Golden days of the black arts: 'human intelligence,' the right way.(At War)

Technology and terrorism are unevenly matched. Undoubtedly it is helpful to be in a surveillance aircraft or at a computer terminal tapping terrorists' telecommunications, encrypted e-mails included. But terrorists have only to revert to pre-modern methods to limit the rewards of SIGINT, the shorthand for signal intelligence gathered by technology. Saddam Hussein had been relying on word of mouth, runners, and cash in hand, and was therefore untraceable through SIGINT. Terrorists in Iraq are organized in small autonomous cells. It is the same in Afghanistan, and in the Palestinian areas. Penetration of the underworld in which these cells form and operate is the surest--perhaps the only--way to defeat such an enemy. This involves HUMINT, or human intelligence, a difficult and dangerous business in the best of times, reaching to every one of the black arts of deception.

British expertise in this field was once proverbial. Principally it was a byproduct of the Empire, and the need to be assessing unrest, but it also had something to do with the British character, with love of adventure and identification with other peoples and their customs. British consuls, soldiers, traders, and eccentrics were in the habit of studying languages and the religion of Islam profoundly enough to be taken for Muslims, adopting Eastern clothing and passing themselves off in the crowd, or as it used to be said, "going native."

Among many feats of impersonation, the great explorer Sir Richard Burton--actually a serving officer of the Indian Army--did the pilgrimage to Mecca undetected under the name of Haj Ibrahim. Armin Vambery--Hungarian by birth but reporting to British intelligence--explored Central Asia pretending to be a wandering dervish. Suspicious local emirs and sheikhs cross-examined him, but he proved more learned in Islam than they were. Professor E. G. Browne, the father of Persian studies, liked to publish a photograph of himself in his habitual Persian clothes as the frontispiece of his books. T. E. Lawrence, a regular intelligence officer, insisted on dressing as an Arab even at the Versailles peace conference. The last in this tradition was probably Wilfred Thesiger, who died last year. A brigadier in the war, and second in command to General Wingate in the Ethiopian campaign of 1941, he had afterwards ridden a camel across the Empty Quarter of Arabia. His passport photograph at the time shows him unrecognizable with Bedouin robes, headdress, and beard.

John Buchan's Greenmantle is a thriller first published in 1916, and it bears re-reading today. Its plot is that British officers and adventurers, with a patriotic and clever American colleague, manage in the nick of time to infiltrate a conspiracy to raise the Muslim world in an anti-Western jihad. This involves both knowledge of the ways of Islam and disguise, and Buchan makes the self-flattering observation : "We are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skins of remote people." Buchan's fictional intelligence chief explains, "We have had our agents working in Persia and Mesopotamia for years--mostly young officers of the Indian Army. They carry their lives in their hand, and now and then one disappears, and the cellars of Baghdad might tell a tale." Buchan's fictional hero is generally assumed to be based on Aubrey Herbert, a Conservative member of Parliament, who spoke perfect Turkish and whose travels in the Ottoman Empire were wild and astonishing--at one point he might have become the ruler of Albania, then still an Ottoman province. But another likely model is Major E. B. Soane, an intelligence officer from the Indian Army. Right now, his exploits deserve to be remembered.

As a young officer, Soane first went to Persia in 1902. There he learnt Persian and Kurdish well enough to pass as someone from the city of Shiraz. He also spoke Turkish and Arabic. He studied Shia Islam, and in 1905 "ostensibly"--to use his word--converted to that faith. Like Vambery before him, he was indistinguishable from a genuine religious sheikh, in his words able "to dispute the Qur'an with the best of them." Calling himself Mirza ...