Everything we know about spies is wrong
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> If she wants to know something specific, but doesn’t want people to notice her asking questions, she should simply make incorrect statements while in the company of experts. Her companions will correct her, especially if they’re men.
Ask them about the story with some facts wrong. If they don't correct you, the story is probably false and they are just confirming anything.
And even among supported devices, some had better drivers (currently, or imminently), and some hardware itself was buggier than others.
I had access to some kernel developers, but they didn't have time for people's FAQs about current device compatibility.
So what I really did do, at least once, was to narrow down the options on my own, and then (lying) mention, in the enthusiastic manner that people did, that I'd just ordered such-and-such device for Linux.
As you'd guess, but it was still impressive to see happen for real, suddenly there were a number of experts telling me what I should've bought instead.
Question answered. I then admitted my deceit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham's_L...
Observe the importance of phrasing. If this had been put as "men enjoy sharing knowledge, while women are content to let others wallow in ignorance and error", it would have ruffled a great many more feathers.
("X is more likely to correct you" can obviously also have a negatively charged interpretation, which I'm leaving as an exercise to the reader)
Correcting typos when everyone can see what was supposed to be there may be pedantic as it serves no communication value, but correcting facts?
My sisters-in-law speak because, if their jaws stop moving for a few minutes, they will suffocate and die. Persiflage is uttered that has no bearing on anything else said.
Almost, but not quite. She had royal blood on both sides of her father's family:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan
Not that this takes away anything from what you wrote, I just happened to be in one of my pedantic moods :)
I recognize only one sovereign:...The Burger King
Bad turn of phrase, I guess.
If you're interested in it, they also did a season on Duško Popov [2] (supposedly the spy that was the inspiration for 007), and one on Aimen_Dean who was an MI6 spy in Al-Qaeda, which includes an interview with him at the end.
[1] https://wondery.com/shows/the-spy-who/season/3/
For a (hopefully entertaining) rundown of her exploits, you can watch this 22m video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdGS5ia2OQ
There's plenty of people who would love to watch.
But instead of looking to really history that actually happened, we get the BF5 trailer fake history nonsense
Also the time when the manager of a supermarket (who looked like an FBI agent from a 1970s movie) thought I was shoplifting (I was going the wrong direction and did look scruffy and had a big bag with an open top) and followed me out holding a clipboard that I'm sure he would have whacked me with and said it was an accident if I'd given him any trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-jtYPHftfY
When GRU defector Viktor Suvorov was in training, he was told, "This is what a spy looks like:" (shifty man in fedora with his collar turned up) "You are not allowed to look like this."
Elsewhere on the Möbius loop lies the madcap 2009-2024 animated series Archer, with a string of award nominations and blink-and-you-will-miss-it references, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486217/
The 2014-2017 series Turn dramatized New York farmers and shopkeepers who comprised the first US spy ring, including Benedict Arnold storyline, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543328/
He didn't. There were other hostages. Not to mention the captagon warehouses. Or the Syrian intelligence network.
But what can you do when their minds are made up and they don't want to listen?
All info vetted by retired CIA, btw.
It's naive to think that any mass entertainment portrayal of intelligence agencies gives any real idea of how these agencies really function and what kind of work they actually do.
(Spoiler Alert)
At the end, there's mural or placard that says something like: Most exhibits in this museum are here because of failure. The best spies are the ones you never hear of.
You could also go south of DC about 30 minutes to Warrenton, where the cold war museum is. It's also free and run bY Francis Gary Powers Jr.
The Spy Museum has better flashy interactive exhibits for kids, but underneath all of the sound and light has a _very_ impressive collection. The National Cryptologic Museum is, as one might expect, more focused on the cryptography side of things as opposed to the more general spycraft collection in both the Spy Museum and the CIA's museum, and is a better one if you're particularly interested in ciphers and codebreaking. The Spy Museum & CIA museum have more exhibits of hidden microphones, weapons, communication devices, etc.
The German Spy Museum (Deutsches Spionage Museum) in Berlin is also quite good and also good for kids. It is, unsurprisingly, particularly deep in Stasi-related materials. They have a fascinating exhibit of a car whose door had been filled with infrared lights for taking covert nighttime photographs, at really mindblowing cost.
Also note that the NSA's collection has an online portal: https://5099.sydneyplus.com/final/Portal/Default.aspx?lang=e....
And the CIA Museum's collection is partly online: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/
(Sorry. I don't know how we became spy museum fans but the kids adore them. :-)
These days, online mapping and Streetview snapshots could be exhibited in a museum of street surveillance.
https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-feature...
