Intelligence quandary: spies or satellites?

The sort of people you do need have emerged in recent years in Northern Ireland, telling their stories of undercover work for the British army and the Northern Irish police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Brian Nelson, for example, has recalled how he worked as a British army agent when he was intelligence chief for the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Defence Association. In that role, he provided a UDA hit squad with a photograph of prominent Catholic attorney Patrick Finucane, to make sure they killed the intended target.

The British Army ran a covert unit, working under the biblical motto "Fishers of Men," dedicated to recruiting and managing informers. One former soldier, who infiltrated the IRA, says their work was invaluable.

"We were the eyes and ears of the Army," he says. "We provided everything from low-level intelligence, like gossip... to high-grade intelligence. We provided de tails of bombings and shootings."

Catholic Willie Carlin, an ex-informer, says he and fellow spies may have been involved themselves in such violence, but that overall "they saved more lives than they cost. Because of these men, bombs went wrong and didn't go off. Or the Army was tipped off long enough in advance to make sure the area was evacuated."

The use of such agents, however, undermined the rule of law, say some. "This distorted the criminal justice system, because you had people involved in criminal acts who were not pursued, in order to encourage them to inform on paramilitary activities," says Maggie Beirne of the Belfast-based human rights watchdog, the Committee for the Administration of Justice.

"When those who make the law break the law, then there is no law," reads one piece of Catholic republican graffiti in Belfast.

In practice, say intelligence experts, agents are rarely squeamish about the sort of people they recruit if they want to track terrorists. "Ethical questions do not exercise the security agencies. They are pragmatic people who want to get the job done, and there is not a great deal of moral agonizing, because they know the intelligence world is extremely dirty,"says Professor Clarke.

But that, he adds, makes it all the more important that the agencies are accountable in some way to the public - for example, through parliament.

In Britain, the parliamentary committee responsible for the intelligence agencies works in private, and generally reports only to the prime minister. And incidents of British-paid agents being involved themselves in murder "have not been properly dealt with,"he adds. "There is a blind spot, when it comes to Northern Ireland."

There are questions, too, about the real value of 'human intelligence,' even when it is accurate, since it is not always properly appreciated.

"In some ways, the whole discussion about human versus technical means of intelligence gathering is pointless," argues Vitaly Shlykov, a former senior official in the Soviet military intelligence agency GRU. "Both tend to produce fairly reliable raw results; things go wrong in the way information is analyzed and used."

Josef Stalin, for example, ignored repeated reports from a Soviet spy that Germany was about to attack the USSR in 1941; he found the reports incredible given the non-aggression pact he had signed with Hitler. And in 1973, recalls Yossi Alpher, an Israeli security analyst, Israeli spies warned that Egyptian and Syrian planes were about to attack Israel. But "the intelligence analysts...had no corroboration from technical means, and they put so much stock in technical means that they tended to pooh-pooh human sources."

The worst intelligence failure ever - of both the American and Soviet agencies - was not foreseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Mr. Shlykov. They "failed to see the fatal weaknesses of the USSR, though both had more than enough information to do so. This really shows the limitations of intelligence," he says.

"Even the most effective secret services cannot guarantee the security of the state."

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