HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

Human Intelligence (HUMINT) has been in existence since the first time one individual spied on another. Over the centuries, it has become more intriguing as it spans the gambit from personal observation reports to covert operations.

HUMINT is the collection of foreign information to identify elements, intentions, composition, strength, dispositions, tactics, equipment, personnel, and capabilities.

This collection is done by trained HUMINT collectors that obtain a plethora of information from mediums such as people and multimedia. HUMINT actively and passively uses human intelligence sources to obtain viable information to cross-cue other intelligence disciplines and provide the commander with sufficient data to make decisions.

HUMINT was the first intelligence discipline and continues to be the most effective for long-term development against asymmetric warfare targets. Nothing provides better actionable intelligence then knowing who, what, when, where, why, and how an enemy plans to operate by gathering information from within the targeted organization. However, these types of covert HUMINT operations often take years, if not decades, to establish sources high enough within an organization to provide actionable intelligence and vice corroborative intelligence. The overt HUMINT activities are an excellent source of actionable intelligence against asymmetric targets. The debriefing of patrols, interrogation of detainees, liaison with a host nation, interaction with non-government organizations, document exploitation, and the development of sources through HUMINT contact operations all capably support actionable intelligence needs of Army commanders.

While a large amount of important information can be collected through signals and imagery intelligence, there are certain types of information that are impervious to these technical means of collection and, instead, rely on humans as the means of collecting the information. For example, some of the most valuable information – plans, intentions, and beliefs for example – might only exist within the heads of those in power or be stored out of reach of technical collection mechanisms.

Only human agents, with their ability to engage with other people, create relationships and physically access certain areas, offer a way of collecting this information. Technical systems cannot photograph planning or policy documents locked in a vault and that some of the most important types of information for state officials include being able to understand the decision process involved in foreign, military and economic policymaking in both hostile and friendly nations.

The reason why human intelligence has proved itself so successful is that almost all targets – states, groups, organizations or individuals – have a ‘human factor’ associated with them that intelligence operatives can engage with and exploit. Human intelligence encompasses a wider range of collection activities. Human intelligence is very simply the use of human operatives to collect information of intelligence value. By using humans as a means of collection it is possible to access and collect information that might not physically exist, but can be extracted from the feelings, opinions, plans, intentions, inter-personal relationships, nuances or general personalities of an individual, group or state.

The first, and most obvious, characteristic of human intelligence is the fact that it uses human beings – their senses, skills, intuitions and relationships – to find, collect and then communicate the intelligence. This is because the information is either stored or exists in such a way that it can only be accessed by a human agent.
That is, in many instances the information will be in the head of some individual or kept locked away in a repository where it can only be accessed by human hands. This means that the information cannot be ‘captured’ by some piece of technology, but rather relies on another individual divulging the information or the intelligence officer accessing the information directly. One of the greatest strengths of human intelligence is its ability to capitalize on the natural tendency and necessity of human beings to form relationships with each other and the power found within those relationships. These relationships are varied and can include ones of trust, threats, coercion, physical pleasure or pain, manipulation, deceit or mutual cooperation. It is through the exploitation of these relationships that human intelligence is made possible.

For example, torture, interrogation, gaining access to a group, persuading an individual to divulge state secrets and even securing a defector all rely on the ability to form and use relationships between two or more individuals. Only humans are able to form these relationships and therefore only humans can access this type of information. In comparison to signals and imagery intelligence there is noticeable difference in how the information is ‘captured’.

HUMINT is the collection by a trained HUMINT Collector of foreign information from people and multimedia to identify elements, intentions, composition, strength, dispositions, tactics, equipment, personnel, and capabilities. It uses human sources as a tool and a variety of collection methods, both passively and actively, to gather information to satisfy the commander’s intelligence requirements and cross-cue other intelligence disciplines. HUMINT was the first intelligence discipline and continues to be the most effective for long-term development against asymmetric warfare targets.
Nothing provides better actionable intelligence then knowing who, what, when, where, why, and how an enemy plans to operate by gathering information from within the targeted organization. However, these types of covert HUMINT operations often take years, if not decades, to establish sources high enough within an organization to provide actionable intelligence vice corroborative intelligence. The overt HUMINT activities are an excellent source of actionable intelligence against asymmetric targets.

A HUMINT source is an individual who provides actionable intelligence to the HUMINT collector. The source can provide information about environment, resources, personnel, tactics, etc. through first or second hand knowledge. Typically, the HUMINT collector analyzes the sight or sound information that the source provides. The source may individuals or organizations such as an NGO, civilians, friendly military or non-military forces, and detainees.

The HUMINT collector has special training, certification, and education that allows for the optimal extraction of information to respond to the intelligence information demands.

HUMINT questioning encompasses a variety of methods that the collector must be familiar and flexible. The five basic phases of all HUMINT questioning includes planning and preparation, approach, questioning, termination, and reporting that may or may not be chronological in order.

Since much of human intelligence involves getting a target to carry out an activity they would otherwise not wish to do, human intelligence necessarily has a coercive element to it. The concept of coercion signifies, in a most general sense, the exercise of power over an individual in order to get him to do something that he might otherwise not have done.
This broad understanding can refer to obvious threats and/or violence as a means of forcing someone to do something as well as less obvious acts of coercion such as subtle pressures designed to guide another’s actions. For human intelligence it is no different; a pressure of some form is applied in order to get the target to cooperate. Furthermore, this pressure can be both direct, compelling the individual to do something, or indirect, guiding or encouraging a specific response. As such, in this thesis a distinction will be made between those human intelligence activities that are ‘directly coercive’ and those that are ‘indirectly coercive’.

The former ‘direct’ coercive form of human intelligence involves power being applied to an individual in order to alter his behavior as a direct consequence of the coercion. The target is directly aware of the coercion and acts because of it. There is a threat that is presented to the individual and he is aware of the ultimatum that is being presented. In comparison, indirect coercion involves pressure being applied to alter the individual’s behavior without a direct confrontation.

The pressure attempts to guide rather than force the individual’s choices and, as such, he might not be aware of the controlling pressure that is being applied. For example, direct coercion can involve activities that involve threats, violence or ultimatums, where the target is told in no uncertain terms that he is to capitulate or he will suffer the consequences. The threat or use of physical force, for example, is directly coercive. The “force is directly applied to cause a behavior in another person” and the individual is directly aware of the coercion. Conversely, indirect coercion can involve actions like bribing someone and manipulating or deceiving him, where the pressure is applied to guide or influence the individual’s actions and the ultimatum is not so starkly presented.

The cloak and dagger of the intelligence world is what most people think of when human intelligence, and even intelligence in general, is mentioned. It is what is most often portrayed in popular culture with intelligence officers running double lives and engaging in romantic affairs. This is not without good reason. Virtually every nation resorts to the ‘dark arts’ of espionage to protect its government, economy and citizens. Throughout the Cold War intelligence agencies on both sides used methods of deception, manipulation and bribery as fundamental tools of the trade. Will focus on these so-called dark-arts, including the use of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial covers’, to infiltrate and penetrate various targets, as well as those tactics used to persuade a specific target into cooperating.

Although there are many different activities, tactics or tools at the disposal of the intelligence operative, will look at two broad categories of human intelligence activities. First will focus on penetration and infiltration tactics where false identities are used to gain access to areas that would otherwise be off-limits. Second, it will focus on those activities and tactics used to encourage a target into cooperating with an intelligence officer. This second group of activities will explore three important types of recruitment: the defector, ‘pitch’ recruitments and seduction.

In many ways, an individual’s identity as perceived by the outside world is just a mask he chooses to wear each day, constructed from various facts that people know about him: his accent, records, what he tells others about himself and anything that physically marks him as who he is. These expressions of an individual’s identity are merely outward representations of the person that exists beneath. However, one of the benefits of masks is that they can, quite easily in fact, be changed.

By altering the operative’s name, job and credentials, and by training him in different languages and anything else that is required, he can be provided with a new identity. This cover must provide the intelligence officer with a “plausible reason for being in a particular country” including “visible means of financial support, and a pretext for meeting people with access to secretive information”.

By doing this, an individual who would otherwise be unwelcome in a certain group or country can turn into a welcomed member and, as a result, become privy to information, resources and individuals that would be inaccessible to outsiders. From here the intelligence operative can carry out several different collection activities. These new identities allow access to areas from which the operative can collect information as well as providing an opening to establish contact with people so as to carry out recruitment operations. In both cases, a cover is necessary since the officer’s true identity would prevent any such activity.

There are essentially two different types of cover and, depending on how and to what end the cover is employed, the type of new identity assigned can vary. In the American parlance the distinction is between ‘official cover’ and ‘non-official cover’ and in Soviet terminology the division was between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ officers, though the distinction amounts to the same thing. ‘Official’ or ‘legal’ covers are where the assumed identity hides the officer’s intelligence role but not his state affiliation.

For example, a cover as a diplomat, attaché, military serviceman, or embassy employee makes clear who the officer works for but not his job as an intelligence operative. This type of cover provides the officer with several advantages.
The first is that the official position that is assumed often comes with diplomatic immunity so that should the officer’s true identity be discovered then the most a state would do is expel him as a persona non grata. In addition, posing as a diplomat improves access to information and individuals of importance as the officer has a genuine reason for meeting with host-government officials as well as other diplomats. However, there are obvious drawbacks to this type of cover, namely that given the connection to the home country the officer is a clear target in the eyes of other intelligence agencies and while his position might give him access to some individuals it can also block access to others.

Furthermore, for those operations designed to infiltrate a group, any affiliation with the state is an automatic disqualifier. In order to solve these problems intelligence officers can also have ‘non-official’ or ‘illegal’ covers. These covers involve creating an entirely new identity designed to detach the officer from both his home allegiance as well as his intelligence role.

This will include an extensive, elaborate and verifiable synthetic life, called a ‘legend’, which acts as a justifiable reason as to why the individual should be where he is with as much distance from his home allegiances as possible.

One of the main sources of information on any organization is most naturally going to be from someone who is part of that organization, someone who is entrusted with secrets, someone who is knowledgeable on the inner workings of the organization and someone who has a genuine reason for being on the inside. Therefore, it is only natural that an intelligence agency is going to try and establish contact with individuals from within a particular organization and try to convince them to provide information. Indeed, it is the job of intelligence officers to locate, assess and turn such individuals. In order to achieve this, the intelligence officer must locate those he thinks will prove to be a fertile source and then offer a ‘pitch’ designed to persuade the target into becoming an agent.

Although in some instances this can be quick and simple, it more often involves a lengthy process of locating the individual, collecting information on him, making an approach, forming a bond with him and then using that bond to create the right mental state so as to encourage the final recruitment.

A part of intelligence that has often received a disproportionate amount of attention from the media and general public is that of ‘Romeo agents’ and ‘honey traps’, whereby the human need for companionship and love is used as a means of gaining information and cooperation from other individuals.

Marcus Wolf, former head of the East German intelligence agency Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), stated that, “Romeo spies gained notoriety across the world by winning women’s hearts in order to obtain the state and political secrets to which their targets had access”. Moreover, as women took on “formerly male jobs as secretaries to important figures” it is not surprising that they represented an important intelligence target. Both Romeo agents and honey traps depend on finding individuals who have access to valuable information but are emotionally vulnerable or lonely.

By offering to fill the emotional vacuum, Romeo agents and honey traps incorporate themselves within an individual’s life, using charm and seduction as the snare. Once the agent has gained the trust and affection of the target, he is then able to use this as a means of extracting information or ensuring cooperation.

One important distinction in human intelligence that is often made is that between recruited sources like those mentioned above, where the intelligence officer ‘persuades’ someone to become a source, and defections, where someone approaches a foreign intelligence agency, often by physically walking into the building, and offering his services.

This is quite different from the methods mentioned above because it does not require intelligence officers going out and hunting or looking for sources, but rather involves the defector making himself available. Why the individual might choose to offer up this information can vary from case to case, but can often stem from desires for money, disgruntlement with his position, ideological beliefs, the need to find sanctuary for some wrong done, or because of a host of other unhappiness’s.

What the intelligence agency must do is ensure that it has the appropriate mechanisms ready when a defector decides to make the jump so as to be there to catch them.

Human intelligence provides for the world of intelligence something that the two other technical collection disciplines cannot achieve, the ‘man on the ground’. Humans form a fundamental part of any organization and as such it would be difficult to ignore them as a possible avenue for intelligence. The two main tasks for human intelligence are being able to gain access to areas that are normally off-limits and to carry out either a recruitment exercise or collect information the new-found access providers.

In the planning and preparation phase, the collector uses relevant research and operational planning to create questions and explore potential tactics to question the source in addition to other specific collection inquiries. The approach phase encompasses the ability of the HUMINT collector to obtain rapport with the source to gain confidence for optimal extraction of intelligence information.

Throughout the questioning phase the collector uses a variety of methods to interrogate the source. Questions may range from applicable OPLAN to be thorough in extracting relevant information from the source. Termination requires that the collector completes all questioning with the source. The collector may establish the understanding with the source that further contact may be required in regards to the operation. The reporting phase may not fall chronologically within the phase due to any pertinent information that is reveled to the collector, during interrogation. The HUMINT collector writes, summarizes, and sends any applicable documents to the relevant individuals requiring the information.

There are eight main HUMINT collection categories: tactical questioning, screening, interrogation, debriefing, liaison, human source contact operations (SCOs), document exploitation (DOCEX), and captured enemy equipment (CEE) operations. While HUMINT collection supports DOCEX and CEE operations, they are usually analyzed by a collector when a source is available to be questioned. Tactical questioning can be performed by members of any DOD personnel. The general purpose of screening is to identify whether or not a source is able and willing to participate in the questioning.

The collector can also identify if the source has any relevant information to answer requirements. This screening process saves time and helps identify the level of knowledge, the level of cooperation, and the placement and access of a given source. Screening operations may include the local employees, checkpoints, and refugees.

Interrogation is an essential part of the intelligence process. It requires authorized personnel to be able to ask direct or indirect questions to a source keeping in mind the objective- to answer all requirements. Interrogation is performed by all types of military organizations and personnel. HUMINT collectors understand the importance of following the Laws of War when interrogating a source regardless of the situation or environment. HUMINT collectors are efficient and qualified to extract as much information as possible.

Soldiers on the front may also be able to interrogate using HUMINT methods, but require that they treat all information as actionable intelligence. The source may cooperate or be extremely difficult, but either way a variety of techniques must be used based on the source. Certain facilities may be more or less available or prepared to receive sources for interrogation. Interrogation requires a high level of planning, tact, the knowledge and experience to know the optimal time to use a given technique.

Source information may also be extracted and evaluated through cooperating sources during debriefing. Debriefing includes refugee émigré operations, local and civilian debriefing operations, and friendly force debriefing operations. All of these areas contain sections in which intelligence must be relayed from individuals to US forces or unites to satisfy and answer requirements.

Typically refugee sources do not require immediate extraction of intelligence. Later on, these sources may be willing to contribute information. This may be due to the personal situation which may include being in custody or detained. All debriefing areas must comply with the appropriate law, including US law and Laws of War. For friendly forces, debriefing process must occur with US units only. Local and civilian debriefing operations may or may not have sources in custody; similar to the refugee émigré operations.

Once all the debriefing has occurred there are activities available for commanders, Soldiers, and other US personnel to coordinate with allied forces. This may include exchanging additional information with NGOs, planning for future activities, targets, reconnaissance, etc. Civilian agencies may also be involved in the liaison operations.

Human source contact operations (SCO) are essentially organized, formal, and planned meetings between US forces and sources that intend on providing essential information. This ranges from potential threats to actual dangers, to warnings. HUMINT sources may be one-time contacts or constant sources of information. They may strengthen or provide tactical, environmental and resource information.

HUMINT sources are great to obtain accurate and subjective information such as attitudes and intentions based on actions. Human SCO requires trained, educated, and certified personnel to bring together the source and collector in a formal setting. Collectors may then analyze information appropriately. All of the HUMINT collection methods lead to the successful and effective contributions to the military decision-making process (MDMP) and therefore, should be utilized by Soldiers to assist on the battlefield.

Another HUMINT collection method, DOCEX, is not strictly part of HUMINT collection, but may be used by other agencies and intelligence categories. DOCEX operations are the systematic extraction of information from open, closed, published, and electronic source documents. Computers, telephones, GPS, Personal Digital Assistants yield a lot of information stored in them which is of intelligence value and may match collection requirements. The HUMINT collector will assess the importance and relevancy of the information, if need be cross-cue it with other intelligence disciplines and then forward it to the intelligence cell.

DOCEX is of particular importance to HUMINT collection due to the tangible results. Essentially, DOCEX views all types of documents from different physical and electronic sources as actionable intelligence. When enemy documents are acquired, the documents are usually truthful due to the fact that the enemy writes them for their own use.

HUMINT collectors exploit these documents and screen each one based on the information that may be best suited for another department or source collecting agency. Many captured documents provide insight into the enemy and provides information to multiple operations. These documents may also be time-sensitive. It is appropriate for the collector to screen these documents quickly since the intelligence may be a part of a bigger picture.

DOCEX may be used as an intelligence attack method to deceive the enemy. This method may proceed with false information falling into the hands of the enemy. Once this occurs, enemy decisions may be to our advantage.

All of the DOCEX methods need to be verified, preferably, by multiple sources. Although it is a fact that as a deceptive measure the captured documents with typed/written matter on it may yield misleading information, in DOCEX most documents yield accurate and true information and has high intelligence value. Linguistics support is called for if the captured document has content of foreign language.

To prevent from being trapped in deception the HUMINT collector should adopt a policy of not relying on single-source information. These captured documents often contain critical and sensitive information and hence should be assessed and exploited as soon as possible. They sometimes, in addition to tactical intelligence, also yield political and important technical information.

HUMINT collectors can be effective gatherers of information from multiple sources and able to provide timely analyses to whichever agency needs it. Tactical intelligence, political waves, and technical data contribute to forming the details on actionable intelligence. Currently, soldiers have access to these methods on a day to day basis. Being able to hone in on the most useful data by using HUMINT collection methods can provide superior actionable intelligence on the battlefield and during operations.

CEE OPERATIONS CEE includes all captured material from detains /EPW. They are examined thoroughly to see if they reveal anything of intelligence value. Whether they satisfy any collection requirement or do they have any military application.

Items that may have intelligence value include:
All electronic communications equipment with a memory card, including computers, telephones, PDAs, and GPS terminals

All video or photographic equipment

Items that may have technical intelligence (TECHINT) value include

New weapons

All communications equipment not immediately exploitable for HUMINT value

Track vehicles

Equipment manuals

All CEE known or believed to be of TECHINT interest

Weapons and equipment/material found with the detainee should be confiscated, tagged and evacuated immediately.
CEE operations are also part of the HUMINT collection process. CEE operations gather all data, physical possessions, and environmental queues from the battlefield and captured enemies.

Manuals and equipment are just a couple of the tangible HUMINT collection intelligences. These physical possessions may lead to actionable intelligence; however this may not be the case. Although the information may not be immediately useful for HUMINT resources, it may be of use to the other methods of intelligence collection such as TECHINT.

CEE operations tract and tag all confiscated equipment and data from the geographical locations of battlefields and personnel.

TRAITS OF A HUMINT COLLECTOR HUMINT collection is a fine-tuned science and a delicate work of art. Although many HUMINT collection skills may be taught, the development of a skilled HUMINT collector requires experience in dealing with people in all conditions and under all circumstances.

Effective HUMINT collectors have certain personal skills that are well-developed. These individuals have adequate education in regards to being able to extract actionable intelligence. In order to create rapport and trust with the source, an experienced collector has patience, is alert, credible, objective, has self-control, adaptable, perseveres, has initiative, and proper demeanor.

