Re-introducing the threat from foreign espionage
Foreign espionage from mainly Russian and Chinese actors constitutes one of the main threats facing many Western societies. Espionage is the act of covertly gathering information about a counterpart – information that is intended to be kept secret – with the aim of obtaining military, political, economic decision advantages on a given topic. This threat has re-gained relevance in recent years, with rising conflicts and geopolitical tensions most evidently in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Most Western (and especially the Nordic countries) are valuable targets for foreign espionage due to their geographic location, membership of NATO, military support to Ukraine and their technological developments.
Counterespionage has traditionally been a core task of governmental intelligence services with the aim of providing expert knowledge and support to decision-makers when forging security. Responding to recent developments in the threat landscape, intelligence observers have however begun to articulate a need for intelligence to become more inclusive and interactive. A central aspect of such an inclusivity is increased cooperation between central actors that usually do not cooperate.
Inviting civil society actors to cooperate in counterespionage aligns with current European Union strategies emphasizing a whole-of-society approach to security. Civil society actors are for example private companies, governmental authorities, and individual citizens. In such approaches, various actors across society are requested to work together to obtain common solutions to shared and often complex security issues.
In their attempt to safeguard our democratic societies, intelligence services have increasingly begun to reach out to civil society actors when identifying and counteracting security threats and in this sense, they apply a whole-of-society approach to counterespionage.
However, it remains unclear what a whole-of-society approach to counterespionage entails, how it is practiced, and what the societal implications of the approach would be.
What is a whole-of-society approach to counterespionage?
Generally, the whole-of-society approach entails the inclusion of a variety of stakeholders in order to tackle pressing threats with the aim of obtaining societal resilience, better situational awareness and more efficient responses.
In the Nordics, intelligence services have primarily reached out to civil society with the aim of establishing awareness on the side of the public via one-way communication in for example yearly risk assessments aimed at the public. This awareness-approach stands in contrast to the United States’ (US) (and to some extend the British) post 9/11-approach. In these settings, governmental intelligence services often ask civil society to chip in and co-produce intelligence with information on suspicions activities – so far mainly related to the threat from terrorism in campaign such as “if you see something say something”.
Engaging civil society in counterespionage is not an entirely novel practice. During the Cold War, Nordic intelligence services launched campaigns asking citizens to be aware of (mainly Russian) spies – see i.e., the Swedish campaign “The Swedish Tiger” or campaigns like “Keep your piece of the puzzle”. After the recent reemergence of foreign espionage as a main threat, a range of new initiatives have been launched.
Recent examples include campaigns asking individual citizens to provide information about suspicious espionage-related activities for example in connection with larger events; engaging university employees and funding bodies in safeguarding against foreign espionage within academia and recruiting civil society actors to help safeguard national interests via more or less formalised partnerships.
Balancing between appropriate pro-action and stereotyped suspicion
The potentials of this approach are most often understood as the assumed ability to build better situational awareness, safeguard societies against foreign espionage and build societal resilience. Since such whole-of-society campaigns are a rather new phenomenon in the Nordic context and more broadly in the EU, the increased inclusion of civil society actors also comes with risks. These are for example, the risk of “responsibilising” civil society actors by including them in security policies and turning them into security actors. This type of governing “through civil society” potentially renegotiates the relationship between state and its citizens. Security then risks turning into a duty, rather than a right, for citizens. Additionally, there is a risk of creating stereotyped countermeasures favouring exclusion and instilling a sense of suspicion across groups in society. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service was for example accused of promoting racist and discriminatory practices by a large group of university employees when launching their latest campaign concerning knowledge security and the risk of espionage at universities in Denmark (“Is your research at risk?”).
These highly inclusive and co-producing approaches to civil society have an intuitive appeal since they aim to include and empower civil society actors and potentially establishes societal resilience via cooperation, inclusion and interaction between all stakeholders. However, they also come with risks which have not been conceptualized or critically assessed in the intelligence literature on counterespionage. In the wake of 9/11 security scholars addressed the increased focus on citizen-led intelligence collection and the risks following along such initiatives e.g., unwarranted and broad suspicion across society and vague risks factors.
Counteracting foreign espionage is an intersectoral endeavour and a cornerstone for reducing malicious, interconnected, antagonistic threats aimed at our societies. However whole-of-society approaches should be guided by cautions eye to the potential democratic and societal implications.
Kira Vrist Rønn
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Center for War Studies
University of Southern Denmark
Denmark
kroenn@sam.sdu.dk
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