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Bob Leonard
from Peace Researcher 23, June 2001
Mike Frost, the primary author of “Spyworld” is coming
to New Zealand in October 2001 for a two-week speaking tour. His book is not
brand new, but it’s loaded with fascinating detail about electronic spying and
is entertaining reading. A question often asked of ABC is why we are going to
all this effort to bring an ex-spy, and an old one at that (he hasn’t actively
spied since about 1990), all the way from retirement in Canada. Well, he’s not exactly retired – he just
shifted from being a spy to telling about it, in detail, and why he chose to
talk. In addition to reviewing the book, this article may clarify why we at ABC
Central think a personal visit by Frost will be a unique and valuable
experience for New Zealanders.
Mike Frost is not the first spy to spill the beans. McGehee, Agee, Wright, and Tomlinson are some of the more notable spies to have had pangs of conscience and gone public about their secret lives in recent years. But Frost’s is the only firsthand account (to our knowledge) of the inner workings of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and its Canadian sibling agency just over the border, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Frost was an employee of the CSE for 19 years and spent plenty of time at NSA as well in training and liaison.
Some background is helpful: there are three other sibling agencies, Britain’s Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate
(DSD) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).
Collectively, these five clubs operate the spy establishments organised since
1948 under the UKUSA agreement. GCSB spies have talked extensively (and
anonymously) to Nicky Hager, revealing the vast amount of information
incorporated in Nicky’s groundbreaking book
“Secret Power”, published in 1996. But that still makes Nicky a
“secondhand” reporter. Mike Frost is a
firsthand reporter, and thus able to tell us about NSA-style spying with unique
credibility. We are very fortunate he is willing to travel all this way to tell
his story to New Zealanders. But it is important to recognise that he was never
involved directly in the kind of satellite signals-interception that is done at
Waihopai. Tangimoana is actually more up his alley; he is an expert on radio
frequency interception. But he was directly involved in the use of some of the
earliest “Oratory” computer systems developed by NSA for sifting through
intercepted telephone calls for key words. Automated signals selection is at
the heart of NSA’s “Echelon” system and the “Dictionary” operating at Waihopai.
“Spyworld” is a rich and readable account of Frost’s
years with CSE and some of his early military-intelligence adventures with the
Canadian Navy. This is an “as told to” book, not my favourite mode of
storytelling. I would much rather Frost had written of his adventures and
technical and moral challenges in the spy business in his own words, however
awkwardly that might have been. But second author, Michel Gratton, an
experienced columnist and former press secretary to a Canadian Prime Minister,
was drafted to spice up the writing and make the book more marketable. This
device does work well in much of the book, although some of the writing is
unnecessarily melodramatic.
The intense and morally dubious life of a spy takes
its toll on the personal lives of many in the business. Frost paid the price with alcoholism and the
near destruction of his marriage. One way to recover, as this book clearly
shows, is to regain control of your life and to question your actions as a spy
– not an easy task when you’ve devoted your professional life to secrecy,
including total exclusion of your family from the realities of your work. The
key may have been Frost’s wife Carole, who stood by him through it all, and
played a major role in his recovery. Mike Frost did believe in his work, and he
still believes spying is an essential role of government in protecting a
sovereign nation from the bad guys. But spying leads to excesses and it is here
that Frost’s revelations are revealing and alarming.
Frost’s earliest spying was with the Canadian Navy
doing radio signals interception in the remote reaches of the Canadian Arctic.
The Soviets were the target and a spy in the 1960s could certainly believe
fervently in his job, hate the Russians, and survive months of isolation from
family and civilisation. Frost’s technical competence led to a rapid rise in
responsibility and challenge. His first training session at the NSA in Fort
Meade, Maryland, was in 1971, shortly after he moved from the Navy to
employment in the CSE. The Canadian spy agency had existed since 1948 but was
about to greatly expand its activities: NSA’s intimate paternal relationship
with CSE was central to this expansion by providing CSE staff with training,
advice and counsel, and high-tech equipment (on loan for indefinite
periods). NSA ran the show and still
does. And Mike Frost was a key player in the earliest days of CSE’s developing
competency and global reach in spying. A big part of his work was
“embassy-collection”. The US had long been involved in embassy -collection by
the time the fledgling CSE and Mike Frost were recruited by NSA to become
involved.
