6 ms·
How to explain the KGB's success identifying CIA agents in the field (2015)
- Kukumber 4y agoThey are also easy to spot online
- cratermoon 4y ago
- danielodievich 4y agoFor someone wanting a bit more of this with great anecdotes, I direct you to the Mitrokhin Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive) sourced pair of tomes (The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005)). An incredible source covering more than a century of operations, predating the revolution, and spanning all continents. The first book dives quite deeply into this exact topics, with double, triple and sometimes quadruple crossings. I loved the part about the prep for large-scale sabotage in eastern seaboard of USA in the events of hostilities, something I had no idea about but would have been quite an bold move. There was also a lot of unbelievably dumb stuff. The book mentions the increased difficulty of doing anything undercover or assumed identity in the modern digitally connected world. All of those undercover things are pretty much the thing of the past now, with OSINT being able to find just about anything about anyone.
- monero-xmr 4y agoA strong argument in favor of rooting out ideologically unaligned thinking. Would you want a communist working in the US government? Clearly they would be far more likely to sympathize with the Soviet Union than a capitalist would.
- atoav 4y agoMost anglosphere communists I know have a term for such people: tankies. And they hate them: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tankie https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tankie
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bearmode 4y agoMaybe if you're talking about anglosphere 'communists' who follow people like Vaush online. Nothing communist about them.
- antifa 4y agoNo true Scotsman. V**sh is cursed/cringe/etc., but we can't exclude his fans from the label merely on the basis of his ideology being garbage/wrong/anglocentric.
- bearmode 4y agoWe can exclude his fans on the basis that they don't believe what communists believe.
- atoav 4y agoI am not talking about them. I am talking about people who are all about worker rights, unions and class struggle — you know — the things that are in the actual communist manifesto. Whether that fits the people arround that "Vaush" — I don't know — but I can tell you as somebody who studied philosophy at a highly political campus, that the amount of communists who think the soviets (or china for that matter) are anything else than a failure is very low. A few of those strange people exist, but I wish the number of right wingers who think Hitler was a great guy was equally low.
- ggm 4y agoThe UK conservative party employs several ex Revolutionary Communist Party (extreme trotskyist) advisors. Sometimes, if you want a job done, these are the people who know how to get things done. Bannon used to be a performative maoist?
- dereg 4y agoWow, this is incredible. Thank you.
- egorfine 4y agoI second that. Buyers beware: Mitrokhin books are not an easy reading, so be prepared to chew.
- euroderf 4y ago> The book mentions the increased difficulty of doing anything undercover or assumed identity in the modern digitally connected world. What does state of the art facial recognition do to operational technique in China ?
- ahartmetz 4y agoSo... I like spy novels and such and I've always wondered how the hell one would keep it a secret which 50% of an embassy are secret service. So many possible patterns! Turns out, one doesn't, unless extremely careful. I also seem to remember that "who is secret service at the embassy" was never an important line of defense against counterespionage, something the article doesn't mention.
- rippercushions 4y agoA friend of mine is a diplomat, and apparently in diplomatic circles it's common knowledge who on the other side is a spy. In Soviet times, the lowest-ranked, blandly-named "member of delegation", typically an older gentleman with a military crewcut, was invariably KGB, while in many embassies including the US the "cultural attache", a position that has minimal qualifications and has almost no real responsibilities, is so commonly a spy that the whole title has become a bit of an in-joke. All of this is kind of beside the point though, since embassy staff are known, heavily surveilled and guarded by diplomatic immunity. The "real" spies are the local people they recruit, and recruiting and keeping tabs on them without blowing their cover is the actual hard part.
- ahartmetz 4y agoYes, right. Dead drops, secret meetings and all that. (I ninja-added a second paragraph before I saw your comment.) I remember a cultural attaché or two from John le Carré novels ;)
- rvba 4y agoIn Russian/Soviet embassy everyone is a spy, starting from the cleaner. Even most wives of random personnel are spies too. Only the truly political functions (ambassador and his wife) are not spies per se, but in Soviet times they came from the party and in current times they come from the mafia-services clique.
- TMWNN 4y ago>while in many embassies including the US the "cultural attache", a position that has minimal qualifications and has almost no real responsibilities, is so commonly a spy that the whole title has become a bit of an in-joke. Isn't "passport control officer" the main go-to title for agents working under diplomatic cover?
- emmelaich 4y ago> How to explain the.... Is grammatically correct in American English? Sounds weird. In UK, Aus, you'd ask "How do you explain the ..."
- HDThoreaun 4y agoYep that’s normal
- saagarjha 4y agoYes, it’s pretty common. “How do you…” sounds like a question.
- dtho 4y agoThe title of the linked article has a question mark, while the HN title does not.
- petesergeant 4y agoBoth sound correct to this native British speaker
- timcederman 4y ago"How to explain" is a common phrasing in Australia though?
- LAC-Tech 4y ago"How dya explain" is very common, not sure I've ever heard a genuine "to".
