The spy with no name | Hacker News Reader

The spy with no name

bbc.com

71 pointsDiabloD320 comments

The means of receiving orders from his superiors, via shortwave transmission of a code consisting of numbers, has been in use for decades by spy agencies from around the world. Radio enthusiasts have been listening to these stations since the end of World War II.

http://www.spynumbers.com/

http://priyom.org/number-stations

http://www.numbers-stations.com/

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24910397

http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project/

Even more interesting is that old radio receivers would give off faint sidebands when listening. This, you could drive around with the right gear and find radios listening to a numbers station.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver

Do you mean that you could tune into the local oscillator in the spy's receiver that would be displaced from the transmitted frequency by the value of the intermediate frequency?

E.g. number station on 6000Khz and IF 465KHz so local oscillator 6465KHz?

What happened when receivers went over to up-conversion and frequency synthesis?

The story doesn't explain how a spy working as a waiter, purchase manager or "artist" can gain access to military secrets.

Extortion, blackmail, etc

For a man, a brothel operator, a private detective, or a drugs purveyor would make more sense for blackmail. How would a waiter in a nondescript location gain access to information that would allow him to blackmail? It's not like the hotel was placed near a military base or was frequented by diplomats or generals. Not to mention placing tapping devices in the Queen's furniture. The story, as presented, does not compute.

>>>> Not to mention placing tapping devices in the Queen's furniture.

They didn't actually placed tapping devices in the Queen's furniture. From the article:

One of his first ideas was to try planting listening devices in the Queen's furniture, he recalls, though he and his bosses realised it was technically unrealistic.

I think he knows that, but that part you quoted didn't make sense to him, since how would Van Haarlem even be in a position to access the Queen's furniture, merely working down the road from Buckingham Palace?

(At least that's what I thought when reading it anyway.)

Yep, obviously.

Karl Koch and his buddies were recruited by a KGB spy posing as a casino croupier in exchange for gambling money and cocaine.

A hotel waiter or a concierge is in the perfect position to mingle with the rich and powerful.

Upper class people use hotels for extra-marital affairs and business trips in unknown cities. You do not need a first degree connection with the military to get an in.

The bar of a famous Dutch hotel was known to be frequented by American spies and drug agents looking to ensnare peons of the local drug maffia, working their way up from there.

This is a time before the internet. Even international phone calls were prohibitively expensive for most people. In this environment, international news could be days old and highly filtered. There is value to having a person physically present reading local newspapers, listening to local newscasts, talking to locals, and so on.

Moreover, this was about establishing a long term cover. He progressed through his cover career until he became an art dealer where he most definitely would have been hob nobbing with powerful people. Even if he didn't have access to "secrets" per se, he would have had access to useful information that would otherwise be hard to obtain.

Possibly to help service other spies acting as a conduit back to presumably STB

Fun read. I must admit, I would have never predicted the ending. Amazing if it turns out to be true.

Yeah it reads like a Leclair novel.

The spy was probably burned from the beginning; an informant could have warned the Britsh(?) of his coming deployment and they in turn set the 'mother' on him.

The fact that the real Erwin van Haarlem seemingly vanished is suspicious. I would assume you would only want to assign an identity of someone who is known to be dead, yet the orphanage apparently sent many letters to the mother. Assuming that's true, of course.

I assume he may have died later in life, maybe late childhood

Spoiler: The real one was adopted and met Johanna later. Source: The story can be found on Kindle Singles, but the BBC article contains basically everything interesting already.

So why weren't there two of them? Or were there and it never became an issue?

The real one got adopted when he was four years old and his new parents "raised him as their own." He found out about the adoption a long time later. Therefore, it is safe to assume that he also had a different name.

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