How to Spot a Spook | Hacker News Reader

How to Spot a Spook

cryptome.org

109 pointslibpcap23 comments

Those spooks are meant to be easy to identify. If caught doing something bad the worst that usually happens is that they are kicked out of the country. No biggie. Much worse are when under cover agents become easy to identify. The USA will do nothing to help them, and they face death.

For instance the outing of Valerie Plame brought to fact that the company Brewster Jennings & Associates was a fake front. After that, a simple Google search for people with that company on their resume made a lot of undercover agents easy to identify.

The USA will do nothing to help them, and they face death.

This sounds a bit exaggerated. The US Government will generally make a good effort to bring back even its own civilian citizens trapped in foreign lands (i.e. the reporters in North Korea). It seems unlikely that the government would not do that and more for its own covert operatives.

One might argue that the government would sacrifice its own agents so as not to attract attention to their presence, but once the agent is captured the jig is already up, so to speak. As for press attention, I'm sure most governments can figure out how to arrange the return of a single person without involving the public in it.

People under cover frequently have covers claiming to not be Americans. And often compromising their cover will jeopardize other people's covers.

Therefore even though there is a chance that the US will intervene, they must be prepared for the possibility that the US will not help them.

The spook that was given as an example in that text, James R. Lilley, sounded familiar to me. I looked him up and saw that his career continued well after the time of that article, being made ambassador by Reagan in '86.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lilley

The article, among other things, confirms that Lilley was a CIA operative. I don't know for sure but it seems like that information was far from public knowledge in 1974.

There is a close relationship between operative and official. As you probably recall, GHW Bush was head of CIA at one point.

In Vietnam, the CIA all had the same spy Rolex to be used as bribery material. I read an account about how all the cabdrivers knew who they all were and never needed directions to drive agents to the safe houses.

Note: this article is from 1974.

True. That may be the reason why the same website published the following two days later: State Department Telephone Directory May 2010, http://cryptome.org/state-phones.zip As far as i understand the abbreviations define "USEO" as "United states Embassy Office" [page A-2], however nothing in the name listing contains "USEO". The document is unclassified after all. However it may very well contain past or future "spooks".

I think we can assume that agents attached to embassies are probably well known to the local intelligence agencies in whatever country they're in. This is absolutely fine from the agency's point of view, since the CIA needs a big operation in Beijing (and conversely the Chinese need a big operation in Washington) and it makes much more sense to run it semi-openly within the embassy, since the alternative is to attempt to run a big covert operation outside the embassy.

I think we can also assume that in countries where it matters there are probably spies who are not employed by the embassies and who may or may not be known to the local intelligence agencies.

I guess in conclusion, you shouldn't go around feeling all clever just because you've figured out some secret that you think some intelligence agency didn't want you to know. They have layers upon layers of secrets, and some of them are designed to be discovered.

>> I guess in conclusion, you shouldn't go around feeling >> all clever just because you've figured out some secret >> that you think some intelligence agency didn't want you >> to know.

I understand what you are saying between the lines. The problem still is i didnt expose a secret when i referenced a unclassified document, which was uploaded by a third party. Also i didnt say that no agency would want me to know.

>> They have layers upon layers of secrets, and some of >> them are designed to be discovered.

I feel this is a good analogy for this audience. [Edit: a good analogy of people in this audience who work with software stacks.]

Yep. Both professions spent way too much time uncovering other people's bugs.

Could the lists in the article be cross referenced with 'public' data such as Facebook or LinkedIn to get better results?

The article is from 1974. I doubt that many people on that list are on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Historical note: this article was put together about the time that Congress decimated the CIA's HUMINT programs -- spies on the ground learning stuff. (In fact the article concludes that the entire agency is not necessary)

Most -- not all, but most -- agency-watchers view the congressional hack-job in the 1970s to be the reason for many problems later on. The CIA had done a lot of bad things. A lot of politicians got a lot of mileage on TV defending the little guy from the evil CIA, and it was very difficult to have a reasonable conversation about what they should be doing. It was all "Witch! Witch! Hang the witch!"

I'm not an expert and can't give an informed opinion. I can note from an organizational standpoint that either killing it or continuing to let it run HUMINT programs is rational, stripping it of all its power and then blaming it later for failures due to what you did to it? That's whacked. Yet if I remember correctly, some of the same politicians that lobbied to take spies out of the CIA (or kill it completely) lambasted it later for not having enough spies.

You can argue that they had a much more "nuanced" position than I am presenting, or you can argue that the CIA was an easy punching bag -- a big old political Piñata that you kick and votes fall out. Don't know.

Clearly the author has never read "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth.

That's not clear to me, because I've never read The Human Stain.

If it provides a different perspective on the same issues, why don't you tell us about it?

I _have_ read The Human Stain, which is about Coleman Silk, a Classics professor at a small liberal arts college, who is fired after an innocuous remark about two students who fail to come to class for the first couple of weeks. The comment is something like, "Are these guys spooks? Or what?" But the students turn out to be black, and so does Silk (which we discover later in the narrative; the administration does not know he is black by most definitions. Silk is ~72 and having an affair with an apparently illiterate 34-year-old maintenance woman named Faunia Farley.

The novel uses the incident to explore the nature of race in the United States and reactions to it; academic power; and the relation of the self to one's past, as Silk tries to erase or ignore his, while the tension with his father leads to recriminations but also success. Like many of Roth's novels, the writing is fantastic and the voice strong.

In other words, I have no idea what the grandparent is talking about either.

Hmm, y'know, until this thread I had never heard the word "spook" as a term for a black person. Anyone know the etymology?

If anything, if you'd told me it was a racial slur I would have assumed it was for white people, since spooks are ghosts and ghosts are popularly imagined as being white.

I assume because 'black people are harder to spot at night time.'

{update} Confirmed:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spook

  > The derogatory racial sense of "black person" is
  > attested from 1940s, perhaps from notion of dark
  > skin being difficult to see at night.

Interestingly enough:

  > Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute during
  > World War II called themselves the Spookwaffe.

IIRC, Two of those Tuskegee pilots were among the very few Allied pilots to down Nazi jet fighters. From hearing their own accounts on Dogfights, the Tuskegee pilots were exceptionally good at spotting, taking, and hitting opportunistic shots. They were flying early versions of the P-51 Mustang. Downing jet fighters that totally outclass your prop plane because you can recognize an opportunity and take it -- I find that awesome!

I think the point was that Agee, like Silk, didn't consider the possibility of misinterpretation. I'm sure if he did consider it, he would have dismissed it as remote. Even so, the ambiguity of the term was current in the 70s, and Agee, given his profession, probably was aware of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (book, 69; movie 73) about a black agent, the title playing on the ambiguity. The Human Stain came out 16 yrs after Agee's article.

It was a joke. The next commenter explained...

Just to clarify, this article is about spotting CIA agents... no racist connotations.

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