Doing X for fun and profit Everything we knew about X is wrong I did X for $timespan and Y happened
I wonder about the practical reason this occurs but I suspect the reality for a given individual could range from being an impatient reader to encountering a poorly-written article. I also wonder how the perception would differ (not trying to start a debate, just noting a thought) if the title here included the "Why" from the title there since, at least in this case, the article does a decent job of answering the question: they don't want to appear as spies.
It's always clickbait. If the title was your suggestion, someone else would say it's clickbait because spies are somewhat like the movies.
Neither James Bond nor Jason Bourne were really "ripped hunks." Maybe an argument could be made for Daniel Craig, but really most Bonds and Bourne were just kind of handsome, charming men who knew their way around a gun.
And yet, in the 1940s at least, the Soviets were absolutely looting the Americans. During the lend-lease program between the US and Russia, planes were flown out of Montana to the USSR. US military officers recalled Soviets flying dozens of large briefcases on each flight. Once, a US officer inspected those briefcases and found detailed factory schematics, product and process diagrams and plans, reels and reels of detailed photographs of machinery and parts, and classified documents on the R&D of uranium enrichment. Apparently, in light of this discovery of massive industrial theft, the U.S. took no action.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/s...
Another interesting one is "The Nazis Next Door" about the US recruitment of ex-Nazis after WWII as spies in the growing Cold War, many with records of war crimes, who were resettled in the USA after their overseas service was completed.
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
Incidentally, there's a big difference between a spy and an assassin, and James Bond was not a spy - he was an assassin who was 'licensed to kill'. It's a mistake to conflate these two things, even if they're both managed by the same intelligence agency.
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...
> The school’s first explosives instructor was Bill Cumper, a boisterous character who walked around with his pockets full of bomb parts and “a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette.”
come on. we can acquiesce that people were maybe getting a little crazy with it
Is the relationship between academia, the media and intelligence agencies ongoing?
The CIA calls their field HUMINT people "case officers."[3] They recruit spies, people who are on the inside of something, but rarely spy themselves. That's how it's really done.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
1) Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein - https://archive.org/details/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetween...
2) Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_T...
3) Yuri Bezmenov's lectures (available on Youtube) on "Subversion Model/Psychological Warfare" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov and https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/
Caution: If you go down this rabbit-hole it will seriously alter your perception of "Reality" itself and you can end-up endlessly second-guessing/triple-guessing etc. everything you experience and think about.
Also I’m not familiar with that second link but it gives me major red flags at first glance. There is some ok stuff out there on that topic. One of the darker ones that comes to mind came out of the 80s when Hezbollah kidnapped the CIA station chief in Lebanon and then basically used him as a real life experiment of just how badly can you psychologically torture someone and give them the slowest shittiest death possible I think it was a 15 month process in the end and it’s probably one of if not the most horrifying story I’ve ever heard.
There’s lots of places to get that story but I believe one of the people who lead that torture also wrote a book about it but I’ve not read it personally.
The second book on "Brainwashing" is unfortunately named (not to be confused with an older book of the same name by L.Ron Hubbard of Scientology infamy) but the author's credentials are stellar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Taylor_(biologist) It is not a woo-woo book but a scientific one; the last paragraph in the wikipedia page states;
Peter Knight believes that Taylor sufficiently "argues that there is no need to invoke the notion of brainwashing as a mysterious and fear-inducing explanation as a last resort" – to Taylor, "brainwashing is less scary than people might think because it is in fact not some magical, secret and ultra-efficient technique of thought control" but a "mundane and ubiquitous" neurological phenomenon that can be understood scientifically.
The first book on "Deception" will in a sense set the background since it focuses on deception as fundamental to everything else. This has already been called out in ancient classic texts on statecraft/warfare by Kautilya, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli etc. Example excerpt;
They were a metaphor for a world in which he saw deception as a norm rather than an aberration. It was a world in which intelligence services could be provoked, seduced, lured into false trails, blinded, and turned into unwitting agents—through the same failure to discriminate between real and simulated information.
The reason it is important for the "common man" to learn about these is because many of these techniques are being used against him under the guise of "harmless business" PR/Advertising/Sales/Marketing/Influence etc. and much much worse eg. Nationalism, Religious Fundamentalism etc.
PS: One more book to read (difficult) is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" by Jacques Ellul - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M... Excerpts below;
"Very frequently propaganda is described as a manipulation for the purpose of changing idea or opinions of making individuals 'believe' some idea or fact, and finally of making them adhere to some doctrine—all matters of the mind. It tries to convince, to bring about a decision, to create a firm adherence to some truth. This is a completely wrong line of thinking: to view propaganda as still being what it was in 1850 is to cling to an obsolete concept of man and of the means to influence him; it is to condemn oneself to understand nothing about propaganda. The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to transform an opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief."
