This is kind of a strange (though interesting) article. The headlining claim is that "spies aren't good at their jobs". But does the article support that?
> The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history.
The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and claims that their sole purpose is defensive, to catch spies, and not to spy on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5?
I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example), and also as the article states, that suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence.
But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything about this question, it makes me think that they typically were.
So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted.
No, they saved that for MI6 and the CIA (well, not the heads of those organizations) where Kim Philby (MI6) and Aldrich Ames (CIA) leaked information about an extremely high portion of their operations back to Russia. Indeed, Ames exposed countless CIA operations and was directly responsible for at least 10 Russian executions of US spies. Then more recently there was Robert Hanson in the FBI who leaked an enormous amount of counter intelligence data along with other sensitive information.
So I really don't think it's accurate to imply the Russians didn't infiltrate these organizations at a pretty high level-- not the top spot maybe, but high enough to severely impair their efforts and cripple countless operations.
I'm very curious and have no knowledge in this field, so forgive my basic questions ...
Was the information leakage (from either or both parties) deliberate through malice, or was it some form of accidental / incompetence? Or something else?
By the end of the cold war British intelligence were pretty good (PIMLICO was an absolute mockery of the KGB) but in the 60s and early they were so paralyzed by the Cambridge five that they didn't investigate a few people because it would be too embarrassing.
Then add in the allegations that Roger Hollis was a GRU asset and you've got a pretty grim picture.
Operation PIMLICO was MI6's ridiculously ballsy scheme to exfiltrate Oleg Gordievsky from directly under the nose of the KGB after he was compromised in Moscow.
It is literally straight out of a spy novel, mainly because they weren't expecting to have to use it.
A quick summary: "We have literally no idea what you look like, but if you hold a British supermarket bag by a bakery on a Tuesday - a man eating a Mars bar or a Kit Kat will walk by. That's the code for you to scramble to the Finnish border, upon which point some MI6 officers will drug you and shove you in the boot of a car. They will then drive (while stuck in between 3 KGB cars - only outrunning them because of soviet engines), through almost 10 diplomatic checkpoints with some absolutely ridiculously excuse about a Dentist appointment in Finland. If you get through those, we will play Finlandia on the radio and you're not quite safe but out of the USSR".
Not only did this plan work, Oleg Gordievsky is still alive! Very brave man - he was betrayed by Aldrich Ames after the CIA got jealous and went spy hunting because how dare an ally keep their assets secret. He was invited home from London for a "promotion" (read: execution a la Tolkachev or Penkovsky); he chose to return.
PIMLICO was an emergency exfiltration operation that had been put in place by MI6 long before Gordievsky requested its activation in May of 1985.
Every Tuesday, shortly after 7:00, a British MI6 officer would take a morning stroll at the Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow. He would pass outside a designated bakery at exactly 7:24 a.m. local time. If he saw Gordievsky standing outside the bakery holding a grocery bag, it meant that the double agent was requesting to be exfiltrated as a matter of urgency. Gordievsky would then have to wait outside the bakery until a second MI6 officer appeared, carrying a bag from the Harrods luxury department store in London. The man would also be carrying a Mars bar (a popular British candy bar) and would bite into it while passing right in front of Gordievsky. That would be a message to him that his request to be exfiltrated had been received.
Four days later, Gordievsky used his skills in evading surveillance and shook off (or dry-cleaned, in espionage tradecraft lingo) the KGB officers trailing him. He was then picked up by MI6 officers and smuggled out of the country in the trunk of a British diplomatic car that drove to the Finnish border. Gordievsky told The Times that Soviet customs officers stopped the car at the Finnish border and surrounded it with sniffer dogs. At that moment, a British diplomat’s wife, who was aware that Gordievsky was hiding in the car, came out of the vehicle and proceeded to change her baby’s diaper on the trunk, thus safeguarding Gordievsky’s hiding place and masking his scent with her baby’s used diaper. If it hadn’t been for the diplomat’s wife, Gordievsky told The Times that he might have been caught.
PIMLICO was one of the code names for Oleg Gordievsky - who copies large amounts of KGB secret files in his position as KGB "Librarian" and handed them over to the British.
