by red_admiral
4 subcomments
- This is pure gold, and still works on the internet to get the specs for PLA tanks:
> If she wants to know something specific, but doesn’t want people to notice her asking questions, she should simply make incorrect statements while in the company of experts. Her companions will correct her, especially if they’re men.
- The story of Nora Inayat Khan is an affecting tale of incredible bravery, heroism, and selfless sacrifice. She nearly survived the war, but was captured only days before she was due to be extracted, and died at the hands of one of Germany’s most sadistic torturers. Nora Khan was a “regular” citizen who rose to the moment, committed herself entirely to the allied cause, and nearly single-handedly maintained radio contact between Paris and London during a critical stage of the conflict.
by PaulHoule
1 subcomments
- Reminds me of the joke in Get Smart where they give Max a suicide pill and he asks "How do I get them to take it?"
Also the time when the manager of a supermarket (who looked like an FBI agent from a 1970s movie) thought I was shoplifting (I was going the wrong direction and did look scruffy and had a big bag with an open top) and followed me out holding a clipboard that I'm sure he would have whacked me with and said it was an accident if I'd given him any trouble.
- Highly recommend watching The Americans, an incredible show about Soviet spies pretending to be a regular American family. Based somewhat on real people, and very well-researched.
- If you find yourself in Washington DC, I highly recommend a visit to the International Spy Museum. Its one of the few attractions in DC you need to pay for but worth the ticket price.
(Spoiler Alert)
At the end, there's mural or placard that says something like: Most exhibits in this museum are here because of failure. The best spies are the ones you never hear of.
by jasonvorhe
4 subcomments
- Is anyone else burned out of these headlines?
Doing X for fun and profit
Everything we knew about X is wrong
I did X for $timespan and Y happened
by marcellus23
2 subcomments
- > In the movies, spies are usually ripped hunks who carry lots of gadgets, like James Bond and Jason Bourne.
Neither James Bond nor Jason Bourne were really "ripped hunks." Maybe an argument could be made for Daniel Craig, but really most Bonds and Bourne were just kind of handsome, charming men who knew their way around a gun.
- Ctrl+f Carre - 0 matches? Not particularly strong engagement with the canon. There are spy stories that aren't James Bond!
by next_xibalba
1 subcomments
- I'm currently reading "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb". The first section of the book focuses on the Russian A-Bomb program in the 1940s and how much of it was accelerated through espionage conducted against the US and UK. I'm struck by how painful a slog spying was. These spies were always effectively working two jobs and much of the nuts and bolts of spying and conveying information to handlers sounds like boring, thankless work. Often, the spies were not paid at all. There are excerpts where handlers bemoan the difficulty and lack of compensation of their spies. All-in-all, it sounds like a crappy job. You really had to be a true believer, I guess.
And yet, in the 1940s at least, the Soviets were absolutely looting the Americans. During the lend-lease program between the US and Russia, planes were flown out of Montana to the USSR. US military officers recalled Soviets flying dozens of large briefcases on each flight. Once, a US officer inspected those briefcases and found detailed factory schematics, product and process diagrams and plans, reels and reels of detailed photographs of machinery and parts, and classified documents on the R&D of uranium enrichment. Apparently, in light of this discovery of massive industrial theft, the U.S. took no action.
by photochemsyn
1 subcomments
- Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" contains detailed coverage of Soviet espionage efforts inside the United States, from the exfiltration of secrets from Los Alamos to a much broader program of industrial manufacturing information gathering (note the Soviets were allies so this latter program didn't really cross any lines).
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/s...
Another interesting one is "The Nazis Next Door" about the US recruitment of ex-Nazis after WWII as spies in the growing Cold War, many with records of war crimes, who were resettled in the USA after their overseas service was completed.
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
Incidentally, there's a big difference between a spy and an assassin, and James Bond was not a spy - he was an assassin who was 'licensed to kill'. It's a mistake to conflate these two things, even if they're both managed by the same intelligence agency.
by dventimihasura
1 subcomments
- "What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives."
https://youtu.be/lNrjAMV0HJk?si=Fbk3fE-Ufm3ACxgv&t=86
- https://archive.ph/iuMg6
by breaker-kind
0 subcomment
- > everything you know and think about spies is wrong
> The school’s first explosives instructor was Bill Cumper, a boisterous character who walked around with his pockets full of bomb parts and “a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette.”
come on. we can acquiesce that people were maybe getting a little crazy with it
by kjellsbells
0 subcomment
- SOE training manual, from the UK national archives, converted to PDF with some introductory text:
https://ironwolf008.wordpress.com/espionage/
- Ha-ha. Hee-hee.
Is the relationship between academia, the media and intelligence agencies ongoing?
- There are lots of books by actual agents. If everything you know about spies is wrong, you've been reading the wrong books. There are histories of intelligence. From WWII, Reinhart Gelhen (Nazi side) [1] and William Colby (US side) [2] both wrote good books.
The CIA calls their field HUMINT people "case officers."[3] They recruit spies, people who are on the inside of something, but rarely spy themselves. That's how it's really done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Colby
[3] https://www.cia.gov/careers/jobs/case-officer/
by rramadass
1 subcomments
- People interested in this stuff should check out;
1) Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein - https://archive.org/details/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetween...
2) Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_T...
3) Yuri Bezmenov's lectures (available on Youtube) on "Subversion Model/Psychological Warfare" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov and https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/
Caution: If you go down this rabbit-hole it will seriously alter your perception of "Reality" itself and you can end-up endlessly second-guessing/triple-guessing etc. everything you experience and think about.
by AlbertCory
0 subcomment
- "Everything WE know" ??? Nobody thinks it's like James Bond.
there are tons of books and TV shows about real-life espionage, including by people who went through the CIA's training course.
- This reminds me... Anyone interested in spy stuff should check out The Bureau (2015). It's an excellent spy series and also a nice change in style compared to the usual Hollywood productions.
by UniverseHacker
4 subcomments
- Cool article. They are saying to use a regular book as a way of numerically referencing your message, but then aren't you limited to some generic phrase from that book?
It seems to me, at least in pre-computer times, that a regular book would work fairly well as a one-time pad. Especially something widely available, innocuous, and very long, like a bible. You'd probably want to add something like an offset, and a rule to skip letters (e.g. use every 3rd letter) so there are no real words to provide predictability. Guessing the book, offset, and skip rule would be a massive space- on the order of billions of possibilities. With modern computers of course, this method would be easy to crack.
- Sounds like something a spy would say
- This article is for everyone that pictures James Bond when they hear the word spy
- I like this because films have promoted a bullshit view of various aspects of life with the defense of "its entertainment" but I think a lot of us (including me) have believed bits of it because we have no contrary evidence.
On a completely different note, my favorite fictional spy, Bernard Sampson, says something like this (can't find the exact quote) "experienced agents are like nervous old ladies - always worrying about everything."
Essentially that "brave" agents are either inexperienced or dead. Sampson is able to do things like shoot but overall he feels its a sign of incompetence if it becomes necessary.
If you haven't already, try the "Game, Set, Match" trilogy.
- That’s what a spy would say…!
by _whiteCaps_
0 subcomment
- An excellent book about a real spy between WWI and II is "Cracking the Nazi Code" by Jason Bell. It's not about encryption, it's about how Canada had someone who understood the German people and how he predicted Hitler's rise to power.
- The first sentence is so disappointing. Are we really living in a world where people think stuff is like "in the movies" and where people think that's the primary source for learning?
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