Governments around the world are responding with outrage about the revelations from National Security Agency traitor Edward Snowden.
Snowden was an outside contractor to the NSA, one of the most secretive American intelligence agencies. Usually when the topic of NSA programs comes up, no member of the American government will even mention the agency or a program’s name.
Snowden said he released secret information because the programs involved violated his moral code. After he went public, a queue of foreign governments assembled to give the U.S. a good tongue-lashing; they were being spied on and they didn’t like it.
Are they really that outraged? Not likely. Only the childishly naÄ‚Ĺ»ve would believe foreign governments were unaware of international espionage. Not only is the U.S. spying on foreign governments, including their allies, virtually every government in the world is engaged in espionage against every other government accessible to them. As Sun Tzu summarized in his famous treatise on war, “Your most important asset is the traitor within your opponent’s ranks.”
For instance, French president Francois Hollande on Monday demanded the U.S. government cease spying on France.
“France cannot accept such behaviour between allies and partners. There are enough elements for us to demand explanations,” he indignantly stated.
A coincidence, because France voiced much the same concerns over the NSA’s Echelon system, a complex eavesdropping network, in the mid to late 1990s. France and other European countries accused the U.S. of using espionage to steal business secrets, such as airline contract information, and pass that information on to American firms. Almost immediately, information was leaked to the media revealing the “airline secrets” involved were actually illegal bribes from the Euro company Airbus to Saudi Arabian officials in order to secure contracts that were supposed to be fairly tendered out.
Think allies don’t spy on each other? Think again. In the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal, the U.S. Department of Defence employee was outed in 2004 for passing sensitive information about U.S.-Iran relations to an Israeli organization in Washington. The information concerned Israel because it involved backroom dealings between the U.S. and Iran, a nation that has sworn categorically to “destroy Israel.” Apparently Franklin had been recruited by Israel for the job because, according to an unnamed U.S. intelligence source, “for whatever reason, the guy hates Iran passionately.”
There isn’t room on this page to list the espionage activities of nations like China. For the curious, simply type, “China espionage” into any Internet search engine.
The tactics used in the espionage world shock and surprise polite society because they seem underhanded and dishonest. And, usually, they are. Just as importantly, they are usually necessary evils.
In the preparations leading up to D-Day near the end of the Second World War, a program of disinformation was conducted to confuse Nazi Germany about what the allies had in mind. Part of the deception included an Allied soldier’s body, complete with phony D-Day plans, being callously dumped overboard in the Mediterranean. This poor fellow remains a mystery.
Like it or not, espionage has been, and will remain, a critical and distasteful part of international relations.
