WIN Short-Form Book Reviews

BY FRED KINCH | AMAZON | RELEASE DATE 24 MAY 2024

Review by: Security Technologist Bruce Schneier

From the vantage point of today, it's surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn't know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn't know whether the crypto they bought was any good. Everyone pretended to know, thought they knew, or knew better than to even try to know.

The Business of Secrets is the self-published memoirs of Fred Kinch. He was founder and vice resident of - mostly sales - at a US cryptographic hardware company called Datotek, from company's founding in 1969 until 1982. It's mostly a disjointed collection of stories about the difficulties of selling to governments worldwide, along with descriptions of the highs and (mostly) lows of foreign airlines, foreign hotels, and foreign travel in general. But it's also about encryption.

Datotek sold cryptographic equipment in the era after rotor machines and before modern academic cryptography. The company initially marketed computer-file encryption, but pivoted o link encryption - low-speed data, voice, fax - because that's what the market wanted.

These were the years where the NSA hired anyone promising in the field, and routinely classified - and thereby blocked - publication of academic mathematics papers of those they didn't hire. They controlled the fielding of strong cryptography by aggressively using the International Traffic in Arms regulation. Kinch talks about the difficulties in getting an expert license for Datotek’s products; he didn’t know that the only reason he ever got that license was because the NSA was able to break his company’s stuff. He had no idea that his larges competitor, the Swiss company Crypto AG, was owned and controlled by the CIA and its West German equivalent. “Wouldn't that have made our life easier if we had known that back in the 1970s?" Yes, it would. But no one knew.

Glimmers of the clandestine world peek out of the book. Countries like France ask detailed tech questions, borrow or buy a couple of units for "evaluation," and then disappear again. Did they break the encryption? Did they just want to see what their adversaries were using? No one at Datotek knew.

 Kinch "carried the key generator logic diagrams and schematics" with him - even today it's good practice not to rely on their secrecy for security -- but the details seem laughably insecure: four linear shift registers of 29, 23, 13, and 7 bits, variable stepping, and a small nonlinear final transformation. The NSA probably used this as a challenge to its new hires. But Datotek didn't know that, at the time.

Kinch writes: “The strength of the cryptography had to be accepted on trust and only on trust." Yes, but it's so, so weird to read about it in practice. Kinch demonstrated the security of his telephone encryptors by hooking a pair of them up and having people listen to the encrypted voice. It's rather like demonstrating the safety of a food additive by showing that someone doesn't immediately fall over dead after eating it. (In one absolutely bizarre anecdote, an Argentine sergeant with a "hearing defect" could understand the scrambled analog voice. Datotek fixed its security, but only offered the upgrade to the Argentines, because no one else complained. As I said, no one knew anything.)

In his postscript, he writes that even if the NSA could break Datotek's products, they were "vastly superior to what [his customers] had used previously." Given that the previous devices were electromechanical rotor machines, and that his primary competition was a CIA-run operation, he's probably right. But even today, we know nothing about any other country's cryptanalytic capabilities during those decades.

A lot of this book has a "you had to be there" vibe. And it's mostly tone-deaf. There is no real acknowledgment of the human-rights-abusing countries on Datoteks customer list, and how their products might have assisted those governments. But it's a fascinating artifact of an era before commercial cryptography went mainstream, before academic cryptography became approved for US classified data, before those of us outside the triple fences of the NSA understood the mathematics of cryptography.

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Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by The Economist. He is the author of over one dozen books—including his latest, A Hacker’s Mind—as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram” and his blog “Schneier on Security” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and AccessNow; and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Ann Hagedorn
Simon and Schuster, 2021

Reviewer: Nuclear Physicist and Advisor to CIA and FBI Dr. Les Paldy

Ann Hagedorn's Sleeper Agent is a masterfully researched account of one of the most successful Soviet spies in American history–George Koval. A gifted young chemist and a native-born American, Koval infiltrated the heart of the Manhattan Project, passing critical nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. Unlike Klaus Fuchs and other Soviet operatives who were eventually exposed, Koval's espionage went undetected for decades, making his story even more remarkable.

Hagedorn's meticulous research brings to life a spy who operated in plain sight, his ideological convictions driving him rather than monetary gain. As she explores Koval's path—from his upbringing in an immigrant Jewish community in Iowa, his family's emigration to the Soviet Union in1932 in response to antisemitism and prejudice in the U.S., to his Soviet training and eventual placement in the Manhattan Project-the book also explores his worldview and motivations.