Education permits the dissemination of propaganda in that it enables people to consume information. Information is indistinguishable from propaganda in that information is an essential element of propaganda because for propaganda to succeed it must have reference to political or economic reality. Propaganda grafts itself onto an already existing reality through "informed opinion".
... Rocca now switched to a more conditional and hypothetical tone. "Soviet intelligence had demonstrated with the Trust a capacity for future deceptions." He spoke almost proudly of the Soviet adversary, as if he were discussing what a magician had proven he could do in earlier tricks. "It demonstrated it could control double agents, like Yakushev, in foreign countries and over extended periods of time." Yakushev was the classic "dangle" which, in the invisible intelligence war, is someone who, while loyally taking orders from his own intelligence service, feigns disloyalty to his country to attract the attention of the other side,like the bait on a fish hook. The dangle may even pretend to defect—in which case he is called a "dispatched agent." "Soviet intelligence also showed it could orchestrate events over the better part of a decade so as to turn these controlled agents into sources on which the West relied." This "orchestration" involved simulating evidence to make a fake underground credible ...
I’m obviously familiar with what a dangle is and how it works both in theory and in practice but if you’re trying to imply Barsky was somehow a dangle I wouldn’t politely say you don’t know what you’re talking about at all.
I’m not trying to give you a hard time about this but if you have some kind of compelling evidence beyond what you’ve read in a single book I’d ask you to share it.
To suggest Barsky is somehow suspect is really at odds with not only all of the details of his story and his eventual arrest but also the entire professional community on the subject. It’s just not true.
The individual episodes like Jack Barsky etc. are not useful unless you have a bigger puzzle into which you can slot in these episodes to arrive at a bigger more complete and more meaningful picture. That was what i was hinting at above.
You can believe whatever you want but then it is up to you to figure out how closely your "beliefs" themselves are real well before you use them to "interpret" the "Real World".
I’m not looking to debate you on this one, I was pointing out that I happen to know with an incredibly high level of confidence that what you are saying isn’t correct.
The resources i have listed are for the general public to get an idea of how to think about the overall subject domain and not some rah-rah storybook. People who study strategy/tactics/politics/psychology/warfare/operant conditioning etc. will understand what i am driving at while the others can ignore it as they please.
One is from a straight up fraud.
Another is based on an series of interviews with the man who is widely known as the single worst leader the CIA has ever had because he was so paranoid and ever since they got rid of him they have spent every moment warning against ever having another person like him in a leadership position again.
The other I don’t know but seems to be really aligned with this same ultra paranoid worldview but has nothing to do with actual professionals.
The book authors i have quoted are established academics/intellectuals/investigative journalists (i.e. the people who study “strategy/tactics/politics/psychology/warfare/operant conditioning etc” for a living) which you don't want to seem to accept thus reflecting quite badly on your grasp/understanding of the subject domain (assuming there is anything at all there in the first place). I can do no more than suggest education followed by introspection as a possible cure.
The first season it's fun to watch and wrestle with whether you would want to be an agent or not. (Eventually I decided I would love to be an agent — but not the high-profile kind — I would want to be the Mémé or Pépé characters from the series — or one of the techies that work in the office).
https://theplaylist.net/joe-wright-to-direct-the-department-...
there are tons of books and TV shows about real-life espionage, including by people who went through the CIA's training course.
It seems to me, at least in pre-computer times, that a regular book would work fairly well as a one-time pad. Especially something widely available, innocuous, and very long, like a bible. You'd probably want to add something like an offset, and a rule to skip letters (e.g. use every 3rd letter) so there are no real words to provide predictability. Guessing the book, offset, and skip rule would be a massive space- on the order of billions of possibilities. With modern computers of course, this method would be easy to crack.
Part of the appeal of a real one-time pad is that no previous communications can be deciphered again, even by the agents themselves.
You also don't have to send an encoded message in every letter. If you have plenty of plaintext correspondence with a distant friend, and only some of it has any special meaning, then it will be less suspicious in the first place.
The whole idea is to blend in and not attract surveillance in the first place. Your counter-argument is based on the premise that blending in has already failed, in which case you're right - the game is up and the spy is compromised. Worse, it's possible to intentionally feed them bad information without them knowing (which happened multiple times in WWII). But this entire article (and the book it discusses) is about preventing that entirely.
Nevertheless, using text extracted from a book for scrambling the message has one of the two characteristics of the one-time pad, it is non-periodic.