When a collector attempts to extract information he does so with the understanding that he has certain requirements to answer. One of the first things a source looks at is the collector’s appearance. Ensuring that the collector has a professional demeanor is very important.

This would directly affect the way the source interacts with the collector. If the collector appears very professional and prompt, this portrays control and power. Other types of attire may come across to the source as nonchalant and therefore uncaring of the information they may provide.

After the initial meet, there are a variety of personality types that the collector must be familiar with and be able to exploit for the most information possible. In order to do this, the collector must be adaptable and alert. The source may provide certain physical or auditory queues that would allow the collector to change his tactics. He may change the type of questioning from indirect to direct or try a different method all together.

There may be frustrating or uncomfortable situations or comments that would arise during intelligence collection, but the collector must keep composure and self-control. H must not let the source obtain the power and control over the conversations; after all, the collector’s job is to obtain answers for his requirements, not to become emotional. In order to be most effective, a collector may at times, attempt to provide compensation for information. Being credible and objective allows for trust to develop between the source and collector. Once trust is established, it becomes easier to extract information and the source may be more willing to provide additional information. Establishing trust is difficult, but saves time, energy, and cost in the long run.

All these situations may only be done if the collector is alert and perseveres. Skills of an experienced HUMINT collector may be learned and developed. Many Soldiers can value and be effective sensors with appropriate education and training. The art of intelligence collection is dynamic, so having a variety of solders and commanders acting as intelligence collectors would help directly on the battlefield. Soldiers would not only be empowered to protect themselves with equipment and weapons, but be empowered to protect the unit in their minds- one of the greatest assets to the unit.

Although there are many imperceptible qualities in the definition of a “good” HUMINT collector, certain character traits are invaluable:

The HUMINT collector must be alert on several levels while conducting HUMINT collection. He must focus on the information being provided by the source and be constantly evaluating the information for both value and veracity based on collection requirements, current known information, and other information obtained from the source. Simultaneously, he must be attentive to not only what the source says but also to how it is said and the accompanying body language to assess the source’s truthfulness, cooperation, and current mood. He needs to know when to allow the source to rest and when to press the source harder. His safety and the safety of his source must also be in his constant thoughts.

The HUMINT collector must have patience and tact in creating and maintaining rapport between him and the source as this would greatly improve the chances of success during questioning. Displaying impatience may harden the resolve of a difficult source to remain unresponsive for a little longer sensing that the HUMINT collector may stop questioning. The lack of tact may cause the source to lose respect for the HUMINT collector hence affecting the process negatively.
The HUMINT collector must present a clear and professional image and exude confidence in his capabilities. He must be able to articulate complex situations and concepts. The HUMINT collector must also maintain credibility with his source. He must present himself in a believable and consistent manner, and follow through on any promises made as well as never to promise what cannot be delivered.

The HUMINT collector must also be totally objective in evaluating the information obtained. Without objectivity, he may unconsciously distort the information acquired and may also be unable to vary his questioning techniques effectively. He must not lose the initiative during questioning by displaying anger, irritation, sympathy or weariness. His self-control must also allow him to fake any of these emotions as necessary.

A HUMINT collector must adapt to the many and varied personalities he will encounter. He must also acclimatize to all types of locations, operational rhythms and environments. He should try to imagine himself in the source's position. By being so flexible, he can smoothly vary his questioning techniques according to the operational environment and the personality of the source.

A tenacity of purpose can be the difference between a HUMINT collector who is merely good and one who is superior. A HUMINT collector who becomes easily discouraged by opposition, non-cooperation, or other difficulties will not aggressively pursue the objective to a successful conclusion or exploit leads to other valuable information.

The HUMINT collector's personal appearance may greatly influence the conduct of any HUMINT collection operation and attitude of the source toward the HUMINT collector. Usually an organized and professional appearance will favorably influence the source. If the HUMINT collector's manner reflects fairness, strength and efficiency, the source may prove more cooperative and more receptive to questioning.

Initiative. Achieving and maintaining the advantage are essential to a successful questioning session just as the offensive is the key to success in combat operations.

The HUMINT collector must grasp the initiative and maintain it throughout all questioning phases. He does not have to dominate the source physically; but knows his requirements and take the lead that would make him achieve his target.
The HUMINT collector must be knowledgeable in a variety of areas in order to question sources effectively. The collector must prepare himself for operations in a particular theatre or area of intelligence responsibility (AOIR) by conducting research.

The G2 can be a valuable source of information for this preparatory research. The HUMINT collector should consult with order of battle (OB) technicians and analysts and collect information from open sources and from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) to enhance his knowledge of the AOIR.

The area of operations (AO) including the social, political, and economic institutions.

The geography, history, language and culture of the target area must be given serious consideration. Collectors must be aware of all ethnic, social, religious, political, criminal, tribal, and economic groups and the interrelationships between these groups.

All current and potential threat forces within the AOIR. Information of the insurgents’ organization, motivation, technical capabilities, limitations and normal operational methodology would be of great advantage. HUMINT collectors must abide by the applicable laws, including the Geneva Conventions where applicable, and relevant international law. Additionally, local agreements and the applicable execute orders and rules of engagement (ROE) may further restrict HUMINT collection activities. However, these documents do not allow interrogation actions that would be illegal applicable laws.

The collection requirements, including all specific information requirements (SIRs) and indicators that will lead to the answering of the intelligence requirements.

Cultural awareness in the various AOs will have different social and regional considerations that affect communications and can affect the conduct of operations. These may include social taboos, customs, and courtesies. The staff must include this information in pre-deployment training at all levels to ensure that personnel are properly equipped to interact with the local populace.

Understanding basic human behavior. A HUMINT collector can relate better to the source’s personality and reactions when he understands basic behavioral factors, traits, attitudes, motivations and inhibitions.

Neurolinguistics. Neurolinguistics is a behavioral communication model and a set of procedures that improve communication skills. The HUMINT collector must be in tune with the specific neurolinguistic clues of the cultural framework in which he is operating.

CAPABILITIES AND LIMITATIONS CAPABILITIES HUMINT collection capabilities include the ability to:
Collect information and cross-reference from an almost endless variety of potential sources including friendly forces, civilians, detainees, and source-related documents.

Focus on the collection of detailed information not available by other means. It also includes building interiors and facilities that cannot be collected on by other means due to restrictive terrain.

Corroborate or refute information collected from other R&S assets.
Operate with minimal equipment and deploy in all operational environments in support of offensive, defensive, stability and reconstruction operations, or civil support operations. Based on solid planning and preparation, HUMINT collection can provide timely information if deployed forward in support of maneuvers elements.

HUMINT is dependent on the subjective interpersonal capabilities of the individual rather than on the abilities to operate collection equipment

Requirements set out before the HUMINT operation starts are used as drivers for identifying sources who have access to the pertinent information. There are a multitude of sources but locating these knowledgeable sources and proper identification is required so that they have the required information. .

There are never enough HUMINT collectors to meet all requirements. Limited assets must be placed in order of importance in support of units and operations based on their criticality.

Time is a factor affecting HUMINT collector operations especially Source Operations as much more time is required to form a solid reliable source base. The requirement listed out at the beginning of the HUMINT operation should allow sufficient time for collection.

Although HUMINT collectors can normally use an interpreter, the lack of language proficiency by the collector can significantly slow collection efforts. Time is required to develop the proficiency.

HUMINT collectors are sometimes assigned tasks meant for the military police, counterintelligence unit or any other specialty. This is usually due to a misunderstanding of the HUMINT mission.

Except in tactical situations when HUMINT collectors are deployed in direct support of maneuvers units, HUMINT collection and reporting require a lot of time. In military operations, sources need to be assessed and developed. Once a suitable partnership has been established with the sources, they need to remain in contact with the HUMINT collector. This takes time and a lot of coordination.

Sometimes the terrain may be an obstacle, i.e. urban areas, mountains and deserts, as these are places where the insurgents and other opponents take cover. The terrain can also wreak havoc on sophisticated technical intelligence equipment and the weather also plays its part in sabotaging the equipment.

The human factor is also another obstacle. Intelligence units should pay attention to the support of the local population. Without support of the local population, actionable intelligence will be difficult if not impossible to get.

Language is another form of obstacle especially in joint operations. Use of a common language for communication would reduce the obstacle. In addition, understanding between interrogators and interrogated persons is very important, where trustworthy, and well-educated interpreters are used.

Deception has never been a stranger to military strategy or intelligence. Feigning, misleading and providing misinformation is at the heart of espionage. The question, however, is to what extent these deceptions and lies are harmful to those subjected to the untruths. While it is arguable that deceiving and lying are natural human activities, with many interpersonal encounters involving some form of deception, these are recognized and accepted as normal means of greasing the wheels of everyday social life. They are, it is quite clear, very different from those deceptions carried out by intelligence operatives.

‘Deception’ can be understood quite broadly as any action or activity that is knowingly designed and intended to encourage an audience of some sort to believe in something which is untrue. This definition is broad in the sense that it includes a variety of different actions designed to mislead people about the truth. For example ‘deception’ can cover the more specific act of lying, hyperbole, pretense, equivocation, distortion, disingenuous statements and omissions, each referring to a particular type of untruthful (in)action. A direct lie, for example, is a message that is communicated with the intention of deceiving others and convincing them of something the liar himself knows to be untrue.

In comparison, the ‘continuous lie’ is where, as Roderick Chrisholm and Thomas Feehan point out, the liar “contributes to D’s [the target’s] continuing belief in P [the lie]”, though the liar is not the original source of the lie.In both the direct lie and the continuous lie, there is the communication of some known untruth with the intention to deceive. However, an individual can also lie by withholding information, known as ‘lying by omission’. This is where the liar has “failed to do something with respect to D [the target] and the belief in P [the lie]” which he could have prevented.14 Lying by omission involves an individual either allowing or contributing to a falsehood by omitting certain facts while having the ability to prevent the falsehood from being believed and with intent for a deception to occur.Was argued that an individual has a vital interest in maintaining his autonomy and that when his autonomy is violated he is harmed. Lying and acts of deception are harmful inasmuch as they violate the individual’s autonomy as they cause him to become a tool of another’s will. In order to be autonomous, as it was argued, the individual must able to make decisions based on his own motivations and needs, towards his own end, rather than that of another. That is, people must be able to act for “reasons all the way down according to their actions and according to their reasons”. However, when people are lied to, their reality is distorted:

Lies may eliminate or obscure relevant alternatives... at times, lies may foster the belief that there are no more alternatives than is really the case; at others, a lie may lead to the unnecessary loss of confidence in the best alternative. Similarly, estimates of loss and benefits of any action can be varied through successful deception.

This means that decisions are then made on a distorted view of the world, or, more precisely, on the will of the deceiver for he is the one who has created this false view. The victim will act in response to this distorted world view and as a result the deceiver brings the victim under his casual control. The victim of a deception becomes the tool of the deceiver because his decision-making process is based on the deceiver’s will rather than his own. Given that an individual’s autonomy is not a binary characteristic, whole one minute and completely subjected the next, depending on the nature of the lie or deception the affect on an individual’s autonomy can vary. That is, depending on the degree to which it is reasonable to expect the lie will alter the individual’s decision-making process the level of harm is altered. The greater the impact of the deception on the individual’s view of reality, or the more intimate the area the deception, the greater the affect it has on his decision-making process. For example, those lies that are related to superficial, non-important, or non-intimate areas are likely to affect the individual’s autonomy less than those lies which are on an important, personal issue or something which is going to dramatically alter the individual’s decision-making process.
Furthermore, lying can damage society as it “chips away at, and could destroy the social bonds of trust” and as a result breaks down the moral and social relationships that hold a society together.

Barbra Misztal argues that for society the notion of trust is “essential for stable relationships, vital for the maintenance of cooperation, fundamental for any exchange and necessary for even the most routine of everyday interactions”.
Both society and the individual need trust as a fundamental principle for maintaining social cohesion and ensuring everyday fluid co-operation. For the individual, “trust affects our understanding of other people, our sense of who they are and what they are doing” and without this trust “only very simple forms of human co-operation which can be transacted on the spot are possible” as “individual action is much too sensitive to disruption to be capable of being planned without trust”. Lying and deception are a poison to trust as they breakdown social-interpersonal bonds. When the lie is between an individual and his political community or the state’s representatives then the loss of trust is often extrapolated to the whole system or community. Sissela Bok argues that trust is a social good and that when this trust is damaged “the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse”.
Closely connected in many ways to some of the issues discussed in the section on deception, manipulation has both a long history within intelligence collection and also poses a problem for an individual’s autonomy. Manipulation is that act whereby an individual attempts to direct, control or guide the actions, thoughts or beliefs of another through the application of various pressures on his decision-making process. The first point is that, obviously, manipulation will have some end in sight; the manipulator will be attempting to either get someone to think something, believe in something or act in some way. The second point is that pressure is essential to manipulation since it is as a result of this pressure that the individual acts in the desired way, as compared to how he might have acted otherwise. This pressure can either be in the form of incentives or as the result of deceptive acts. Using incentives involves “controlling signals about rewards and deprivations or by controlling rewards and deprivations, or both”. That is, offering the target something positive if he carries out the desired action or even punishing him if he fails to capitulate. Using incentives will often involve exploiting an individual’s weaknesses or his personality since knowing how to ‘push someone’s buttons’ or ‘pull someone’s leavers’ is essential in tailoring the incentives and assuring the correct response.
Another type of pressure that can be applied in order to control the actions of an individual is, again, the use of deception. As noted previously, lying will often involve making someone believe in options, activities, avenues or realities which the individual would have not have believed in before. By altering the target’s view of reality, the manipulator is using the deception to guide the target’s actions. Obviously not all lies are manipulative, but it can be argued that those lies that are used to control an individual’s actions can be manipulative.
The reason why manipulating an individual is harmful is because of the affect it has on his autonomy. Given that the autonomous agent is one that decides his own actions based on his own reasons, when an outside force deliberately applies pressure on his decision-making process it is essentially forcing him to make his decisions based on the will of another. Joel Rudinow notes that by looking at manipulation through the lens of autonomy “finally, we can understand.... that the attempt to manipulate someone is to elicit behavior without regard for – and with a will to interfere with – his operative goals”. The individual becomes the subject of the manipulator’s will, a means to the manipulators end, rather than an end in himself.

Seduction is not inherently harmful in and of itself. Indeed, individuals can seduce each other with the best of intentions, resulting in no harm. What is harmful about seduction, however, are the methods used and the intent behind them. That is, seducing someone through deception or manipulation is harmful because of the intent behind the seduction itself. Indeed, seduction, as practiced by intelligence operatives, is a special type of manipulation, whereby a manipulative pressure is applied to an individual in order to direct a particular response. This seduction involves exploiting the most intimate feelings an individual has, preying on core emotions in order to provoke the correct response. Seduction attempts to manipulate the individual through targeting his feelings of love, affection and adoration. By utilizing these core emotions it is possible to create a situation where the individual will carry out activities that he would have otherwise not done. The person does not simply act weakly because he finds the new prospect overwhelmingly tempting but is brought to this weakness by the influence of someone else.

As a form of manipulation, seduction is harmful because it violates the target’s autonomy. The seducer provides the target with false information, distorting the normal view of reality and causing decisions to be based on the will of the seducer. Then, by using the power gained through the seduction, what should be a blight-free activity – that is, deciding whether or not they should perform a particular action – is distorted by intimate emotions based on lies and deception. Furthermore, given that seduction involves exploiting the individual’s feelings in an area that is of great intimacy – an exploitation of an individual’s most intimate sense of self, his sex and love life – there is the additional harm caused by the affect it can have on his sense of self-worth and mental integrity. It is therefore important to reflect this special quality in the level of harm that is caused when applied to the varying case studies.

Bribery, although akin to manipulation in that it involves getting someone to do something they would otherwise not do, is something quite distinct and carries with it a separate ethical status. Bribery occurs when “property or personal advantage is offered... with the intent of ... [to encourage the target to] acting favorably to the offer in contradiction to moral or legal norms”. What is first notable about bribery is that it necessarily involves a payment, either in the form of material goods – money, drugs, food – or as some other non-material benefit – expressed gratitude, favors, or an undeserved promotion – in order to secure or encourage the desired end. However, given that payment of money or other goods in order to obtain a particular service is not itself unethical, since this would render all commerce and employment immoral, it is necessary to note the intention behind the bribe, that is, the wish to control the target’s behavior in some way. Moreover, this desired behavior will often run contrary to some legal or moral norm, such as those borne from a duty, responsibility or trust that an individual has as a result of his position or role.

What this standard model of bribery demonstrates is that behind a bribe is the intent on behalf of the briber to control and direct the actions of another, that is, “the person bribed would not have acted as he did without the inducement of the bribe”.

The briber exploits the weaknesses of the bribe in order to alter his decision-making process and get him to carry out an act he might not have previously considered. Even in cases where the individual would have carried out the desired act anyway, as in the case where a bribed judge would have given the same verdict regardless of the bribe, the fact that the briber had the intent of controlling the decision-making process of the target means that there is the intent to circumvent the individual’s autonomy.

Moreover, by bribing someone to carry out an act that breaches his responsibilities or duties, any further harm that results from the breach is the responsibility of both the briber and the bribe. Without the influence of the bribe the breach would not have occurred and therefore culpability must be accredited to the briber as well as the individual who actually carried out the act and who still had a degree of choice.

Borrowing from legal terminology, “we may view the person offering a bribe as an accessory to the improper act committed by the person accepting that bribe – he is an accessory before the fact and therefore the briber is at least as culpable as his hired agent”.

Forming relationships with people, organizations and groups is an important human characteristic. Out of the multitude of bonds an individual will create in his life, the importance may vary, but the significance to the individual of having bonds does not. “To say that humans are social animals is to say that they depend on others for psychological sustenance, including the formation of their personalities.

The individual draws his identity from that group of people he identifies with, forming bonds which are morally worthwhile inasmuch as they define who he is. To lose these relationships means the individual is harmed as a result of the damage to his identity and sense of self. Concern must be given to relationships between the individual and the associations he is a member of, and the ethical significance to be attributed to these associations.

Furthermore, Toni Erskine argues that it is important to understand that one’s morally defining communities can “come in a variety of forms, including political parties, social movements, and labor unions”. Moreover, given that relationships are two-way streets, it can be argued that not only is the individual who is forced to betray his friends or colleagues harmed by his losing these bonds, but those people with whom he is bonded are also harmed. In addition, when he betrays or is forced to betray the group, such betrayal can break down trust between and within that social group and can lead to degradation of social cohesion. However, the nature of these bonds can vary between people as “there is a host of allegiances and associations to which individuals are strongly committed”, meaning that some betrayals can be more or less harmful than others depending on the individual, the organization and the types of bonds involved.

One of the most important jobs for an intelligence agency is gaining an insight into the activities, mentalities and personalities of their adversary. Only by gaining access to the adversary’s home ground can the intelligence officer collect information or carry out other essential intelligence collection activities, such as recruitment, maintaining an agent or information transmission.

In order to infiltrate or penetrate a target, intelligence officers are supplied with ‘covers’, a full or partial identity that hides offending parts of the operative’s identity. In this section three types of cover will be discussed, that is, the use of ‘official covers’, ‘unofficial covers’ used against a state or society, and ‘unofficial covers’ used against a specific organization or group. By outlining what each type of cover involves, providing illustrative examples and then applying the ethical framework, it is possible to demonstrate the different levels of harm caused.

