Comment by grugq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grugq | Hacker News Reader

Arguably WWII was won due to the information provided by a spy, Sorge[1]. His timely info to Stalin informing him that the Japanese would not invade Russia allowed Stalin to pull most of his eastern armies back to Moscow. Combined with the Russian winter, the sudden influx of new troops halted and reversed the German advance. This was only possible because the Soviet policy makers understood the __intent__ of the Japanese government. That knowledge was provided by a spy.

The purpose of a spy is not to "defeat the enemy", but rather to provide the leadership apparatus with a clear understanding of the capabilities and intents of the other actors in the game. (This is the theory anyway). Usually this is referred to as "reducing uncertainty". The intelligence agencies collect raw information, process it (e.g. determine its veracity, probability for accuracy, etc.) and combine it with existing knowledge to produce "product"... the intelligence output that provides the political leadership with the "best estimate" of what the other actors are capable of doing, and what they plan on doing. (capability and intent).

The author appears to have confused SIGINT, HUMINT and covert action (and also doesn't seem to have a clear idea on how spies actually operate). SIGINT is considered particularly useful because it is not subject to the whims, calculations and forgetfulness of a human agent. HUMINT is much more useful in the long run, and this is something that the Russians knew from at least the days of the Okhrana. The Russians wrote the book on HUMINT and have forgotten more about it than the West will ever know. (See "Technophilic Hubris and Espionage Styles During the Cold War" [2])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge

[2] http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/653104.pdf

Arguably Russian Winter by itself won the war. I do not know if Japanese actually understood that attacking Russia from their front was futile at that time due to several reasons.

1. Russia is big, very big. Traversing Siberia would have taken a long time. Something that they would have to do without any naval support. Can you imagine trying to establish supply lines through Siberia?

2. Add continental winter on top of that and you get no go on Japanese invading USSR. (Temperatures of 15-20 degrees centigrade colder than people living near the ocean are used to).

3. Because China would obviously sit very still, when large portion of Japanese ground forces would be absent.

4. Remember no naval support? Attacking Russia would effectively split Japanese fleet and ground army.

I do not know if Japanese understood those simple facts, but Russians sure did. European front was way higher priority than Siberia. An if Japanese did attack, an order of magnitude smaller, more mobile force would had been enough to harass supply lines and stall any progress. It is not only winter time that would have been problematic, when snow melts things are worse for a while due to all the mud.

Similar story with Germans, it is not that Russians in monumental effort stopped the advance. They merely stalled German blitzkrieg (while taking heavy losses), and continental winter stopped it. I am not trying to take away from monumental effort thrown by soviets to stop the advance, but ultimately all it came down to: Germans could not advance and adequately deliver supplies and Russians could due to intact railroads.

* I am not saying those were only reasons, but people tend to underestimate importance of supply lines and role of winter.

Winter played a role, but let's not downplay Russian tenacity in defending their land. I'd rather say "winter and a huge number of desperate Russians won the war" ;)

Japanese goal would not have been advance through Siberia towards Moscow. They would have just grabbed everything on the Pacific coast. Taking it back with troops being moved from European USSR by 1 rail link.. would be an impossibility.

Russian Winter is all well and good but there piles of what iffs that would have won Germans the war earlier. It was a very very close thing and knowing from inside that Japanese will not strike was of massive value

Honestly, Vladivostok or Moscow? I know which one I would defend if I were the leader of Russia.

As I understood it, the point is not that human intelligence never works. Rather, it works unpredictably. One can argue that the Sorge episode is random chance: the chance of someone acting on correct information is equal to the chance of someone acting on the wrong information. Sorge's own story about the German invasion proves this out.

The German invasion a difficult case as the policy maker (Stalin) had decided what he wanted to see ("no German invasion") and he would discount, or worse, any information that contradicted his preconceptions. This is a problem with the analysis of intelligence being subject to the political whims of the reigning government (see also: Bush's invasion of Iraq).

One might make the argument that Sorge's intelligence convincing Stalin was random chance, but one would be arguing against a lot of evidence that says otherwise.

There a plenty of other examples from history, although few are as world altering as Sorge. Penkovsky, for example, provided the CIA with the manuals for the Soviet nuclear missiles that were deployed to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. These manuals provided the JFK government with knowledge about the _capabilities_ of the Soviet missiles. In particular, they told the Americans how long it would take to prepare and launch a missile (several hours). This gave the Americans some confidence during negotiations, knowing that they would have hours of warning (from their IMINT and SIGINT assets) before the first missiles were ready to launch.

If the argument is "spying doesn't work because the odds of a leader acting on that information are the same as random chance"... that is an argument against the quality of the leadership, not the quality of the intelligence agencies.

HUMINT is not predictable because humans are not reliable. However, when you score big with HUMINT, you score very very big. HUMINT is absolutely the most devastating spying technique available.

Any discussion about "misinformation" falls under counterintelligence which involves, as they used to call it, D&D -- denial and deception. It is incredibly difficult to create a plausible deception, requiring a huge investment of resources to make it believable. There are a large number of channels that the opposition will use to evaluate information, OSINT, IMINT, HUMINT, SIGINT, etc. etc. If there are discrepancies from these sources, then the deception will fall under further scrutiny. Not really what you want to have happen when you're already unable to provide a consistent "story" across multiple sources.

Point is: HUMINT is seriously powerful stuff.

SIGINT also helped the Americans cripple the Japanese fleet at Midway.

I don't think the author cares about the difference between SIGINT, HUMINT and covert action. He's just looking at sources of information in the abstract. (Likewise, the author isn't concerned with how the information is used. Only whether or not is it reliable.)

If it's cheap and easy for the enemy to produce misinformation that's indistinguishable from the real thing, then it's reasonable to assume that the enemy will do so (and it's a good idea to do so with our own information). Maybe Sorge is a good example of a type of source of information that is costly to fake. He was a trusted agent who had a long career. Maybe it would be far too costly to implant a double agent like that.

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