Bases for Spies: When States Host Others’ Intelligence Collection Operations

• In Event: Examining the Performance and Decision-Making of Intelligence Agencies

Abstract

Great powers often ask other states to host great powers’ intelligence collection operations on their territory, from signals intelligence operations to basing for surveillance flights. Hosts’ decisions influence great powers’ ability to gather vital information about rivals, such as the status of a rival’s nuclear weapons arsenal or the geographic disposition and readiness of a rival’s military forces. However, to great powers’ frustration, prospective hosts sometimes accept the great power’s requests to spy and other times do not. In 1979, the United States asked Turkey if the United States could conduct U-2 spy flights in Turkish airspace for the purposes of verifying the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Turkey refused, despite simultaneously permitting other kinds of U.S. intelligence collection operations on its soil. What explains variation in states’ willingness to host others’ intelligence collection operations? Existing explanations for states’ decisions to host great powers’ overt military facilities do not fully account for host decision-making in this secret realm. I argue that hosts’ decisions hinge on three factors: the likelihood that the target of the spying will detect the host’s complicity in the great power’s intelligence collection operation; the costs to the host state if its cooperation indeed comes to the target’s attention; and the benefits the host state enjoys from the great power in exchange for hosting the intelligence operation. Case studies of varying British receptivity to U.S. requests for use of British bases for U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union in the 1950s and Iran’s consideration in the 1960s of various U.S. requests for use of its territory for signals intelligence collection against the Soviet Union show that, unlike decision-making regarding overt bases, hosts’ decisions depend most of all on whether they think an operation will remain secret to the target.

Author

• Cullen Nutt, U.S. Naval Academy