There is no doubt that MI5 was effectively rubbish in the spy vs spy games during the Cold War. But it's also possible to go a bit far in judging them purely on that basis.
If you (allow me to remove the civil liberties issues for a second) look more towards Northern Ireland and assess its success (from a UK gov point of view), along with RUC SB (the most important UK org in the conflict), SIS and the FRU, then it's a slightly different assessment you'd have to take. Of course interpretation depends on your viewpoint and how you patch the pieces of the story together. Considering the amount of Islamic radicialisation in the UK, it and CTC/SB have arguably been fairly successful. A similar sort of assessment could probably be made about the Communist Party in the UK - it was effectively going no where and well infiltrated. Though there were blips around miners and bits of the Labour Party, MI5 and Special Branch had such a tight hold of them post 1950 to the point where they were actually chasing their tail and seeing conspiracies where none existed.
I think reading the various bits of information to come out since the Cold War about the CIA in Russia can also probably show how little they really achieved there in the spy game. There is a whole genre of similar sorts of stories waffling away about disguises and technology but recently there was are challenges to the orthodoxy around that. Essentially successes were pretty minimal, dangles were swallowed all the time etc.
Worth reading this on that topic "Fictitious Spies and Fake History"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2019.16...
> look more towards Northern Ireland and assess its success (from a UK gov point of view)
They spent approximately 40 years failing to defeat the IRA while covering for various "loyalist" terror groups and murdering a band they were trying to frame, defense solicitors for those arrested, and several actual children?
> Though there were blips around miners and bits of the Labour Party, MI5 and Special Branch had such a tight hold of them post 1950
The democratically elected opposition did manage to take power on a couple of occasions, at which point the security services considered doing an Allende on Harold Wilson?
Never mind "defund the police", we need (and of course are never going to get) prosecution of the security services for their partisan political interference and domestic crimes. Even the "soldier F" stuff rumbles on.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you are saying about collision etc, with the exception of the PIRA part. PIRA was so heavily penetrated with informers by early 80s that the Security Service (amongst others) managed to help push a strategy towards peace. Again I'm looking at it from UK Gov perspective, they managed to pretty much defeat the IRA by opening the door to Sinn Fein.
> The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history.
Which is correct. MI5 only had that information thanks to the work of MI6, not by its own devices.
Plus their successes were towards the end of the Cold War. They were effectively neutered by their own arrogance, ego and class blinding foolishness in the Russia sense until the 80s.
Norwood retired when Gordievsky was still in Denmark if I have my dates correct, which is probably why he never heard about her (he never made it quite to the top of the tree).
"I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service" (As with most Soviet spies she lived the lie until she died)
You can see the difference in attitude in their careers websites - MI5 could just be another government agency almost whereas the SIS website (note the conspicuous gap in their history section!) are clearly recruiting spies and "experienced business(etc) leaders" (to manage high level assets presumably)
Well, I guess if you consider something to be a zero-sum game, it’s tough to say whether humans are good or bad at that game. Are we as a species better at chess, or tennis, or underwater hockey, or paper-rock-scissors?
You could use Elo rating[0] range to rank them. Basic idea is that if player A has 100 points more than player B, then you could expect player A to win 64% of the time.
In rock-paper-scissors, everyone wins 50% of the time, so everyone has the same Elo rating, so the Elo range is zero.
For chess, a beginner might have a rating of 400, while the best in the world might have a rating of 2700. So you could imagine a line of 23 people, each of which can beat the one behind them 64% of the time. It seems fair to say that the person at the front of the line, representing the best that humanity has to offer, is much better at chess than the best rock-paper-scissors player is at rock-paper-scissors.
It's a very murky, embarrassing, and oleaginously classified hole to go down. When you factor in the alleged practice coup at Heathrow it gets very very murky.