It was in the development and testing of signals
interception equipment that Frost developed pangs of conscience about what he
and his mates were doing. “It was one thing to be fooling the ‘enemy’. It was
quite an eerie feeling, though, to be listening in on so many conversations
between fellow Canadians. Being rabidly patriotic, he felt it was wrong. He saw
the incredible potential for abuse in the power they held, and he didn’t like
it”. This was “domestic” spying and Frost was uncomfortable with it.
The CSE expanded its international embassy-collection
into several countries including some in Africa. The operation was code-named
Pilgrim, after Frost’s sailboat. The Oratory system, developed at NSA’s
technical development centre in College Park, Maryland, was incorporated into
CSE’s embassy-collection capabilities.
“Mike Frost couldn’t say enough about ‘Oratory’ or the [NSA] engineers
who created it. Because for CSE, it was truly a godsend”. Frost reports that
“’Oratory’ captured many communications between France and Ottawa relating to
the question of separation…. When it comes to the CSE, the ultimate authority
is the Prime Minister. In this case it
was Pierre Trudeau, the separatists’ nemesis”.
A CSE station in West Africa was very likely used to make the
Ottawa-France intercepts.
In 1983, CSE was asked to spy for GCHQ at the behest
of Margaret Thatcher. “…it seems as if
Margaret Thatcher [then British Prime Minister] thinks two of the ministers in
her cabinet are not ‘on-side’… She wants to find out if they are”. CSE carried
out the intercepts: “We never stopped
to question the morality of doing what amounted to dirty tricks for a partisan
politician, for her very personal reasons, in a foreign land. After all, we
weren’t spying on Canadians…that time anyway”.
Another quote from Frost is highly relevant to ABC’s
repeated allegations that our GCSB engages in domestic spying on New Zealanders: “The moral issue was raised, says Frost. We
listened so routinely to private conversations we were not supposed to hear
that I guess we had become immune to that kind of soul-searching. The other
prime reason for going ahead eagerly was the total lack of danger. Who was
going to catch us? The guys who did the
catching were the ones asking us to do it”.
Embassy collection even involves the Americans spying
on the Canadians. In his many trips to College Park for NSA briefing, Frost learned
of techniques for disguising antennas on the roofs of embassies. He and his
colleagues quickly concluded that Canada was not immune to NSA spying. “The
Americans don’t care who they commit espionage against, on the principle that
they may get something that’s useful to their country. They routinely collect foreign intelligence
against everybody”.
Spying from embassies on host countries does have one
security advantage for the spying country that Echelon-type spying does
not: “…they [Ottawa] would never send
‘Pilgrim’ material directly to NSA without analysing it first”. The
intelligence gathered in a foreign embassy does not go down an automated
“pipeline” to NSA as does the satellite interception intelligence gathered at
Waihopai and its sibling stations.
“Spyworld” reveals much. But Mike Frost seems to have
got away with it relatively unscathed in comparison to some of his counterparts
like Philip Agee and Richard Tomlinson. He says he is harassed in various
subtle and non-so-subtle ways – reminders that CSE and NSA would rather he
would keep his mouth shut. But over ten
years after his “retirement” he will travel to NZ for the first time to tell
New Zealanders what our UKUSA partners have been up to for decades. Waihopai
and our very own GCSB are an integral part of an international spy network, now
extensively automated and beyond local control, and with the same operational
freedom to spy on “everybody” as described by Frost. Our Government’s recent
glossy publication, “Securing our Nation’s Safety”, admits “…it does not answer
the operational, or ‘how’, questions”.
Frost answers many of those questions in his book and tells how feeble
and ineffectual is the so-called oversight of spying. The potential for abuse
is immense and uncontrollable.
Mike Frost will not be here to tell us to close
Waihopai. But maybe we’ll learn enough from him about how the spies operate to
make that decision for ourselves.
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