The book provides a concise overview of the history of the time, touching on the immigration of European physicists to the US, the first experiments with nuclear fission at Columbia University, the Einstein letter to President Roosevelt, and the decision to organize the Manhattan Project. It also describes Soviet tradecraft for handling Koval.

One of the book's most compelling aspects is its exploration of Koval's lasting impact.

The information he transmitted to the Soviet Union on the production of polonium for nuclear weapon triggers probably contributed to the Soviets achieving nuclear parity far earlier than U.S. officials had anticipated, detonating their first nuclear weapon in 1949.

Yet, despite the significance of his espionage, Koval never wavered in his belief that he had done the right thing, seeing his actions as maintaining a global balance rather than an act of betrayal.

Hagedorn also raises intriguing questions about modern intelligence and counterintelligence. Koval's success was facilitated by an era in which deep background hecks relied on paper trails rather than digital footprints. Today, a spy with his history— someone who had lectured and written in support of Communist causes—would likely be flagged early in the vetting process through simple internet searches. His ability to penetrate the most secretive scientific endeavor of the 20th century seems almost inconceivable in the digital age.

For readers interested in Cold War espionage, nuclear history, or the Manhattan Project's security vulnerabilities, Sleeper Agent is a fascinating read. It is both a biography of an enigmatic spy and a cautionary tale about the ways in which ideology, espionage, and historical circumstances can align to shape world events.

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Dr. Lester Paldy, a nuclear physicist and professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, played an advisory and operational support role for CIA and FBI for 25 years. Paldy, an AFIO member and regular contributor to The Intelligencer, last year published a memoir about his exploits as a scientist working in the U.S. intelligence community: No Cloak, No Dagger: A Professor’s Secret Life Inside the CIA (Rowman and Littlefield, March 2024).

Author: Ronald Drabkin, William Morrow, 2024

Reviewer: Former National Counterintelligence Officer for East Asia David A. Gutschmit

In "Beverly Hills Spy", Ronald Drabkin has authored a compelling narrative centering on the complex journey of a spy whose espionage in the years leading up to World War II should be more well known. Englishman Fredrick Rutland was a decorated hero of the First World War, a pioneer in the field of naval aviation, and an expert in warship design. He also betrayed Great Britain, helped build the Japanese Navy that enabled Japan's onslaught in the Pacific, and spied for Tokyo against the United States in the runup to Pearl Harbor.

 Drabkin successfully showcases the multiverse of vulnerabilities and motivations that made Rutland an ideal target if not an ideal agent. Japanese Naval Intelligence showered Rutland with cash and enabled an extravagant lifestyle in pre-war Los Angeles, capitalizing on his taste for the high life. One of his frequently exasperated handlers noted that Rutland was paid almost ten times as much as Japan's most senior naval officers. They also played to his large if not narcissistic ego, reinforcing his self-image as an irreplaceable authority on naval matters, and a high roller who could interact at the highest levels of U.S. society. Looming in the background is the resentment Rutland felt for his homeland's obsession with class, for which, being from a blue-collar background, he blamed his failure to rise in the Royal Air Force during the interwar period. Finally, as pressure mounted on Rutland from U.S. authorities, his overconfident efforts to protect himself by belatedly aligning with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and British intelligence as a double or even triple agent smack of magical thinking.

The author weaves several other interesting themes around the periphery of the Rutland drama. He documents the hostility and lack of cooperation between ONI and the FBI as war approached; a sad commentary on the pre-War state of the U.S. "intelligence community" that rings true. The ONI establishment on the West Coast was fixated on counterespionage and counter-sabotage threats, at the expense of trying to ferret out Tokyo's war plans and intentions. The FBI resented ONI's poaching on its domestic turf; but was focused an alleged Communist menace until late in the game.

Somewhat more surprising is Drabkin's description of Tokyo's wider espionage operations in the United States. Beyond Rutland, these were generally characterized by incompetence, relying on untrained and undisciplined line navy personnel rather than professional intelligence officers. The exception is Yoshikawa Takeo, the most gifted of Tokyo's naval intelligence operatives, who provided valuable intelligence on the disposition of U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor and surrounding facilities from his arrival in Honolulu in March 1941. For the most part, these are woven smoothly into the master narrative centering on Rutland himself. However, at some points the pace of the book is slowed by somewhat stilted dialogue which is not clearly documented, underlining an overall lack of footnotes/endnotes.

