church Committee hearings and sought assurances that this inquiry would not become multinational in scope. But in a global era, when clandestine agencies rarely work alone on large issues, the near invisibility of liaison arrangements to oversight by elected representatives is problematic. Oversight mechanisms have not kept pace with global issues. This shortcoming has recently been underlined by a Dutch government inquiry into intelligence and the dismal events at Srebrenica in 1995, for while national aspects of that inquiry have gone well, the alliance dimension has been difficult. Will we eventually need multinational oversight teams to look at multinational operations? Doubtless, the agencies will shake their heads, but the problem will still have to be faced.