Despite advances in technological surveillance, key spy capitals continue to play a significant role in the world of geopolitics and international espionage
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi landed in Vienna in July following successful summit talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, he became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit the Austrian capital since the 1980s. Perhaps eclipsed among the myriad MoUs and statements of intent jointly signed and articulated between Prime Minister and his Austrian counterpart, Chancellor Karl Nehammer, was the knowledge of the country’s importance as a locus of global espionage for decades—and to that end, its criticality to India’s intelligence and diplomatic priorities shaping its global posture.
Notwithstanding the scale of technological advancement that has come to shape international relations and global espionage, key urban landscapes have come to be inextricably linked to international espionage—in particular the Austrian capital. Crafting strategies to engage these third countries and their capitals is therefore vital to the success of one’s foreign intelligence endeavours and wider foreign policy objectives.
The bipolar strategic competition of the Cold War expanded the profile of global spy capitals, from Vienna to Beirut and Berlin to New Delhi. Usually located in ‘neutral’ third countries, these cities served as key entrepots in international espionage, where spies could tap into vital sources of intelligence, operate with lowered diplomatic consequences to undermine one another, or even quietly negotiate to mitigate tensions. Indeed, the neutral Austrian government allowed its capital to become a byword for Cold War espionage, legalising intelligence activity on its soil in its 1955 Constitution as long as such activity did not directly target Austria. Berlin, too, divided between its Western and Soviet sectors came to serve as a hub for spies and defectors traversing the Iron Curtain through the narrow passages of Checkpoint Charlie and Glienicke Bridge. Beirut was a key locus for Polish intelligence, a proxy for the KGB, in the latter’s efforts to gather intelligence on Western capabilities in the Middle East—but it was also the city from where Kim Philby, the famous Soviet double agent and member of the Cambridge Five, would escape to the Soviet Union in 1965. Even New Delhi played a role from the 1950s to 1980s as a theatre of Cold War espionage, with both sides using India as a laboratory for disinformation campaigns, recruitment and other machinations, with MI6 officer and Soviet spy George Blake describing the city as providing “the most favourable conditions…for establishing contact with Soviet citizens”. The reputation that these cities acquired as international ‘spy capitals’ became interwoven with popular imagination of the Cold War itself, with Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man picturing the shadow wars in Vienna in the fledgling years of the Cold War. This is also noted in John le Carre’s novels The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Smiley’s People which popularised Berlin’s image as a Cold War spy hub, while his two most famous characters—George Smiley and Karla—are described as encountering one another for the first time in a New Delhi prison in the 1950s during the events of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in a meeting facilitated by local police and the Intelligence Bureau.
The reputation that these cities acquired as international ‘spy capitals’ became interwoven with popular imagination of the Cold War itself, with Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man picturing the shadow wars in Vienna in the fledgling years of the Cold War.
With the end of the Cold War, however, and advancements in technology, particularly with regards to surveillance and interception, the idea of a physical ‘spy capital’ may seem redundant. Yet as the past decade’s geopolitical record reminds us, human intelligence must remain at the heart of a nation’s foreign and national security strategy for the latter to be effective To that end, the world still requires international locations where intelligence officials may meet, strive to outcompete one another, or discuss areas of mutual convergence or rivalry—as evidenced, for instance, by the role played by Ankara as a location for secret talks between CIA chief Bill Burns and his Russian counterpart Sergei Naryshkin in November 2022, at the height of the Russia-Ukraine War. What then, does the modern intelligence capital look like, and what does it say about the state of international politics today?
While Vienna and Berlin have maintained their image as urban environments where spies interact and seek to outcompete one another in pursuit, shifting geopolitical dynamics have caused a proliferation of intelligence capitals worldwide.
