Rules of Spycraft (2009) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Rules of Spycraft (2009) [pdf]

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170 pointsTomte62 comments

For the sake of argument, I'll say, "spies aren't cool."

Interestingly, about half of the "tips," Dulles writes are standard management training these days. The spy business as described is about using others as instruments, and I would argue most flat organizations are just a bunch of bored managers trying to get leverage over one another using similar tactics.

Trouble I have with the whole spy genre is it is the exaltation of deceptive people, which by most standards means objectively terrible.

The people I've met in the past who I pinned as "spies," seemed fun and intelligent, yet predictable and compromised. They were creatures of their institutions and just not free people, and on a basic level, they got off on betraying others. That inner smallness was what I think made them suitable for that job, and the remnants of admirable qualities that made some of them leave.

The WWII and cold war era seems romantic, but now it appears mostly what spies do is manage their domestic political situation as to maintain a status quo of an increasingly unpopular elite, who have more in common with their international counterparts than the citizens they ostensibly protect. Examples of states with advanced espionage operations can also be described as "kakistocracies," where people are promoted to senior roles for their ability to abuse and deceive. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy)

Are spies necessary? Sure, but only for a very narrow military counter intelligence mission, and any creep beyond that should be seen as a social ill.

> exaltation of deceptive people

The most exalted celebrities on the planet are actors, i.e. professional liars. Spies at least risk their life, and I bet they have to actually improvise more often.

I would argue there are more actors who do their own stunts than spies who risk their own lives (albeit I can't comment on those of others). It seems closer to being a reporter, where you cultivate sources and relationships for access to information and better sources. Very similar personality type, hence why they recruit people with marketing and PR backgrounds, where instead of being earnest and civic minded or ideological like a reporter, they apply those same journalistic skills strategically.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as lying when both involved parties are aware of it. Escapism isn't the same as deception, as one entails a person willfully relinquishing reality and the other entails a person subversively creating a false reality for another.

On screen, both sides realize the lie. But being a modern actor is just as much about life off screen. Celeb culture, starting with stage names, is all about manipulating how people percieve your realworld persona. The people reading the celeb websites really do believe the lies.

The point of The Great Game, the Cold War, was to keep the game going. Either the game ended because everyone became friends or perhaps one side folded peacefully, or there was a Third World War. So yeah the point was, at least in part, to maintain the status quo, since that meant nukes were in silos.

I'm with N. Taleb on the "suppressed volatility multiplies danger," principle.

(some here, goog: taleb suppressed volatility, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/nassim-nicholas-t...)

My understanding is that a) Dulles was somewhat of a manic depressive nutjob (with a number of screwups in Europe and the Middle East) that Eisenhower could barely stand most of the time...he kept him around to keep his brother and Sec State, John Foster Dulles happy. b) most of the "intelligence" these days seem to be signals/electronic intelligence; human intelligence still plays a role but in more specific circumstances.

just chiming in to say you couldnt be more wrong about everything. Carry on

At least this is per Evan Thomas' biography on Ike. I am sure the younger Dulles has his supporters

the last bit

For reasons I can’t quite remember, in the late 90s I once had a drink at an army club in London. I’m not very army at all, so it was not somewhere I’d expect to go as a rule. My overriding memory was an old paratrooper at the bar telling me in a very old-fashioned and serious voice, “never be a spy”. I must have not been 20 at the time, and it seemed like very good advice.

That makes sense, given that people who would be paratroopers and people who would be spooks are very different types of people (generally).

Doesn't say much about the profession of espionage/intelligence broadly though.

And did he mean a spy or an intelligence officer. And remember that the more traditional army/navy types look down on intelligence.

I mean how nitpicky do we need to be here because spy isn't a real title.

Just HUMINTers? Or are SIGINTers and GEOINTers also spies? Pick from the list:

Paramilitary Operator, Non-Official Cover Agent, Clandestine Case Officer, Technical Operations Officer, Case Agent, Operations Officer, Desk Officer, Analyst, Imagery Analyst, Counterintelligence Officer, Field Officer, Military Intelligence Analyst, Linguist, Airborne Linguist, Reconnaissance Pilot etc...

That’s quite an exciting list of job titles. Although follow the advice of the old fellow in the bar, who could quite well have served during the war: “never be a spy...”.

That said there was a CIA job ad in the Economist a few months back, looking for “adventurers, travelers and entrepreneurs” (or similar). Far more romantic sounding than “full stack developer”...