As Section One discusses, official covers have the benefit of giving the intelligence operative access to valuable sources of information through the normal diplomatic mechanisms associated with an official posting along with a genuine reason for being in a target country, while also maintaining a level of separation from any intelligence affiliations.

During the Cold War, an essential core to U.S. human intelligence involved using official cover operations. For example, “in the late 1970s, the CIA station in London, the agency’s largest liaison station, was staffed by some forty CIA officers who worked out of five offices – the Political Liaison Section; the Area Telecommunications Office... the Joint Reports and Research Unit.. the Foreign Broadcast Information Service; and the Office of Special U.S. Liaison Officer”.

These officers had a variety of tasks including maintaining the intelligence network in the area, monitoring and facilitating the infiltration of illegal cover officers, the recruitment of potential agents, working as the liaison between the embassy and the home intelligence team, as well as going on visits around the country in order to collect information from a variety of public sources.

One of the necessary aspects of an official cover is that the intelligence officer deceives other people about his role as an intelligence operative. In doing so he misleads people in regard to the true intentions behind his activities and interactions. That is, the intelligence officer is intentionally creating a reality where he is not actually an intelligence officer in order that they treat him differently. In this sense, he controls other people’s will in regards to himself.
The main victim of his lies, that is those who have their reality distorted the most, will be those individuals he intentionally interacts with and directly aims to influence. For the official cover officer this will most likely be either state officials or any one the operative decides to approach.

For everyone else, however, although their view of him is the same as those he directly engages with, the officer’s lies do not affect their view of reality in an important area. Therefore, their autonomy is not greatly affected. This demonstrates something important that was mentioned in the previous section in that there are different ways and degrees to which the view of reality can be distorted, and that depending on how and to what extent the target is deceived, the degree to which the autonomy is affected can change. Therefore, in most cases, the degree that this deception affects other people’s autonomy is relatively limited.

With official cover the officer’s citizenship is clear and therefore his intentions are more apparent. This means that people interacting with the intelligence officer have a reasonable ability to make rational decisions in regards to some important information about the officer. Therefore the level of harm caused by official covers features at Level One on the Ladder of Escalation.

Official cover, however, comes with some inherent obstacles. By expressing state affiliation the intelligence officer automatically sets alarm bells ringing for both other intelligence organizations and individuals with whom he might want to interact. Unofficial cover on the other hand completely removes the officer’s true identity and replaces it with one that would make it impossible to know any part of his previous life or allegiances.

As such, unofficial covers have the added benefit that they allow access to areas hitherto unavailable, including organizations and other states that would be wary of his home state association. Moreover, a distinction can be made between two different instances where these unofficial covers are used, between gaining access to a target state or society and gaining access to a particular group or organization. The former, gaining access to a state, involves getting through the border controls of a state, being able to gain residency, finding a job (quite often running a small business) and assuming the life of the average citizen.

The individual is free to move about within the target state, often making no move to be ‘noticed’ by any particular party. In many examples, it is truly the agent’s unobtrusiveness that becomes his strength. By contrast, those covers that are designed to gain access to a particular organization, group or job require the officer to be noticed by this group, and for him to gain acceptance and trust from its members. While the fundamental principle of unofficial cover is similar for state and organization infiltration, the methods, targets and actions may vary. As a result, the harm caused can also vary.

There are a few different techniques for gaining access to another state. One of the most commonly used tactics during the Cold War was to send an officer through a third-party country, gaining residency there first so as to develop his legend before moving on to the main target. There are many examples of this type of infiltration throughout the Cold War. One of the first was a Soviet agent codenamed KONOV, a muscovite Greek who took the identity of Gerhard Max Kohler, a Sudeten-German born in 1917. As a war veteran and radio specialist he was sent to East Germany for four years to work as an engineer and establish his German cover while studying American and German cultures and language.

The KGB then had him marry EMMA, a Stasi officer who took the name of Erna Helga Maria Decker. Posing as East German refugees, they crossed to the Federal Republic of Germany with the aim of moving on to America. After visiting America as a tourist, KONOV was able to secure a job under his assumed German identity and gain an immigrant visas. He worked the science and technology circuit and after seven years he and his wife were able to take the oath of allegiance and become American citizens. A similar example is that of Reino Hayhanen who spent three years in Finland developing his identity as Eugene Maki before securing U.S. citizenship.

However, in some instances in order to gain access to certain places the intelligence officer must first secure the support of the target country’s communities who are living in third-party states. For example, in order for Israeli intelligence to secure an agent within Syria it sent Eliaha Den Shaul Cohen, a Jew born in Alexandria in 1928 to Syrian parents, to Argentina first in order to make contact with the Syrian community there.

Once in Argentina Cohen spent almost a year building himself up as a successful businessman, Syrian patriot and making as many Syrian connections as possible: “in addition to professing his patriotism, he became a well-known supporter of the local Arab newspaper and its editor; he established friendly relations with the Syrian diplomats and military attaché working out of the embassy and in particular Colonel Amin el-Hafaz”.34 When he announced that he had plans to make his move to Syria he was not short of having the right type of support to make his transfer as smooth and natural as possible.

As was the case with official cover, the vital interest violated when an officer assumes an unofficial cover is that of autonomy. Similarly, those individuals who come in contact with the officer under the unofficial cover are subjected to a series of lies and deceptions. They are interacting with the intelligence officer as the assumed persona and, as such, their view of reality in regards to him is distorted. By lying to other people the intelligence operative is controlling how others view him and therefore making them a tool of his will. What this means is that any decisions they make in regards to him are controlled by his lies and deception; he is encouraging them to act differently to how they would have otherwise acted.

For the Lonsdale, KONOV and Hayhanen cases, all of whom spent several years deceiving people so as to build up their ‘legend’, the harm caused is greater than official covers because anyone who interacted with them was interacting with the adopted identities, having no idea about their state affiliation. This means that the decisions of those who the intelligence officer interacts with are affected to a much greater extent.  

For example, people are likely to act differently in regards to someone who is from a friendly nation and who does not work for an intelligence agency than the reverse. However, a difference can be marked between those unofficial cover cases where the operative lies on a superficial level and those cases where deeper lies, designed to control or manipulate, are used.

That is, it can be argued that for KONOV and Hayhanen the main targets of their lies were state border officials, whose autonomy was affected relatively significantly because their reality was distorted to a great effect in an area of importance. In comparison, even though they directly lied to their neighbors and friends, it can be argued that their lies were not designed to alter their autonomy to any great effect. The aim was to have the identity believed and to live an unassuming life, rather than to ‘pump’ anyone directly for information.

In comparison, however, in the Cohen case, where he actively engaged and used the Syrian community, the deceptions used were designed to affect other people’s autonomy to a much greater extent. Cohen actively went out and discovered the Syrian community, actively lied about who he was and his intentions behind the friendships he made, all in order to gain the community’s trust and support.35 He used his lies, his charm and the relationships he formed with people to influence their decision-making processes and encourage them to give him something they would not have otherwise given.

Finally, by forming bonds with those who were members of the Syrian community through deception and manipulation, he betrayed their trust. By breaking these bonds of trust not only did he harm those individuals with which he was bonded, but also risked causing the whole community to lose trust in each other. The argument is that once a mole is found amongst one’s own, suspicion and distrust are likely to be felt between all other members of that group.
Therefore, in the case of Lonsdale and Hayhanen, the level of harm caused features at Level Two on the Ladder of Escalation. In the Cohen case, on the other hand, as a result of the type of lie, the attempt to manipulate others and the effect that such actions can have on other individuals and social cohesion as a whole, the action features at Level Three on the Ladder of Escalation.

It can be argued that there is a distinction between using unofficial covers to gain access to another state and using unofficial covers to gain access to a specific group or organization. The difference comes from the degree of deception and manipulation required to secure the membership. In order to become a member of a specific group or organization the intelligence officer must use his false identity with the intent of creating interpersonal bonds and then use these bonds to his own advantage. By doing this the intelligence officer is able to gain access to the group, control its members and access information he would not be privy to otherwise.

For example, in 1956 Gunter Guillaume and his wife Christel, both HVA officers, had staged a carefully orchestrated escape from east Germany and set up a small business in Frankfurt to act as a cover for their intelligence activities. Once established they quickly became active anti-communists and members of the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) and by 1968 Gunter Guillaume had been made chairman of Frankfurt SPD and an elected member of the Frankfurt city council. In November 1969 Guillaume gained a post in the Chancellor’s office, initially as an assistant in dealing with trade unions and political organizations and then 1972 he was promoted to become the Chancellor’s aid for SPD relations and to arrange the chancellor’s travel arrangements. Guillaume had been able to infiltrate the state’s governmental infrastructure and gain acceptance.

During the Cold War communist subversion from within was one of the West’s biggest fears. This meant that groups with socialist leanings, including political parties or trade unions, were targeted for intelligence infiltration. For example, British intelligence became significantly concerned with the activities, plans and personnel of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and so issued officers to penetrate their inner walls.

One of the most successful penetration officers for MI5 was Miss Olga Grey. Miss Grey was recruited by Maxwell Knight as a long term penetration agent. On Knight’s instructions, Miss Grey started to attend CPGB meetings and was quickly employed as a secretary. Through this role she got to know both Harry Pollitt, the CPGB’s general secretary, and Percy Glading, an officer who was later found guilty of espionage.

This was a tactic repeated by Knight, again with great success, with another of his female agents joining the CPGB as a secretary and who proceeded to pass records and documents to British intelligence for over a decade. In the end this second agent had managed to fill volumes on internal activities.MI5 operatives were also put inside trade unions, most notably the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984-85 strikes: “these people were working within, sometimes actually employed by legitimate organizations, working for the good of their members in the trade union movement... and yet they had the dual role of reporting back to the Security Service certain aspects of what goes on within the union”.

Another penetration operation that is vital for any intelligence agency is the infiltration of the opposing state’s own intelligence community. An example of this rare achievement was attained by the Czechoslovakian StB when in 1965 two StB illegals, Karl and Hanan Koecher, arrived in New York claiming to be refugees fleeing from persecution in the Czechoslovakia. Fluent in Russian, English, French as well as Czech, they were able to find a job easily working as a consultant for Radio Free Europe.

By 1971 Karl succeeded in becoming a naturalized American citizen, his wife a year later. In 1973 Karl moved to Washington and obtained a job inside the CIA as a translator in the Agency’s Soviet division with top-security clearance. Not long after he was asked to write intelligence reports based on material from the Soviet bloc.

Using an unofficial cover in order to infiltrate a group or organization relies on the extensive use of deception, manipulation and exploitation of other people. Indeed, the difference between state and group penetration is the level and type of deceptions and manipulations that are often used. That is, state-unofficial cover mainly used passive deception, while with penetrating an organization the intelligence officer must manipulate other people’s perceptions of himself to a greater extent and put pressure on them in order to gain acceptance and information.

The deceptions carried out are designed to distort the perceptions of those within the group in regards to who the intelligence officer is and what he wants from them. The autonomy of those within the group is violated as they are forced to make decisions based on the reality created by the operative.

The reason why these deceptions are more harmful than those used for state infiltrations is the increased amount of lying and manipulation involved. Individuals are having more of their reality distorted and are being manipulated to a much greater extent in increasingly important areas of personal concern.

Additional harm is also caused because when the intelligence operative lies about his intentions for joining the group he not only betrays the trust they have in him but also the trust they have between each other. When deceit and betrayal is carried out within a closed organization there is a greater impact on the bonds of trust that bind the organization together. Moreover, the more close-knit the group, the more profoundly the betrayal is felt.
In the Olga Grey, Karl and Guillaume cases, they each lied about their intentions for joining the group as well as using people to get the access they needed.

Miss Grey lied about why she wanted to join the CPGB and then manipulated people by feigning interest in communist ideals; Guillaume lied about why he wanted to join the SPD and manipulated his co-members; and Karl lied about to whom he held allegiance to in order to become an intelligence officer.

Furthermore, not only did they deceive other people, but they also betrayed the trust the group had placed in them. This subsequent betrayal adds a further harm to the deceptions mentioned. However, since the degree of harm caused by breaking these bonds of trust is dependent on the characteristics of the group, it can be argued that there is a greater level of harm caused by Karl’s infiltration and betrayal of an intelligence agency than the examples of trade unions or Grey’s and Guillaume’s party infiltration. This is because the level of trust seen within an intelligence agency is special.

Very few organizations demonstrate a reliance on bonds of trust and interpersonal dependence to the same extent. The often ‘life-or-death’ scenarios officers face requires high levels of trust. Indeed, despite the ease intelligence officers show at deceiving, manipulating and betraying those in the outside world, within the group there is a high degree of reliance on comradeships and trust. Wolf, former head of the HVA, wrote on the special type of betrayal felt by intelligence agencies:

Some people assume that a willingness to betray colleagues might make those who work in the intelligence immune to disillusion when betrayal happens among their own ranks. That is wrong. Betrayal is poison for every intelligence service.

The poison of betrayal can then cause distrust, suspicion and increased monitoring of individuals, which can quickly cause a breakdown of the social cohesion felt within the organization.

Therefore, with respect to Grey’s penetration of the CPGB and Guillaume’s penetration of the SPD, given that each lied and manipulated their way into a group, using the feelings and trust of others to their own ends, their actions feature at Level Four of the Ladder of Escalation.

In the case of Karl and the infiltration of the close-knit community that is an intelligence organization, given the wider harms to the organization and the betrayal felt as well as the increased degree of deceptive and manipulative acts, it features at Level Five on the Ladder of Escalation.

While being able to get one’s own agents inside an adversary can open up many doors, such tactics are not the only way of getting this information. Indeed, instead of using their own operatives to infiltrate an adversary, intelligence agencies can also recruit those already on the inside. The actual recruitment process is somewhat of an art form, and the tactics used to create the right mental state required for a recruitment can be quite varied. What this section will do is to go through some of the main tactics and ‘pitches’ used and outline different levels of harm that can be caused.
The first, and often the simplest and shortest recruitment tactic, is the ‘direct pitch’ whereby the intelligence operative approaches the target offering him something in exchange for his cooperation. Although this is a basic interpretation of the tactic, it demonstrates the principle of offering something in exchange for cooperation.

To help ensure success, this tactic can be augmented by running a check on the target in the hope of discovering that he “has committed a minor legal transgression, has financial problems or needs a job”, information that can be used as a means of initiating or influencing contact.

However, if the target has no problems the intelligence agency can exploit then it is possible to manufacture one: “the position is created for a man so that MI5 can come along and help him out – a bit like breaking a man’s leg so that you can offer him a crutch”. Obviously, one of the most common examples of this type of pitch is to offer money, but the offer could essentially be for anything, including “loans to relatives, consulting fees, gambling tips, inside information on a stock, or participation in a profitable business venture”. For example, in the instance of William Bell, the offer was made by looking into his personal history and discovering he had debts and then using this information as a means of getting him to co-operate. After he was arrested Bell was asked if he supported or had any political sympathies toward his recruiters, the Polish intelligence. “No”, he replied, “Mr Zacharseci (his Polish handler) had found a fool who needed money. I had a weak spot. He took advantage of me”.

When a direct pitch is made the target is approached and offered some benefit in return for his cooperation. This is essentially a bribe. The intelligence agency is using payment with the intent of altering the target’s previously conceived will. As a result the interest that is violated is the target’s autonomy.

The bribe is used to indirectly influence or guide the target’s decision-making process, steering him down a path he might not have otherwise travelled. The less opportunity there is to refuse the bribe the more harmful the action is because the degree his will is controlled is greater. However, the degree to which the bribe affects the individual’s autonomy is generally, it can be argued, minimal. It is, after all, still a bribe and not extortion or blackmail; the individual will most often have room to decline.

Therefore, if there is a reasonable option to turn down the bribe then it can be argued that the target’s decision-making process is not hijacked but merely guided. This is, after all, not a discussion on the use of extortion, where the individual is threatened with “some harm in order to obtain” cooperation. If it were, it could be argued that the individual has less room to resist (because of the fear of harm) and so his autonomy would be violated to a greater degree. Bribery, on the other hand, leaves the option (albeit sometimes slim) to resist and so the effect on the target’s autonomy is less In the case of William Bell, the money given was used as a form of pressure on his normal decision-making process; his will was directed down an avenue which, without the bribe, he would not have necessarily gone.
However, given that what was being offered was something he could refuse, his autonomy was not fully usurped. He had a reasonable degree of control over his own will and it can be argued that he was reasonably able to resist the pressures placed on his decision-making process. In this instance, the direct pitch features at Level One on the Ladder of Escalation.

Other recruitment tactics involve creating the right mind-set in the target so that come the final pitch the target believes that cooperation is the correct course of action. The intelligence officer can employ a range of tactics to achieve this, though often it will involve exploiting the emotions or natural inclinations of an individual. Feelings created as the result of a bond of friendship, a sense of obligation resulting from a debt, or some existing resentment, anger, or other strong emotion can all be used by the intelligence officer to influence the target. For example, creating a friendship with the target means that he is less likely to see the final pitch as threatening, with the months leading up to the pitch being used to ‘soften up’ the target and gradually alter his opinions.

This has the added benefit of the ‘familiarity factor’ whereby “eventually even the most cautious person drops his guard and forgets that the person he is talking to represents a foreign state”.47 Valuable intelligence can often be picked up from casual talk between friends. If the friendship is not enough to achieve the final conversion, however, the intelligence operative can build on it by carrying out some ‘favor’ so as to create a situation where the target becomes indebted to him. The sense of obligation to fulfil this debt can then be used as a lever on the individual’s decision-making process.

Each of these tactics can be seen in the recruitment of ‘Mr G’: Mr G was a young diplomat who arrived in Moscow in 1953 to work in one of the Near Eastern Embassies. When he first arrived he found it very difficult to secure an apartment due to the bureaucratic processes being overly drawn-out. Soviet intelligence made the initial approach, having the operative establish a ‘chance’ friendship with Mr G. Once the friendship was established, Mr G commented on “how he was amazed at the slow civil service and how for three months they had not found him a flat”; feigning surprise the recruiter stated that he had some friends that might be able to help him out. A few days later the recruiter called him up and said that his friends had found him a flat. Due to this, the target was now indebted to the recruiter and their friendship had been deepened as a result. In this example, the intelligence officer was also able to use the familiarity factor:

The conversations moved gradually on to political topics and I began to ask G. about his government’s policy towards the Soviet Union... G answered my questions in a relaxed manner and talked more openly every time we met... he told me about the diplomats he knew who were working in the British, American and French embassies, about the matters they discussed, and so on.

By establishing these bonds of friendship and then creating a situation where the target was indebted to the recruiter, the move towards converting him would be increasingly sweetened.

Finally, the intelligence officer was then able to capitalize on the ‘favour’ he had created when, in 1954, a Soviet defector jumped over the wall into Mr G’s embassy. The recruiter pointed out that those friends that had helped Mr G before were asking for something in return and that if Mr G was unable to help now then his friends would be in no position to help in the future; Mr G told the recruiter who the defector was and was even able to encourage the embassy to return him.

Another case that involves the manipulation of an individual’s emotional state is the recruitment of Abdoolcader, who was approached and recruited in 1967 while working in the Greater London Council motor licensing department. Born into a well-to-do Malaysian family, Abdoolcader had arrived in London ten years earlier to study at Lincoln’s Inn. As a result of his repeated failure to pass his law exams and dissatisfaction with his social life he became steadily more bitter and resentful.

