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Spies have historically been unhappy people with personality problems or emotional issues that put them at odds with their own countrymen. Almost 20 years ago I

Spies have historically been unhappy people with personality problems or emotional issues that put them at odds with their own countrymen. Almost 20 years ago I had to go through a bunch of background investigations in the military, and after a couple of interviews a theme emerges making it clear that they were trying to filter out people who basically had self-esteem issues. They definitely try to keep you unaware of what they're really after though, which yields some really weird results. I wonder how that is going now... probably not well. Anyway, Hollywood spies do kind of exist - but they aren't the Rosenbergs breakdance fighting on a rooftop. They're active duty military on "loan" to the NSA's Special Collection Service. They rarely return to the military, not because a life of blackbag jobs and no stability is fun, but because the military really doesn't want them after the CIA has potentially screwed them up.

wahern 5y ago
I once met someone who went around surreptitiously maintaining recording equipment near airports that tracked tail numbers of landing aircraft. They would have done their work in the 1980s and AFAIU mostly involved retrieving film and tending to cameras positioned in hotel and apartment windows. I don't know which intelligence agency they worked for, though; not even which country. I presumed they worked for either the U.S. or Israel; probably the latter given the low-tech, laborious method. The person didn't tell me directly. My boss told me about our visitor's career after they left. I was working at a political advocacy organization that promoted U.S.-Israeli security ties and which regularly worked with people--mostly retired--from the intelligence and defense communities.
- sennight 5y ago
  heh, like I said - the military doesn't want them afterwards. Bill Hicks had a bit about the military's esprit de corps, and how nonsensical it seemed to him - an organization tasked with killing people and breaking things so fixated on old fashioned ideas like honor and a sense of duty. Well the US military has a very long institutional memory and rarely does anything without good reason: the morality conditioning is a very effective, functionally useful, program. They can drop 150 18-year-olds into a distant village for months with little to no supervision and it doesn't devolve into a 24/7 machete-rapefest. Look at what happened in East Germany when an army with no such program rolled in... industrial scale inhumanity. Same thing frequently pops up in Africa when one tribe temporarily becomes king of the hill. Anyway, the "clandestine services" are morally bankrupt and the DoD is aware of how dangerous a game it is to play with people they've invested a lot of time on. This is obviously just a guess... assuming this took place on US soil: it sounds to me like that dude worked for somebody doing something "extra-legal" and it wasn't the USG. Israeli is a pretty big fan of honeytraps and blackmailing intelligence assets. So that is where I'd put my money. Also: the civilian side of the US intel industry puts almost zero effort into OPSEC. Just search LinkedIn for prior military who list "remote sensing" or whatever the current euphemism is for NSA stingray tender, you'll get a results page full of laughably low effort cutouts.
  - wahern 5y ago
    > assuming this took place on US soil IIRC, Europe was mentioned. That doesn't necessarily exclude other countries, including the U.S., but this organization had relationships with and members retired from high-ranking government offices, including CIA directors, defense secretaries, Pentagon leadership, etc. IOW, not the kind of place that would consort (at least knowingly and in the office) with people who directly participated in intelligence operations against the U.S. At least until the Trump Administration current and former officials were still rather hostile to the threat of intelligence operations against them.

wahern 5y ago

I once met someone who went around surreptitiously maintaining recording equipment near airports that tracked tail numbers of landing aircraft. They would have done their work in the 1980s and AFAIU mostly involved retrieving film and tending to cameras positioned in hotel and apartment windows. I don't know which intelligence agency they worked for, though; not even which country. I presumed they worked for either the U.S. or Israel; probably the latter given the low-tech, laborious method. The person didn't tell me directly. My boss told me about our visitor's career after they left. I was working at a political advocacy organization that promoted U.S.-Israeli security ties and which regularly worked with people--mostly retired--from the intelligence and defense communities.

sennight 5y ago
heh, like I said - the military doesn't want them afterwards. Bill Hicks had a bit about the military's esprit de corps, and how nonsensical it seemed to him - an organization tasked with killing people and breaking things so fixated on old fashioned ideas like honor and a sense of duty. Well the US military has a very long institutional memory and rarely does anything without good reason: the morality conditioning is a very effective, functionally useful, program. They can drop 150 18-year-olds into a distant village for months with little to no supervision and it doesn't devolve into a 24/7 machete-rapefest. Look at what happened in East Germany when an army with no such program rolled in... industrial scale inhumanity. Same thing frequently pops up in Africa when one tribe temporarily becomes king of the hill. Anyway, the "clandestine services" are morally bankrupt and the DoD is aware of how dangerous a game it is to play with people they've invested a lot of time on. This is obviously just a guess... assuming this took place on US soil: it sounds to me like that dude worked for somebody doing something "extra-legal" and it wasn't the USG. Israeli is a pretty big fan of honeytraps and blackmailing intelligence assets. So that is where I'd put my money. Also: the civilian side of the US intel industry puts almost zero effort into OPSEC. Just search LinkedIn for prior military who list "remote sensing" or whatever the current euphemism is for NSA stingray tender, you'll get a results page full of laughably low effort cutouts.
- wahern 5y ago
  > assuming this took place on US soil IIRC, Europe was mentioned. That doesn't necessarily exclude other countries, including the U.S., but this organization had relationships with and members retired from high-ranking government offices, including CIA directors, defense secretaries, Pentagon leadership, etc. IOW, not the kind of place that would consort (at least knowingly and in the office) with people who directly participated in intelligence operations against the U.S. At least until the Trump Administration current and former officials were still rather hostile to the threat of intelligence operations against them.