I knew a girl in college who interviewed with the CIA but didn't get the job. I was so happy then and even happier now, though I haven't seen her for over 30 years. She was very pretty, Irish, Catholic, so fit the mold for the CIA. They are vile people though. The paratrooper was right.

Asking for a "full stack son of a bitch" would be a bit too direct.

the paratrooper probably meant anything undercover, analyst should be fine. anything where your country can abandon you/deny you work for them, for the greater good.

>And remember that the more traditional army/navy types look down on intelligence.

Those people are ignorant of the fundamental principles of modern warfare, then.

I doubt very much anyone but some irrelevant dinosaurs are dismissive of intelligence and the decision superiority that it enables.

> Doesn't say much about the profession of espionage/intelligence broadly though.

Espionage/intelligence is a very thankless and at times very depressing job, there's not that much glamour into it, I'd say the state of mind of the people involved in such a field are better described by John le Carré's books than by Ian Fleming's books or even by what it's written in the post linked to by the OP.

I'm from a country located on the East side of a Wall and I used to have an uncle (my grandpa's brother) who used to be an "embassy attaché" in East Berlin in the mid '50s (there's where his daughter, my aunt, was born). In other words: he was a spy. He didn't do anything fanciful like you can see in the movies, afaik he didn't wear any disguises nor did he do anything "spy-ish" as described in Dulles's document because he wasn't a Yale graduate (he used to be a boot-maker's apprentice when the communists came to power), the only "spy"-worthy thing that he did was to be a driver for his boss when one day they crossed into West Berlin (the Wall hadn't been built at that time). Down there they both met with a dissident from our country who had escaped when the Soviets had come "to liberate" us just after WW2.

My uncle's boss had first "maimed" said dissident back in Istanbul by promising him a business opportunity which (the boss said) they should have continued talking about in West Berlin. Said dissident was trustful enough, so that he decided to meet with my uncle and my uncle's boss in West Berlin. I'm not sure of the exact circumstances but at some point during said meeting my uncle and his boss immobilized the dissident and "I just pushed him in the car's trunk", as my uncle told my father a couple of decades after the event. After that my uncle drove the car through the checkpoints back into East Berlin, the dissident hidden in the trunk and then sent packing back to our country (he wasn't killed, after a couple of years he even got back his former job as a university professor, but I suppose the first years after his "forced repatriation" weren't the best for him).

So, nothing fancy about it at all, just some minor deceit and then pushing someone into a car's trunk. After this whole affair my uncle got pretty high up in my country's spy ranks, at some point he was the chief of some foreign intelligence Directorate (like I told you, this is more like John le Carré's books than Ian Fleming's), he even received his nomenklatura house, nothing big or shiny, just something that would keep all the people (and their families) on which the system depended physically close to the local dictator. All was relatively well until at some point in the late '70s the big boss of my country's foreign intelligence services decided to defect to the Americans. Not long after that my uncle was found hung-up in his nomenklatura house. Like I said, a very thankless job (at least his wife, my aunt, a salt-of-the-earth type of lady, got to keep the house).

And this story involving my uncle happened when this whole spy thing still had something like an ideological tinge to it, when the East vs West thing was not about money or hidden off-shore accounts but about who was right when it came to the future of the human condition (Marx vs Adam Smith, to use a lousy metaphor). My grandpa's generation (and that includes his brother, my spy uncle) really believed that the communists were right and the capitalists were wrong and were exploiting the normal people. Nowadays (and I think it has been that way since about the late '70s - early '80s, again, John le Carré's books really capture this transition really well) the spy thing is almost all about getting an economic advantage over your "adversary", there's no ideology, there's no perceived right and wrong, it's just a fight over some resources (protecting/stealing IP, some things that need to be dug out from somewhere in Africa etc etc). Which is to say that the spy job has become even more sinister.

Well said, and that story is very similar to a lot of people's stories who are part of the "diplomatic" spy corps.

There certainly are exciting parts, depending on your job, but generally speaking those end up being around the edges and rare.

“Never be a spy...” :)

Interesting story. Thank you for sharing.

It isn't the "embassy attaché" (official cover) spies who are alleged to be having the cinematic adventures, but non-official cover agents and their in-country sources/freelancers. Of course this part of a spy agency is much smaller and more secretive than the vast army of bureaucrats you are more likely to hear from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-official_cover

>It isn't the "embassy attaché" (official cover) spies who are alleged to be having the cinematic adventures

For James Bond style adventures, yes. But there are tons of adventures, cinematic and in books, for embassy attaché style spies as well, from John le Carré's heroes to Berlin Station...

