Long-described as
the world’s second-oldest profession, spying is something which most states
above a certain, albeit undefined, size undertake on a regular basis. Understanding the
thinking of other states seen as potential adversaries is something which many
rulers over the centuries have found useful. Spying on ‘friends’ is also common
– who knows when friends might turn into enemies or what they might be holding
back? There’s something more than a little disingenuous in the Danish Foreign Minister’s
claim
this week that “we don’t spy between friends”, given that the Danish
intelligence services actively
assisted the US to spy on Germany’s former Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
It's still more than
a little strange, however, that Trump should have decided that a major
priority for the US intelligence services should be Greenland. It’s not as
though the country actually poses any immediate danger to the US – a country of
56,000 inhabitants is hardly likely to invade New York. And a dispassionate
observer might well believe that there are one or two rather more significant potential
threats to the US.
The focus of espionage
activity is apparently to be twofold: intelligence gathering on the
independence movement and identifying individuals likely to welcome a US takeover.
In theory, it should be an easy task to resource. The three US intelligence
agencies (CIA:
21,500; DIA:
16,500; NSA:
30-40,000) employ more than 68,000 people between them (unless Elon Musk has
fired most of them by now); allocating a few thousand to monitor 56,000
Greenlanders shouldn’t be too much of an ask. How many of those are Greenland
specialists, though, might be more of a problem. Some 70%
of the population speak only Greenlandic, and I’d be surprised if as many
as 1 of those 68,000 ‘spies’ could understand what they are saying. And when it
comes to intelligence ‘on the ground’ (as opposed to remote electronic
monitoring), someone unable to communicate in the language might just stand out
a little.
A country planning a
takeover might well find it useful to identify in advance a sufficiently large cohort
of people who would welcome the invasion (and perhaps fill posts in the new
government) in order to give it a gloss of respectability, but previous attempts
at going door-to-door to find someone who would welcome the Vice-President and
his wife were less than entirely successful. They found no-one. On another
occasion they had to resort to handing out MAGA hats to homeless people as
a reward for eating a Trump(Jr)-provided meal. Even the CIA, with its renowned
ability to destabilise and topple governments, will find it a challenge to make
a coup look like some sort of popular uprising.
Trump’s obsession
with Greenland is an odd one, especially given that he could get most of what
he really wants (which is about US corporations getting access to valuable
mineral rights – and maybe building a hotel and a few golf courses?) by
friendly negotiation, but that, it seems, is not the way that the ‘art of the
deal’ works. Still, whilst sympathising with Greenlanders, there’s something
mildly reassuring about seeing him give so much of his limited attention span
to the question.
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