Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB.

A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known by the host country intelligence services. This is largely because you generally only take so much risk with ongoing collection efforts, for example going through customs and attending official diplomatic functions (dinners etc...) under status is typical and gives the locals a record. What they do in their "off time" is the real collection work, but even then their chance of gaining access to well placed contacts that have very specialized intelligence is low. The majority of officers know this, and it ends up being a political dance, where if someone gets too risky with their collection they get tagged and persona-non-grata'd.

The real question here is why the Soviets decided at that time to burn the officers that it knew about - because that turns into a tit-for-tat across waters that eats up resources and really strains diplomatic relations. I think the answer is very clear in that it was the last gasp of a dying system, so they were doing what they could to purge and wrest power.

Nothing particularly shocking or complicated here if you know how the system works.

> A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known by the host country intelligence services.

Do you have a citation that would support this?

Nope, that's why it's a "dirty little secret."

... so how do you know, and why should I believe you?

The most valuable information never comes with a citation. Thus the derogatory term "book smart."

Upvoted this. Not all cases require a rush for citations to support what you're saying.

It's easy to say your information is true when you say I can't look at the information and see if it's true. Not a tenable position, sir.

I didn't say "the most accurate information."

Try Google.

This is pretty widely known phenomena, as in anyone who has read anything about cold war espionage is aware of it. This article confirms it through a source from the former KGB.

Here's a 1985 NY Times article detailing Soviet use of this ruse in Mexico: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/23/world/mexico-city-depicted...

Here's a 1983 NY Times article "Soviet Orders US Vice Consul Expelled as Spy": http://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/13/world/soviet-orders-us-vic...

Key quotes from the 1983 article:

>"The Soviet action against Mr. Augustenborg followed a pattern set twice earlier this year. In March, when Richard Osborne, a first secretary in the embassy's economic section, was expelled, and again in June, when Louis Thomas, an embassy attache, was ousted on spying charges, the Soviet announcements were issued promptly and said the men had been caught in the act on Moscow streets. Previously, such announcements had often been delayed or not made public at all."

>"...no American diplomat had been publicly expelled since 1977, and in that case, involving Martha Peterson, a vice consul at the embassy, there was no Soviet statement until 11 months later, after the United States had announced the arrest of two Soviet employees of the United Nations caught picking up documents on antisubmarine warfare."

>"The recent Soviet actions against Americans come at a time when Western counterintelligence services have stepped up their actions against Soviet agents. Nearly 100 Russians have been expelled for intelligence activities around the world ... Also in April, the United States expelled three members of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, including a military attache, Lieut. Col. Yevgeny N. Barmyantsev, who was reportedly caught retrieving what he thought were stolen American military secrets from beneath a tree in rural Maryland."

Unless I missed something, those articles just give specific examples of agents being uncovered. Nothing is given to indicate how many remained uncovered. Its a pretty long jump from examples of such to the general statement that "the majority of official-status officers" being known by their host countries.

From the 1985 article:

>"United States counterintelligence specialists estimate that at least 150 K.G.B. officers are working out of the embassy under cover as diplomats, clerks, chauffeurs, journalists and in other jobs."

Just as a point of reference, the US Embassy in Iran during the 1979 revolution and subsequent hostage crisis had something on the order of 75-100 people working there.

Again, Google around, there is a ton of material out there on these topics. If you read Russian, I'm sure there are similar stories talking about US spies. (Although the reliability of Soviet media is questionable at best) I was really interested in this stuff when I was a kid, and recalled these events vaguely from those days, there's plenty more to find.

You still haven't provided the evidence needed though to support the conclusion of a majority given some or even many.

Also, we are talking about an endeavour in which deception is the norm, so even evidence like this is more than a little bit questionable.

What evidence would you like? Embassy payroll documents annotated with "spy" and "not a spy"?

Given the privileged status of the embassy and the protections offered by diplomatic status (eg the diplomatic pouch) you'd be crazy not to staff your embassy with spies, at least in any country worth spying on. You'll probably get a few actual diplomats to do the actual diplomacy too, and the occasional low-level passport stamper, but the default assumption should be that they're pretty much all spies.

My point is that this is the kind of evidence you would need to support the original claim. If the top-level comment I was pursuing had, instead of making the claim that the majority of the spies posing as diplomats were known as spies to the host nation, had rather claimed that many of them were known, I wouldn't have pursued it.

Edit: fixed language

What are you talking about? Look it up if you're not going to believe anyone here.

> What are you talking about?

I think you need to read this comment thread starting at the top: my point is that the original claim I was asking for a citation in is essentially unsupportable, so no citations exist.

Almost all of the official covers (covert) are known. Hence they have a safety net of simply being persona-non-grata'd. It's the non-offical clandestine covers who really get screwed.

One submission on HN a few months ago, IIRC, was a history of how the USA dealt with a subtle bugging of all the typewriters in the US embassy. Given penetrations like that, it's not much of a surprise if the USSR had known most/all of the US's spies...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray makes an interesting claim https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/06/five-reasons... :

> 3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.

(I quickly tried to look it up, but there are so many mutual expulsions it would've taken too long.)

There is a strong implication in the article that the Soviets were much better than the Americans at this game.

The implication was that the Americans were "embarrassed" by how easily their agents were identified (or conformed to a formula of sorts). I don't believe it mentioned if the Soviets were in fact "better" at either spying, or identifying spies.

Mostly because the Soviets did everything under a veil of secrecy -- likely as much to shield their own people from what was going on as the West. This extended to most parts of the government, not just the military/intelligence apparatus.

The definition of "better" in this game is dependent on what your goals are.

There are three primary things you can do with a foreign IO on your soil in increasing order of difficulty: 1. PNG them 2. Collect on them 3. Flip them. Add in #4 of killing them if you are a certain type of country - very, very rare though and headline worthy.

In fact in some cases it's worth more to let an IO keep stealing secrets, and know what they are, than it is to get rid of them - so these things aren't binary.

edit: I note this distinction because in the case of this article it is discussing specifically officers that the Agency knew were burned - which serves the same goal as kicking them out of your country as they are no longer operationally effective.

Exactly. But, those are official covers, most of these are covert but not necessarily clandestine. There are people with Non-official covers (the real clandestine people)who don't get the grace of diplomatic immunity and persona-non-grata if they are caught.

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