> All was relatively well until at some point in the late '70s the big boss of my country's foreign intelligence services decided to defect to the Americans

Are you Romanian by any chance and is that Pacepa you are talking about? Ever thought about going to CNSAS and try getting any flies they might have had on your uncle? It would be, I think, an interesting bit of family history.

> Are you Romanian by any chance and is that Pacepa you are talking about?

Yeah, it's about Pacepa.

> Ever thought about going to CNSAS and try getting any flies they might have had on your uncle?

My brother suggested that we should give it a try, I might actually do it at some point. In fact, I got the info about my uncle being a Directorate chief later in his career from a "semi-public" CNSAS document that somehow was leaked on the Internet, document which was detailing the hierarchal structure at the top of the Romanian foreign intelligence services in the 1970s (before Pacepa's defection).

The phrase "more John Le Carre than Ian Fleming" can also be found as a quote on this website https://www.sie.ro/viata-in-sie.html under the first testimony. Don't know if this is a frequently used metaphor.

The quote makes sense, but anyone that thinks James Bond is even 1 percent realistic isn't being serious at all.

Obviously _some_ people do believe that is what spies do. I would even venture the majority of people believe that. The people that write in these threads on HN are more in the know than most of the public, because they had some interest/curiosity about them. Most of the public lack knowledge about these institutions and have a severely distorted image of what they do.

I would guess, some of the commenters in the thread had some brushes with intelligence agencies. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, you're answering to a throwaway. What better place to talk with people about your job you can't talk with anybody than an anonymous online medium where smart people congregate?

Never think like a spy. Never think of other people just as assets, constantly scanning for flaws and weakness to roll them "downhill", think about all the people you know - your family, your spouse, your kids, your neighbors as individuals you could get to do anything, so entangled in lies and corruption. Never be a spy. Because once you are a spy, can can never stop being one.

It reminds me of "A most wanted man", a movie I would strongly recommend if the subject interests you (I cannot recommend the book since I have not read it yet).

obviously no one can comment here without drawing undue attention to their cover. awkward.

It's not an article that lends itself well to bike shedding, so most HNers have little to comment.

Never stopped them before.

Life, uh, finds a way.

I like how a domain can be contained by set of rules. You look at these, and you look around between the lines what they speak to and it's a complicated shape but one you can see. Very cool to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Dulles

Ok, what is the origin of this document? It looks like a pdf copy of an article, but it reads like a poor ocr.

Check out #54.

Wouldn't surprise me if this document is a victim of one of those "compressing scanners". They reuse glyphs to save bytes.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_m...

As the lead says, it was a rough never-published draft, typed by Dulles. Found in his papers. And later published verbatim in Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies.

Interesting to see how well most of these have stood the test of time or have even become more forceful because of it (17 for instance).

Wonder how the writer would have written these today, what would be changed, left out or added.

Tradecraft hasn't changed much. It has been fairly well tested. Operational security and information security have not changed much... They have become more difficult with cell-phones and small internet connected devices.

I think another big difference and a subject that probably would be included in a redo is understanding how all of the modern data generating systems can reveal covert activity through the analysis of metadata and how to "hide in the noise" of this.

The geospatial correlation of burner phone to actual identity if one does not practice good sanitation as far as locational security when accessing wireless networks as an example.

I treat my cellphone as though I have an always-on homing beacon on me that can not be trusted to be off even when it says it is off. And that's not even a smartphone, so I can still remove the battery if I want to. Now throw ANPR, face recognition, cheap DNA synthesis, ubiquitous video surveillance, public transport ID cards and a some more modern goodies into the mix and it takes real work just to move from 'A' to 'B' without leaving a trail a mile wide.

I’m going to presume you’re not conducting illegal activity such that you’re worried about getting caught. Given that presumption, what risks are you trying to mitigate by treating your cell phone as you describe?

Knowing what companies are on the market. My cell phone location would pretty much tell you who is being invested in or about to be sold. That could really cause trouble.

if a party was going to go to the trouble of getting access to your phone geo data, couldn’t they just as easily put a tail on you?

I don't think that would be a strategy that would work for very long, and besides that, why make it easy?

Someone you know may be without your knowing and you can be snapped up in the "drag net"...

I live in a country which retains phone location data for 2 years and can be warantlessly accessed by hundreds of government agencies down to tiny local councils and has zero oversight. Would love to "mitigate" the risks of that information falling into the wrong hands whether legally accessed or not, sadly it's too much effort so I don't.

