It Did Not Begin With Snowden The Declassified History of American Intelligence Operations in Europe: 1945-2001 Matthew M. Aid, October 2014 Background article for Brill’s Research Collection U.S. Intelligence on Europe, 1945-1995. The online collection is available at http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/us-intelligence-on-europe. pg. 1 U.S. Intelligence on Europe – Background article Contents Introduction THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY’S 70-YEAR PRESENCE IN EUROPE U.S. INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS IN GERMANY, BRITAIN AND TURKEY • U.S. Intelligence Activities in West Germany and West Berlin • The U.S. Intelligence Presence in Great Britain • The Turkish Intelligence Facilities U.S. ESPIONAGE ACTIVITIES IN EASTERN EUROPE DURING THE COLD WAR • East Germany • Czechoslovakia • Hungary • Poland • Romania • Bulgaria • Albania SPYING ON AMERICA’S EUROPEAN FRIENDS AND ALLIES • France • Great Britain • West Germany • Norway • Spain • Italy • Greece • Turkey / Cyprus • Spying on the Picayune of Europe • Spying on the Western European Communist Parties • Economic Intelligence Gathering in Europe • Monitoring European Anti-Nuclear Groups in the 1980s INTELLIGENCE REPORTING ON EUROPE • Terrorism in Europe • Coverage of European Socio-Economic Issues pg. 2 U.S. Intelligence on Europe – Background article CHAPTER 1 Introduction The great thing about the study of history is that it is a dynamic process. Unlike the sciences, engineering and mathematics, there are no hard and fast rules to the study of history because it is forever changing as new information come to light. This is especially in true in the realm of intelligence history, one of the youngest but fastest growing areas of serious academic endeavor, where literally every day researchers around the world are unearthing formerly classified documentary materials on dusty shelves in archives and libraries that are changing, in some cases dramatically, our understanding of how and why certain world events happened the way they did. The result is that many of the books and articles written over the past seventy years about intelligence matters by journalists and popular non-fiction writers, which were based largely on interviews with confidential sources of varying levels of knowledge and sometimes dubious reliability, are now being challenged by intelligence scholars and researchers, who have the benefit of access to many of the formerly classified primary source documents that their journalistic brethren did not. The vital importance of serious intelligence scholarship has become abundantly clear by the revelations in the American and European media over the past two years based on leaked material provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the activities in Europe of America’s electronic eavesdropping organization, the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In the U.S., the media revelations have led to demands for strengthening the oversight controls on NSA and limiting the electronic surveillance activities that the agency is legally authorized to perform. But given the current propensity of the American political and legislative systems towards inaction and perpetual partisan squabbling, it remains to be seen if any of these calls for NSA ‘reform’ will ever be enacted into law. In Europe, the revelations about NSA and GCHQ’s electronic eavesdropping activities in the European press have brought into clear relief the broad outlines of the electronic surveillance activities currently being conducted by these two agencies on the continent. Not only have the revelations generated considerable public anger, but they have also had a decidedly negative impact on the U.S. government’s relations with some (but not all) of its European allies, especially the German government because of 2013 stories indicating that NSA and GCHQ monitored the cell phone calls of German chancellor Angela Merkel. Many current serving and retired American and European intelligence officials that I have spoken to over the past two years are both angry and more than somewhat perplexed about the reaction in Western Europe to the reports in the press about U.S. intelligence activities, many of which they adamantly believe to be distorted, inaccurate, or lacking in historical context and political perspective. There is more than a little truth in what these past and present intelligence officials say, but regardless of whether you agree with their views or not, the simple fact of the matter is that the Snowden leaks have, perhaps forever, changed the way Europeans view the U.S. intelligence community and its activities. The irony is that seventy years after the first American spies took root in Europe, the American intelligence presence in Europe has now become a source of both public controversy and high-level concern within a number of Western European governments. pg. 3 U.S. Intelligence on Europe – Background article CHAPTER 2 THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY’S 70-YEAR PRESENCE IN EUROPE As the documents in this collection show, the multitude of civilian and military intelligence agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community took root in Europe even before Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945, and have never left the continent in the intervening seventy years despite the significant changes that have taken place in the global security environment. As a former senior CIA official aptly put it, “The world may change, leaders come and go, governments rise and fall, but spying is forever.”1 There were many reasons why the U.S. intelligence community devoted so much time and resources to systematically build up such a massive, multi-layered espionage infrastructure in Western Europe during the Cold War. • First, in 1948 the CIA was tasked with doing whatever it took to prevent any Western Europe countries from coming under the control of Moscow. One of the top tasks assigned to the CIA’s covert action arms, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) after its creation in 1948 was to prevent by any means necessary Western European communist parties from taking over their host governments at the ballot box, or even from participating in the governance of their host countries in a coalition environment.2 • Second, and perhaps most importantly, after the end of World War II Western Europe immediately became the U.S. intelligence community’s most important platform for gaining access to its top intelligence targets: the USSR and its Eastern European allies. It must be remembered that gaining access to even the most mundane information about the Soviet Union, such as train schedules and telephone books, was very hard to come by in the early Cold War years, and the U.S. intelligence community’s personnel in Europe were ill-equipped to overcome these obstacles. After the end of World War II, the U.S. intelligence community did not have much of a presence in Western Europe. The U.S. military services had perhaps 900 intelligence officers and supporting staff in Europe in 1946, half of whom were radio intercept personnel based in West Germany belong to the U.S. Army’s cryptologic organization, the Army Security Agency (ASA). Most of the remaining personnel were counterintelligence officers belonging to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC).3 As of mid-1946, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the predecessor to today’s CIA, had a little more than 300 men and women stationed in Western Europe organized into semi-overt detachments under U.S. Army cover in West Germany, Austria and Italy, as well as covert stations hidden inside the American embassies in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Berne, Prague, Bucharest, and Athens.4 The largest of the European stations was the 170-man SSU Mission in Germany, whose headquarters was located in Heidelberg. The SSU German Mission included a five-man liaison detachment in Frankfurt, a 25-man intelligence unit in West Berlin (the predecessor of what would become known as the Berlin Operations Base), and a seven-man station in Prague, Czechoslovakia.5 Credible sources of hard intelligence about what was going on behind the Iron Curtain were very few and far between after World War II. This was the era when the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to break high-level Soviet codes and ciphers was practically nil. Virtually all of the agents that the CIA dropped into the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1954 were either killed or captured. Reconnaissance overflights of the USSR and Eastern Europe were not permitted by the White House in the early post-war years. The first flight of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane over the USSR did not take place until July 1956, and the first operational American KH-4 CORONA spy satellite was not put into orbit until August 1960. Desperate for any intelligence information about the Soviet Union and its allies, the CIA and the U.S. military intelligence organizations based in Europe engaged in some ill-conceived operations in the early post-World War II era. American intelligence officers in Germany and elsewhere, who were under enormous pressure from pg. 4 U.S. Intelligence on Europe – Background article Washington to produce intelligence, frequently fell prey to dozens of predatory and unscrupulous peddlers of intelligence information throughout Western Europe who ran so-called “paper mills” which cranked out fabricated or misleading information about what was going on behind the Iron Curtain that the young and inexperience American intelligence operatives were all too willing to buy at the grotesquely inflated prices being charged.6 The vulnerability of the US intelligence community to these intelligence fabricators and paper mill operators in Western Europe is told in vivid color by a number of declassified documents contained in this collection. Many of the most rapacious intelligence fabricators were clustered in Paris, France and Brussels, Belgium, where many prominent members of the White Russian community financed their lavish lifestyles by selling fake intelligence information to the highest bidders, which in many cases was the cash-rich CIA and other equally well funded branches of the U.S.