Chapter 4: Spies

EastHem Military Intelligence Office
New Rome, EastHem
Monday, October 17, 2146

Colonel Smith was ushered into Brigadier Bullstrode’s office shortly after lunch. She came to attention, and he nodded in return. “As you were, Colonel. Please be seated.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s been a week since you were assigned the job of getting agents into Mars. Anything for me yet?”

Smith nodded. “Yes, sir.” She held up a thumb drive and Bullstrode pointed towards the monitor across from them. She stood and inserted the drive and grabbed the remote. “Thank you.”

The colonel called up her presentation and began. “There are several aspects of obtaining agents on Mars that we need to consider. From what I have been learning, there is not going to be a single technique that will give us perfect intelligence. Instead, we will need several techniques which will generate imperfect information which we will then need to combine to form a picture of what is happening. It might, however, be a fuzzy picture.”

“Understood, Colonel,” commented the brigadier.

“Yes, sir. Unlike the vids, intelligence never gives us a crystal-clear look at the enemy. In fact, some of our efforts won’t be able to generate positive information, but only negative information.”

“How so?”

“Take the recent war. WestHem information services put detailed operational plans out on the Internet. Where they would land, what their military objectives were, times and dates ... they even posted tables of organization and equipment and orders of march! Insanity! Martian forces, on the other hand gave out nothing, not a word. However, and this is important, they also stated that they would only give MarsGroup honest information. If they didn’t give out the information, or didn’t respond to requests, it was for operational reasons. So, if they don’t answer a question about a topic, don’t be surprised. If, however, they do answer a question, then they are probably being honest. It’s a rather novel approach to information warfare.”

Bullstrode gave her an odd look. “Honesty and discretion are novel?”

“It was a pre-WestHem politician who once said that the first casualty of war is the truth.” Bullstrode grunted and motioned for her to continue. Smith said, “So, we have one group of analysts collecting information on what the Martians say they are going to do and what they aren’t saying at all. If nothing else, it will give us something to compare against other intelligence. Another aspect of this effort will be our conventional intelligence efforts in WestHem. Our current WestHem officers and analysts will be probed for what they are developing on Mars. We might find out something useful second hand, as it were. We combine that with our Martian intelligence, and we might find a nugget or two.”

“Okay.”

“A third approach is a very direct approach. We have an embassy there now and an ambassador. There is no reason not to ask the Martians directly. From everything I am hearing from our people, they might just tell us to go pound sand, but they probably won’t lie to us. It doesn’t seem to be their way. These people aren’t WestHem, and they don’t lie for a living. Person-to-person contacts might be very useful,” she said.

Bullstrode scratched his head for a moment. The very concept of asking a WestHem politician for information was almost beyond imagining. “What else?”

“We will still need to insert agents. We can assume they will be tracking our embassy personnel. Fine, but they don’t have infinite resources. We start bringing in additional agents, that stretches them. We have a lot more resources than the Martians have. We start bringing in immigrants, we can flood them.”

“Have you looked into that? How are we going to send them emigrants? And will they take them?”

Smith gave a wry look and shrugged. “Sir, I suspect you are going to have to talk to the Foreign Office about that one. A brigadier general in charge of EastHem intelligence and with the blessing of the Chief of Staff’s office is going to get a lot more assistance than a brand-new colonel.”

“Huh. Figure out who I need to talk to and the questions I need to ask, and then you be in the background.” Smith nodded and smiled. “Did you get any sort of feel for how we would send them people?”

“Not really. The people I talked to all said it would be easy to do. The bulk freighters could easily transport thousands of people on the return trip. The Martians have not indicated they want any technology transfers or equipment. They want to limit trade to what was already negotiated, food for hydrogen. Otherwise, if they want it, they’ll make it themselves or do without.”

Bullstrode gave Colonel Smith a curious look. “Is that realistic? They don’t want anything else?”

Smith replied, “It’s in line with their public statements about WestHem. They don’t want anything that will tie them to the WestHem or EastHem monetary systems. They don’t want anything that will involve any Earth financial system. Their Laura Whiting has imposed on them a very strange communist system of finance. Our economists are going crazy trying to sort it out.”

“Do you think they’ll accept people?” he asked.

“Sir ... I have no idea. This is just totally new to us. A year ago, the answer would have been no, but that was when we were dealing with WestHem. They didn’t allow anybody from EastHem to come in, like we prohibit anybody from WestHem into the Lunar colonies. We’re going to have to ask.”

“Add it to the list of questions when we talk to the Foreign Office.”

“Yes, sir. Also, we need to consider who we are sending up there. If we bury an agent or two in a thousand people, who are the rest of the thousand? Do we ask for volunteer emigrants? Send them some criminals? Maybe get rid of any malcontents we have, give them a one-way ticket out of EastHem? That’s a question above what a colonel normally answers.”

“Above what a brigadier answers, too. Okay, start writing up a list of questions to ask. What’s next?”