- pelasaco 4y agoI don't know if its right, I always used it, but googling for "how to explain the", you will find occurrences in many places, including: https://medium.com/@aaronDfrank/how-to-explain-the-metaverse-to-your-grandparents-b6f6acae17ed https://medium.com/@aaronDfrank/how-to-explain-the-metaverse... https://www.hiig.de/en/explaining-ai-explain-the-unexplainable/ https://www.hiig.de/en/explaining-ai-explain-the-unexplainab... Or even books like "How to Explain the Trinity"
- wrp 4y agoThroughout the Cold War, it was accepted common knowledge around American intelligence circles that our side had never successfully inserted agents into the USSR because their counterintelligence was so effective. I always wondered whether this was really true or whether it was just a cover story spread by our side to give the Soviets a false sense of security. There were known cases of insider espionage, but they were always men who had come to us on their own initiative. By what I've heard, while the Russian military fell apart in the 1990s, they increased support for intelligence to compensate. I've not heard anything to indicate that they allowed their counterintelligence capabilities to deteriorate. Over the past year, Washington has done a lot of bragging over how much they have penetrated the Russian establishment, but I suspect there is a large element of bluff there.
- mhoad 4y agoJust as a heads up you seem to be referring to a VERY specific thing here and might not be meaning to. “Inserting” someone into a hostile intelligence agency is known as a seeding operation and if you told me that they never were able to pull one off, I believe you. However, they still had eyes and ears on the inside through a combination of recruiting existing officers already on the inside and via defectors. Quite a lot has been written on the topic since then but I’d suggest checking out my other comment if you’re looking for some resources on that kind of thing.
- wrp 4y agoI was carefully specific in saying that "our side had never successfully inserted agents into the USSR." I meant people from outside, during the Soviet period, and into the whole country, not just intelligence agencies. In the current war, there is no doubt that NATO enjoys significant signals and imagery capability. It is the claim that they have extensively compromised Russian intelligence internals that I suspect is more propaganda than reality.
- deaddodo 4y agoWhere did you get this idea? There is a ton of intelligence the US had gained from its intelligence community, along with a ton gained from allied intelligence agencies. There's an entire category on Wikipedia dedicated to well-known defectors[1] and spies[2] in the USSR. The reason you hear less about it from a Western perspective is because the Western allies leveraged reconnaissance technologies more efficiently. They had better aerial reconnaissance, a wider satellite network (from the late-70s onward), nearer proximity to Moscow, wider military projection and better code breaking. It is well-accepted that the Soviets, and the Russian successor state, have always had a hell of a time keeping encryption secret long from the combined US, Commonwealth, Israeli and German intelligence. While the West didn't know everything going on inside, they were able to see almost everything from a birds eye view. It was necessary for the Soviets to have an extensive spy network to get the equivalent viewpoint. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_intelligence_personnel_who_defected_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_intelligence_p... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_spies_against_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_spies_agains...
- mhoad 4y agoFor anyone is into this kind of thing I would suggest checking out The Team House on YouTube which has a lot of very in-depth interviews with some very recently retired CIA folks talking about their experiences in the field. Given a lot of the crazy shit I hear come up in the comments here every time the CIA tends to get mentioned in almost any context this might actually be a good resource for a lot of folks here to start separating fact from fiction. I’ll drop a couple of my favourites here but they must have at least 20 of them by now. Doug London https://youtu.be/aV9HdJtPbZA https://youtu.be/aV9HdJtPbZA This guy had a really long career at CIA in the particular job that you all think of when you think of a “spy” that spanned around 30 years from memory with 9/11 occurring right in the middle of his career. He talks a lot about not only how that changed the face of the agency but about all the mistakes that got made along the way and how the wheels fell off the truck with things like the rendition programs etc. Overall, it’s a great self reflective and critical look at the agency from a very senior person on the inside. Jim Lawler https://youtu.be/AFnfTDbcPOA https://youtu.be/AFnfTDbcPOA This guy is probably the most “spooky” kind of CIA guy I’ve ever seen them interview. Even to the point that he is rather unusual amongst his peers if his reputation is to anything to go by. You can immediately see why he was so good at his job almost from the start. Like Doug he was also VERY senior and at the pointy end of the spear as they say. The later stage of his career was focused on nuclear non proliferation and its very interesting to hear him talk about things like the decision to invade Iraq for example and once again where things went completely off the rails. Holden Triplett https://youtu.be/0NSGOJs150w https://youtu.be/0NSGOJs150w On the other side of the fence Holden was working to actively catch foreign spies in the US while working at the FBI where he left in mid 2020. Covers a lot of interesting topics and stories that I think folks would be interested in.
- ggm 4y agoTraffic analysis but applied to leave, advancement and record keeping. Second order effects indicative of first order function. If you can obtain the telephone directory and track it over time and it has job titles you can probably reconstruct the history of IBM, which party is in power, whatever, for the institution which publishes it. And what the role and career progression is for the longterm players. What does it tell you about the short term players? Maybe as much if they come and go. I bet you could identify McKinsey hires coming and going from top 10 institutions by their name as they are attached to the CEOs office and move between roles, if you can get the phone book.
- mhoad 4y agoIf you’re looking for a modern version of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_medical_data_breach https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_medical_data_breach I don’t know if it’s covered in there but these two incidents ended up exposing everyone inside the CIA if I remember the details correctly.
- ggm 4y agoI found the fitbit geolocation thing (exercising with a fitbit in secret location camps, logging your reps to Facebook &c) a good example of "oops"
- euroderf 4y agoI heard from coworkers about how in the 70s in New Jersey, headhunters would get ahold of a phone directory from some facility in Bell Labs and just go thru the entire directory. But what if they weren't headhunters ? What if they were... Chinese operatives ?
- harriet1 4y ago[dead]
- egorfine 4y agoAnother thing worth mentioning is the Spy Dust. A substance that KGB used to track CIA officers which remained a mystery for a long time. Read "Spy Dust" by Tony Mendez. I can't recommend this book high enough.
- xiaodai 4y agoMoney