Such a substitution cipher with a non-periodic key was called a running-key cipher and it is the precursor of the one-time pad.
Running-key ciphers had been used starting from the second half of the 19th century up to the end of the first World War.
Until the end of WWI, everybody believed that it is impossible to decipher any message encrypted with a running key (i.e. non-periodic key). This belief has been proven to be false by William F. Friedman, who has succeeded in 1918, during the final months of the war, to decipher some messages that had used running-key ciphers extracted from books, even if he had no idea which were those books.
At the end of 1918,the ATT engineers Gilbert Sandford Vernam & Lyman F. Morehouse have invented the kind of running-key cipher which is now named binary additive synchronous stream cipher, where the enciphering & deciphering are done by a modulo-2 additive combiner (a.k.a. a XOR gate) of the plaintext symbol stream with 1 or more encryption mask symbol streams. The machine designed by Vernam and Morehouse mechanized the tedious operations of encryption and decryption, which became as easy as sending a message through any teletype.
While Vernam and Morehouse were aware in 1918 that the encryption key must be non-periodic, they were not aware of the classified work of William F. Friedman, which had been done a few months earlier, so they did not know that the key stream must be random. They have learned about this additional condition some time between 1918 and 1926. In February 1926, Vernam has published one of the most important articles in the history of cryptology, where the one-time pad has been described for the first time in the non-classified literature ("one-time pad" is a much later term, probably coined by the British; Shannon has used "Vernam cipher" for the one-time pad, but Vernam was not its inventor, but only the one who made it public).
There has been a certain Frank Miller, who has described a one-time pad already in 1882, in an obscure publication. Nevertheless, he had given no explanation for his suggestion to use a random key stream, so it is more likely that this was just a lucky guess and he had no understanding about whether the randomness is a necessary condition for the cipher to be unbreakable, besides the non-periodicity. Moreover, his publication had been completely unnoticed and forgotten, so it had no influence on the development of cryptography.
It is most likely that William F. Friedman is the one who has invented the one-time pad, because he was the one who has deciphered the running-key ciphers that were previously believed to be unbreakable and his cryptanalysis had been based precisely on exploiting the fact that the running key was not random, even if it was not periodic. So since the middle of 1918 he was perfectly aware that the only case when his method does not work is when the running key is both non-periodic and random.
There have been several books where the authors have guessed that perhaps Joseph Mauborgne, who at that time was the boss of William F. Friedman, has been the inventor of the one-time pad. I do not agree with this supposition, because there exists absolutely no evidence supporting it and because it makes no sense.
The one-time pad was a trivial consequence of the cryptanalysis work of William F. Friedman and he was a much better cryptologist than his boss. It is extremely unlikely that Friedman had not understood the consequences of his own work and that he would have needed some additional idea from his boss. Friedman has written classified reports about his work for his boss and he must also have informed Mauborgne that the traditional running-key ciphers are no longer secure and they must be replaced with ciphers that use a non-periodic and random key.
The military were interested in the Vernam-Morehouse encryption machines, so Mauborgne was in touch with the ATT engineers and he had been providing some consultancy for them. He may be the one who has informed Vernam about the one-time pad. However, there has been a published interview with Mauborgne, where he does not mention this.
Some time later, around 1924, so a couple of years before the 1926 publication of the one-time pad, Friedman has also been in contact with Vernam and other ATT engineers and he has invented a modification of the Vernam-Morehouse encryption machine that was able to generate a pseudo-random key stream with improved randomness instead of the key-stream with a very long period that was generated by the original Vernam-Morehouse machine.
I believe that most likely during this collaboration with Friedman around 1924 is when Vernam has learned about the correct requirements for a one-time pad, as Friedman must have explained to him why the modifications invented by Friedman are necessary to improve the encryption machine.
Yes, a book is not a one time pad, but in practice is probably more practical for a real spy in historical times, and probably "good enough." But the possibility of retroactively breaking all past communications if your book is seized is a huge problem. However, simply getting caught with a one time pad would essentially prove you were a spy. Nowadays of course, it is both easier to digitally conceal onetime data, e.g. on a regular phone, and easier to brute force a book based cipher, especially if you have access to large digital book archives.
On a completely different note, my favorite fictional spy, Bernard Sampson, says something like this (can't find the exact quote) "experienced agents are like nervous old ladies - always worrying about everything."
Essentially that "brave" agents are either inexperienced or dead. Sampson is able to do things like shoot but overall he feels its a sign of incompetence if it becomes necessary.
If you haven't already, try the "Game, Set, Match" trilogy.