Espionage

Espionage is the systematic clandestine collection of information on other nations. Traditionally human agents (spies) collected such information; but since World War II, technical methods, although less romantic, exciting, and glamorous, have produced far more reliable and timely intelligence.

Before and during World War II, the intelligence services of the Axis nations, especially those of Nazi Germany, were reputed to have legions of spies and saboteurs operating in the United States and South America organized into a centrally directed “fifth column,” capable of damaging not only war industries but also national unity. In the United States, the task of countering this reputedly well-entrenched clandestine force was the job of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which expanded from fewer than 400 agents in 1933 to nearly

5.000  agents by 1944. The process began in 1936 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, concerned about a coming war in Europe, requested that the FBI begin covert operations relative to potential foreign subversives, communist and fascist alike. However, he insisted that any action taken be done discreetly and within prescribed legal parameters.

On September 4, 1939, three days after Germany invaded Poland, Roosevelt escalated his policy and tasked the FBI with investigating espionage, sabotage, and violations of American neutrality regulations. The urgency of the situation also compelled the president to form a national intelligence committee, comprising leaders from the FBI, army intelligence, and naval intelligence, which was an unprecedented step in terms of national anti-espionage activity. Moreover, by 1940 the attorney general had also granted the FBI permission to begin wiretapping the telephones of suspected enemy agents. In March 1940 Congress reactivated the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalized issuing false reports that might benefit an enemy power, inciting disobedience in the military, or obstructing recruitment or enlistment activities. Three months later Congress also passed the Smith Act, or Alien Registration Act, through which five million aliens were registered with the government and fingerprinted.

During the war itself, the FBI conducted more than

19.000  investigations of alleged Axis sabotage and espionage, although none was proven definitively. Thirty-three Axis agents residing in the United States in 1941 were quickly identified and imprisoned, as were thousands of Axis nationals who were taken into custody and deported by 1942. They had been identified by William G. Sebold, a naturalized citizen recruited by German intelligence who had agreed to serve as a double agent for the FBI. Indeed, postwar analysis found that no coherent Axis fifth column ever existed in the United States, or the Americas, and the few attempts to infiltrate agents were amateurish failures. The FBI apprehended eight German saboteurs who landed on Long Island in June 1942, and two who landed in Maine in November 1944, within days of their arrival.

Nazi espionage failures in the United States were shared by the Japanese military Special Service Organizations, which included units for decoding, recruiting foreign spies, and conducting propaganda and fifth column activities. The espionage agents attached to the Japanese diplomatic posts abroad did score some notable successes, such as gathering information about U. S. Navy forces at Pearl Harbor before December 1941. But Japanese ignorance of Allied successes in code breaking resulted in a massive security breach revealing tremendous amounts of vital Axis tactical and strategic information. Although most Americans assumed that Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast constituted a fifth column force, a fear that contributed to the relocation of Japanese Americans, no credible evidence existed at that time or later to support this fear and no Japanese espionage activities were

As Americans became more fearful that the United States would become involved in World War II, many citizens began to worry that there were spies among us. The FBI poster shown here warns Americans to be on the lookout for evidence of sabotage or rumormongering. (National Archives)

Uncovered in the United States during the war. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover testified after the war that the bureau had been called in to investigate 19,587 cases of suspected sabotage, of which only 2,417 proved to be real. Because of bureau vigilance and prompt arrests, 611 cases ended up in convictions.

The USSR conducted far more successful espionage operations against the United States and Great Britain than did the Axis powers. Indeed, Soviet intelligence and espionage services, consisting of the Red Army GRU, and its Communist Party counterpart, the NKVD, later known as the KGB, enjoyed enormous wartime success against the Allies and Axis alike, that carried over well into the postwar era. The GRU had extensive agent networks in Europe, including the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, that controlled the Lucy ring in Switzerland that handled spies within the Nazi military and political high command in Berlin. In Japan, Richard Sorge, another GRU agent, provided copious information on Japanese military and political activities until his capture and execution in 1944. Soviet espionage operations against the Allies included successful NKVD efforts in recruiting double agents within the British MI organizations that operated into the postwar years and by the GRU in recruiting spies working on the American Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb. One of the most celebrated Soviet spies of the later cold war period, Julius Rosenberg, began his espionage activity by working as an electrical engineer during World War II and passing along highly sensitive technical intelligence to Soviet handlers regarding top secret radar proximity fuses for antiaircraft artillery.

Espionage efforts by Great Britain were equally sophisticated during the war. In July 1940 the British created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to conduct espionage operations and to control a growing body of agents belonging to resistance groups in Nazi-occupied Europe. The British had extraordinary success in running clandestine organizations in Europe, consisting largely of SOE administered guerrilla organizations and individually recruited and trained agents. The XX or 20 Committee managed to identify and recruit all German agents sent to Great Britain to become double agents for the purpose of feeding the Nazis false information. The British intelligence agencies also excelled at deception operations, such as the 1943 operation that led the Germans to think that an invasion of the Balkans was imminent.

The United States formed the Office of Strategic Services in June 1942 to conduct espionage operations abroad. However, with the British SOE dominating in Europe, and given the geographic expanses of the Pacific, the Americans came to rely on technical means of intelligence collection and their agent networks remained relatively small and of secondary importance.

Further reading: Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001); Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Allen Weinstein, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999).

—Clayton D. Laurie and John C. Fredriksen