Michael Foot was almost definitely an extremely naive soviet cooperator - but not a spy, which is what was alleged (He successfully sued on that particular allegation but a civil case is almost literally meaningless when you take into account that SIS have no declassification policy other than no and MI5 wait decades)
The accounts I have read make it sound pretty harmless - Foot apparently met someone from the Soviet embassy a few times, had discussions about things like the roles of unions in the UK but didn't share anything remotely secret or indeed, and critically in my view, know that the person he was speaking to was KGB. I don't think he was even close to being "recruited".
I seem to remember that one of Gordievsky's own points was that the KGB at that point tended to greatly overstate how important their contacts were to make them look better to Moscow.
> met someone from the Soviet embassy a few times ... but didn't ... know that the person he was speaking to was KGB
Come on.... just a friendly chat about union politics with a man from the communist superpower?
Was there anyone at the Soviet embassy at the time who was not likely working for the KGB to some extent?
Embassies are still to this date I believe a key way intelligence agencies get people into a country. Assume anyone you meet and everything you do in an embassy of an adversary you're in a cold war against are going to be working against you.
If you think about it, it really shouldn't be surprising. James Bond and other spy movies have convinced us that the government just has endless amounts of money to throw at hard problems. But they don't. Even though the numbers involved are staggering, government departments fight tooth and nail for allocations.
The cash you do get, you have to spend most of it on things that make your department look good rather than what will make you better at your job. Then there's plain ole' fraud, waste and abuse, trying to instill an ethic of frugality into someone who is in charge of more taxpayer money a month than they make in a year, well a lot of times that's just going to fall on deaf ears.
Spy departments derive effectiveness mostly from having the ability to skirt the law rather than training or having better equipment. The government does have people that really know what they're doing. But their time and attention is limited, again mostly to projects that make their departments look good.
As a result it's much easier than you'd think to get away with a lot more than you would think you could.
I think that’s a common, but flawed outlook on it.
Early in my career I worked for a social services department, a department that was constantly kicked around in the press for various “scandals”, incompetence, etc.
It certainly wasn’t the most efficient organization that I’ve seen, but it was not much worse than fortune 100 companies that I’ve worked for or done business with. And For all of the woes, it was very good at what it did. Benefit payments were made, enrollments done, procurements procured, hearings adjudicated, audits completed.
It’s easy to get caught up in the noise and determine that these organizations are incompetent and ineffective. The reality is that usually the machine of state is very good at what it does, but they measure many aspects of success with a different measure (compliance) than a company (profit).
Systematic research using large datasets shows that public sector organizations are associated with significantly worse management practices.[1] Public sector organizations are nearly as poorly managed as the worse category of private sector firms: those run by the heirs of the original founder.
In particular public sector organizations have significantly worse incentive structures, are much more likely to promote based on tenure rather than competence, and are much more likely to retain low performing employees.
> In particular public sector organizations have significantly worse incentive structures, are much more likely to promote based on tenure rather than competence, and are much more likely to retain low performing employees.
Have these practices been measured to cause worse outcomes? Not so long ago there was a paper here that said most companies would be better off promoting at random than the measures they actually use, and we all know how practices like stack ranking can destroy team cohesion.
> we define “best” management practices as those that continuously
collect and analyze performance information, that set challenging and interlinked short-
and long-run targets, and that reward high performers and retrain/ fire low performers
It appears that the purpose of the paper is to apply a set of normative judgements in order to validate at a shallow level the types of preconceptions that GP was questioning. It's not a surprise that government organisations aren't operating in a cut throat manner.
MBA students are going to be looking for specific indicators and terminology (OKRs, KPI dashboards, etc) and things like comp plans. That's not because they are stupid or evil, it's just their world. They aren't trained to understand performance management in an environment where collective bargaining gives employees due process rights, for example. Conversely, public sector leaders are going to struggle with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or financial decisions that incorporate tax optimization.
Your state/local government isn't going to provide meaningful incentive compensation, for the simple reason that it doesn't work in most cases and taxpayers won't tolerate paying rewards to people for doing their job.
You also need to evaluate the effectiveness of governance differently, because management within an organization is not empowered in the same way. If Congress or a state legislature decrees that you must do X in Y way, you need to do Y, even if it doesn't make sense or is inefficient. Usually in a corporation business management is expected to own their P&L on a broader scope and optimize. Public sector managers can only optimize in the (more limited) scope they control, and only with the consent of the elected/appointed official or board.
