N.A.T.O. learns to live with spies

Press, 18 June 1976, Page 12

N.A.T.O. learns to live with spies

By

DAVID FAIRHALL

in the “Guardian,” London

Italians who have recently had to listen to stern lectures from Dr Kissinger on the security risks of allowing Communists into their Government may perhaps be forgiven a wry smile at the news that yet another big

spy ring has been uncovered at the heart of a staunch N.A.T.O. ally’s administration. This is the third espionage scandal to break in West Germany in as many weeks; and it follows by' only a year the shattering discovery that Gunter Guillaume, personal aide to former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, was actually a captain in the East German Army’s intelligence service. “Suspect,” “unreliable” Italians might reasonably comment that if there were a Communist Party member in their Cabinet one would at least be aware of the potential security risks. If information were to flow through him or his staff the source would be obvious. N.A.T.O. secrets could be filtered appropriately — perhaps even by open agreement. The key to a covert spy’s usefulness is that you never know just how much the other side knows. A multinational alliance like N.A.T.O. has to learn to live with espionage, and in fact there are a number of

built-in safeguards. The most fundamental is the principle that the member nations only feed into the central intelligence pool what they are prepared to let all their allies know — which to a large extent means what they will risk letting the Warsaw Pact know. There is no automatic exchange of sensitive information.

What does exist, superimposed on the Alliance’s central intelligence network, is a pattern of bilateral contacts between countries which trust one another to such and such a degree. And this sort of exchange is also governed by what each government has to trade for another's information. Britain’s access to American satellite surveillance data for example might be determined by how much we can see and hear' from our bases in Cyprus, and how much the Americans currently value the facilities we provide for their radars and radios in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Norway must be in a peculiarly strong position on the opposite flank of the AI-

Hance, where she provides a constant watch and early warning of Soviet naval and air movements from the complex of military bases round Murmansk. The first MiG fighter to fall into Western hands, I am told, was crash landed on a grass airstrip on the Danish island of Bornholm. Its specification must have been worth a small fortune on the international intelligence market — equivalent in these days to the wide range of Societ military equipment the Israelis have captured in successive wars, first for their own analysis and then for barter with the United States. The second safety mechanism is a specific one, which emerged to deal with Portugal’s internal upheaval and could to some extent be applied elsewhere. The Portuguese asked — they were not formally told — if they could withdraw from the Nuclear Planning Group. This is the N.A.T.O. committee which discusses the most sensitive issues of strategic deterrence. At what point should Allied com-

manders be authorised to resort to nuclear weapons? How should the decision be taken? Can the Warsaw Pact usefullv be warned or bluffed? It may well be that Portugal’s access to a range of secret documents and information is being discreetly censored. But clearly there is a limit to the circumstances in which the country concerned can tolerate such discrimination, and a limit to how far the Alliance can function collectively without trust between its members. So although one can rationalise the latest disclosures from Bonn to make them less alarming than they might seem, the cumulative effect is dangerous. One of those arrested recently is said by the West German public prosecutor to have had “access to topsecret N.A.T.O. documents”; another is described as having- been a “close aide” of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt when he was Minister of Defence. The East Germans, and through them the Russians, may have learned a lot —

though whether real information on Western intentions and capabilities would do any harm in peactime may also be uncertain. Now they have the added bonus of strengthening the undercurrents of suspicion that have never been quite still beneath N.A.T.O.’s surface.