Intelligence quandary: spies or satellites?

If only the Central Intelligence Agency had sneaked an informer into the group that planned last Tuesday's attacks on New York and Washington.

As the CIA and other security agencies struggle to explain one of the worst intelligence failures in their history, many critics are blaming the disaster on official faith in machines over men.

But the experience of other countries that have used more traditional cloak-and-dagger double agents to penetrate their enemies' ranks suggests that the results are not always as good as they might be. And these governments have often preferred to ignore ethical questions about the sort of people they deal with in the dirty world of espionage.

In the wake of this week's savage assaults, a chorus of voices has accused US intelligence agencies of paying too little attention to 'human intelligence' - information coming from people on the ground.

"When electronic capabilities came onstream, the Americans went the technological route," says Michael Clarke, head of the Centre for Defence Studies at Kings College in London. "Human intelligence was messier and more dangerous, and most Western agencies got out of it" to some extent.

A handful of countries, however, stuck with their agents in the field.

The Russians, for example, who built their spy network in the 1920s, when technology was scarce, scored successes with double agents such as Kim Philby, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hanssen.

The Israelis have always relied heavily on informers among Palestinian ranks, and the British learned almost all they knew about the IRA from members they had 'turned.'

"The most important secrets can only be found in the human mind," says Mikhail Lyubimov, a 25-year veteran of the Soviet KGB, who is now a popular author of espionage novels.

In this difficult and dangerous work, the Israelis have an advantage; they have been able to use Jews born in Arab countries who can blend into Arab society, and they have been able to blackmail or manipulate Palestinians in the occupied territories into informing on their neighbors.

The British Army has been able to draw on Catholics in Northern Ireland who oppose the IRA, and has also been known to use blackmail. The Soviets could exploit ideological sympathies in closet communists, or simply pay a lot of money.

But the task of penetrating the sort of closely knit Islamic terrorist cell typical of the Middle East - the sort that is widely believed responsible for Tuesday's atrocity - is much, much harder.

"When you have a family or clan-based terrorist cell, and where the requirement for getting in is to kill some people, penetrating those groups is no walk in the park," former CIA Director Robert Gates said earlier this week.

Nor can you set up such double agents overnight. "It takes years to get human intelligence up and running," says Professor Clarke. "You need 'sleepers' who come to recognize patterns of behavior, and those sources are critical. When you need human intelligence, nothing else will do."

The US National Commission on Terrorism found in its report last year that the CIA had paid too little attention to such sources. "Complex bureaucratic procedures now in place send an unmistakable message to CIA officers in the field that recruiting clandestine sources of terrorist information is encouraged in theory but discouraged in practice," it said.

Among those procedures are 1995 guidelines "restricting recruitment of unsavory sources," such as those who had committed human rights abuses, or killed Americans.

CIA officials insist that these guidelines merely "make us cognizant of the sort of people we are dealing with," in the words of spokeswoman Anya Guilsher. "We don't shy away from dealing with unsavory characters." In 1998, she added, the CIA launched a seven-year program to increase the recruitment of operations officers by 30 percent.

But recruiting undercover agents who can get close to Islamic terrorist organizations is hard, she points out. "These are not the sort of people you meet at cocktail parties. James Bond would not make it in this era."

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