8 ms·

The KGB’s success identifying CIA agents in the field

199 points by cpete 11y ago

philsalesses 11y ago
I wonder if this pattern could still be applied. For a NOC they'll setup a shell corporation called "Southern Electronics Corporation, LLC" or some other discrete sounding name and have a real website, office address and phone number actually manned, but surely they register the corporations, domains, phone numbers at the same place, staff the phones with the same voices... Makes me wonder if they fixed the problem or if it's just hidden one level deeper.
- edwhitesell 11y ago
  There are a lot of services which will act as the Registered Agent for an LLC or corporation. Those can have hundreds of corporations listed at their mailing address with the same phone number. It wouldn't be too difficult to put a few NOC shell corps into the buckets already existing legit businesses.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  It is absolutely applicable. In fact this is pretty much how the whole "extraordinary renditions" program was (fairly easily) unravelled by journalists. Dummy ("brass-plaque") corporations, recycled aircraft registrations, special landing permits at military airports... just a matter of connecting the dots, basically.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Old school investigative journalism, in other words.
- scintill76 11y ago
  Some civilians and journalists uncovered FBI spy planes by correlating generic, formulaic fake company names and shared addresses: https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillance https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillan...
EdwardCoffin 11y ago
> Any Soviet citizen had an intimate acquaintance with how bureaucracies function This makes me wonder whether there is any literature out of the Soviet Union on topics like this, kind of like how the U.S. produced works like Dale Carnegie's How to make friends and influence people.
- mfisher87 11y ago
  I'm trying to decipher the implication. Is it that Americans have a unique understanding of friendship and influence?
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
    It's that 'Winning Friends and Influencing People' was a gateway to success, and an activity the vast majority of the population was trying to be successful at. Whereas a soviet book on navigating bureaucracy would serve the same role.
    - EdwardCoffin 11y ago
      Thanks yes, that is pretty much what I meant.
  - zombees 11y ago
    "How to make friends and influence people" was actually written more from a sales perspective. The topics usually boil down to efficiently establishing trust with lots of people. While I'm not sure this is really what's being asked, it does actually make a little sense in a capitalist vs communist sort of way.
- p1esk 11y ago
  Russian bureaucracy goes back centuries. I don't think that the way things were handled was fundamentally different in 1970 from what it was in 1870. For literature on the topic look for the classics: Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ilf and Petrov are good ones. The rules are simple: you give bribes, in a form of money, goods, or favors. If you're on the receiving end of a bribe, make sure you share with relevant people. Other than that, the methods described in Dale Carnegie books work just as well in Russia as in America.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known by the host country intelligence services. This is largely because you generally only take so much risk with ongoing collection efforts, for example going through customs and attending official diplomatic functions (dinners etc...) under status is typical and gives the locals a record. What they do in their "off time" is the real collection work, but even then their chance of gaining access to well placed contacts that have very specialized intelligence is low. The majority of officers know this, and it ends up being a political dance, where if someone gets too risky with their collection they get tagged and persona-non-grata'd. The real question here is why the Soviets decided at that time to burn the officers that it knew about - because that turns into a tit-for-tat across waters that eats up resources and really strains diplomatic relations. I think the answer is very clear in that it was the last gasp of a dying system, so they were doing what they could to purge and wrest power. Nothing particularly shocking or complicated here if you know how the system works.
- EdwardCoffin 11y ago
  > A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known by the host country intelligence services. Do you have a citation that would support this?
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Nope, that's why it's a "dirty little secret."
    - EdwardCoffin 11y ago
      ... so how do you know, and why should I believe you?
josu 11y ago
The pattern isn't described until the second to last paragraph. I'll just c&p: >Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.
unics 11y ago
This proves American Intelligence is an oxymoron.
neurotech1 11y ago
The problem today is that with LinkedIn and Facebook, some CIA personnel are stupid enough to actually mention their status with the Agency, or are friends/connections with known CIA Analysts etc. who do mention their status. NSA Contractors sometimes mention classified codenames in their LinkedIn page. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/discovering-names-secret-nsa-surveillance-programs-via-linkedin.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/disco...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Are they actually NSA contractors, or is this a honeytrap?
- gherkin0 11y ago
  That seems like something that competent counterintelligence people should be monitoring and shutting down. Hell, they probably should have unit in their new employee orientation covering this: "Do not list your occupation as 'Spy'" on LinkedIn.
  - ep103 11y ago
    I kinda wanna put spy on my linkedin page now
    - GauntletWizard 11y ago
      Honestly, the CIA should want you to too. The more randos listing fake intelligence activities that can't be easily discounted, the more time russian counterintelligence has to spend chasing down false leads.
      - gherkin0 11y ago
        > time russian counterintelligence has to spend chasing down false leads. But don't do it if you ever plan on actually traveling to Russia or China. IIRC, they've held innocent Westerners in the past on suspicions of espionage.
migsvult 11y ago
two thoughts 1. In the 70's and the 80's our Soviet counter-intel was fairly compromised. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hassan are just the biggest examples. That probably does a better job explaining a Soviet CI advantage than 'we looked at the things agents did and looked for correlations.' I mean, every agency has been doing that forever. 2. There are a number of different types of cover, like the article points out. Diplomatic cover is the 'laziest' and for some (usually very low lever or very high level) people it's not really meant to fool anyone. There's private sector cover, with dummy corps and rented office buildings, and genuine P&L sheets. Private sector cover can be extremely clandestine, and extremely sophisticated. As AndrewKemendo points out, the things that this article points out are maybe not very impressive at all.
- obrero 11y ago
  Hanssen was posting stories to Usenet's alt.sex.stories in the late 1990s, stories of voyeurism about his wife ( https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/lI68TqLeJ0cJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/... ). He can't be said to have been keeping the lowest of profiles.

