How to explain the KGB’s amazing success identifying CIA agents? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

How to explain the KGB’s amazing success identifying CIA agents? (2015)

salon.com

101 pointsgregmac23 comments

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Spying has always seemed like something nations do because they think they’re supposed to, rather than because of actual benefits it produces.

General Michael Flynn was really big on a kind of OSINT approach which devalued the current crop of experts in Washington, before he got railroaded out of the National Security Establishment in 2014-2015 (no comment on his later political antics). Basically he said for any information produced by a spy, you could have found the exact same info in some tiny circulation magazine or journal available for free, if only someone had been there to read it in whatever language to read / report it.

The CIA has large numbers of OSINT analysts. Pay isn't too bad either, at the higher end:

https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/open-so...

In later years, KBG agents in boring posts would basically repackage OSINT as secret intel and send it back to Moscow. Putin was supposedly one of the people who did so, during his assignment to Dresden.

assuming you don't live in an overpriced city, that strikes me as a good pay range in the middle and possibly lower brackets too.

>Spying has always seemed like something nations do because they think they’re supposed to, rather than because of actual benefits it produces.

See also; ~80% of office work.

There's a book about it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

To look at spying rationally, the first thing to do is to not look at it with romantic mystique. Meeting people in a foggy, dark alley at night, who are going to uncover the identity of a major agent - this makes for a suspenseful movie, but has little to do with national security.

Most of what spying is is nations trying not to fall behind technologically. What is in the news? The Chinese spying on US technology. What happened in the past? The Pakistanis and Israelis and Russians using spying to not fall behind on nuclear technology. The Soviet Union's Directorate T was a huge part of the Soviet spy apparatus, all to catch up to certain aspects of the west technologically. You can also read the news stories about US spying with relations to Airbus.

Blown agents, military secrets that can jeopardize a nation etc. all makes for high drama, but on a rational level things are more mundane.

OSINT really has a limit.

*Lieutenant General Michael Flynn

No comment on his later antics, because they, ah, rather throw his judgment into question:

He utterly beclowned himself with hilariously sloppy op-sec. From being caught planning to exfiltrate a Turkish dissident in the US to Turkey to gobbling up every Russian carrot waggled in front of him, his repeated face-plants forced even the willfully ignorant Trump administration to fire him.

That all said, I wouldn't be shocked if that is representative of our boldest, most forward-thinking intelligence agents

Crazy too how a former Secretary of State kept classified materials on a personal server or that a convicted pedophile had those classified materials on his personal laptop despite not having a security clearance for those materials.

What? When was this?

Crazy that people like you seem to think that bringing Hillary Clinton into the conversation counts as a defense.

The two-party fever syndrome.

You would think that the CIA/NSA has a team whose job is to try and identify their own people using just public information. Like white hat penetration testers to ensure you spot weaknesses in your own processes/systems before the enemy does. Or at least have a new team try it out once a year so you have a variety of different approaches tried.

For anyone who wants to learn more about Angleton and the destructive effect his paranoia had on the CIA, I strongly recommend "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner. Gripping stuff, with lots of primary source material and high-level interviews.

> What Totrov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas.

Terrible. That's a lot of signal.

False positives probably aren't a huge concern over in Putinville

not at all related - but this post reminded me of the movie "Burn After Reading" :) J K Simmons plays a hilarious [deadpan] CIA officer ..his character's responses to the situations that arise seem both hilarious and on point.

Interesting read!

With the digitization of data, it's hopefully easier to create a digital trail but I was wondering how they would handle this in terms of a paper trail, especially because a lot of things might need to be backdated.

Also, wouldn't other employees in the embassy also know based on a similar pattern or the fact that this person abides by a different set of rules on a day to day basis?

It was understood that official cover agents were known to the Soviets. The official cover was just a fig leaf on both sides. Phil Agee was publishing names of official cover agents in his newsletter for God's sake. The questions were about how NOCs were compromised, and many of them were by double agents -- Ames, Hansen, etc

If I were head of the CIA, I would ask my counterpart at the FBI to use their counterintelligence skills to try and do exactly what the KGB did to identify my agents.

I find it pretty hard to believe nobody did exactly that, or some other version of the same.

Large organizations often don't work this way.

> Experts do something that seems obviously wrong/fixable

This is always cause for serious re-examination. If I were a betting man I'd assign probabilities something like

15% CIA is incompetent 85% Theres no reason to care if these agents are exposed/identified as their work does not require non-identification by state level actors.

CIA should have sought out the information theorists at NSA for advice.

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