In 1967, Aleksandr Savin, the recruitment officer, struck up an apparently chance conversation with Abdoolcader in a bar introducing himself as a Pole named Vlad who had lived in England for many years. After several more convivial pub evenings, with Vlad buying most of the drinks, he revealed himself as a Russian. Feeding off Abdoolcader’s bitterness and the friendship he had built with him, Savin was able to get him to search the records at his work and provide the details of the individuals who drove cars of certain registration numbers, a number of which belonged to British intelligence, meaning that the KGB were able to identify who these officers were. By exploiting an individual’s “sense of personal dissatisfaction that stems from feelings or being overlooked, overworked and under-appreciated”, the intelligence officer was able to create the right mindset needed for the final recruitment.

Using the emotions of someone can often prove to be a valuable lever for intelligence agencies. Exploiting an individual’s bonds of friendship, feelings of obligation or even feelings of resentment or bitterness, the recruiter essentially interferes with the individual’s normal decision-making process. For example, people will naturally lower their defenses if they think they are dealing with a friend, or will become more willing to believe or help out a friend as compared to a stranger. In the illustrative examples mentioned, the intelligence officer forms a relationship with the target and over time is either able to collect information through conversations or to capitalize on the feelings of friendship.

Creating this friendship, however, relies on an extensive use of deception and manipulation by the intelligence officer. Not only is the intelligence officer lying about his identity, but also about the intention behind why he wishes to establish the friendship. Furthermore, the intelligence officer is then using the friendship and the associated feelings as a form of pressure to be applied to the target’s decision-making process.

Had the target known what the intelligence officer was really after when he started the relationship then the target might have acted very differently. Feelings of obligation can also act as a form of pressure on the decision-making process. The individual is made to feel indebted to the intelligence officer for some reason, and either the intelligence officer then explicitly uses this debt to get the individual to act in a certain way or lets the feeling of obligation influence the target’s decisions.

Furthermore, additional harms can be caused as a result of betraying those bonds the target creates with the intelligence officer. As already noted, individuals form morally worthwhile bonds with each other in order to define themselves, and in doing so they draw strength from these bonds. When these bonds are then manipulated or based on lies there is a great sense of betrayal.

This method of manipulating the emotional bonds of a target figured centrally in the case of Mr G. In this case, the intelligence officer struck up a friendship with Mr G based on a false identity and under false intentions. The intelligence officer’s intentions behind this chance friendship were not as Mr G understood them – a genuine interest in Mr G for example – but rather were based in the intelligence officer’s desire to use Mr G for his own ends.

Mr G’s ability to make decisions in regards to the intelligence officer was based on the lies he was told and, as such, his decision-making capacity, and therefore his autonomy, was altered. Furthermore, feelings of obligation and indebtedness were used as a lever on Mr G’s decision-making process, pressuring him to return the favor: “Mr G did not know what to do. It was awkward for him to refuse to give me the information, but by providing it he would be breaking the law”.

Likewise, Abdoolcader had both his feelings of bitterness and resentment and any feelings of friendship exploited so as to guide his decision-making process. However, in comparison to the Abdoolcader case, it can be argued that the recruitment of Mr G caused a greater level of harm because Mr G’s remained ignorant of his ‘friend’s’ true identity, meaning that more of his reality was distorted resulting in a greater control over his will.

So, while Abdoolcader eventually knew his recruiter’s true identity before the final pitch, and was therefore able to make a more informed decision, Mr G. was not afforded this luxury. Therefore, with respect to the activities involved in the case of Abdoolcader the harm is Level Two on the Ladder of Escalation, whereas in the case of Mr G who was not aware of who he was dealing with, though still aware of the connection to an opposing state, the harm is on Level Three of the Ladder of Escalation.

The use of seduction, love and even sex has long been an important tool in intelligence. This is because of the influence that affection towards someone can have on the individual. Most individuals are more likely to trust, think favorably of, or be open to those individuals they have fond feelings for, even if that individual is not treating them well.
For intelligence, this bond of affection makes the target more malleable to the recruitment process. In comparison to the other pitches discussed, seduction involves targeting and exploiting an individual’s core emotions, those most intimate to him, and therefore can cause a different type of harm than previously discussed.

The most infamous type of seduction is that of the ‘Romeo agent’, where an attractive male agent targets women who were lonely and use their loneliness to create feelings of love and affection. Once the target is enthralled with the Romeo agent these feelings can be used as a lever to influence the target’s decisions. In the first illustrative example, the Romeo agent was able to exploit feelings of affection so as to ensure a successful direct pitch.
Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler was a divorced 27 year old western secretary who was hooked by a slender, young, blond East German calling himself Herbert Richter while on holiday in Bulgaria. They were quickly married in a ceremony that was orchestrated by East German intelligence. As a result of the boundless affection that she felt for him, Richter was able to make a direct pitch, telling her who he was, who he worked for and then persuaded her to carry out espionage for him.

At his direction, she applied for jobs in the West German Foreign Ministry and at the Federal Chancellery in 1975, and then using a Minox camera she photocopied everything of interest that crossed her desk. As a result of the information she provided, East German intelligence was treated to highly confidential communications between Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and President Carter.

The second case is that of Lorraine DeVries, a lonely woman of fifty, who had long given up on any hope of marriage. But while working as a secretary at the Netherlands embassy in Moscow, she met a dashing Russian some ten years her junior, Boris Sergevich Kudinkin. After he had seduced DeVries he rang her in panic, informing her that the KGB had interrogated him about their relationship and claimed that they said they would ruin his career. DeVries agreed to help the KGB if they promised to keep the relationship a secret and leave Boris alone.
The final example involves a ‘false flag’ case where the intelligence officer says he is working for a different country so as to encourage cooperation. In the example discussed here, Wolf sent Peter Krause to Bonn to seek out a lonely secretary who worked for the Foreign Ministry. Krause soon located Helge Berger, a newly arrived and lonesome individual. After winning her affections, he suggested that they go on holiday and once there he informed her that he was British Intelligence, SIS.

She was relieved to hear he was an SIS agent and not East German or Russian intelligence. As a result of using this false flag coupled with the affections she had for him, she was willing to slip him secure documents. Until the very end she believed that she was working for British rather than East German intelligence. It can be argued that her willingness to hand over the secure documents was heavily influenced by the emotional bonds that were created and exploited between her and Peter Krause, feelings built on a false identity and false intentions.

In a similar case Roland G. targeted Margarete, a good Catholic who had spent her time working diligently at NATO and living the quiet life until Roland came along and spent considerable time and effort sweeping her off her feet. Roland took her on extravagant trips, evenings at the theatre and lavished attention on her in ways she had never before experienced. After the first night of sexual relations Roland “emptied his heart” to her, telling her that he was Danish intelligence and how Denmark felt left out of NATO and needed its own intelligence. She quickly agreed to help him by supplying NATO secrets, disclosing preparations and evaluations of the Alliances’ military man oeuvres as well as any strengths and weaknesses.

As previously noted, there is something special about the harm caused in seduction cases. This is because, first, seduction cases require a greater degree of deception in the initial stages to secure the seduction and, second, seduction requires manipulating and exploiting more deeply-felt emotions than in the other tactics.

As such, seduction cases can cause a greater level of harm. An individual’s ‘love life’, it can be argued, features at his most intimate level in that who he loves and trusts resides at the root of his sense of self. If a comparison is made to the type of bond made between chance friends, the level of intimacy made with a loved one and the emotions felt, it can be argued, are much closer to the individual’s personal core, and are therefore more sorely felt when violated.
In Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler’s case, where the seduction was designed to encourage the success of a direct pitch, the target was willing to provide the information because of the pressure her affection was having on her decision-making process.

She was harmed inasmuch as some of her most intimate feelings were used as a lever to influence her decision-making process for another’s benefit. Dagmar did, however, know that the person making the pitch was an intelligence officer, meaning that she was afforded some measure of control over her decision-making process. In comparison, DeVries had no knowledge that her Romeo, Boris, was an intelligence officer. While her feelings of affection drove her to act as an agent, she did it while still believing Boris’s cover. Therefore, her autonomy was affected to a greater extent because not only was she having her decision-making process influenced through the manipulation of her core emotions, but she also had her view of Boris distorted.

However, she was still aware that the information she was passing on was going to the KGB so in this way she was aware of who was using the information and so there was still some ability to control the cost-gains analysis she had to make. In the cases of Helge Berger and Margarete, on the other hand, given that they were both unaware of whom it was they were working for and were actually encouraged to believe that they were working for someone else, their ability to control their own decision-making process was affected to a much greater extent.

That is, they were unable to make a fully informed decision in regards to where their information was going and the damage it could cause. Therefore the level of harm caused was greater. In summary then, the harm in the Dagmar case is Level Three, whereas in the case of DeVries the harm caused is Level Four and the harm caused by the activities involved in the cases of Helge Berger and Margarete are at Level Five of the Ladder of Escalation.

The ‘walk-in’ or the ‘defection’ offers the intelligence agency one of the most lucrative opportunities for intelligence collection. A defection is simply where an individual comes to the intelligence agency, quite often by physically walking into an embassy or intelligence building, and offering either himself or information.

During the Cold War examples of defections from both sides of the Iron Curtain exhibited some of the most lucrative sources of intelligence. Unfortunately for intelligence collectors, however, these defections are hard to predict and there is significant pressure to ensure that when they do happen the intelligence agency is able to secure both the individual and the information.

There are two types of defections, those who fully defect, leave the job and physically cross the boundary – ‘defectors-in-fact’ – and those who defect but remain in their job – defectors-in-place – passing information until they choose to fully and physically defect (at which point they become defectors-in-fact).In some instances, the walk-in might demand a price for the information they possess – be it in money, sanctuary or other goods – but this is not always so.

Some of the most noteworthy, and also most famous, defections during the Cold War include – defecting from the Soviet bloc to the West – that of Oleg Gordievsky, Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin and Oleg Penkovsky. Each of these individuals was a defector-in-place for long periods of time until each of them fully defected some years later.

For example, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky was deputy-head of the foreign section of the GRU and proved one of the most important defections for the British SIS during the Cold War. Even though his first few attempts to indicate his wish to defect were unsuccessful, since he held such a high position within Soviet intelligence and British intelligence feared that he was a KGB provocation, Penkovsky persisted until they believed his offer in 1961.Analyses of the documents provided by Penkovsky over the years concluded that he delivered “unique information concerning the Soviet intelligence structure, new information on staff responsible for sabotage, subversion, and assassination... the identity of more than 300 soviet intelligence officers and over a dozen agents active in the West”.

In the other direction, defections from West to East, one of the most famous cases is that of Aldrich Ames. In March 1984 Aldrich Ames told his boss, Rod Carlson, that he wanted to see some action; he offered to start meetings with Soviets in Washington in the hope that it might perhaps lead to recruitment or two.

According to a CIA investigation Ames stated that his primary motivation for his decision to commit espionage was his “desperation regarding his financial indebtedness he incurred at the time of his separation from his wife, his divorce settlement and his cohabitation with Rosario (his new wife)”.In April 1985 Ames made the decision to sell agency secrets to Moscow: “In exchange for $50,000 I provided the KGB with the identities of several Soviet citizens who appeared to be cooperating with the CIA inside the Soviet Union”.

This was the beginning of what was to be long-term exchange of information for money and proved to be one the most beneficial defections for the Soviet bloc and one of the most costly for the Americans.

With the walk-ins and defections the onus of acting is on the individual and not the intelligence agency. It is the decision of the defector to offer his services to the intelligence agency. The decision to make the approach is, therefore, that of the defector and is not the result of manipulation, deceit, encouragement or interference.

The ability to make decisions is kept intact and the decision-making process is free from interference. The individual’s autonomy is therefore left unaffected. He acts and therefore consents to the consequences of his actions.

Furthermore, while there might be some form of payment involved in the exchange of information – money, goods, paper-work – this payment is different from a bribe seen in previous cases.
A bribe is used with the intent to alter an individual’s choices, to interfere with the normal decision-making process. In the case of a defector the decision to defect has already been made; there is no outside force directly trying to encourage or interfere with the choice to defect. The defector has free rein to defect or not and the decision process is left free from interference. Where the harm can be caused is the betrayal felt by the group that the defecting individual has left.

Depending on the type of group he belonged to and the importance of the bonds he had, by defecting he can both harm those individuals who relied on him as well as damaging the cohesion of that group as suspicion fills its ranks. However, the harm that he causes by his defection is not the fault of the intelligence agency, but rather the defector. It was the defectors choice to change sides and betray his social group, rather than it being the result of some intelligence operation.

Therefore, the harm caused remains with him rather than the agency. Therefore, accepting a defection features at the pre-level on the Ladder of Escalation, known as the Initial Level. However, this does not mean that by defecting the walk-in surrenders to all the harm that could befall him.

By accepting the defector the intelligence agency is then responsible for those operations that they task for him. He becomes one of their own and therefore, even though he has defected, if they ask him to carry out some act which will cause harm then they are the source of that harm. Furthermore, by accepting the defection they become responsible for his safety as they would any other officer. This is most important for defectors-in-place who are risking themselves for the intelligence agency.

This section demonstrated the various levels of harm that indirectly coercive human intelligence can cause. Defections feature at the Initial Level since they do not affect the individual’s autonomy; defections are essentially self-motivated. Using an official cover or a direct pitch are positioned at Level One on the Ladder of Escalation.

Even though they each affect an individual’s autonomy through different means – the former using a distorted view of reality to encourage the target to act in a particular way while the latter using incentives to influence the decision-making process – both have low impact on the individual’s autonomy as he is still the main guide on his will. At Level Two, the use of unofficial state infiltration, where the agents become unassuming members of society, the degree and types of deception used are much greater. This is because, compared to official cover, the ability to control one’s own will is circumvented to a greater extent as a result of the greater degree to which the individual’s view of options are distorted. Also at Level Two is the case of Abdoolcader: he had his decision-making process interfered with by exploiting his feelings of bitterness and resentment, which means the level of harm is greater than that of a direct pitch, but in the end he is still aware of who he was working for.

Therefore, compared to the recruitment of Mr G, the level of harm caused is less and Mr G features at Level Three on the Ladder of Escalation. With the use of seduction it can be argued that in the case of Dagmar that even though she was aware for who she was working, this was after a period lying and manipulation that was targeted at a more intimate part of her life. This is why Dagmar’s case features at Level Three on the Ladder of Escalation.

Also at Level Three is the case of Cohen and his infiltration of the Syrian state through the manipulation and exploitation of the Syrian community of Argentina. Cohen manipulated and controlled the decision-making process of other people to a larger extent and in more important ways. The harm involved in cases of unofficial cover used to infiltrate a group is located at Level Four.

This is because, in comparison to the unofficial cover of states seen at Level Three in the Cohen case, the degree and type of lying and manipulation used is much greater.

Also at Level Four is the seduction of DeVries because she had an intimate part of her life exploited while also never knowing the true identity of her Romeo. She was therefore never really able to act in relation to a truthful version of reality and was always under the control of his lies.

This means that she was harmed more in comparison to the Dagmar given that Dagmar was aware of who she was dealing with. However, if the DeVries case is compared the that of Helge Berger and Margarete, DeVires knew that ultimately she was passing information onto the KGB and so could understand the consequences of that action, whereas Helge and Margarete were never aware of who they were working for and therefore were harmed to a greater degree, and therefore feature at Level Five.

Finally, also at Level Five is the infiltration of another’s intelligence agency. In this case the degree of manipulation, deception and degradation of the bonds of trust as well as the wider effect these actions have on a group as close-knit as this one, means that the level of harm is one of the highest.

As previously outlined, an intelligence agency will often send its officers into another country in the guise of state officials so as to gain access to both information stores and important individuals. It has been argued that, as a result, even though the intelligence officer is lying about his true occupation, individuals who come in contact with him are able to make a decision in regards to his state affiliation and, so, their decision-making process is only slightly affected. Therefore, official covers can be placed at Level One on the Ladder of Escalation.

For those activities which cause a degree of harm seen at Level One, there must be a reasonable suspicion of a low level of threat in order for there to be a just cause. In the international sphere this low level is often reached. This is because, as Klaus Knorr argues, “while international systems have been systems of cooperation, they have also been threat systems... the choice of conflict has been frequent over the millennia”. Therefore, invariably all states will pose at least a minimum level of threat. Even though this threat might be a limited in some instances, given the low level of harm official cover cause, this is a sufficient level of threat to justify its use.

As with other Level One harms, the level of authority required to authorize the use of official covers is relatively low. That is, it can come from within the intelligence agency itself, for example officers who have responsibility for a particular operation. However, there should also be some form of oversight mechanism that exists to make sure that these individuals are acting in accordance with the Just Intelligence Principles.

The principle of proportionality maintained in this thesis takes into account the wider damages caused by intelligence collection. The harm caused by the deception must be outweighed by the good provided by the official cover. Moreover, it must also be determined if there are any additional damages caused by official covers that need to be included in the ethical calculation. For example, it can be argued that for official covers, the effect that discovering an agent can have on international diplomacy should be taken into account.

That is, even though official covers have almost become an accepted part of international relations, finding an intelligence officer can always lead to strained relations between states even if the response is most often to export the individual as a persona non grata with little real fallout. However, if it is likely that discovering the agent will lead to severe and/or harmful consequences for the agent or the state then the calculation is altered.

Given that in the majority of cases, those who are under official covers will generally target those who are a part of the state infrastructure, the principle of discrimination can be satisfied. Those who are working in an official capacity for their government are legitimate targets because they have waived their protective rights by taking on a job within the state’s infrastructure. Care, however, must be taken not to use or influence those who have not done anything to waive or forfeit their protective rights, for example the average citizen.

In the previous section it was argued that there is a distinction between those unofficial covers that take up unassuming lives within a social group and those that directly interact and exploit people for their aims.

The former, as a result of the degree and type of lies propagated and low level of manipulation, in comparison to the latter, cause a lower level of harm. This means that in many cases where unofficial cover is used to gain entrance to a state the harm caused is Level Two. However in those instances where the intelligence officer is encouraged to interact, manipulate and gain the trust of people, then the level of harm caused is higher, a Level Three.

When discussing state penetration operations, the level of threat is determined by the threat that the targeted state represents. That is, the state being penetrated must represent a sufficient enough threat to justify the level of harm caused by acts of deception and manipulation.

For Level Two harms the target state must represent a greater level of threat as compared to official cover. This means that there must be some reason for why that state is to be deemed a threat in some way, that is, to be neutral or hostile to the needs and concerns of one’s own state. This means that ‘friendly states’, unless they have acted in some way as to promote a probable threat, are not likely to present a just cause for this type of infiltration. The cases discussed are mainly drawn from the Cold War period, during which there was more than enough history of hostility between the West and the Soviet bloc to act as a just cause for a Level Two harm.

Therefore, for the cases of Kohler and Hayhanen there was a sufficient just cause. For the case of Cohen, which caused a Level Three harm, clearly the threat required should be higher than in the other two cases, necessitating a hostile or potentially hostile state for a just cause.

For Israel, Syria was a country which was increasingly becoming one of the most radical Arab states: “its politics, geographic proximity and large arsenal made it a major concern for the Israeli leaders”; thus it represented a sufficient level of threat to act as a just cause. In comparison, however, if any of the cases had been between American and the United Kingdom, then the years of cooperation, openly friendly relations and lack of any immediate threat or issue would have meant that there was no just cause for the use of unofficial cover in this way.

Again, the principle of proportionality takes into account damages caused by the operation in addition to the harm caused to the target and argues that the good of the operation must outweigh these accompanying costs. Additional concerns for unofficial covers can include those problems that arise as a result of the intelligence operative being discovered, for example the damage it might cause to diplomatic relations. Given that unofficial covers often involve a much higher degree of fraudulent activities by the intelligence officer and the fear of having an illegal within one’s own borders means that if discovered the repercussions could be much greater than that of official cover.

