Hi there!

That’s a very good question there. The historians of intelligence can be roughly divided into two camps. There are the so-called ‘Moderns’, who view the creation of professional intelligence bureaucracies such as the British SIS and American CIA as a distinctly modern phenomenon of the 20th century. In a sense they’re right. Many of the present day secret services are a creation of the 20th century – I will touch upon why they were created in a minute.

Many historians have however demonstrated that espionage is indeed the second oldest profession in history, and is even recorded in biblical stories. Even before that, the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu in the Art of War highlighted the importance of having spies within the enemy’s camp. These historians have located the first secret services in Europe in Renaissance Venice, but also point to Sir Francis Walsingham who served as Queen Elizabeth of England’s spy chief in the 16th century, infiltrating the Catholic circles that threatened her power.

In Russia, Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible, a flawed translation of his Russian nickname ‘Grozny’), was so obsessed with conspiracies and sabotage against his authority that he retreated to a monastery at Aleksandrovskaya, outside Moscow, and demanded far-reaching powers if he were ever to return and govern the country. His demands were met, and he created his own private guard known as the ‘Oprichniki’, who rode on black horses and black robes, carrying decapitated dog heads on sticks as a symbol for ‘sniffing out’ the enemies of the Tsar. For years they went from town to town to arrest, interrogate, torture and execute real and imagined enemies. Their blood thirst eventually culminated in the destruction of the city of Novgorod and the slaying of many of its citizens around 1570. If you notice some parallels with Stalin’s Great Terror, that might be because Stalin admired this episode in Russian history.

In later centuries, historians have observed the rise of pre-modern SIGINT operations in Europe. SIGINT, or Signals Intelligence, means the interception and decryption of secret communication of an adversary, nowadays chiefly performed by the NSA in the US (founded in 1952), and the British GCHQ that dates to 1919. The electronic interception of electronically transmitted signals or communication is of course largely a 20th century phenomenon (although it occurred as soon as telegraphy was invented in the 19th century). In the 17th and 18th centuries, the system of embassies between countries became firmly established in Europe. Ambassadors served dual roles as both messengers and observers. For their king they reported on affairs abroad, and for this they used both overt and covert means – such as local print media, but also court gossip that reached them through paid informers. The host country however also spied on embassies by intercepting their mail, and using crafty techniques to open it unseen, copy its contents, and then forward it. This often happened through bribing couriers or running secret chambers inside post offices, and the phrase *‘cabinet noir’ (*Black chamber) referred to the secret interception of letters.

When embassies in the later 19th century started using telegraphy and encryption techniques to protect their communication, governments tried to tap those cables and break the code. The Germans for example recruited French cleaning leadings to bring them snippets of code they found in the bin, and the Russian secret police (founded in 1825 in response to a military uprising), blatantly burglarized foreign embassies to get access to the secret codes.

The late 19th century is also when we see the rise of professional, centralized, intelligence bureaucracies. The services I had so far described were not yet professional in the sense that there was no training, their existence had an informal character, and their methods and aims were largely ad hoc. The Tsarist secret police created in 1825 for example, largely relied on the Gendarmerie to forward them tips, although they did establish the first modern surveillance units in the 1860’s to follow dissidents. The US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882 can be seen as America’s first modern intelligence service. In Europe, most countries by then operated military intelligence staffs (often emerging out of geographic reconnaissance sections), secret police units – especially to counter the rising problem of Anarchist terrorism, and black chambers to intercept foreign diplomatic correspondence.

With the growing threat of war in the early 1900’s, the first modern British intelligence services were established. The Boer War served as a reminder to London that its ad hoc system of military intelligence staffs was insufficient, and deliberations in Whitehall led to the 1908 creation of a small bureau that was eventually to become the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, and the Security Service MI5. This took place within a context of public spy-mania, as more than 300 spy novels were published between 1900 and 1914, often alarming the public and political establishment over the alleged dangers of German espionage. Through MI6 the UK tried to centralize and rationalize its intelligence collection process, and the purpose of MI5 was to conduct counterintelligence against German espionage, of which we now know that it was largely non-existent in the UK. After the emergence of the Soviet Union, MI5 became largely responsible for monitoring the threat of Communist subversion. During WWII, MI6 facilitated the creation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) that handled covert operations in occupied Europe, such as sabotage and aiding the local resistance. After the War, the SOE was disbanded, but covert operations moved to MI6.

In the US, the growth of organized crime coupled with the growing danger of terrorism – a US president had been assassinated in 1901 – and the threat of German sabotage fuelled the creation of the 1908 Bureau of Investigation, later to become the FBI, that would usurp counterintelligence responsibility within the US during WWII. Unlike other countries, US politicians found espionage a corrupt practice that did not belong in the proper conduct of international relations, and therefore no signals intelligence or permanent foreign intelligence services were maintained under peacetime. During WWII the OSS was created to collect intelligence and carry out sabotage, but it was disbanded again after 1945. As the Cold War dawned in the next few years however, and the extend of Soviet espionage gradually began to be grasped by US politicians, they radically changed the US security structures with the National Security Act of 1947 that gave birth to a centralized intelligence agency, the CIA. Part of the reason for having a permanent agency was the experience of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the surprise attack. Briefly, covert operations fell under a separate organization, the Office for Policy Coordination, but in the 1950’s this became part of the CIA.

The NSA was established in 1952 as well. Initially, signals intelligence had been collected by many bodies such as the US Air Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the US Army, the US Postal Service, but they worked poorly together, and their poor performance during the 1950 Korean War gave rise to the desire for centralized SIGINT effort. The NSA immediately became America’s largest and most expensive intelligence service.

End of Part I

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Part II below