199 points by cpete 11y ago

I wonder if this pattern could still be applied. For a NOC they'll setup a shell corporation called "Southern Electronics Corporation, LLC" or some other discrete sounding name and have a real website, office address and phone number actually manned, but surely they register the corporations, domains, phone numbers at the same place, staff the phones with the same voices... Makes me wonder if they fixed the problem or if it's just hidden one level deeper.

edwhitesell 11y ago
There are a lot of services which will act as the Registered Agent for an LLC or corporation. Those can have hundreds of corporations listed at their mailing address with the same phone number. It wouldn't be too difficult to put a few NOC shell corps into the buckets already existing legit businesses.
kafkaesq 11y ago
It is absolutely applicable. In fact this is pretty much how the whole "extraordinary renditions" program was (fairly easily) unravelled by journalists. Dummy ("brass-plaque") corporations, recycled aircraft registrations, special landing permits at military airports... just a matter of connecting the dots, basically.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Old school investigative journalism, in other words.
scintill76 11y ago
Some civilians and journalists uncovered FBI spy planes by correlating generic, formulaic fake company names and shared addresses: https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillance https://storify.com/jjwiseman/tracking-fbi-aerial-surveillan...

EdwardCoffin 11y ago

> Any Soviet citizen had an intimate acquaintance with how bureaucracies function This makes me wonder whether there is any literature out of the Soviet Union on topics like this, kind of like how the U.S. produced works like Dale Carnegie's How to make friends and influence people.