Smith flipped to a new set of slides. “I asked some of our technical people how we get messages back and forth. I was worried we would need to send somebody outside in a biosuit with a radio system. They almost laughed me out of the office. It seems like I was overly nervous. They assured me that there is more than sufficient message traffic back and forth that we can bury stuff in. What with us talking about all that AgriCorp foodstuff, there has been a huge increase in messaging back and forth between Mars and EastHem. They assured me that it would be very easy to bury encrypted messaging in the traffic. We wouldn’t even need to send a thumb drive or microchip with an agent in case they get searched. We would simply need to make the necessary software available on the EastHem nets. An agent could download it and then decrypt it with a passcode that they would memorize ahead of time.”

Bullstrode nodded. “That sounds good. Everybody on Mars has access to a personal computer. They can’t monitor everything all the time.”

“No, sir. They even demonstrated it for me.” Smith put a slide on the screen showing the process.

“All right. Start figuring out what we have to ask the Foreign Office. Then ask every department head to develop the information they will want to discover about the Martians. Assuming we can get agents in, we are going to need to know what specialties the agents will need to be trained in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll find out who I have to talk to in the Foreign Office. I’ll let you know. Thank you.”

“Yes, sir.” Colonel Smith stood up, dismissed. She came to attention and left the office.

WestHem Military Intelligence Headquarters
Denver, WestHem
Thursday, October 20, 2146

Colonel Whitestone contacted General Morgan mid-morning. “I have some more information for you, General.”

Morgan looked at his planning system. “Can you do this by vid, or does this need to be face-to-face? I am booked until dinner and beyond.”

“I can do it right now, sir.”

“Very good.”

Whitestone threw a series of slides on the screen. Morgan glanced at them and then at the side screen with Whitestone talking. He nodded receipt and said, “Tell me what I am looking at, Colonel.”

“We’ve been able to sort out some of the questions regarding getting intelligence officers into Mars. First, our technical people say that it should be much easier than I imagined getting information back from Mars. We can either tap into EastHem message traffic or fake our own EastHem traffic and insert it into the Martian Internet. Our encryption systems will be more than adequate to protect the traffic from either Martian or EastHem attempts at counterintelligence.” Whitestone tapped a few of the slides in explanation.

“Very good, Colonel. Next?”

“I just received word late last night that EastHem is going to be discussing immigration with the Martian terrorists.” There was always the chance that the WestHem Internal Protection Service was monitoring their conversation. IPS had the highest security clearance in WestHem and were charged with finding and prosecuting any officer or citizen not sufficiently dedicated to whatever was the political fad being pushed by the Executive Council. They were the most hated branch of the government - and the most feared. Whether the Martians were actually terrorists or communists was something that Oliver Whitestone had no opinion on, but he knew he needed to refer to them as that if he didn’t want to end up in a ghetto or the Butte prison.

Morgan’s image raised an eyebrow. “Continue.”

“We have several agents in EastHem who are reporting that their Foreign Office will be contacting the Martian Embassy about opening immigration channels between EastHem and Mars. If they can do this, then the possibility exists for us to insert officers and agents into the immigrant stream.”

“Doing half our work for us? Why would Mars want to allow EastHem to send people to Mars? Who would want to go, anyway? The entire planet is a giant ghetto!” argued Morgan.

“I don’t know, General. I would simply point out that if they do set up an immigration system of some sort, then they would also be able to send agents back and forth,” commented Whitestone.

“The same could be said for the Martians. How hard would it be for the Martians to send agents to Earth? Even if the EastHem intelligence service was following them closely, how hard would it be for an agent to break surveillance and disappear in a nation of five-and-a-half billion? I don’t care if the Martians are spying on EastHem, but we don’t want them spying on us.”

“Not to take this lightly, sir, but we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Any system that will allow us to send agents one way can be used to send agents the other way.”

“Well, if EastHem allows people transfers as well as food, we’ll just have to get counterintel cranked up. You should probably give them a heads-up.”

“Yes, sir.” Whitestone internally winced as he assented to his boss’ order. WestHem Counterintelligence was incredibly chauvinistic and unsophisticated. As far as they were concerned, WestHem technology and doctrine was the finest in the Solar System, and any enemy attempts to penetrate WestHem military or political planning was doomed to failure before they even got started. A string of WestHem counterintelligence failures had not dented this belief. It had gotten so bad that WestHem Intelligence had a very informal counterintel unit of its own.

“Stay on this. If the Martians are silly enough to let EastHem send people back and forth, we’ll want to take advantage of it. Begin selecting officers. We can use the standard techniques to insert agents into EastHem and then move them on from there.”

“Yes, sir. Understood.”

That was the end of the conversation. Morgan broke down the connection and returned to a report from the Navy concerning emergency ship construction.

Martian Planetary Guard Headquarters
New Pittsburgh, Mars
Wednesday, November 9, 2146

“So, what’s the word from the Governor’s office?” asked Morey Weinstein. It was the weekly staff meeting and the EastHem specialist knew that his boss dealt with the Governor’s office regarding the EastHem proposal to send colonists from EastHem to Mars on the return trips by the bulk freighters.