When an officer uses unofficial cover to become an unassuming member of a society, blending as much as possible into the background and attempting to become as unnoticeable as possible, the officer’s lies are superficial inasmuch as they do not alter people’s view of reality to any great extent in a vital area. Since the victims of those lies have their autonomy only partially affected, the need to be discriminating is reduced.

Therefore they can be used against most people. In the case of the more direct lies which are designed to affect the target’s view of reality to a greater extent or in an important field, the individual’s autonomy is violated to a greater extent. This means that the officer should therefore only directly target those who are a part of the political system or similar.

In the Level Two cases of Kohler and Hayhanen, the main targets are state officials as they attempt to gain residency. Those officials are legitimate targets given their role within the state’s infrastructure. In the Level Three Cohen case, he targets both illegitimate and legitimate targets as he spent considerable time making friends with and manipulating people of a particular community, many of which had done nothing to waive any of their protective rights and so were therefore illegitimate targets.

However, some of the individuals with whom he was liaising were part of the political system, including Colonel Amin el-Hafez who was a Syrian politician, military officer and a member of the Ba'th Party. These individuals are clearly part of a military or political infrastructure which means they had tacitly waived their protective rights and were therefore legitimate targets.

The use of unofficial cover in order to gain access to a group or organization will face many of the same issues discussed in the section on unofficial cover for state penetration. The difference, however, is that the level of lies and manipulation required is much higher and will therefore generally feature at a higher level on the Ladder of Escalation.
In the Olga Grey and Guillaume cases and the other trade union penetration operations, the harm caused was Level Four as a result of the deceit and manipulation used. In comparison, in the Karl case, where the individual infiltrated an intelligence agency, the level of harm caused featured at Level Five on the Ladder of Escalation.

The level of threat a particular group poses can act as a just cause for investigating that group. For example, those groups that are more ‘threatening’ – advocating or practicing violence for example – provide a stronger just cause than those groups which are passive – carrying out peaceful protest for instance. By evaluating the group it is therefore possible to determine the level of just cause present. For those cases at Level Four, there must be a significant degree of threat from the group in order to act as a just cause.

The level of proof required is such that the officer must bear the onus to prove to an objective third party that the threat is “more likely than not”.66 In the case of Olga Grey, who penetrated the CPGB, there was a sufficient just cause. This is because at that point in time, there was sufficient evidence to argue that this was an organization that was politically and financially supported by the Comintern as well as propagating policies that would overthrow the government.In comparison, in the case of Guillaume who infiltrated the SPD as well as instances where the British intelligence infiltrated trade unions, there is no sufficient just cause.

In the Guillaume case, the SPD was a political party that posed no direct or violent threat. It had stayed within the legal limits of its role. Furthermore, even though trade unions were fielding some support from the Soviet bloc, there was no evidence to prove that they planned any violent action or proposed overthrowing the government. Being an annoyance to the British government is not a sufficient threat. However, had there been sufficient evidence that indicated that the group was planning violent activities then there would be a just cause.

In the case of Karl, who infiltrated another state’s intelligence organization and caused a Level Five harm, it can be argued that intelligence agencies are bodies which pose a significant level of threat by virtue of what they are and their mandate. However, given that an intelligence agency is part of a state, the level of threat it poses can be seen as a reflection of its parent state.

Therefore, for states that have a history of antagonism, especially those whose intelligence agencies specifically also have a history of antagonism, the threat of the state as well as the organization itself represents the just cause. During the Cold War, for example, relations between the Soviet bloc and the West, especially between their respective intelligence agencies, were such that an expressed degree of hostility was present. However, in an America-United Kingdom example, the long-term friendly relations would mean that there is no just cause for this type of infiltration.
Activities that violate different groups or organizations can often have wider repercussions on the domestic society or the system the organization belongs to. If the group is a social movement or represents certain parts of society, for example, by infiltrating them the state runs the risk of alienating that particular group from the rest of society, which can have a negative impact on the coherence of the society as a whole. When discussing penetrating a group or organization, the principle of discrimination is determined by the character of the group or organization itself. Those individuals who have joined the group have accepted the character of that group and in doing so opened themselves up to those dangers that the group represents.

If, therefore, the group is one that has demonstrated that it is involved in activities that are threatening, then by being a member of that group they have waived their normal protective rights as well as becoming a contributing factor to that threat. Therefore, in the CPGB example, given that their activities were threatening, those who joined the group forfeited their protective rights and become legitimate targets. In the case involving infiltrating trade unions or legitimate political parties, given that the organizations themselves were not threatening, those who joined the group were not legitimate targets as they posed little or no threat.

Finally, those cases that involve infiltrating an intelligence agency, given that intelligence officers are groups of individuals who have ‘entered the game’ to the greatest extent as compared to any other group or individual, they are legitimate targets, even for Level Five harms. Therefore, in the case of Karl, those individuals who were members of the intelligence agency were legitimate targets.

The recruitment of individuals by intelligence agencies relies on an array of different activities and tactics, including the direct pitch, a range of manipulative tactics and preying on an individual’s emotional weaknesses. The levels of harm caused can vary according to the type and degree of deception and manipulation used.

The use of a ‘direct pitch’, since it involves the intelligence officer going up to a target and asking him to cooperate, normally in exchange for money or some other favor or goods, features at Level One on the Ladder of Escalation.

For Level One harms, the individual approached should represent some level of threat to act as a just cause, however this threat might be relatively low and there only needs to be a reasonable suspicion of its veracity. This level of threat might be a reflection of the individual himself or the organization/state to which the target is directly connected. For example, in the international system, given that most states represent even at a minimum some level of threat, there is reason for direct pitches to those directly connected to the organization/state.

Those activities that rely on manipulating an individual’s emotional weaknesses – manipulating bonds of friendship or pushing emotional levers – the level of harm caused is much greater, ranging from Level Two to Level Five depending on the circumstances. In the case of Abdoolcader, who had his bitterness towards the his circumstances, and therefore the British system, as well as his feelings of friendship manipulated, the harm caused was Level Two since he was eventually told the truth and so was able to make a more informed decision.

Therefore, the individual or associated state/organization, must represent a more substantial threat than that seen with the direct pitch. For Abdoolcader, even though the organization he works for is not central to the state’s infrastructure, given the history of hostility between the East and the West and the relatively low level of harm, it could be argued that there is a just cause. For the case of Mr. G, which was a Level Three case, it can be argued that the level of harm was not justified. The threat for a Level Three harm has to be something of importance or has the ability to cause a reasonable amount of destruction.

The state/organization for which Mr G worked, however, did not necessarily represent this level of threat. If there was a belief of an upcoming operation, or there were significant tensions between the two countries or the organization for which he worked represented a particular threat, then there would have been a just cause. But given that Mr G worked for an embassy – which posed no direct threat – of a country with which there was passable relations means there was no reason to fear a threat and therefore no just cause.

In order to determine to what extent those targeted for recruitment are legitimate targets or not, the character of the organization they belong to or the role they play in a state’s infrastructure should be considered. In the case of Abdoolcader, given that the harm caused was relatively low at Level Two and that he had placed himself in the political infrastructure meant that he was a legitimate target in this instance.

However, if the case had been that the level of harm were any higher than Level Two and if the organisation he worked for were on the periphery of the state infrastructure, he would have been an illegitimate target. In comparison, Mr G worked for his state’s embassy and so was aware of his role in the state’s infrastructure, as demonstrated by the type of information he was able to convey when he was asked. As such, even for the higher Level Three harm caused, Mr G’s role in the embassy meant that he was a legitimate target. However, given that he was still a junior member of his Embassy, had the level of harm been any higher, he would have been an illegitimate target.

The use of seduction is a special case where very intimate, core feelings are manipulated by the intelligence officer in order to gain information. In this way, the level of harm is greater and is reflected in the distribution of activities up the Ladder of Escalation.

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For those direct pitches that rely on the use of seduction to influence the target the harm caused is Level Three. This means that there must be a medium level of threat, that is, the threat is targeting something of importance or has the ability to cause a reasonable amount of destruction. At this level there must be evidence that ‘on a balance of probabilities’ a threat exists.

In the case of the Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, the climate between the Soviet bloc and the West was one of overt hostility and therefore a sufficient level of threat for a Level Three harm. In comparison, in the DeVries case at Level Four there is no just cause for the activity. This is because the state she was associated with was not directly or overtly hostile. Working for the Norwegian embassy, there lacked the same institutional and political tension. Had she belonged to a state which represented more of a threat or the tactics used caused a low level of harm then there would have been a sufficient level of threat present.

In the last two cases, that of Margarete and Helge Berger, the harm caused is a Level Five. In both cases the targets worked for states or organizations that were overtly hostile or represented a threat to state interests and therefore represented a sufficient just cause. For example, Margarete worked for the military organization NATO and Helge Berger worked for the West German Foreign Ministry, both of which, it can be argued, represented an actual threat for Soviet interests. Furthermore, the organizations or departments, both military based, were central to the role of the threat.

In order to satisfy the principle of discrimination, the target must have done something to waive the normal protective rights. In the case of Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, she was unemployed when the Romeo agent seduced her and made the direct pitch. She, therefore, was not a part of any state infrastructure, meaning there is no evidence that she had acted in a way that indicated that she had voluntarily given up her protective rights or that she was a particular threat.
Therefore, at Level Three she was an illegitimate target. In order for her to be a legitimate target for an operation that caused a Level Three harm she would have had to be have worked for an organization belonging to a state or group which represented a direct threat.

For those activities where the harm caused is Level Four, the target must be both from a state that is threatening in some substantial way as well as part of the state’s infrastructure. In the case of DeVries, therefore, she is a legitimate target. This is because she worked for her state’s Embassy and so was well aware of her position in the state’s infrastructure and what was expected of her in her position of responsibility.

In the case of Margarete and Helge Berger, the type of organizations or departments for which they worked meant that they had both taken on jobs that were central to the state or belonged to a military organization and in doing so had taken on positions of responsibility and had thus waived their normal protective rights. However, it can be argued that they were not sufficiently far enough up the ladder to be targeted for such an operation. Therefore, at a Level Five harm they represent illegitimate targets.

Of the human intelligence collection cases discussed, defections represent the lowest level of harm caused. Receiving a defector should be placed at the Initial Level on the Ladder of Escalation. Therefore, there is no need for a just cause, authority or discrimination.
Human beings naturally form relationships with each other and often these relationships play a huge role in their lives. What is important for intelligence collection is being able to exploit these relationships to the advantage of the operative.

However, exploiting one’s fellow man does not, unsurprisingly, come without a price. Coercing people, even indirectly, comes into conflict with their vital interests, namely that interest in autonomy.

It was also shown that depending on the degree that the individual’s normal decision-making process is hijacked, the level of harm caused can vary. As a result, limitations on the exploitative nature of human intelligence have been established.

The Just Intelligence Principles provide these limitations while also making it clear when the actions are justified.
It will explore those actions carried out by human intelligence operatives which directly force another individual into complying with their needs, outlining both the harm this can cause to the individual and discussing whether this harm can be justified or not.

On human intelligence made it clear that there were several sources and forms of information only accessible to human beings, either by using the intelligence operative to access a particular area, group or individual or by using certain tactics to encourage others to divulge the information.

Throughout history torture has been used as a tool of the state. It has been used as a means of securing a confession or gaining information, to punish those who transgressed or as a means of deterring and intimidating those who might resist the authority of the state. Similarly, blackmail has proven itself to be a potent instrument for both states and individuals as a means of controlling people for some gain.

Indeed, torture and blackmail both have the potential to be powerful means of encouraging even the most reticent to comply. It is therefore not surprising that many powers have put a lot of effort into perfecting these as tools. In this first section blackmail and torture will be examined in order to outline what actions are employed under these two type of activities so as to give a better understanding of what is happening to those targeted.

Throughout history various legal authorities and canons have spent considerable time examining and discussing what blackmail entails and why society should prohibit its use. As it currently stands, the legal definition of blackmail highlights four key points.

First, the blackmailer makes an unwarranted demand; second, the demand is made with menace; third, the blackmailer acts with a view to gain for himself or another with the intent to cause a loss to the target; and finally, the blackmailer does not believe that he has reasonable grounds for making the demand or that the use of menaces is a proper means of enforcing the demand. In breaking down this definition it can be seen that there is a clear threat or demand being made by the blackmailer; it is the ‘give me or else’ part of the act, though how the demand is made can vary. The second point about blackmail is that it involves a gain to the blackmailer or a third party and a loss to the victim. That is, blackmail will involve something being given, whether it is money, services or information. Finally, the demand must be made with ‘menaces’, a threat of an action detrimental or unpleasant to the person being addressed, although the menace itself does not have to be illegal.

Furthermore, these menaces of a threat should be not be minor, in that “the mind of an ordinary person of normal stability and courage might be influenced or made apprehensive so as to accede unwillingly to the demand”.

There are, however, several different formats these criteria can take. For example, emotional blackmail, physical blackmail, information blackmail, entrapment blackmail, economic blackmail, et cetera are all different forms of blackmail, changing in response to the threat made or the gain requested. For this thesis the main focus will be on information and entrapment blackmail. Information blackmail is where the “sale of silence by someone who is otherwise free to disclose what he knows” is used in order to get the target to capitulate in some way. Entrapment blackmail involves the target being manipulated and ensnared within a trap designed to provide the information that then forms the basis for the blackmail.

From its birthplace in the ancient Greek and Roman legal systems, through medieval times and up to the eighteenth century, torture was used in continental European legal proceedings as a means of securing confessions from people, known in the hierarchy of proofs to be the “queen of proofs” as its results were considered beyond reproach.
Torture has also been employed as a tool of intimidation and punishment by some regimes so as to instil fear, exert domination, and to punish those who pose a threat to the authority. The study of torture is therefore often broken down into terms of whether it is being used to intimidate, secure a confession, carry out punishment or interrogate. While each of these forms of torture are worthy of investigation, they are not all the direct concern of this thesis.

Only torture as an interrogation tool, with the specific goal of collecting intelligence information, is the focus. While it can be argued that all forms of torture are politically motivated, and therefore it is impossible to escape some intimidation, for simplicity this thesis will focus on its interrogational aspect, though some consideration will be given to the side-effects when appropriate.

Definitions of torture through the ages have changed little. From Roman jurists of the second and third century to modern day philosophers and lawyers, those who have taken the most trouble to consider the question of what torture is have come up with remarkably similar answers. Third century jurist Ulpian declared: “By quaestio [torture] we are to understand the torment and suffering of the body in order to elicit the truth.

Neither interrogation itself, nor lightly inspired fear correctly pertains to this edict. Since, therefore, quaestio is to be understood as force and torment”. Contemporarily, the most prominent definition is that set down in the Geneva Convention Against the Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, stating torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person.

In addition, this convention also binds its signatories to “prevent other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment that do not amount to torture”. What can be understood from these definitions is that there is a level of suffering inflicted on the individual that is above and beyond that seen in almost any other activity. Furthermore, it is clear that torture is not just about physically attacking someone’s body, but also about the psychological or emotional attacks one can suffer.

However, while these definitions give the broad understanding that torture involves severe torment of an individual, what they fail to elucidate is what exactly torture involves, how it works or what makes it ‘torturous’. By highlighting some of the underlying principles and mechanisms of torture, not only can the act of torture itself be better understood, but also the affects it can have on the individual and the types of activities employed.

The first point for understanding how torture works is recognizing it as a specialized form of operant conditioning. After the Korean War a psychologist called Albert Biderman worked to challenge the myth about the ability of Chinese officers to use mystical means to break detainees, and, along with I. Farber, Harry Harlow and Louis West, outlined a system called DDD – Debility, Dependency and Dread – that explained detainee compliance. Using conditioning theory as the basis of their analysis, they argued that the physical, social and emotional conditions created by the three Ds, can be used to, first, break down any resolve or resistance the individual might have, while, second, conditioning his responses.

Although torture is rarely as scientific as this, understanding how the mechanisms work upon the human psyche is essential to understanding the main characteristics of torture. Debility is designed to attack the body so as to deliberately induce physical and mental weakness in the target.

This can be caused, for example, through the use of “noxious stimulation, injury, disease, malnutrition, deprivation, sleeplessness, fatigue... and chronic physical pain”. Through the use of physical, psychological and emotional attacks the torturer breaks down any resolve of the target. Furthermore, these attacks act in order to condition the individual into associating resistance with highly negative results.

Prolonged deprivation of life’s essential factors is then made more poignant by periods of occasional and unpredictable respite, reminding the victim that the torturer is able to alleviate the pain if he so wishes. This creates a paradoxical dependency upon the torturer; the victim is brought to believe that his fate is entirely within the hands of the torturer.

This demonstrates another essential characteristic of torture, that it involves a special, asymmetric relationship between victim and torturer. The victim must realize that he is completely at the mercy of the torturer. The victim is completely defenseless and open to constant attack.

As a result of this asymmetric relationship, the victim starts to feel obliged to the torturer both as his punisher and savior. This acts as a positive reinforcement to encourage cooperation. Essentially, favorable responses are met with favorable repercussions, and unfavorable responses are met with unfavorable repercussions.

Through punishment both physical and psychological, coupled with select moments of relief and constant variation in the treatment in order to stop the victim from seeing through the ordeal, statements like “you can go sleep now, we’ll start again tomorrow”, provide positive motivation for compliance.

The final element, dread, is not applied directly during the sessions, but is the fear that is experienced between the sessions. As Farber notes, dread is the most expressive term to indicate the chronic fear that they feel: “fear of death, fear of pain... fear of deformity or permanent disability... and even the fear of one’s own inability to satisfy the demands of insatiable interrogators”. Even in the down-time, when the torturer is not around, the individual is not given respite; the torture continues and therefore the individual is unable to build himself back-up, to offer renewed resistance come the next session.

By combining each of these factors through selective reinforcement of certain responses and the punishment of others, the use of torture is designed to break any resolve the target has while conditioning him to cooperate. The conditions created by DDD provide the means for selectively reinforcing certain modes of response.
Mechanisms for Compliance: Every Man Has His Breaking Point?

Since torture aims to break down an individual’s resistance and resolve, while both negatively and positively reinforcing certain responses, it is possible to indicate the sort of activities that might be employed by the torturer. What this section will examine is the arsenal of the torturer in respect to the physical and psychological limits of the human body.
Given that the human brain is both the repository for the individual’s knowledge as well as the organ that controls all human functioning, it is in many ways the main target for the torturer. As an organ the brain can only operate “optimally within the same narrow range of physical and chemical conditions” and as such “any circumstance that impairs the function of the brain potentially affects the ability to give and withhold information”. Therefore attacks that affect the brain or its environment are crucial to torture.

The brain, like any organ, exists and relies on an internal milieu maintained by and dependent on a complex variety of chemical and environmental factors. Homeostasis refers to the body's ability to regulate the inner environment so as to ensure stability in its normal operations in response to any fluctuations in its environment. Any disturbance in the consistency of this milieu can bring homeostatic imbalance that can severely impact the body and normal brain function.