Spies are ultimately attracted to those locations with significant concentrations of high-value information, which may be processed to provide strategic meaning for a nation’s foreign policy. To that end, Djibouti, the small northeastern African state bordering the Bab el-Mandeb Strait with its crucial shipping lanes and undersea fibre optic cables has come to be known as the ‘new Berlin’—another entrepot where the United States (US), China, Japan, Italy, and France, all of which have military bases stationed here, may spy on each other. Just a few hundred miles away across the Arabian Peninsula lies the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which with its reputation as a global financial hub and light-touch legislation has attracted state but also non-state actors such as the Kinahan Cartel to D-Company to set up base in the Emirates—in turn attracting intelligence services seeking to gather information on actors of strategic interest. And in Europe, cities such as Brussels and Geneva, due to their high concentration of intragovernmental global and European organisations, and the lax security legislation and anaemic quality of counterintelligence of the country they are situated in, have gained new significance in the world of espionage, where spies from Qatar to China, and the US to Russia, have sought to recruit agents and secretly lobby the EU in pursuit of their strategic goals. Closer to home, Indian intelligence officials have long worried about Kathmandu acting as a staging post for intelligence activities, given the porous border India shares with Nepal, and the poor quality of the latter’s internal security machinery. Notably, Kathmandu has served as a transit point for both flows of fake currency notes into India, and in the 2004 defection of R&AW officer and CIA double agent Rabinder Singh to the US.
Closer to home, Indian intelligence officials have long worried about Kathmandu acting as a staging post for intelligence activities, given the porous border India shares with Nepal, and the poor quality of the latter’s internal security machinery.
Additionally, the mitigation of power differentials as a consequence of multipolarity has also seen growing middle power involvement in regional conflicts. This indicates the growing agency and ambitions of these middle-power countries to achieve both national interest and play an outsized role in world affairs. This behaviour has factored into the construction of the modern spy capital, and is evidenced in Israel’s use of Azerbaijan, in particular its capital Baku, as a base for spying on Iran and its nuclear programme, as part of what appears to be a quid pro quo and consequence of Israeli military support to Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia. That the Mossad used Baku as a point of transit in their 2018 heist of documents from Tehran pertaining to Iran’s nuclear programme points towards the veracity of this argument, despite counterarguments by Azeri officials. As a result of this, Baku has begun growing into the spy capital of the Caucasus, with Israel using its privileged position to establish itself as a key strategic actor in the region, as seen in its efforts to negotiate the release of French citizens arrested in the capital for ‘espionage’ from Azeri officials. The case of Baku, therefore, reflects the equiprimordiality of global geopolitical dynamics and intelligence—with the city’s emergence as a regional spy capital reflecting this trend’s continuation in a multipolar, post-Cold War era.
From the above examples, it may be argued that the modern spy capital must bear one or more of the following characteristics:
A weak national counterintelligence or internal security apparatus, so as to facilitate easy access to information (as is the case with Brussels, Geneva, Kathmandu, or even Cold War-era New Delhi)
Lax or non-existent national legislation on spying (as with Austria and Switzerland)
Preferably a high concentration of regional or global intragovernmental organisations attracting significant streams of foreign diplomats for subornment (as with Vienna, Geneva, and Brussels)
Proximity to global trade or information flows (as with Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Djibouti)
First, countries such as India may take steps to strengthen and train the internal security machinery of neighbouring countries as a countermeasure against cities like Kathmandu from developing into regional spy capitals. Buttressing local police forces and counterintelligence would not only strengthen diplomatic relations between India and its neighbours but also protect it against intelligence challenges from other governments and their agencies operating out of these cities. Such a line of action could eventually be expanded globally.
Second, measures must be taken to identify key global spy capitals and to strengthen diplomatic ties with them, be it economically, militarily, or otherwise. Strategies crafted to this end must be developed individually in relation to each government and at both the bilateral and multilateral levels.
Measures must be taken to identify key global spy capitals and to strengthen diplomatic ties with them, be it economically, militarily, or otherwise.
Third, changing geopolitical dynamics and the consequences for countries’ toleration of espionage must be recognised, with strategies drawn up and regularly updated to account for changes. In the case of Austria, not only has the country’s ‘neutral’ domestic intelligence community occasionally taken an active and partisan stance, as seen in its exfiltration of Syrian intelligence officer Khalid al-Halabi from France in 2015, but the country has also begun to take a stronger line against spying on its soil, particularly in the field of counterintelligence to preclude the further compromise of its own security apparatus.
Perhaps nowhere is the enmeshment of espionage and geopolitics as visible as it is in the urban landscape of the spy capital. While technological surveillance is one thing, spying has and will continue to be shaped by a reliance on human intelligence. Cityscapes will only continue to serve as watering holes for those navigating the geopolitical underworld of multipolarity.
Archishman Goswami is a postgraduate student studying the MPhil International Relations programme at the University of Oxford.
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Archishman Goswami is a postgraduate student studying the MPhil International Relations programme at the University of Oxford. His writing focuses on intelligence activity as a ...
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