Nick Bloom is a well-regarded economist. I'm not familiar with the others. He has a couple of papers on this theme that the advantage of some countries is superior management. I haven't read the papers, but people seem to not regard the idea as laughable.
The paper does rely data from McKinsey and Accenture, for what that's worth.
A study I heard discussed on a podcast once, and have been unable to subsequently locate, found that once you have accounted for failed private businesses the public sector was on par (and perhaps slightly better, though from memory they said it wasn't a statistically significant) with the private sector in terms of efficiency of output (i.e. what society gets for what is invested). If that rings any bells to anyone I would love to find the paper!
Social services are an interesting case because rather than attracting the worst possible job candidates, the kind of people who want power over others and don't really care about service, social service attracts the sorts of people who really care about doing a good job and helping people, and are capable of wringing good economics out of even tighter budgets than other gov orgs.
I'm not surprised your experience was different there.
All large organizations are the same. There are hidden experts who keep the machine running, and there are outward showmen who generate a lot of heat and light. Pareto suggests the hidden workers are 20% of the total, and I believe it. Not only are they in the minority, the people who know what they're doing often are passed over for promotion because the system would fall apart if they moved from their role.
It so happens that this story has since moved on slightly since it was last posted. Two years ago, Michael Bettaney died. I knew him briefly - after he got out of jail, he moved into small-group communist politics, where we crossed paths.
The stuff about his incompetence as a spy is rather overstated. By the time I knew him, he certainly had a drink problem, which may for all I know have predated his long prison sentence (much of it in solitary). The truth is of course that MI5 was not the only intelligence agency with double agents and he was shopped by one such British KGB mole, Oleg Gerdievsky. One rather suspects that the fate of the cold war did not hang in the balance.
The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.
> The underlying point - that counterintelligence has very often proved to be a spectacular waste of human effort - stands, although that is hardly a reason to be insouciant about mass surveillance.
Mass surveillance causes significant problems regardless of whether intelligence works, and so not only does it make sense for the IETF to write that "Pervasive monitoring is an attack" but I believe that it's morally right for us to say that therefore we should demand our governments desist from such attacks.
But that article takes a pretty typical Adam Curtis angle when it comes to facts that dismantle his core thesis - acknowledge them very briefly and then carry on as if they didn't exist. Double Cross is less than a hundred years ago and took place under the circumstance in which actual spies are more valuable - a war. It can and should continue to be held up as an example of how actually sometimes (in a war for example) there are enemy spies and turning or eliminating them can be significant.
In the modern era we fight a lot of actions short of war. The most significant subsequent military action in the UK was the Falklands in 1982. But something like Double Cross would have been pointless. Britain did not go to war against Argentina. Argentina wasn't at with Britain. Both countries disagreed about the status of the Falklands, which the Argentinians had (for local political reasons) decided to just seize by force. Because this wasn't a war per se, our "intelligence" was mostly just a result of being friendly with the (similarly awful but not hostile to us) regime in neighbouring Chile. No James Bond types, just somebody who will turn a blind eye to human rights abuses and focus on immediate military intelligence resources.
Körner, "The Pleasures of Counting" (1996), has a bit in "The Poles" (on breaking Enigma) that might shed some light on traditional tradecraft vs mass surveillance. (compare what the Stasi could accomplish with their non-automated labour-intensive methods)
> Churchill's romantic soul loved the excitement and secrecy surrounding Bletchley. He relished the way that
>> ... old procedures, like the setting up of agents, the suborning of informants, the sending of messages written in invisible ink, ... all turned out to be largely cover for this other source, as one might keep some old-established business in rare books going in order to be able, under cover of it, to do a thriving trade in pornography and erotica.
2nd level quote from Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time" (1973) p139
Mass surveillance will causes even greater problems, if failings like the ones in the article keep happening, which is likely. Look at the MI5 arresting some students based on nothing but a list of different meaning, baseless assumptions and jumping to conclusions. Now imagine such data gathered on a massive scale and the process of bad decision making fully automated. Secret agencies close to the military building a paranoid delusional AI that searches for threats from humans. What could possibly go wrong?
