Why countries are suddenly broadcasting their spies' exploits

Mint

4 hours ago

Israel's airstrikes on Iran exploded across the world's screens as a public display of military firepower. Underpinning that was a less visible but equally vital Israeli covert operation that pinpointed targets, guided the attacks and struck Iran from within.
Agents from Israel's spy agency, Mossad, operated inside Iran before and during the initial attacks earlier this month, Israeli officials said. The disclosure was itself an act of psychological warfare—a boast of Israel's ability to act with impunity inside Iran's borders and Tehran's failure to stop it.
Israel flaunted its tactical success by releasing grainy video emblazoned with Mossad's seal that it said showed operatives and drone strikes inside Iran.
Not long ago, such covert operations stayed secret. Today, belligerents from Ukraine to the U.S. increasingly broadcast their triumphs, with messages amplified in real time by social-media networks.
When T.E. Lawrence wanted to publicize his World War I secret forays deep into Ottoman territory, he wrote a book and articles. Nobody saw those commando raids for half a century until the blockbuster film 'Lawrence of Arabia" recreated his exploits.
T.E. Lawrence played a clandestine role in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule during World War I.
These days, barely hours pass before the world sees action footage of Ukraine's latest drone attacks on Russian military targets. Israel's detonation of explosives hidden inside Hezbollah militants' pagers played out in almost real time across the internet. The U.S. repeatedly fed social media the details—and sometimes imagery—of its special-operations strikes on Islamic State leaders in recent years.
The result is a major shift in warfare: Call it the battle of timelines. Spying and clandestine operations, in the traditional sense, have never been so difficult. Biometric data makes document forgery obsolete. Billions of cameras, attached to phones, rearview mirrors and doorbells, stand ready to capture the movements of any operative hoping to lurk invisibly. In seconds, artificial intelligence can rifle through millions of photos to identify the faces of foreign spies operating in the wild.
Instead, fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East is bringing a new doctrine to spycraft stemming from changes in both what their organizers seek to achieve and how information spreads. Operations that would have once been designed to remain under wraps are now meant to be seen, to produce spectacular optics. They play out not just on the battlefield, but also on social media, boosting morale at home while demoralizing the enemy watching from the other side of the screen.
'A major goal of covert operations is often to show an adversary's leadership that we have identified and can damage elements involved in lethal activity," said Norman Roule, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer. 'Demonstrating this capability is hoped to act as a deterrent and even to encourage an adversary to seek diplomatic solutions." Such operations aren't done lightly, because they are dangerous and risk exposure of sensitive sources and methods that once compromised can't be used in the future, he added.
'You don't waste such critical capabilities for a cheap political win," Roule said. 'That said, in addition to the operational impact, you can exploit such operations for propaganda, psychological impact or diplomatic gain."
Covert operations once remained secret long after they wrapped up, or they were revealed by chance. Allied World War II code-breaking efforts stayed largely unknown for three decades. Countless Cold War-era espionage operations gained public attention only after the Soviet Union collapsed. Central Intelligence Agency efforts to raise a sunken Soviet submarine went public accidentally, following an office burglary in Los Angeles.
Exploits dubbed black ops—because the operations stay in the dark—traditionally fed into a quiet game of signaling and deception. One reason the release of the Pentagon Papers alarmed the White House in 1971 was that some information in them could have only come from a U.S. bug planted in Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's car, former President Richard Nixon said in 1984.
Fast forward to 2021, when President Joe Biden took the exceptional step of going public with highly sensitive intelligence about Moscow's plans to attack Ukraine. The pre-emptive disclosure of hard-won secrets didn't stop the invasion, but it did restore allies' perception of the U.S.—and American spycraft—which had been tarnished by the warnings of weapons of mass destruction that led to the Iraq War.
These days, secrecy is often beside the point. Almost weekly, Ukrainian drone attacks deep in Russia's interior play out to the same script: An ordinary bystander whips out a phone to capture the flicker of a Ukrainian drone against the night sky, seconds before it reduces some strategic target—an oil refinery, an air base or a rail depot—into a fiery ball.
Soon, the footage circulates on social media. In come amateur war analysts posting commercial satellite photos of the damage, followed by declarations of responsibility from the Ukrainian special services eager to demonstrate their capabilities to ordinary Russians scrolling at home.
'Ukraine does an excellent job in planning out these operations, and they know that in this day and age every attack is going to be filmed," said Samuel Bendett, a Russian-studies adviser at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va., a federally funded nonprofit research organization. 'They're trying to design their attacks so that more and more Russians are aware of the war and are impacted by the war."
Kyiv feels obliged to wage a public propaganda war against Moscow because it isn't winning the shooting war. Israel goes public with results of its espionage and covert operations against Iran and its proxies to convince foreign governments and populations that Tehran is both dangerous and vulnerable.
The communication war is raging in an information free-for-all. Governments and elites that until the middle of the 20th century controlled their information environment are today trying just to navigate it, said Ofer Fridman, a former Israeli officer and a scholar of war studies at King's College London. 'Now they're struggling to communicate with their target audience through overwhelming noise," he said.
Compounding that is the digitization of almost all information—both new memos and dusty archives—meaning that no event is guaranteed to remain secret from hackers or publicity-minded politicians with access to files. The impact of data leakers including the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and the National Guard airman Jack Teixeira weighs heavily on intelligence officials.
Russia is still adjusting to this new form of warfare. The country has made filming or posting sensitive details about military attacks a crime in its front-line regions, punishable by fines. Not even the country's police and special services have been able to discourage civilians who, almost by instinct, take out their phones when Ukrainian saboteurs strike. Soldiers on the front lines, disobeying their own codes of conduct, regularly capture battlefield operations.
For its part, Russia has made minimal effort to cover its own tracks in its barely disguised spree of covert operations in Europe. The GRU, the Russian military-intelligence organization, has repeatedly hired European civilians over social media, paying them to burn down a shopping mall in Warsaw, or an IKEA in Lithuania, according to Western officials. When a Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine was shot dead in Spain last year, Russia's spy chiefs didn't deny involvement—they all but boasted of it.
'This traitor and criminal became a moral corpse at the very moment he was planning his dirty and terrible crime," Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, told state media.
Write to Daniel Michaels at [e-mail] and Drew Hinshaw at [e-mail]