Friday, October 27, 2000

"It’s all about talking to someone and getting what you want," said counterintelligence expert Del McCune.

Indeed, wars have been waged, empires have fallen and countless spy movies have been made based on the type of business they conduct.

But the 100 people gathered at Kleber Casern in Germany this week aren’t actors. In fact, they’re not even spies. They’re part of NATO’s contribution to the fields of human intelligence and counterintelligence. They are counterspies, if you will.

"Our primary focus is espionage," said Lt. Col. Carl Burrell of the Allied Command Europe Counterintelligence Activity, which along with NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe brought the group together for the exercise called Unified Blade 2000.

Participants from 15 NATO nations have worked for nearly 10 days to refresh their skills in:

The goal of the exercise is to establish a baseline of information among these multinational ranks so that when the participants go to hot spots such as Bosnia or Kosovo, they’re all on the same counterintelligence page. That means they’ll be able to work together effectively in English and be familiar with their counterparts from other countries.

Because, at some point during Balkans duty, many of these civilians and military members will be working with NATO counterparts and not with their own counterintelligence teams.

They reach the goal in several ways but the most effective, said participants, are the role-playing exercises where these allies meet "contacts" in a realistic setting, such as a German village or a town café, then develop a relationship with that source that may lead to information that could help protect NATO troops.

The process is very much like what they do when they are actually on duty. They might meet a mayor or a shopkeeper who ultimately turns out to be a valuable source of information to allied troops. And if they come across bad guys collecting sensitive or threatening information about allied troops, they take care of it.

"It’s their job to seek out any threat to NATO forces and neutralize them," said Capt. Patricia Larsen of the allied operatives. "That doesn’t mean shooting them, like in the spy movies."

Neutralizing, according to McCune, means arresting them, exposing them or cutting off the bad guys’ access to information they are collecting.

The group also is running through exercises to strengthen their human intelligence skills. That means collecting information needed by NATO troops to make sure troops are safe and assist military operations.

Among the participants are NATO’s three newest members, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Cooperating with these former enemies has brought a touch of intrigue to the proceedings, McCune said.

In fact, one of the first ground rules set down was that no nation in the exercise could collect information on any other participating nation. So far, nobody has been kicked out, but one has been warned. McCune said he couldn’t go into details about the incident.

In a profession as old as counterespionage, it seems, it can be tough to break with old ways. But everybody still knows how to play the game.

"These guys used to work against us and now they’re working with us," McCune said. "There is a very common language we can speak."