For a comedic take on the topic, the British satirist Chris Morris released a movie called The Day Shall Come a couple of years ago which explores how "news" is constructed by media jointly with organisations like the FBI. It's not as entertaining as Four Lions imo but it's very well researched as usual.
Before I glanced at the authors name, I knew this was Adam Curtis just from the writing style. Instantly reminded me of "Hypernormalisation" (which everyone should watch) and "The Power of Nightmares."
It's still baffling to me that we are expected to believe, for example, that the CIA passes out millions of dollars in war-torn obscenely poor countries like Afghanistan, versus the more obvious assumption that people who work for the CIA have more suitcases full of cash buried around the world than Pablo Escobar ever did.
There is also the interesting case where spies and intelligence can be TOO good.
It goes something thing like this:
- Spy for Country X picks up intelligence that Country Y is about to do crazy thing A. This information is 100% true and correct.
- Country Y is not in the habit of doing crazy things like A.
- Given that, the government of Country X thinks "This must be false because country Y would NEVER do such a thing."
- Country Y then goes and does thing A.
There are MANY instances of this throughout the history of intelligence services and I always think of this type of scenario every time I hear "well spies are just terrible."
Or the more common case where the information is so good that acting on the information would reveal the source/means of the information allowing the spied upon to eliminate the source so no action is taken.
The biggest one of those was Stalin's refusal to believe that Germans would attack the USSR, even when it was so imminent that all alarms were going off (and duly reported to him as such).
Even without plans, the Allies crashed a bunch of gliders and the Germans unexpectedly had tanks positioned in the area.
(Glider tow pilots generally did not use the correct air speeds when avoiding flak and enemy fighters, resulting in horrific losses. Often soldiers would jump, and the high airspeeds would instantly rip off their parachutes and equipment.)
The Germans in WW2 were not an army you wanted to fight with on equal terms.
The more I see headlines like The Suspect was known to the Secret Services", and, "The Suspect was on the Authorities' radar and deemed of no interest", the more I believe our spies are dumber than they'd admit. Either that or they, and the Government have a different agenda.
Did anyone ever seriously believe that spies in general know what they are doing?
It seems unlikely that such groups of people would necessarily be better organized than any other well financed group of people (such as a major industrial concern) especially when you consider that much of what they must do has to be done in the dark and is difficult to verify.
Plus of course you have the problem that a lot of what they do know how to do only exists because of the existence of their counterparts in the opposing country and has nothing to do with actual intelligence gathering but rather is about competition and conflict between agencies both between and within counties and alliances.
[Alice in wonderland is secret code for a terror attack.]
Teenage girl found guilty of plotting terror attack in London
>> Safaa and Rizlaine Boular discussed the attack in a coded conversation – played to the court – about an Alice in Wonderland-themed party.
>> In a recording, Rizlaine Boular said she wanted to have “an English tea party kind of thing, little tea cups, tea cakes and stuff”, and Safaa Boular suggested an Alice in Wonderland theme, saying: “You can be the Mad Hatter ‘cause your hair’s crazy. You can have cucumber and butter sandwiches.”
>> Around the same time, Dich and Rizlaine Boular travelled around various landmarks in London, which was believed to be a reconnaissance of potential targets. The following day, they went to a supermarket on Wandsworth Road and purchased a packet of kitchen knives and a rucksack.
(...)
>> “This was without doubt a major investigation for the counter-terrorism command working jointly with the security service,” said Dean Haydon, the Met’s senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism.
>> “Not only because it involved a family with murderous intent, but because it is the first all-female terrorist plot that’s been launched in the UK related to Daesh [Isis].”
[A columbine style attack is planned by teenagers aremed with a rucksack containing stones, batteries, ~50g of screws and matches. And a bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo.]
Boys given 10 and 12 years for Columbine-style plot in Yorkshire
>> Police spoke to both boys separately at home after the incident. Bolland confirmed they “planned to go into school with a firearm in order to get rid of those who had wronged them”, but Wyllie denied everything.