mfisher87 11y ago
I'm trying to decipher the implication. Is it that Americans have a unique understanding of friendship and influence?
- GauntletWizard 11y ago
  It's that 'Winning Friends and Influencing People' was a gateway to success, and an activity the vast majority of the population was trying to be successful at. Whereas a soviet book on navigating bureaucracy would serve the same role.
  - EdwardCoffin 11y ago
    Thanks yes, that is pretty much what I meant.
- zombees 11y ago
  "How to make friends and influence people" was actually written more from a sales perspective. The topics usually boil down to efficiently establishing trust with lots of people. While I'm not sure this is really what's being asked, it does actually make a little sense in a capitalist vs communist sort of way.
p1esk 11y ago
Russian bureaucracy goes back centuries. I don't think that the way things were handled was fundamentally different in 1970 from what it was in 1870. For literature on the topic look for the classics: Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ilf and Petrov are good ones. The rules are simple: you give bribes, in a form of money, goods, or favors. If you're on the receiving end of a bribe, make sure you share with relevant people. Other than that, the methods described in Dale Carnegie books work just as well in Russia as in America.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known by the host country intelligence services. This is largely because you generally only take so much risk with ongoing collection efforts, for example going through customs and attending official diplomatic functions (dinners etc...) under status is typical and gives the locals a record. What they do in their "off time" is the real collection work, but even then their chance of gaining access to well placed contacts that have very specialized intelligence is low. The majority of officers know this, and it ends up being a political dance, where if someone gets too risky with their collection they get tagged and persona-non-grata'd. The real question here is why the Soviets decided at that time to burn the officers that it knew about - because that turns into a tit-for-tat across waters that eats up resources and really strains diplomatic relations. I think the answer is very clear in that it was the last gasp of a dying system, so they were doing what they could to purge and wrest power. Nothing particularly shocking or complicated here if you know how the system works.

EdwardCoffin 11y ago
> A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known by the host country intelligence services. Do you have a citation that would support this?
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Nope, that's why it's a "dirty little secret."
  - EdwardCoffin 11y ago
    ... so how do you know, and why should I believe you?

josu 11y ago

The pattern isn't described until the second to last paragraph. I'll just c&p: >Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.

unics 11y ago

This proves American Intelligence is an oxymoron.

neurotech1 11y ago

The problem today is that with LinkedIn and Facebook, some CIA personnel are stupid enough to actually mention their status with the Agency, or are friends/connections with known CIA Analysts etc. who do mention their status. NSA Contractors sometimes mention classified codenames in their LinkedIn page. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/discovering-names-secret-nsa-surveillance-programs-via-linkedin.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/disco...

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Are they actually NSA contractors, or is this a honeytrap?
gherkin0 11y ago
That seems like something that competent counterintelligence people should be monitoring and shutting down. Hell, they probably should have unit in their new employee orientation covering this: "Do not list your occupation as 'Spy'" on LinkedIn.
- ep103 11y ago
  I kinda wanna put spy on my linkedin page now
  - GauntletWizard 11y ago
    Honestly, the CIA should want you to too. The more randos listing fake intelligence activities that can't be easily discounted, the more time russian counterintelligence has to spend chasing down false leads.
    - gherkin0 11y ago
      > time russian counterintelligence has to spend chasing down false leads. But don't do it if you ever plan on actually traveling to Russia or China. IIRC, they've held innocent Westerners in the past on suspicions of espionage.

migsvult 11y ago

two thoughts 1. In the 70's and the 80's our Soviet counter-intel was fairly compromised. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hassan are just the biggest examples. That probably does a better job explaining a Soviet CI advantage than 'we looked at the things agents did and looked for correlations.' I mean, every agency has been doing that forever. 2. There are a number of different types of cover, like the article points out. Diplomatic cover is the 'laziest' and for some (usually very low lever or very high level) people it's not really meant to fool anyone. There's private sector cover, with dummy corps and rented office buildings, and genuine P&L sheets. Private sector cover can be extremely clandestine, and extremely sophisticated. As AndrewKemendo points out, the things that this article points out are maybe not very impressive at all.

obrero 11y ago
Hanssen was posting stories to Usenet's alt.sex.stories in the late 1990s, stories of voyeurism about his wife ( https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/lI68TqLeJ0cJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/... ). He can't be said to have been keeping the lowest of profiles.