One of the most important factors in maintaining this equilibrium is body temperature. The temperature of the human internal environment is maintained as near to 37.5°c as possible; an elevation to 41°c or below 31°c will nearly always impair normal brain function. This internal equilibrium is also dependent on the level of both organic and inorganic compounds in the blood stream, and any disturbance in the concentration of the level of either of these can have a direct impact on the brain’s normal ability to function. For example, excessive sweating, deprivation of water, diets high or low salt, ingestion of excessive amounts of water, inducing vomiting, diarrhea, burns, shock caused by injuries, hemorrhages or damage to the kidneys, can all cause the levels in the body’s internal chemistry to alter dramatically.
Changing the body’s chemistry in this way can result in what is referred to as ‘brain syndrome’, an impairment of the brain’s functions across the board. In the first stages the individual might experience “pain, fatigue, thirst, hunger, drowsiness...

he may lose the capacity to carry out complex responsibilities accurately, speedily, effectively and plan his activities... he is likely to become emotionally liable, irritable, depressed, jumpy and tense”. As the brain syndrome develops the subject’s stress levels increase rapidly and, as a result, the subject is likely to suffer sensory experiences, illusions, delusions, hallucinations, or paranoid thinking.

The brain as an organ is one that deals with information, and as such has become dependent on and sensitive to the types of information it receives. The accumulation and transmission of information through the highly developed nervous and sensory systems found in all human beings is fundamental. Indeed, depriving or overpowering these sensory systems can have severe effects on the brain’s normal functions: “deprive the brain of information and it does not function normally... it must have a certain quantity of patterned, meaningful, sensory input from the external environment”.

For example, isolation, sleep deprivation and fatigue are three factors that can have adverse effects on the brain’s normal functioning. An isolation experiment carried out by Donald Hebb between 1951 and 1954, for example, involved putting a 22-year old male in a cubical for twenty-four hours without any sensory stimuli – muted light diffused by translucent goggles, auditory stimulation limited by soundproofing and constant low noise and tactile perception blocked by thick gloves and a U-shaped foam pillow about the head.

After just two days Hebb found that the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate and he suffered eerie hallucinations akin to the drug mescaline as well as deterioration in his capacity to think systematically. Similarly, sleep deprivation has proven itself to be a powerful means of affecting an individual’s ability to think properly. The brain, for reasons not yet fully known, cannot function properly without occasional periods of sleep.

Indeed, most people deteriorate after about seventy two hours without sleep and the higher functions are the first to go: speech, behavior, delusions, hallucinations, emotional liability, disorientation and intellectual functions.

Finally, the use of hunger and physical pain are powerful mechanisms for attacking the brain. Inflicting pain is probably one of the first things people think of when torture is mentioned, and this is for good reason. Inflicting pain on an individual involves attacking him on a fundamental level. Pain is one of those sensations that is so aversive to the body that it completely encompasses an individual’s entire world view; he is brought to his physical limits as the body cries out to stop whatever is causing the pain.

As for using hunger as a means of attack, it has been seen in starved populations, among inmates in concentration camps, prisoners of war and reproduced experimentally that people deprived of food very soon develop persistent hunger that can directly affect their behavior. As starvation progresses and the threat of death comes closer, the behavior of the individual starts to be governed by the desire for nutrition and almost all other personal restraints - honor, pride, honesty – drop away. In the advanced stages, defects of memory, confusion, hallucinations, delusions and intellectual deficits become evident.

Clearly, one of the most powerful tools available to any torturer is the ability to attack the physical body. The individual’s body, and the brain more specifically, is directly tied to who he is, and attacking the physical body will have direct repercussions on how he thinks. However, this is not the only way of attacking the individual. Indeed, attacking an individual’s emotional and psychological self can be equally powerful. There are techniques that rely on the “the disintegration of an individual’s personality, the shattering of his mental and psychological equilibrium and crushing of his will”. Like any other physical limb, attacking an individual on a psychological or emotional level can have direct and negative repercussions. Moreover, many of the physical attacks mentioned above can have mirrored effects on the individual’s mental stability and sense of worth due to the distress these physical attacks cause to the individual’s brain.
For example, the use of hooding, sleep deprivation and stress positions can all directly impact the individual’s mental integrity.

What has therefore proven to be an incredibly powerful tool for torture is the use of humiliation and degradation of the victim’s sense of self-worth. Indeed, Richard Arneson argues that “shame, humiliation, and disgust are negative states of mind that can be deployed as tools to induce desired behaviour”.34 How an individual views himself, or is forced to view himself, involves accessing one of his most intimate relationships and attacking it can damage his sense of worth and therefore cause harm.

Blackmail and torture as mechanisms are powerful tools when it comes to forcing a target to capitulate. The stark contrast they highlight to the individual between what he has and what he has to lose if he fails to cooperate means that for intelligence agencies both activities are tempting avenues. In the next section both blackmail and torture will be examined in terms of the vital interests they can come into conflict with in order to outline the harm they can each cause.

What is Harmful about Blackmail?

As Section One detailed, blackmail involves an individual who has the view to “gain or cause loss” to someone by making an “unwarranted demand with menaces”. But this description does little to outline what it is about blackmail that is harmful. Intuitively there is the sense that there is something noticeably untoward about blackmail and as a crime in society it has been remarked as one of the foulest: “far crueler than most murders because of its cold-blooded premeditation and repeated distress of the victim; incompatibly more offensive to the public conscience than the vast majority of other offences we seek to punish”. What this section will do, therefore, is to discuss which of the vital interests blackmail comes into conflict with and how it, as a result, causes harm.

As noted throughout this thesis, autonomy is the individual’s ability to act as an end in himself; to be able to choose his own will, free from outside control. Blackmail, however, directly circumvents this vital interest by forcing the individual to base his decisions on the direct wishes of the blackmailer and not himself. Blackmail is essentially about the power the blackmailer has over the victim and the blackmailer using that power to get the victim to do what he wants.

This is demonstrated by the fact that blackmail necessarily involves a loss for the victim and a gain for the blackmailer. As Grant Lamond argues, the wrong of blackmail does not simply rest with the fact that the threatening act is impermissible but rather that it “relates to the way action is used to dominate against the victim”.

The level of harm caused by blackmail is the result of the type of threat the blackmailer wields over the target as this indicates the extent to which the target’s autonomy is affected. It can be argued that if the blackmailer holds a minor threat over the victim then the power influencing the individual’s will is minimal and thus the target is only harmed slightly as he has room to resist. In comparison, if the blackmailer has a strong threat over the victim then it can be argued that the victim has less room to resist and therefore has less control over his decision-making ability. The harm is, therefore, greater.

There are then additional harms the individual can suffer caused by the “loss” associated with blackmail. This is the result of the constant draining of a person’s resources (both physical and emotional) that blackmail can cause. It can in many instances be literally ‘too much’ for the individual to handle. Mike Hepworth argues that the “enervating [sic] and relentless pressure” can “produce a state of suicidal despair in response”.

The never ending and often increasing demands made, coupled with the constant fear of being ‘found out’ creates a situation where the individual is constantly anxious, fearful, and unable to be at ease. Depending on the threat used this can cause severe mental anguish and even encourage self-harm. This distress is experienced as a result of the fear the individual has that the threat will be carried out and that as a result he will suffer damage to his reputation and his sense of self-worth. That is, given that the individual’s sense of self-worth is in a large part the result of the attitude of others – Cooley’s “looking-glass self” where the ego thinks of itself as others think of it– to fear the loss of respect from one’s identity group can cause stress, anxiety and depression in the individual.

Another concern for the use of blackmail revolves around how the information that forms the basis of the blackmail is collected. Since blackmail in many instances involves the threat of revealing something private, how that information was obtained becomes important. If it was collected by violating someone’s privacy then this is an additional harm that needs to be incorporated.

For example, tapping an individual’s telephone wires to gain the relevant information causes additional harm as a result of the privacy violation. Or, if the information were collected through an entrapment exercise, then the use of manipulation and deception required to set up the scenario creates additional harm.

 Discussing what is harmful about torture almost seems to be stating a given. The word ‘torturous’ indicates something that is inherently severely damaging to the individual. However, what this section will seek to unpack is how those methods used can come into conflict with an individual’s vital interests and thereby outline exactly what it is about torture that is ‘harmful’.

As already noted, pain is often the first thing thought of when torture is mentioned. Pain as a tool attacks the body in a fundamental way, creating a state where the individual’s own body is crying out to him, begging him to act in any way to bring it to an end, pushing the physical and mental aspects of the individual to such a limit that it depletes all resolve.
Physical pain is experienced through the body’s nervous system and implies a neural perturbation. The amount of pain felt by the individual is directly related to the level of force applied to the body and the degree of sensitivity of the area attacked. Although it is not always the case, often the level of pain experienced will indicate the level of damage being caused to the body.41 This is because the body produces pain in order to draw the individual’s attention to those parts of the body under threat. As such, the levels and degrees of pain can vary, “from momentary seemingly painless to excruciating agonies lasting [or seeming to last] indefinitely”.

When the body is in extreme pain it is completely debilitated, unable to conceive of anything else as it “forcibly severs our concentration on anything outside of us; it collapses our horizon to our own body and the damage we feel in it... the world of man or woman in great pain is a world without relationships or engagements, a world without exterior”.

Mental pain, in many ways, is quite similar. As noted in the previous section there are certain attacks on the body that, while they are felt physically, also attack the individual’s mental state or psyche. Sensory deprivation and overload, sleep deprivation, alteration of the body’s homeostatic balance, can each affect the individual’s mental state.

For example, they can cause delusions, hallucinations, or paranoid thinking, emotional liability, disorientation, intellectual dysfunctions, defects of memory, confusion, and intellectual deficits, all a painful or debilitating state to experience. The mental pain created, much like physical pain, is one that is inherently harmful to the individual, designed to erode any resolve he might have.

Moreover, mental pain can be created within a target without attacking the brain on a physical level, but by attacking it psychologically. For example, fear, anxiety and dread are purposefully created by the torturer through the use of threats or frightening experiences (mock executions for example), and the manipulation of natural phobias and weaknesses. These mental states inflicted on an individual are ‘painful’ and can create the same reactions and sensations as discussed with physical pain: the individual’s view of reality is eclipsed by the event, he is in pain, his psyche cries out for attention and it inflicts on him the extreme urge to bring the situation to an end.

These attacks can also cause damage to the individual that can then be felt long after the torture has finished. Beatings, stress positions, subjection to harsh environmental conditions are all painful in the immediate sense and in the sense that the damage caused to the body can still be experienced many years later. For example, hand cuffing with flexi-cuffs can cause nerve damage in the hand so that it will never properly work again or will continue to feel pain long after; stress positions force the muscles to their breaking point and beyond resulting in “ankles doubling in size, skin becoming tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen”; and burns caused by exposure to both flames and the sun leave the skin ravaged and sore.

The long-term effects of the mental damage caused can in many ways be harder to see yet the traumatic effects can be even more debilitating to the individual. A study in 1967 of seventy-nine subjects who had been in sensory deprivation and manipulation experiments in a Canadian hospital showed that 60% continued to suffer from “persistent amnesia” and 23% from “serious physical complications”. Some participants were still suffering from prosopagnosia (a brain disorder resulting in an inability to identify faces) nearly twenty years later.

Other studies have shown similar results, outlining that the most common reported psychological problems of torture include long-term anxiety, depression, irritability, aggressiveness, emotional instability, self-isolation and social withdrawal; and further cognitive or neuro-vegitative problems such as confusion, disorientation, impaired memory and concentration, insomnia, nightmares and sexual dysfunction.

While torture most definitely involves and relies on inflicting mental and physical pain in extreme quantities, there is another important aspect to torture quite separate from these pains but of equal importance; that is, the use of degrading treatment. Degrading treatment is designed to attack an individual’s sense of self-worth, causing him to suffer pain in a place beyond the flesh, a place most central to who he is.

One important factor includes how the individual is forced to view himself in relation to his own standards. When he is subjected to degrading treatment he is forced to feel shame, humiliation or disgust with himself. Each of these emotions are particularly powerful forms of self-reflection, with contemporary psychological and philosophical theories arguing that they are the distress caused by the individual defining himself as no good or not good enough.

The individual views himself through the eyes of his social group. For example, these might include the eyes of his friends and family, himself as an impartial viewer, a higher power or even the torturer. He views himself through these ‘eyes’ and judges himself as those eyes would. To inflict shame or disgust on an individual is to place him in a particular state or circumstance where he looks at himself through these eyes and sees himself as something less than he is. The feelings created as a result of being made to feel shame, disgust or humiliations are “painful emotions responding to a sense of failure to attain some ideal state”.

Torture utilizes degrading and humiliating treatment as a form of assault, attacking that which is core to the individual. For example, by making an individual stand in his own wastes for long periods of time, the individual feels dirty, he recoils, feeling disgust at the state he is in and therefore himself. He starts to view himself as an object of disgust. When an individual is forced to carry out homosexual acts that go against his religious belief he sees himself through the eyes of that religion and judges himself degraded or dirty. When an individual is paraded around a room naked on a dog chain, he is being paraded for all to jeer at, he views himself as an object of humiliation with on-lookers judging him, and through them he judges himself and loses value as they laugh at him.

When discussing the issue of torture there is a large (and albeit right) focus on the impact the torture has on the victim. However, this can mean that the torturer and the harm that he suffers is not taken into account. This is folly given that there are several important studies that have been undertaken, drawing on interviews with former torturers in Greece, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Israel, which have demonstrated that particularly powerful forms of self-reflection, with contemporary psychological and philosophical theories arguing that they are the distress caused by the individual defining himself as no good or not good enough. The individual views himself through the eyes of his social group.

For example, these might include the eyes of his friends and family, himself as an impartial viewer, a higher power or even the torturer. He views himself through these ‘eyes’ and judges himself as those eyes would. To inflict shame or disgust on an individual is to place him in a particular state or circumstance where he looks at himself through these eyes and sees himself as something less than he is. The feelings created as a result of being made to feel shame, disgust or humiliations are “painful emotions responding to a sense of failure to attain some ideal state”.

Torture utilizes degrading and humiliating treatment as a form of assault, attacking that which is core to the individual. For example, by making an individual stand in his own wastes for long periods of time, the individual feels dirty, he recoils, feeling disgust at the state he is in and therefore himself. He starts to view himself as an object of disgust. When an individual is forced to carry out homosexual acts that go against his religious belief he sees himself through the eyes of that religion and judges himself degraded or dirty. When an individual is paraded around a room naked on a dog chain, he is being paraded for all to jeer at, he views himself as an object of humiliation with on-lookers judging him, and through them he judges himself and loses value as they laugh at him.

When discussing the issue of torture there is a large (and albeit right) focus on the impact the torture has on the victim. However, this can mean that the torturer and the harm that he suffers is not taken into account. This is folly given that there are several important studies that have been undertaken, drawing on interviews with former torturers in Greece, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and Israel, which have demonstrated that the process of training a torturer can cause harms akin to those that the torturer then inflicts on his targets. It has been demonstrated through these projects that in order to train a torturer, he must have those barriers, which would have previously prevented him from carrying out these brutal acts, eroded. This, it is argued, involves subjecting the trainee to a program of considerable abuse and radical dehumanization that often has deleterious effects on his sense of self, his family, and his community. In their research, psychologists Mika Haritos-Fatouros and Janice Gibson noted that the cruelty of the training programs that the men were put through were so extreme that only a very select few were ever able to make it through to the end and be chosen to torture. The aim was to break down the normal social and personal boundaries that prevent individuals from performing these actions. It would seem that in order to get an individual to inflict inhumane acts on another, it is necessary to remove the humanity in the torturers first.

The above sections have outlined how the use of torture can have profound effects on both the victim and the torturer. Finally, it can be argued that acts of torture can detrimentally affect society as a whole. Firstly, it can be argued that allowing torture, even in only the most extreme situations, is to bring it in as a legitimate tool of the state.

This can have a detrimental effect on the social and legal norms as a result of the normalizing effect that any use of torture can have. That is, it is feared that any case of authorized torture will open the flood gates for it to be used in the future and that each time it is used its use becomes more ‘normal’ and the limits on its use become reduced. This is only going to directly affect the cohesion between a society and its sub-groups as they become, or feel they become, marginalized and targeted.

Finally, the use of torture, even for intelligence collection purposes, is necessarily going to cause an intimidating effect. Henry Shue argues that “Almost all torture is ‘political’ in the sense that it is inflicted by the government in power upon people who are, seem to be, or might be opposed to the government”. Individuals will naturally become fearful and less likely to act as freely as they would otherwise.

Blackmail and torture come into direct conflict with an individual’s vital interests and in doing so cause that individual harm. Blackmail forcibly affects people’s autonomy by directing them to cooperate or let themselves suffer quite severe repercussions, as well as causing varying levels of stress within the individual as they are forced to (continually) suffer a loss of some form.

Torture, on the other hand, comes into conflict with all of an individual’s vital interests. Detaining the individual and subjecting him to severe physical, psychological and emotional attacks means that he if forced to experience the most extreme form of harm. What the next section will explore is in what ways the tools of blackmail and torture are used and what levels of harm are caused as a result. Both blackmail and torture are seemingly powerful tools for getting someone to cooperate. Section one outlined the mechanics of both of these activities and Section Two highlighted in what ways they can cause harm. Blackmail was seen to come into direct conflict with an individual’s autonomy as well as causing various degrees of anxiety and stress.

Torture violates almost all the vital interests an individual has as it seeks to push him to his limits and break down any resolve he might have. In this section, by applying various illustrative examples regarding these two activities it is possible to explore both how they are actually used as well as the levels of harm they can cause.

The blackmail cases will explore, first, the use of ‘information blackmail’, where the intelligence agency has information about the individual that is then used as a lever on the individual and, second, the use of an ‘entrapment operation’ where the individual is enticed to act untowardly so as to provide the blackmail information. The torture examples will include the use of ‘The Five Techniques’ used during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the treatment experienced at detention centers such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and finally the extraordinary rendition programs where individuals are transported to countries known for torture in order to secure information.

The use of blackmail often relies on gaining compromising information on an individual. What this information is exactly can vary from case to case depending on the target’s social situation. Markus Wolf, former head of the East German intelligence agency HVA, outlined how, “the past was a powerful weapon among the spy services... we sought to bring down politicians or senior figures hostile to us by revealing their Nazi complicity”.

Or another often-exploited piece of information for blackmailers would be any personal or sexual failing. Being unfaithful is an activity that people will go to great lengths to hide. People in the diplomatic or intelligence services, because of the nature of their work, are expected to live almost impeccable lives: “if you have been unfaithful to your wife, you are probably less afraid of her than your supervisor.

You live in fear that he is going to find out about it”. It is this common failing that forms the basis of the first case discussed. This case involves a Western European diplomat, known simply as Mr B, who at the time was a functionary of his country’s embassy in Warsaw. While there he met and married a young Polish girl, Miss C. Soon they both left Poland to work in Paris. Polish intelligence followed Miss C and intercepted almost all of her mail in the hope of gaining information to be used against her: “we had a file as big as a table on them, with photocopies of every letter from her to her family, to her friends, to her relatives and from them to her”.

After several years of intercepting her mail, Polish intelligence finally discovered that there was an old flame with whom she had renewed contact. When she informed him that she would be returning to Poland for a visit, Polish intelligence acted quickly so that any encounter could be monitored and recorded. When the Polish wife and her old flame went on a camping trip Polish intelligence was there, ready to capture any indiscretion: “we had more than ten operatives hidden in the area with cameras, tape recorders and other equipment... our photographers took pictures of the couple swimming naked in the lake, we even planted microphones in their tent so that at night when the journalist and young wife were screwing each other we could capture every word”.

Upon her return, the wife was confronted by a Polish intelligence officer who presented her with the incriminating information and an ultimatum: “I told her, ‘you can imagine the situation if your husband knew. He is really a very intelligent man, noble person, from a good family. He isn’t going to accept it. He is going to divorce you for sure. You are killing some kind of happiness in your own home. No Poland, no parents, no husband.” The Polish wife felt she had no alternative and cooperated with Polish intelligence in every way they asked.