William Binney once said in an interview that one could also analyze which pair (or cluster) of cellphones went off together, and then analyze possible rendezvous.

I think one way to circumvent this is to force all participants to keep the cellphones in their offices/homes, and then meet elsewhere at a predetermined time, with no one carrying phones.

As many security professionals often say, it's not about whether I do any illegal activity, it is also about whether someone can "impersonate" me for various crimes like phishing. The less sensitive information people know about you, the safer it is for you.

There is that, but there is also the massive palaver at Gatwick which reveals that the authorities aren’t actually very good with modern tech.

They aren't good. Hence the dragnet approach of collecting all data, and then waiting for Google or some such entity to come up with the research for mining methodology.

They would surely remove the point about not leaving a public phone book open on a hot page.

Probably not. While that rule is becoming dated, it's general form: not leaving hot pages out and exposed, still makes great sense. And there's no reason to rescind the rules, unless they really do become invalidated. It would just be amendments to an already existing and robust practice.

And frankly, there still are places where a phone book is still in use.

As others have said, it would probably be more difficult today to hide. Things like access to mass collected information from cameras (traffic, security, etc), cell phone location logs, face recognition, passport databases being leaked etc.

The OPM hack highlighted how opponents will attack weakest points such as the database of background check data. Now supposedly the Chinese know the detailed backgrounds, the secrets, even biometrics of millions of US agents.

The Russian passport database was leaked, which allow independent investigators to track down and prove that the Skripal assassins were GRU officers. It was based on special markings in the database and the sequential passport numbers:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/10/09/ful...

It was further confirmed by researches looking through tons of photos posted on the wall of Russian military academies to find Chepiga - one of the assassins:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/10/02/ana...

What's interesting here is that the exposure is not only to other state actors (who will presumably keep it secret) but also to these independent researchers, and leakers (Snowden), who don't mind laying it out for the whole world to see.

The resolution and zoom capabilities is absolutely astounding of those little traffic cameras we see.

The "Red Sparrow" series was written by a former CIA operative. There are some good books by ex-CIA people. They get censored somewhat, but the general concepts come through.

The field people in HUMINT are called "case officers". Their job is to recruit and manage spies, not spy themselves. It's a strange combination of sales, human resources, and counseling. Dulles was from that world.

The big difference today is that the targets are smaller.

Back in the Cold War era, I worked for a company that built stuff for the three-letter agencies. They were all focused on the USSR; anything else was almost a spare time activity. It was a huge culture shock to the intelligence community when the USSR went down. First there was a big downsizing in intel. Then all the little players who had been squelched by the superpowers started asserting themselves, and the US intel community struggled to figure out what to do. The agencies had the wrong expertise and capabilities. And the wrong speed. The USSR was a very slow moving opponent. The little players moved much faster.

During the Cold War, huge efforts were put into finding out very general things about what the Soviet Union was doing - how many bombers, how many missiles, where the air bases were. Big attack surface. Today, it's trying to find some tiny terrorist group and getting someone to talk.

Dulle's declassified report from the late 1940s on how to fix the CIA is also good reading. The report was referenced in Legacy of Ashes... A book that takes a very dim view on the agency: basically a bunch of ivy Leaguers trying to shape world events with disastrous consequences...

It's easier than ever for people to moonlight as a spy and get away with it. You'll probably only get caught if your adversary has the means and motivation to counter.

Most people in civilian/domestic situations are unable to defend themselves. Thus, amateurs get away with spying more easily. They can work alone more easily and have a wider variety of commodity spying tools.

Comment was ghosted, comment seems like a valid viewpoint:

"It's easier than ever for people to moonlight as a spy and get away with it. You'll probably only get caught if your adversary has the means and motivation to counter. Most people in civilian/domestic situations are unable to defend themselves".

edit: HN has gone down the toilet progressively for the past 8 years. There's no reason the comment (or my resurrection of it) should be downvoted or ghosted.

The other account was "bbllbves" and it shows "1 point" but a moderator 'saw to it' that the comment disappeared silently. If it were a low-value or troll comment, then maybe that would be justified.

We banned you for using multiple accounts to post in the same threads. If you'd please stop doing that, we'd be grateful.

"Dead" means that the account has been banned. "Flagged" means that the comment has been downvoted.

Dead comments are dead regardless of content. I believe they may be vouched, though that takes some doing.

Otherwise, what dang said.

(I frequently look at dead/flagged comments and have sussed out a fair bit of HN's operative rules. Try to heed by the guidelines and moderator advice. You'll find youself more able to contribute productively to the discussion.)

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