>> A month later, detectives seized the latter’s diary and found a rucksack in his hideout containing a balaclava, a bag of screws, cable ties and a bottle of flammable liquid. He told police he had the items so he could run away with his girlfriend. He denied planning to kill her parents or pupils and teachers at his school.
(...)
>> Prosecutors said North Yorkshire police did not respond adequately to the threat until a specialist counter-terrorism team took over the investigation a month later. Phil Cain, assistant chief constable, admitted their investigation fell below standards and that a review had taken place.
[A terrorist assembles a terror kit containing a knife, a hammer and a suicide note.]
Ordering Gunton, who suffers from an autism spectrum disorder, to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the judge Mark Wall QC, told the former A-level student: “The police found a rucksack in your room which contained a knife, a hammer and what has been referred to as a suicide note or a martyrdom letter. In the martyrdom letter you referred to yourself as a ‘soldier of Isis’.
“The letter was written in such terms that it was obviously to be found and read after you had carried out a terrorist attack.”
The judge described the items found in the rucksack as a “terrorist’s kit” and said it was clear from Instagram posts in English and Arabic that Gunton, who lived on a farm, had planned to launch an attack.
On a related note, was there someone working in US Intelligence whose job it was to tell President Trump that possibly the WHO's early statement on human-human transmission of the "new coronavirus" depended on information from China, and maybe that information from China wasn't correct, because, you know, you can't always trust everything that the Chinese government says?
I mean the FBI thought it would be a good idea to persuade MLK to kill himself over his adultery. Moral quandaries aside, that is a remarkably stupid plan if you’re looking to cripple the civil rights movement. Best case scenario, he does it and everyone immediately suspects the FBI/CIA forever.
It's a lot worse than the title claims: almost NO experts ANYWHERE in government are good at their jobs. And it isn't limited to governments of course.
The book "Wrong: Why Experts* Keep Failing Us" by David H. Freedman shows that government, academic and private industry are quite lacking in "expertise". The current pandemic cock-ups with the CDC, "epidemiology experts", reporters, commentators, analysts and political appointees all now make sense.
Freedman doesn't have a solution, instead leaving us with "11 Simple Never-Fail Rules For Not Being Misled by Experts". but the situation laid out does suggest that we (taxpayers) should slash funding for most governmental, academic and private agencies b/c they fail to come through and literally lack expertise.
"No lesson seems to be so deeply inoculated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts."
A “small-government” libertarian argument predicated on the assumption that the private sector - with its profit-motive - yields better overall results.
The lesson should be trust science, and trust an expert only when he or she is speaking directly from knowledge of the relevant science.
Unfortunately, not all areas of human endeavor are amenable to the scientific method. Economics is an edge case; there seems to be at least as much quackery as solid science among economists. Forensics could be much more scientific but is held back by poor incentives. Spycraft or “intelligence” is almost like forensics writ large, and I suspect it will always be dominated by intuition and emotion, even when using mass surveillance techniques.
> The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history.
The whole article focuses on MI5, which I'm not really familiar with, and claims that their sole purpose is defensive, to catch spies, and not to spy on other countries. But almost by definition, if Soviet spies were left in high places for decades through the incompetence of MI5, doesn't that mean the Soviet spy agency had a pretty decent track record, either by luck, or by their competence in exploiting the specific weaknesses of MI5?
I think it's more likely that the focus on defense is at fault, and not the focus on MI5 in particular. If you get a bunch of spies together, and task them with discovering other spies, then they'll probably find some people who may or may not be actual spies. The problem is in part that the base rate of spies is very low, but also that the people sent to spy in other countries for the most part seem to have kept a low profile (they didn't become head of MI5 or Prime Minister, for example), and also as the article states, that suspiciousness starts to crowd out your actual evidence.
But get a bunch of spies together, and task them with gathering intelligence in other countries, and maybe they'll have a much better time of it, on average. At least, if this article provides me with a reason to think anything about this question, it makes me think that they typically were.
So all in all it's a nice story, but it's not clear that the claim in the headline is warranted.