A second example follows the same pattern but focuses on using an individual’s homosexuality as the basis for the blackmail. The power for cases based on homosexuality comes from the negative social stigma, and in some cases the illegality, still attached to it. As an ex-intelligence blackmailer notes, “homosexuality, depending on the country within which you are operating, was the classic ‘crime against nature’”, and therefore knowledge about an individual’s sexual inclinations could very often prove to be a potentially powerful lever. Obviously, this type of blackmail can vary greatly from society to society and from person to person: “in Great Britain, knowing someone’s homosexuality is not going to be important unless the individual is a member of the British Foreign Service or intelligence service...

however, if the individual is stationed in a country where homosexuality is classified as a crime, he could get into trouble very easily”. This case involves that of Tom Driberg, Labour MP, journalist, member of Labour’s National Executive and party chairman. Unfortunately for Driberg, in 1956 his less than discreet activities made him a perfect target for Soviet intelligence. Mitrokhin maintains that the KGB were able to gain evidence of his homosexuality while he visited Moscow and used it to blackmail him for over twelve years: “he was used as both a source of inside information from the Labour National Executive and to promote active measures... wonderfully placed to report to his controller on both the evolution of the Labour Party and the rivalries within the leadership” as well as being useful in influencing “the campaign within the Labour Party for unilateral nuclear disarmament”.

This first set of examples demonstrates how an individual can easily become victim to blackmail as a result of their own actions. However, if the individual does not act so as to put himself into a compromising position then the intelligence officer is ready to help the situation along. Indeed, the Soviets excelled at using sexual entrapment operations in order to get compromising information on specific targets. As Allen Dulles notes, “the Soviets cannot eliminate love and sex and greed from the scene... so they use them to ensnare people”.

People working, travelling or visiting the Soviet bloc would start the gears moving automatically the minute they applied for a visa. The visa application, possibly accompanied with a report from the KGB Residency from the home country of the visitor, would be submitted for evaluation; all information on the applicant would be correlated and then the decision would be made as to whether the target was worth the effort. If he was, the visitor would be photographed and followed from his point of entry and they would have his hotel room covered in microphones and cameras. The next stage was then to expose him to desirable women (or men if the first few advances did not seem appropriate), all highly trained and capable in sexual seduction.

The first example involves Phillippe Latour, a forty-two year old electronics engineer who visited Russia in the late 1960s. He worked for a company engaged in developing missile guidance systems for the French government and when he submitted his visa for entry, as an authority in his field, he proved a prime target. In the subsequent file that was developed on him, it was noted that he was a careful, conscientious and very ambitious man, with a taste for fine wine and young women. This, for the KGB, was perfect. One night while out, a slender, well dressed, attractive blonde female came into the restaurant; she was a language teacher and informed Latour that she enjoyed talking to foreigners and so asked if he would like her to act as his guide while in the area. Within two days she was joining him in his hotel room. The following afternoon he was asked to see the manager and found two KGB officers. They gave him an envelope containing photographs revealing the previous night’s sexual encounter. The KGB wanted information on the air-to-air missiles that his company was developing and informed him that the woman he had met was actually the wife of an important military leader and that as such this encounter could be construed as an attempt to gain military secrets from her, for which he would be imprisoned for many years.

Within three days he provided the information. This betrayal was then used as a further hold over him and he was blackmailed again and again for the secrets he had access to. Other entrapment cases can involve the KGB acting as jealous boyfriends who catch the affair and sympathetic Soviet authorities who offer to help the target out. The offer of help never comes, alas, without strings attached. Such a strategy was used against French Ambassador Maurice Dejean. After using a young actress employed by the KGB to entrap the ambassador, during sexual relations another KGB officer burst into the room claiming to be the jealous husband and, after beating the ambassador up for effect, exclaimed that he would take this to the authorities. Suitable ‘friends’ were already in place by this point to offer help in exchange for future favors; he became indebted and over time would be “gently asked for the favor to be returned. One favor would lead to another until Dejean crossed the threshold of treason from which there could be no return”.
The final case is similar in that it involves an entrapment exercise but again has the added twist of focusing on an individual’s homosexuality. John Vassall, who had worked as a naval intelligence clerk, was posted to the British Embassy, Moscow in 1955. An introverted and vain individual, Vassall found himself isolated and lonely. A month after his arrival, the young clerk was invited to a restaurant and introduced to an attractive female KGB, a ‘Swallow’, charged with ensnaring Vassall. However, when she failed to gain his attention, they replaced her with a male operative, a ‘Raven’. This proved more successful.

This Raven agent invited Vassall to a party with some of his closest ‘friends’, a party which quickly turned into a gay sex orgy, all of which was secretly photographed by the KGB. To seal the deal, the KGB then arranged for Vassall to be caught within a second entrapment operation, having a military officer invite Vassall back to his apartment with the KGB on-hand to burst into the scene mid-event. It was at this point that the KGB officers showed Vassall the photographs of his activities, warning him that he had committed a serious offence under Soviet law. This was the moment he became a Soviet spy. Over the years Vassall handed the KGB copies of secret signals that passed across his desk and when he returned to Britain to take his job as Director of Naval Intelligence, Vassall’s value only grew.

As discussed in Section Two, the use of blackmail can cause harm as a result of the impact it has on the target’s autonomy as well as causing additional harms in the form of stress and anxiety. For the ‘information blackmail’ cases, the blackmailer uses the information he has over the individual as a pressure to directly influence his decision-making process.

The individual is no longer the author of his own will, but rather the tool of another’s will. Bribery, deception and manipulation only influence or guide the individual’s will, whereas blackmail is a more direct force, interjecting into the individual’s decision-making process and attempting to force a specific response.

Therefore, blackmail has the potential to cause a higher level of harm. The exact level of harm caused, however, is the result of what pressure, or in this case what information, is being used. The more severe the repercussions of revealing the victim’s secrets the greater the power the blackmailer has and therefore the greater the affect on his autonomy. In the Polish wife example, therefore, it can be argued that the intelligence operative presented her with quite a dramatic cost. In the words of the Polish intelligence officer, she would be left with “No Poland, no parents, no husband”.

Being presented with such a level of loss the pressure on her autonomy is quite significant. This point is demonstrated again in the case of homosexual-information blackmail that given the social stigma and the likely backlash that the target would suffer (depending on the social situation) means that there was a significant degree of pressure on the target to comply and therefore his autonomy was significantly affected.

In comparison to those operations where the individual was entrapped it can be argued that there was the additional use of manipulation and deception and therefore a greater level of harm caused. Entrapment operations rely on deceiving the target about who he is sleeping with and the intentions behind the encounter. The Swallow or Raven is manipulating the individual in a very significant way and in an area that is very intimate to the target. Therefore, in the entrapment cases, since the intelligence officer purposefully manipulated the targets in order to encourage the act, the level of harm is greater. Again, in those cases involving homosexuality, if the social situation means that the target is likely to suffer severe repercussions then there is a great influence on his autonomy.

In the Polish wife and Tom Driberg cases, where there was blackmail but with no entrapment, the level of harm caused features at Level Four on the Ladder of Escalation given the pressure placed on their decision-making process. However, in the entrapment cases, such as that of Ambassador Maurice Dejean, Phillippe Latour and John Vassall, given the affect that deception and manipulation have on the target’s autonomy in addition to that of the pressure of the blackmail, there is a greater level of harm caused and so features at Level Five on the Ladder of Escalation.

In recent history, as a result of the Geneva Convention against Torture, the systematic use of torture by Western intelligence agencies has been prohibited. However, this does not mean it does not occur and, indeed, in recent years it has been brought back into debate regarding the possible role it could have in collecting intelligence.

After the September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in the US and UK respectively, many were left with the feeling that they had been let down by their intelligence community. For the intelligence operative, “public expectations of intelligence have never being greater” and many blamed the ability of the hijackers to carry out their plan as a failure of the intelligence community to provide timely information that would have stopped it. There is now significant pressure on the intelligence services to look like they are doing more to provide protection. FBI officials have expressed their own frustration at being restrained in their interrogation techniques: “It could get to that spot where we go to pressure – where we will have no choice”.Cofer Black, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, noted that “there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11… and after 9/11 the gloves come off”.

Indeed, shortly after the attack President Bush gave broad powers against terrorists suspects: on November 13th, 2001 he issued orders that allowed for the detention of all Al-Qaeda suspects, denying them access to any civilian court and relegating them to military tribunals; and in January 2002 President Bush acted to ‘suspend’ the Geneva Conventions by claiming that those detained did not qualify for ‘prisoner of war’ status and the protection normally accorded by the Conventions. Alan Dershowitz, a criminal law professor at Harvard Law School, argues that given extreme enough circumstances, law enforcement officials would most probably torture; when the costs are massively outweighed by the benefits torture becomes tenable. Torture, it would seem, is back on the table for debate.

In the three cases discussed below, the first examines the use of torture by the British government during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, called ‘The Five Techniques’, the second explores the treatment received at American-run detention centers designed to ‘prepare’ its inmates for interrogation, namely Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and finally the third involves the rendition of individuals by Western intelligence agencies to countries known for torture as a means of interrogation, referred to as extraordinary rendition.

In April 1971 there was a secret meeting in Belfast between senior British intelligence officers and members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s (RUC) Special Branch. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the most effective way of gaining intelligence in the battle against the IRA, something the RUC had previously failed in doing.
The interrogation methods that were to be used on those arrested by the RUC were to become known as ‘The Five Techniques’ and would, between 1972 and 1976, occupy the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights as the Republic of Ireland government sought to have these techniques classified as amounting to torture.

 a) wall standing: forcing the detainees to remain for periods of some hours in a ‘stress position’, described by those who underwent it as being ‘spread-eagled against the wall, with their fingers put high above the head against the wall, the legs spread apart and the feet back, causing them to stand on their toes with the weight of the body mainly on the fingers’;
b) hooding: putting a black or navy colored bag over the detainees’ head and, at least initially, keeping it there all the time except during interrogation;
c) subjection to noise: pending their interrogations, holding the detainees in a room where there was a continuous loud and hissing noise;
d) deprivation of sleep: pending their interrogations, depriving the detainees of sleep;
e) deprivation of food and drink: subjecting the detainees to a reduced diet during their stay at the center and during pending interrogations.
The unanimous conclusion of the Commission was that the combination of these techniques amounted to torture. What this section will examine is how these techniques can cause harm to the individual and the level of harm experienced.
Those arrested and subjected to The Five Techniques included Paddy Joe McClean, a remedial school teacher from Bergagh, Tyrone; Jim Auld, a twenty year old unemployed dental technician; Patrick Shivers, a civil rights activist from Toomebridge; Francis McGuigan from Belfast; and Kevin Hannaway who was also from Belfast. By exploring Auld’s recollection it is possible to see how The Five Techniques were used and how they affected his physical, mental and emotional state. Auld was taken from his home in the middle of the night to Gindwood Barracks where he recalls receiving some fairly serious physical damage: “they beat with batons, they kicked me around the place. They were aiming towards my privates and my head and they were making me keep my hands at my sides”. Without warning or explanation a hood was placed over Auld’s head, he was handcuffed and made to run into a post: “straight into my head, flying in full force in it, I just went down”. From here they took him inside, stripped him, put him in a boiler suit and then started the next phase. With the hood still on, designed to increase his sense of isolation, he was put in a room filled with an increasingly intense noise, “sounding like an airplane engine or the sound of compressed air escaping”. For a solid week the sound was absolute and unceasing and many who experienced it recalled it as the “worst part of the ordeal”. Then Auld was forced to stand in a stress position for a long period of time without a break:

My hands were put up against the wall, after ten or fifteen minutes they started to get numb, so I dropped them down to my side, and as soon as I lifted them off the wall I got beaten with the batons, just beaten solid. You very quickly get the message you weren’t supposed to move your hands. But you can only keep your hands up for so long. And so what they did was to set upon me again. I was knocked unconscious. And when I woke up they threw me back up again. It just went on for days. I know I wet myself.

During all this time the men were deprived of food, water and sleep; Auld remembers being kept awake for six days straight.

In any discussion on torture, there are two images that dominate the scene: one is the photograph published in various media showing hooded and handcuffed detainees in orange overalls kneeling in wired cages, depicting the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, while the other shows a young female American soldier with a naked man on the floor to her right wearing a dog leash, portraying the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

These pictures show prisoners being subjected to cruel and humiliating treatment at the hands of U.S. troops. In other photographs naked prisoners are being forced to lie on top of each other in a pile or to simulate sexual acts; several pictures showed naked, hooded inmates, handcuffed in painful positions or tied to beds and cell doors; some detainees had bleeding wounds, and others appeared to have wires attached to their bodies.

In response, on September 15th, 2004, the Taguba Report was released testifying that terrorist suspects were being actively tortured in American run prisons in the hope of gaining information. The Taguba Report stated that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib prison by the 372nd Military Police Company and the American intelligence community.

What is more, Taguba reported that these undertakings were not the work of high-spirited or revenge-driven individuals, but were the result of an ordered effort to break detainees, to make them more malleable to questioning by intelligence operatives. Taguba concluded that, “personnel assigned to the 372nd Military Police Company, 800th MP Brigade, were directed to change facility procedures to ‘set conditions’ for MI [military intelligence] interrogations”. Army intelligence officers, CIA agents, and private contractors had “actively requested that MP [Military Police] guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses”.

Those methods used to ‘prepare’ the detainees are reported in the Taguba Report as:
a. Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f. Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and
attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l. Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
In addition to these actions several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances Tagbua claims to find credible, given the clarity of the statements made and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses. These include:
i. Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
ii. Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
iii. Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
iv. Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
v. Threatening male detainees with rape;
vi. Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
vii. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick
viii. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

Extraordinary Rendition
The final case to be discussed involves the rendition of an individual from one state to another for the purpose of torture, which, while it has none of the same powerful imagery that has become associated with the cases of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, has still received significant attention from the international community.

This is not least of all because it has highlighted important and significant questions regarding the role other states have in facilitating the use of torture. The practice of rendition is itself nothing new. Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 2001, rendition operations were carried out to bring individuals subject to arrest warrants to justice. In recent years, however, what has been alleged is that these rendition programs are being used with the intention of interrogating and torturing individuals outside the normal legal system. Most notably, flying individuals to countries known for torture in order to collect intelligence while distancing oneself from the act. The allegations as they currently stand are that the American CIA flew individuals to other states, including Egypt, Jordon and Syria, with the knowledge and even the intent that they were to be interrogated in ways far too extreme to have been allowed under any American jurisdiction. Furthermore, claims have been made against several European states, stating that they have aided these rendition programs in various ways.

Extraordinary rendition operations in the context of the CIA’s counter-terrorism activities are comprised of three steps or elements, namely the apprehension, transfer and end point.

All three stages are interconnected and have to be taken into account for a full analysis of the harm caused and the role other states play. Each of the elements, however, can take several forms. The apprehension might, or might not, include a legal process, be ad hoc or planned long ahead of schedule. For example, Monica Hakimi describes that one method involves unlawfully detaining, through kidnapping for example, the target before he is secretly transported.

The transfer itself can then occur by various means, the common method involving CIA operated aircraft, although the flights themselves will often either have to refuel or stop in other countries en route. Finally, the end point might either be an American military detention center, a detention center belonging to a third party state or possibly a joint detention center. It is here that the individual is tortured for intelligence collection purposes.

One case that has found itself at the fore of the debate on the use of extraordinary rendition is that of a British national Binyam Mohamed al-Habashi, who was rendered from Pakistan to Morocco in July 2002. When Binyam tried to return to the United Kingdom in April 2002 after leaving over a year earlier, he was arrested by Pakistan officials for travelling under a false passport.

Binyam claims that he was held by Pakistan officials for a period of three months during which time he was mistreated and interviewed by CIA officers who threatened to send him to Jordon for torture.

Then in July 2002 Binyam claims that he was subject to a CIA-ran extraordinary rendition program from Pakistan to Morocco. It is then in Morocco that Binyam claims to have been tortured.

Binyam reports that he was subjected to physical, mental and emotional torture: “Three men came in with black masks. One stood on each of my shoulders, and a third punched me in the stomach... I was made to stand but I was in so much pain I’d fall to my knees. They’d pull me back up and hit me again”.

Then came what Binyam claimed was the worst part of the torture: “‘Strip him’ they shouted. They cut off my clothes... I was naked... I thought I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me. Maybe castrate me. One of them took my penis in their hands and began to make cuts with a scalpel. They cut all over my private parts”.

During September and October 2002 Binyam was taken by car to another place where they played excruciatingly loud music constantly: “I think I came to several emotional breakdowns in this time... I never saw the sun, not even once”.Binyam was then transferred to Guantanamo Bay. Similar examples of rendition programs include that of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr who was kidnapped by CIA officials in Milan before being rendered, via the American base in Avaino, Italy, to Egypt; or, the report of Murat Kurnaz, a German resident rendered from Pakistan to American custody in Kandahar, Afghanistan before finally being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002 and finally being released in August 2006.

The Harm of Torture

It can be argued that each of The Five Techniques used in the Irish case is for the purpose of causing direct harm to the individual. Using stress positions, physical violence and the denial of life’s essentials, such as food and sleep, all attack and violate the individual’s physical and mental integrity. Stress positions quite literally push the body to its limit. The arms, legs, muscles, tendons, all scream for the individual to give up, drop the arms and stop.
However, when the individual follows this wish, he is set upon by a different type of physical pain in the form of beatings. Furthermore, it is not just the physical damage inflicted, but also the mental pain experienced. As was discussed in the Section Two, a lot of the physical attacks on the body can have psychological repercussions. These pains are then exacerbated by the lack of food and sleep, again directly impacting on the mental state of the individual. Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983 who was tortured as a young man in the Soviet Union, tells in his book, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, of how his fellow prisoners who had endured extreme tortures under other regimes and had not cracked, lost the will to resist with sleep deprivation: “in the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget”. The individual is physically and mentally harmed as the body is attacked and damaged in a most fundamental way.

Use of ‘hooding’ and the ‘noise room’ can then harm the individual by attacking his sensory system and, as a result, his psyche. In Section Two it was outlined how through the use of sensory deprivation and overload the individual’s brain is attacked, directly affecting his mental state. With hooding, the individual is forced to experience constant anxiety, never knowing what is going on around him, fearing what is happening, where the next blow might come from and never knowing how to defend himself. This can result in extreme anxiety, stress and can lead to hyperventilation, which, while inside the hood, can cause asphyxiation. Furthermore, constant bombardment of the aural center can have extremely traumatic effects. The sensory overload attacks the brain and can induce ‘‘a state of psychosis, a temporary madness with long-lasting after-effects.’’

The result of these five techniques upon the individual is, understandably, severely detrimental. Of those individuals mentioned, Paddy Joe McClean was deprived of water to such an extent that his tongue swelled up and he almost choked on it; Patrick Shivers hallucinated visions of his dead son; Francis McGuigan hallucinated that he was among his friends but could not realize why they refused to remove his handcuffs and by the end of his ordeal could no longer even spell his own name or count to ten; and Kevin Hannaway said how he lost the power to talk and would just sit and wait for death.

Although there is no direct documented evidence for the long-term effects of these techniques, conclusions can be drawn from various studies. For example, Doctors Finn Somnier and Inge Genefke examined twenty-four torture survivors 10 years after their torture and found that 71% had nightmares, 79% complained of headaches, 79% impaired memory, 75% impaired concentration, 75% experienced fatigue, 50% suffered persistent fear and anxiety, 38% had impaired hearing, 38% became socially withdrawn, 33% experienced vertigo, 21% reported sexual problems and 12% had constant tremors and shaking.