 It is not surprising that several major questions surrounding Rutland linger. The most poignant chapter in the book describes bewildered FBI agents following Rutland around Washington during a visit in the summer of 1941 as he shuttled between ONI Headquarters and the British and Japanese embassies looking for a way out as the Bureau, and the war, closed in. Drabkin affords Rutland considerable benefit of the doubt, maintaining that, in the course of looking for financial and physical self-preservation, he was sincerely trying to warn Washington and London that war was imminent - that his allegiances were clear in the end. While he did make it back to London courtesy of MI-5, he spent the first two years of the war in confinement and died an apparent suicide in January 1949 in a small apartment in Wales. Drabkin speculates that somehow Rutland was still enough of a potential embarrassment four years after the end of the war to have been eliminated by one or another of the allied services he tried to con. Rutland would have delighted in this fantasy.

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David Gutschmit, former National Counterintelligence Officer for East Asia, is a retired CIA Operations Officer. In addition to numerous tours with the Directorate of Operations in the foreign field and at headquarters, he held assignments at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Counterintelligence Executive/Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the U.S. Naval War College. He currently teaches intelligence studies to graduate students at New York University, Columbia University, and Georgetown University, focusing on economic and industrial espionage and comparative intelligence systems.

by Nicholas Eftimiades, Vitruviun Press, 05 January 2025

Review by Randal Phillips*, Former CIA East Asia Division Chief (acting), Chief of China Ops, COS Beijing

Nicholas Eftimiades has once again provided a thoroughly researched and comprehensively detailed roadmap of China's intelligence apparatus. This not only builds upon and updates his seminal 1994 book Chinese Intelligence Operations, it provides the reader with a detailed understanding of China's "whole-of-society" espionage activities that dwarf the approach of any other nation.

Eftimiades painstakingly provides the reader with factual details derived from analyzing over 850 known espionage cases of how that "whole-of-society" approach works in practice today. He starts with an overview of the legal framework that has been put in place in the Xi Jinping era that explicitly mandates that any Chinese organization, business or individual must cooperate with China's security and intelligence apparatus, if requested. He then layers upon this how multi-faceted the number of players are in China conducting espionage, including state-owned and private business entities, the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department, research and academic organizations, individuals sensing a business opportunity off of stolen intellectual property, and of course, China's formal intelligence agencies.

Perhaps most interesting from my perspective, given a career at CIA working on China issues, is the analysis provided on China's intelligence objectives. A perennial question was always to identify how the Chinese leadership decided upon its clandestine collection priorities, and how this was communicated up and down the chain of command to its Order Book Herebevy of collectors, particularly the Ministry of State Security and the PLA's Joint Intelligence Bureau. Eftimiades quite effectively details how this process is tied to China's domestic and global security and economic development requirements, particularly that laid out very transparently in the "Made in China 2025" policy blueprint seeking a dominant position for China in 10 critical industries. Whereas in days past it could be said that Chinese espionage efforts were in many ways quite scattershot in function, almost in a "target of opportunity" fashion, it is clear that today China has a more streamlined and focused set of collection priorities against which they unleash their vast resources.

Perhaps no less compelling from my perspective is Eftimiades' superb use of the 850 plus espionage cases to explain how significantly China's espionage players have altered their tradecraft and taken on a truly global collection effort. Particularly in the Xi Jinping era, the various espionage arms – particularly the MSS – have been both incentivized and browbeat into being more aggressive in their pursuit of their requirements. This includes more daring targeting of individuals in operating environments around the world, and greater confidence in using bountiful social media approaches and financial incentives of various forms. This can be seen as part and parcel of Xi's pursuit of the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" and an element of a more confident China on the world stage.

It's hard to truly wrap one's arms around the global impact of China's espionage activities, both in terms of the economic impact well into the trillions of dollars lost, but also in the enormous scope of China's campaign that dwarfs the capabilities and resources of target nations to combat these efforts. Eftimiades provides a great service to all readers, whether those in government or in the private sector in the crosshairs of this battle, to truly begin to understand what is happening here. I would say that this book provides in a concise 180 pages a tremendously useful description of the challenge, and an opportunity to understand what will be required to mount an effective defense.

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*Randal Phillips is Founder and President of HFBB Associates, a bespoke strategic geopolitical and financial risk consultancy on China and Asia issues. Randy previously spent 28 years with the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations, serving a number of tours abroad in Asia, including most recently as COS Beijing. He also served as Chief of China Operations and Acting Chief of East Asia Division in CIA HQS.

Randy has a B.A. in Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs from Miami University and a Master of International Public Policy from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is fluent in Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia. Randy can be reached at randalphillips@hfbbassocates.com