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Cold War Period[edit]
Main articles: Cold War espionage and List of Eastern Bloc agents in the United States

Further information: Nuclear espionage, Soviet espionage in the United States, History of Soviet espionage, Central Intelligence Agency, and American espionage in the Soviet Union and Russian Federation

After 1990s new memoirs and archival materials have opened up the study of espionage and intelligence during the Cold War. Scholars are reviewing how its origins, its course, and its outcome were shaped by the intelligence activities of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other key countries. Special attention is paid to how complex images of one's adversaries were shaped by secret intelligence that is now publicly known.

All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies, double agents, and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The most famous and active organizations were the American CIA, the Soviet KGB, and the British MI6. The East German Stasi, unlike the others, was primarily concerned with internal security, but its Main Directorate for Reconnaissance operated espionage activities around the world. The CIA secretly subsidized and promoted anti-communist cultural activities and organizations. The CIA was also involved in European politics, especially in Italy. Espionage took place all over the world, but Berlin was the most important battleground for spying activity.

Enough top secret archival information has been released so that historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of HUMINT (espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however, he concludes:


 * We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that there were no successful “moles” at the political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side.

The USSR and East Germany proved especially successful in placing spies in Britain and West Germany. Moscow was largely unable to repeat its successes from 1933 to 1945 in the United States. NATO, on the other hand, also had a few successes of importance, of whom Oleg Gordievsky was perhaps the most influential. He was a senior KGB officer who was a double agent on behalf of Britain's MI6, providing a stream of high-grade intelligence that had an important influence on the thinking of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He was spotted by Aldrich Ames a Soviet agent who worked for the CIA, but he was successfully exfiltrated from Moscow in 1985. Biographer Ben McIntyre argues he was the West's most valuable human asset, especially for his deep psychological insights into the inner circles of the Kremlin. He convinced Washington and London that the fierceness and bellicosity of the Kremlin was a product of fear, and military weakness, rather than an urge for world conquest. Thatcher and Reagan concluded they could moderate their own anti-Soviet rhetoric, as successfully happened when Mikhail Gorbachev took power, thus ending the Cold War.

In addition to usual espionage, the Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors.

Middle East[edit]
The United Kingdom's MI6 was involved in the region to protect its interests, notably collaborating with the CIA in Iran, to bring back Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power in a coup in 1953, after the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh attempted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The CIA operated with the intent to curtail the influence of the USSR know as the Eisenhower Doctrine, by funding anti-communist organisations such as the Grey Wolves in Turkey. Middle Eastern states developed sophisticated intelligence and security agencies referred to as Mukhabarat (Arabic: المخابرات El Mukhabarat), primarily used domestically for population control and surveillance, notably in Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Syria under Ba'athist rule and Libya. According to Owen L. Sirrs, the 1967 War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, signalled a failure by Egyptian intelligence to adequately evaluate the military capabilities of their foes. The Yom Kippur War can be attributed to intelligence failure on the side of Israel, caused by a over confidence that Egypt and Syria were not reading for an invasion, despite intelligence proving the contrary provided by high ranking Egyptian Official Ashraf Marwan.

Post-Cold War[edit]
Further information: War on terror and Electronic warfare

In the United States, there are seventeen (taking military intelligence into consideration, it's 22 agencies) federal agencies that form the United States Intelligence Community. The Central Intelligence Agency operates the National Clandestine Service (NCS) to collect human intelligence and perform Covert operations. The National Security Agency collects Signals Intelligence. Originally the CIA spearheaded the US-IC. Following the September 11 attacks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created to promulgate information-sharing.

Since the 19th century new approaches have included professional police organizations, the police state and geopolitics. New intelligence methods have emerged, most recently imagery intelligence, signals intelligence, cryptanalysis and spy satellites.

Counter-terrorism[edit]
Main articles: Counter-terrorism and Anti-terrorism legislation

Western intelligence agencies have progressively turned from traditional state spying to missions resembling international policing: the tracking, spying, arrest and interrogation of high profile targets in prevention of terrorist threats. During The Troubles, the British Security Service (MI5) created a counterterrorism cell in response to the activities of the Irish Republican Army, active in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, including the interception of arms shipment from Libya. In France, the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) engaged in counter-terrorism already in the 1980s in the context of active Basque and Corsican nationalist movements, as well as Middle Eastern Organisations such as the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization and the Lebanese Hezbollah. In the 1990s, Western Intelligence services started to pay increasingly attention to Islamic Terrorism, notably due to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the attacks on the French Public Transport in 1995 by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Islamic Terrorism became the primary focus of the US Intelligence services after the 9/11 Attacks by Al-Qaeda, leading to the Invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and ultimately to the tracking and killing of Osama Ben Laden in 2011.

Traditional human intelligence is obsolete when it concerns Islamic terrorist organisations for several reasons: infiltrating such organisations is more difficult than dealing with states, recruiting from within is significantly riskier for loyalty reasons, and working with informants that are engaged in attacks poses ethical concerns. Counter-terrorism information gathering strategies rely on collaboration with foreign intelligence services and prisoner interrogation.

War in Afghanistan 2001 - 2021[edit]
Main article: War in Afghanistan (2001–2021)

In December of 2009, Jordanian doctor Humam al-Balawi performed a suicide bomb attack at the Camp Chapman American military base near Khost which led to the death of 7 CIA operatives, including the chief of the base, one Jordanian intelligence officer and an afghan driver.

Iraq War 2003 - 2011[edit]
Main articles: Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and Rationale for the Iraq War

The most dramatic failure of intelligence in this era was the false discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. American and British intelligence agencies agreed on balance that the WMD were being built and would threaten the peace. They launched a full-scale invasion that overthrew the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. The result was decades of turmoil and large-scale violence. There were in fact no weapons of mass destruction, but the Iraqi government had pretended they existed so that it could deter the sort of attack that in fact resulted.

Israel[edit]
In Israel, the Shin Bet unit is the agency for homeland security and counter intelligence. The department for secret and confidential counter terrorist operations is called Kidon. It is part of the national intelligence agency Mossad and can also operate in other capacities. Kidon was described as "an elite group of expert assassins who operate under the Caesarea branch of the espionage organization." The unit only recruits from "former soldiers from the elite IDF special force units." There is almost no reliable information available on this ultra-secret organisation.

Cyber Espionage[edit]
Main articles: Cyber spying, Cyberwarfare and Cyber Security.