Again, as was seen in the Irish case, there is extensive use of physical attacks on the individual. In the Taguba Report, those points lettered a), h), and numbered i) iii), iv), vi) and vii) each outlined a different physical attack that resulted in a physical pain or physical damage of some sort. However, what is important about the activities discussed in this report as compared to those of the Irish case is the increased use of humiliation, degradation and sexual attacks.
And this is exactly what those actions listed in the Taguba Report were designed to do. Forcing the individual to feel disgust in regards to himself attacks his emotional core and causes him to lose the will to resist. In the same way that beating and starving an individual is an attack on the individual’s physical body, these humiliating acts are an attack on his emotional and psychological self.

For example, Tarek Dergoul who was held in Guantanamo Bay, said that they tied him to a chair so that, “inevitably I’d soil myself. It was humiliating”. However, the humiliation was then purposefully driven home: “they were watching through a one-way mirror and as soon as I wet myself a woman MP would come in yelling ‘Look at what you’ve done. You’re disgusting’”.

The point was to emphasize the humiliation felt by Dergoul. His cultural background meant that the use of a female interrogator was even more humiliating, and to be ridiculed in this way would only emphasize the disgust he already felt in himself.

Furthermore, the use of rape and other sexual related abuses attack the individual in an extremely damaging and often violent way. It can hardly be argued that sexual abuse does not have a dramatic and debilitating effect on the individual: “sexual abuse is an extremely damaging form of torture; for tormentors to penetrate this most private realm produces deep feelings of despair and self-loathing”.

Sexual abuses, and other forms of humiliation, can leave the victim feeling emotionally destroyed, powerless, with severe post-traumatic stress disorders and suicidal tendencies. Furthermore, to force an individual into performing homosexual acts pushes the degradation even further for those whose cultural background emphasizes it as an abhorrent way of life. For many it turns what should be an intimate and loving act into a humiliating and painful experience.

Given that the two previous illustrative examples on torture outlined the various activities employed and the harm these can cause, the purpose of this section is not to examine the harm caused by extraordinary rendition, but rather to question who is culpable in the harm caused. This is to be done, first, in regards to the actions of the CIA as the main propagators of the extraordinary programs and then, second, in regards to those states who allowed their airspace or equipment to be used in the rendition process.

Whether people are to be morally culpable for the actions of others is the result of the role that they play in “assisting others in their wrong doing, or encouraging them to engage in wrong doing” since it is “through our acts we participate in their wrongs, and so become liable for them”.

This sentiment is reflected in Anglo-American law whereby one can become liable for a crime by playing a complicit role in another’s commission of a crime: “Whosoever shall aid, abet, counsel or procure the communication of any indictable offence... shall be liable to be tried, indicted and punished as a principle offender”.

John Gardner points out, however, that there can be both strong and weak causal links between the principle and the accomplice, and that depending on the type of causal link, the degree of liability is altered. By examining the extent to which the event would have (not) occurred without the accomplice it is possible to understand if the individual has a strong or weak causal link to the event.

In the instance of the CIA, by looking at the three stages associated with the extraordinary rendition programs, in almost all stages the CIA are directly linked. In some cases, like the case of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr who was kidnapped by CIA officials in Milan, the CIA had a direct role in the first ‘apprehension’ stage of the process. For the ‘transfer’ stage the CIA also played a central role by physically transferring individuals to states known for their harsh interrogation methods through the use of airplanes chartered and manned by CIA officers.

Finally, although the CIA officers themselves might not be in the room while the individual was tortured, they knew both what would happen to the individual once they handed him over and that they actively encouraged the torture by asking for intelligence gained from the torture. Therefore, they are aware, directly facilitate and even benefit from the use of torture by these other countries. This means they are directly involved in the harm caused.

The involvement of European countries on the other hand is less clear cut. The most detailed investigation into this issue so far has been carried out by the Council of Europe Rapporteur Dick Marty.

He maintained in two reports that between 2001 and 2006, European airspace had been used for flights operated by the CIA, and at least some of them for the purpose of extraordinary rendition. On September 12th, 2005 the Guardian newspaper reported that it had compiled a database of flight records from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that demonstrated British logistical and refueling support for CIA extraordinary rendition operations. In particular, the article referred to the case of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, where it is alleged that the CIA rendered him from Indonesia to Egypt, and then flew on to Prestwick airport in Scotland to refuel before returning to Washington. Since September 2005 a number of other reports have referred to the use of UK airspace by CIA-operated aircraft and their possible use in rendition.

In comparison to the involvement of the CIA, while it can be argued that allowing the use of one’s airspace is a far cry from the role they played, this does not mean that the other countries which facilitated the rendition, such as the UK, are not complicit in some way. The important question that must be asked is whether the relevant authorities were aware of the CIA flights using their airspace for extraordinary rendition operations. If they were then it can be argued that they are culpable for the harm caused.

Becoming aware of how one’s airspace is being used and allowing the action to continue does place that particular state in the chain of events. Furthermore, those states which then use the collected information are also increasing their involvement by implicitly sanctioning the collection technique. This was clearly the concern of the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who in July 2004 sent a telegram to both London and British Missions around the world saying: “we receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence via the U.S. We should stop... we are selling our souls”.

Torture by its very definition is designed to push the body to its absolute limit; to break down any resistance the individual has and to force him to go against his will. Torture is actually designed to be harmful, and what is more, to be harmful in the extreme. As a result, torture will often come into conflict with not just one or even two of an individual’s vital interests but virtually all of them simultaneously.

Moreover, when it violates these vital interests it does so in the most severe, extreme way. Some of the other activities previously examined – blackmail, manipulation, seduction – it was argued that they violate the individual’s vital interests to varying degrees and so various levels of harm are caused. Torture, however, is an utter attack of all the individual’s vital interests and to an extreme degree, and in doing so causes a level of harm unlike that previously seen. In addition, torture not only significantly harms the individual targeted, but also harms society and even the torturer. Torture is, therefore, one of the most harmful acts that an individual can suffer. This means that torture would always sit at the top of the Ladder of Escalation, above all the other actions discussed in this thesis. Indeed, in order to incorporate this extreme level of harm caused by torture, a separate level of harm on the Ladder of Escalation must be established, called Maximum Harm, where actions that cause the most severe harms are placed. This Maximum Harm level is not just one more increment on the Ladder of Escalation, but a whole separate category significantly different from any of the other levels, meaning that the activities placed at this level are going to be fundamentally different to those placed at other levels.

Clearly blackmail is one of the more harmful activities explored in this thesis with many of the illustrative examples featuring at either Level Four or Level Five on the Ladder of Escalation. By forcing an individual to cooperate through the use of menaces, that individual not only has his ability to control his own life severely impinged but is also put under quite severe levels of stress and anxiety. Therefore, the use of blackmail, which involves the individual being forced to do something they would have otherwise not done, will always feature at the higher levels on the Ladder of Escalation. In comparison, torture not only features at the higher levels on the Ladder of escalation, but at the highest. So severe in fact is the level of harm caused by torture that a separate level is established, called Maximum Harm, to represent the uniquely extreme type of harm caused.

In the instance of blackmail and torture, this need to limit intelligence is not only clear but also, given the extreme degree to which they affect the individual’s interests, they both belong at the top echelons on the Ladder of Escalation. By making reference to the Just Intelligence Principles it is possible to determine if these higher levels of harm can be justified and if so under what circumstances.

It has been argued in previous sections that blackmail can cause a level of harm to the individual that features at either Level Four or Level Five on the Ladder of Escalation. Blackmail in order to be justified would therefore need quite a serious just cause. That is, it should only be used when there is a direct threat present. The threat should be known to the level of ‘clear evidence’ and should represent a serious threat to the nation’s security. In understanding this, it can be argued that the use of blackmail in all the above cases are not justified. In each of the cases, the use of blackmail was almost standard practice; anyone who was of slight interest was targeted and blackmailed in order to put them in the agency’s pocket. There was no direct, serious threat to act as the just cause. The only case where there might have been a sufficient degree of threat is the case of Phillippe Latour who worked for a company engaged in developing missile guidance systems. If he was working on a piece of weapon technology where there was clear evidence that it would or could pose a serious threat, then this would be a just cause to investigate the weapon. However, from the case presented there seems to be no direct threat but more a general fact gathering mission, an insufficient threat.

While it is possible for an organization of sufficient authority to be established to authorize blackmail, in the cases mentioned none of them seemed to have achieved this. For the level of harm caused it would need to be an authority that was external to the agency’s own hierarchy and preferably authorized by a senior body of multiple individuals. None of the cases discussed demonstrated this level of authorization. Instead, it would seem that in each of the cases discussed blackmail was routine and so no authorization from outside was sought.

Proportionality

In order for the use of blackmail to be proportional, the information gained must outweigh all the negative results of blackmail. That is, those blackmail cases where there are additional harms – for example stress and anxiety caused by the pressure placed on the target – the information gained must be of increasing value.

In order to be a legitimate target it must be demonstrated that the individual is either a threat or has placed himself within the defense infrastructure at a sufficiently high level so as to warrant being targeted. Therefore, in the case of the Polish wife, she would be an illegitimate target since she had done nothing to justify being targeted, except marrying a French diplomat and this is insufficient given the level of harm caused. In comparison, in the case where the French Ambassador, Maurice Dejean, who slept with the KGB actress, it can be argued that not only was he a part of the state infrastructure but maintained a high and prominent position and was thus a legitimate target. John Vassall, the intelligence clerk, and Tom Driberg, an MP in the house of Commons, could also be thought of as legitimate targets given that Vassall was within the intelligence structure and so had waived his rights, as did Driberg given his official position.

By applying these understandings to some examples, including the ‘Irish Case’, treatment at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay detention centers and the practice of extraordinary rendition, the level of harm caused by torture was established. It was concluded in the previous section that torture as an activity should be situated at the very top of the Ladder of Escalation featuring at a separate stage called Maximum Level.

It was argued that since torture involved the most severe violation of almost all the vital interests an individual has, coupled with the harm caused to the torturer and society as a whole, that torture was an extreme form of harm, above and beyond anything discussed before. The question now, however, is whether or not it is possible for there ever to be a sufficient enough threat to act as a just cause for this level of harm. This is a difficult question and one that has received much attention recently.

There has been a significant amount of work regarding the possible range of the threats that a state might face in the current climate and whether these threats are sufficient to justify torture.

By employing the harm ethic it is clear that torture is one of the most extreme forms of harm, causing physical, emotional and psychological obliteration unlike any of the other collection activities, while producing additional harms to the torturer and to society as a whole. As a result of the level of harm caused, it can be argued that torture represents one of those activities that is so inhumane that no threat can exist to justify its use.

This argument – that there are certain activities that cause such high level of harm so as to be absolutely prohibited even in times of war or when facing extreme threat – is not new. It can be argued that there are activities that cause such intense levels of harm and result in the degradation of the human condition to such a degree that it is not possible for the action to be justified. International law, as a reflection of this position, outlines that there are certain actions that are ‘crimes against humanity’ as a result of their inhumane nature and are absolutely prohibited as a result.

That is, those acts which are “particularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings”.Even in times of extreme threat it is recognized that these actions are still not allowed.

What this highlights is that there is an established understanding that certain types of actions are prohibited because of the extreme level and type of harm they cause. What this thesis argues is that torture, with its utter destruction of almost all of an individual’s most vital interests, is akin to this idea of crimes against humanity and therefore there is no just cause possible that can justify its use.

Even though it has been argued that using torture would never fulfil the principle of just cause, it is important to understand how the level of harm torture causes relates to the other Just Intelligence Principles. The principle of proportionality stipulates that the cost associated with carrying out the act must be outweighed by the benefits of the information. Indeed, one consequentialist argument for the use of torture would be that when the costs number in the thousands or millions of lives, sticking to one’s principles is a grave error. The cost of one life cannot surely outweigh that of hundreds, thousands or millions of others, it is argued. However, the problem with this argument is that it fails to recognize that quite often the intelligence operative is not presented with such a stark contrast between quantifiable high gains in comparison to costs. Much of intelligence comprises of gathering bits of information from many different sources; often intelligence information is as “sparse as a telephone number or an address to check”. It is not the situation where one bit of information will provide an instant and quantifiably high amount of gain.

For example, the information that was ‘produced’ in the Irish Five Techniques case demonstrates that while this information might be useful, it is still a long way from those consequentialist arguments that claim that intelligence can save hundreds, thousands or even millions of lives. Lord Parker, who headed a committee that looked in The Five Techniques, noted that:

As a result [of the internment and interrogation of individuals] the following information was obtained: identification of a further seven hundred members of both IRA factions and their positions in the organizations; over forty sheets giving details of the organization and structure of the IRA units and sub-units; details of possible IRA arm caches; safe houses; communication and supply routes; details of morale, operation directives, propaganda techniques; the discovery of individual responsibility for about eighty-five incidents recorded on police files which had previously remained unexplained.

Even with these so-called gains it should be clear that they are not sufficient enough to outweigh the costs of torture, including the harm to the target as well as the additional harms caused to the torturer and society as a whole.
The principle of discrimination is used to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets, affording the illegitimate targets protection from the harm that intelligence collection can cause. The higher the level of harm caused by the intelligence collection the greater the threat they must pose.

However, this does not mean that an individual can forfeit all of his protective rights. Indeed, in times of war even when a combatant is classified as a legitimate target and has waived his right not to be killed, this does not mean that he has waived the right not to be treated humanely. Ian Clark makes the point by asking, “Which is the greater evil, the humane killing of non-combatants or the burning of combatants to death by flamethrowers?” Thomas Nagel argues that flamethrowers as a weapon are an “atrocity” for “burns are extremely painful and extremely disfiguring – far more than any other category of wound” and, therefore, because of the type of suffering caused the use of the flamethrowers is prohibited. Clearly there is this notion that some actions are prohibited because of the inhumane nature of the weapons, meaning that no target, no matter the level of threat, is a legitimate target. It is thus possible to categorize weapons as more or less humane depending on the nature of the weapon, and that some weapons are prohibited as a result. Nagel argues that, “one can justify prohibitions against certain particularly cruel weapons: starvation, poisoning, infectious diseases, weapons designed to main or disfigure or torture” according to the claim “that such weapons attack the men, not the soldiers”. Clark notes that this indeed might sound slightly paradoxical idea to some in that the soldier should “lose his right to life (arguably the most important right of all) and yet retain some rights over the manner of his death (arguably a right of the second order)”.

However, it can be argued that there are instances where being treated inhumanely or being killed in an inhumane manner is worse than a humane death. Indeed, codes of war reflect this understanding and are uniquely concerned with the drawing of lines between different weapons of war. These lines are often drawn either prohibiting the use of weapons because they cannot discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate targets or because they are considered inhumane as a result of the type or level of harm they cause and therefore are prohibited regardless of the target. Accordingly, the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868, Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles, the 1899 Declaration on the Use of Bullets Which Expand or Flatten Easily in the Human Body, the 1980 Protocol II on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices (amended in 1996) each renounce the use of certain weapons established on the argument that the weapons should not be employed given that they are “designed or of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering”.
If we follow the premise that even fully assimilated combatants are still illegitimate targets for certain weapons because of their inhumane nature, then it is clear that torture, as the epitome of inhumane treatment, will never be able to find a legitimate target.
Torture represents an activity that is inhumane in the extreme. It encompasses a set of activities that violate all of an individual’s most vital interests, inflicting the highest level of physical, psychological and emotional pain. Even though it does not kill it is more inhumane in its treatment and therefore should be prohibited absolutely.

As Henry Shue argues, “Torture is usually humiliating and degrading – the pain is normally experienced naked and amidst filth. But while killing destroys life, it need not destroy dignity. ”It can be argued therefore, that in the case of torture there is no act that the individual could perform that would result in him waiving the right that protects him from being tortured. Essentially, when it comes to torture, everyone, even combatants, are illegitimate targets. 
Blackmail and torture are two topics for intelligence collection that have received much attention from academic, professional, and popular communities. In recent years there has been increased pressure on the intelligence community to assume an aggressive stance on intelligence collection; to be seen to be going out and producing intelligence so as to prevent such catastrophes from happening again.

This thesis started with the proposition that the field of intelligence lacked any coherent, rigorous or systematic ethical review. That is, intelligence has never developed an ethical framework that offered a means of determining if and when intelligence is ethically justified. The Introduction argued that this is unacceptable. Intelligence can claim no a priori entitlement to be excluded from the realm of ethics and as such requires an ethical framework specifically designed for intelligence that outlines if and when its activities are justified.

After reviewing well established ethical frameworks such as realism, consequentialism and deontology, it was argued that none are an appropriate means for ethically evaluating intelligence. It was argued that realism is unsuitable since it places too much emphasis on what the state might deem expedient and, as such, ignores some important limits that should be put on intelligence usage.

Consequentialism, such as Michael Herman’s “ethical balance sheet”, presented the problem of being too permissive for some of the more damaging intelligence collection activities as well as presenting several difficulties resulting from the “highly complex computations of goods and harms required”.

Finally, deontology would be too restrictive and unable to take into account the important ethical role intelligence plays. The Introduction therefore concluded that the most appropriate ethical framework for intelligence collection would be one that takes into account both the ethical role that intelligence plays in protecting the political community as well as the harm that intelligence can cause.

Principles to determine if the harm caused is justified or not. These principles are based on the just war tradition and are designed to reflect the ethical good that intelligence can do while limiting the harm intelligence can cause.
The collection disciplines explored are imagery intelligence, signals intelligence, indirectly coercive human intelligence and directly coercive human intelligence.

These illustrative examples are designed to explore in greater depth the way that imagery intelligence comes into conflict with an individual’s vital interests, namely the interest in privacy and autonomy. It first argued that individuals maintain a degrees of control over their image as well as arguing that there is a difference in the degree of privacy that can be expected depending on where individual is.
Secondly, it was argued that if an individual feels he is being watched he is likely to alter his behavior so as to coincide with the will of the watcher, thus affecting his autonomy. It was concluded that CCTV cameras on passive scan feature at the lowest level on the Ladder of Escalation, the Initial Level, because they only minimally violate the individual’s interest in privacy and autonomy. However, focusing or tracking a specific individual represented a greater violation of privacy and, as such, caused a slightly higher level of harm, that is Level One.

However, by making reference to the power of the Panoptic Gaze, it was also argued that pervasive monitoring of individuals will likely cause an unwarranted effect on social cohesion as well as affecting the autonomy of those individuals not directly targeted. Therefore, en masse or pervasive monitoring through CCTV cameras can cause an increased level of harm.

Intensive surveillance was a greater violation of an individual’s privacy given its ability to monitor the individual in both greater quantity and quality, causing a Level Two harm. Finally, it was argued that intrusive surveillance is the highest privacy violation out of the imagery intelligence activities.

This is because it violates a sphere of privacy that is established both socially and legally as one of the most intimate and therefore maintains a  greater degree of privacy. Monitoring an individual in his house therefore causes a Level Three harm.

Once the particular level of harm was established, the activities were put in context of the Just Intelligence Principles so as to determine if their use is justified or not. It was shown that CCTV cameras on passive scan can almost always be justified as long as their usage is controlled so as to not cause the detrimental effect of the Panoptic Gaze that was mentioned.

Intensive CCTV scans can also be justified providing that the operator is careful to distinguish between the average citizen and those who cause a breach of the peace. Intensive surveillance, it was demonstrated, should be restricted to operations where there is at least a probable threat and should only target those who are connected to the threat in some way. Finally, it was concluded that intrusive surveillance can only be done when it is demonstrated to a third party that there is a significant threat and when the intelligence operatives only target those who are directly related to the threat.