The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History

3 As Good as It Gets

79 CHAPTER 3 As Good as It Gets War is thought, and thought is information, and he who knows most strikes hardest. The House on 92nd Street, 20th Century Fox T he First World War had hardly ended before all the combatants started preparing for the sequel. The Great War unleashed national and ideological passions and destabilized entire economies and social orders. France’s greatest soldier, Ferdinand Foch, prophetically quipped after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” The industrialized powers recovered from the war, to some extent, during the economic revival of the 1920s, but soon the Great Depression strangled finance and production around the world. The crisis helped turn a rabble rouser into a would-be national savior, bringing Adolf Hitler to power in Berlin in 1933. Where extremists of the Left and Right had fought one another in the streets in the 1920s, now they could prepare for war on a national scale. Indeed, Hitler began immediately, blaming the Communists and citing their treachery in his imposition of dictatorial rule and a remilitarization of Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin reciprocated, soon declaring a Popular Front with progressives and socialists against the common fascist enemy, but also attempting to maximize this opportunity to control the international Left. From thence began a weird symbiosis, with each tyrant exploiting the fear of the other to consolidate power at home and foment violence abroad. The Second World War would be the most horrendous conflict in history , killing perhaps 70 million combatants and civilians. The war changed the map of the world, as had the First World War, but it also presaged the end of the European empires, the rise of Asia, and a two-generation stalemate between the Communist world and the West. The new business of intelligence played vital roles in these outcomes. The soldiers, sailors, and 80 chapter 3 pilots won the war’s battles, of course, and farmers and factory workers and scientists provided the wherewithal to do so, but secret insights and means guided the decisions of policymakers and commanders to a perhaps unprecedented degree. The winning side, moreover, gradually developed stunning advantages in the clandestine arts. While still developing, those advantages helped the Allies stave off defeat; when mature, they hastened the collapse of the Axis. Perhaps the greatest testament to the contribution of intelligence to final victory came in the separate and joint decisions of the Western Allies not only to break precedent by preserving significant portions of their new intelligence capabilities but also to maintain a novel and powerful collaboration in signals intelligence after the war had ended. The effects of World War II for intelligence linger still. By 1918, states dominated intelligence because only states could afford the new capabilities that gave them the collection capacity and the ability to exploit what was collected through intercepts and photo reconnaissance. But what kind of states, and what kind of intelligence, would prevail? Not every advanced nation had the insight and the wherewithal to remain competitive in this arena. Fortune would favor science and ideology—and the ability to organize them. Ideological Challenges The aftermath of World War I brought demobilization and retrenchment in every military, yet the new intelligence capabilities, if sometimes neglected, were nonetheless preserved. Those capabilities suddenly had more work to do. The new enemy within was not the vanguard of an advancing army or a surprise invasion, but rather of a proletarian revolution or a Leninist uprising. The “cold war” between the Russian intelligence services and their Western rivals really began in September 1918, when the Cheka murdered the Royal Naval attaché in Petrograd as he defended his embassy from intruders seeking evidence of British espionage. Britain’s new SIS took a measure of revenge the following year by mounting torpedo boat attacks from Finland on the Soviet fleet.1 For most of the next sixty years, communism would be the primary concern of Western intelligence services. The British and French services also had much more ground to cover, monitoring events in their own empires while also trying to keep order in formerly German and Ottoman possessions that fell to them in the Treaty of Versailles. Britain and France were weaker in relative terms than they had as good as it gets 81 been in 1913, but they remained...