5 ms·

CIA Travel Advice to Operatives

83 points by us0r 12y ago

doctorfoo 12y ago
So, how long will it be before Assange trips and falls down some stairs in the embassy?
- xnull2guest 12y ago
  With the destruction of his reputation, operatives working with him at Wikileaks, harassment of his living conditions, false contributions of fake cables to increase his workload, tapped communications and locked down locale I don't think they need to kill him. They just need to control what information he can publish. This might involve leverage against would be informants and mysterious deaths to the same crowd (a la Michael Hastings), but I'm not sure that Assange himself needs offing in the immediate future.
colinbartlett 12y ago
I skimmed through these and they are really fascinating documents with actual useful info for normal tourist and business travelers. If you know what screeners might be looking for, you can avoid making yourself a target unnecessarily, even when your travel purposes are completely legitimate.
GabrielF00 12y ago
The "Surviving Secondary" document is several years out of date, and notes that it isn't designed to provide tactical advice. However, there are a lot of tidbits about screening procedures at specific airports, and this gives me pause. There are several concerns: 1) Does leaking this document give bad people information and tools that they might otherwise not have, that might allow them to travel undetected. 2) Does leaking this document compromise the people or the tools that provided this information. Should we be concerned if countries are less willing to discuss the security of international travel with each other? Should we be concerned that there are sources within these countries that could be compromised? On balance, it's difficult to see the benefit to the public of releasing this information, and easy to see the risks.
- spacefight 12y ago
  OK I bite. The benefit is to know, that such organisations are present these days on european soil. Another benefit is to know, that certain biometric border checks do not only hassle regular travellers but also them.
  - GabrielF00 12y ago
    Those are topics that could be discussed in a newspaper article without releasing the original documents, which contain all sorts of potentially problematic material. Here's a sample from the report: "In an operation to screen for Hizballah members traveling from Venezuela, the Mexican Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) planned to take into secondary screening Venezuelan passport holders without a mastery of Spanish." Casually disclosing what airport security officials know about the travel patterns of terrorist groups, and how they intend to watch for those groups is very troubling.
    - spacefight 12y ago
      Troubling? Why? The docs are multiple years old.
    - furyg3 12y ago
      Screening for people who do not have mastery of the primary language of their nationality seems like something so obvious that leaking it is of little consequence.
      - GabrielF00 12y ago
        It identifies Hezbollah operatives as using a specific country's passport (Venezuela) to travel to a third country (Mexico). It also says that Mexican security officials are on the lookout for Hezbollah operatives. Maybe these are obvious facts. I'm not sure that people on the Internet are in a position to assess that.
        12y ago
sauere 12y ago
I am always amazed of the bad quality of these leaked documents. Not just the design but also the contents. Both PDFs have a ton of unsorted, unordered information. It looks like just a bunch of random facts thrown together. Not sorted by country, not sorted by threat-level, no table of contents, no references. CIA, step your game up.
- d0ugie 12y ago
  Sir, did you just insinuate that the US intelligence community has room for improvement?
tptacek 12y ago
These documents are boring; if you crowdsourced documentation on how to handle security checkpoints at airports to Metafilter, you could expect comparable insight and quality. They're practically brochures. Presumably, every western intelligence agency in the entire world has comparable (or, hopefully, better) brochures. Make sure your passports are in order! Carry the right amount of luggage! Don't fidget! Keep your story straight!
- dogma1138 12y ago
  This document isn't intended for field operatives. You do realize that the CIA employees people in 1000's of positions ranging from secretaries to architects and doctors? This is a simple guide for people who are not trained for wet work or intended to be deployed as field assets but rather just for office staff who travel to countries for official or non official CIA business. Many countries including US allies would like to pinch a CIA employee even if it's the guy who makes changes the toner.. So yeah if you are some low level analyst who worked for the US diplomatic mission in Egypt, Yemen and Pakistan traveling to Thailand for a vacation following some guidelines in the brochure might prevent you from being halted and be put into a bad situation. So yeah this isn't the instruction manual for an operative who just assassinated the vice president of kirgistan traveling with stolen Romanian passport trough a soviet era checkpoint... ;)
us0r 12y ago
A lot of this is common sense although this stood out "Hotel and car reservations are similarly examined for unusual discounts or government affiliation.". Is this based on providing it to them or the car and hotel chains providing it? Side note: Why don't they just mark the entire document (S//OC/NF)?
- dogma1138 12y ago
  That's just a fluff the document is ORCON, so although the company that probably charged way too much money to generate this classified it as secret it seems that this is an SBU(Sensitive But Unclassified )/FOUO document at best. ORCON gives the generator of the content full control over the dissemination and classification of the material regardless of the actual content. As for your question probably both, you might be asked for multiple reasons to provide a proof that you have a hotel and that you have a return flight showing that you are indeed entering the country for a "limited" period of time. This is actually quite a common practice in many European countries especially when young people traveling alone or in small groups from out side the EU are involved. If you show them a hotel reservation and they see some odd discount because you booked a hotel trough the US diplomatic mission they might look deeper :)
AdamMickiewicz 12y ago
Are they paid by Putin to do this? Snowden must have been... I mean when you look at it from the time passing perspective: Putin had planned confrontation with the West since at least 2004. From 2004 he was planning to attack Ukraine. His RussiaTV, all the Alex Joneses and others, Snowden, far right in EU -- all of that seems to be KGB sponsored (whether they know about it or not is another matter entirely)

83 points by us0r 12y ago

doctorfoo 12y ago

So, how long will it be before Assange trips and falls down some stairs in the embassy?

xnull2guest 12y ago
With the destruction of his reputation, operatives working with him at Wikileaks, harassment of his living conditions, false contributions of fake cables to increase his workload, tapped communications and locked down locale I don't think they need to kill him. They just need to control what information he can publish. This might involve leverage against would be informants and mysterious deaths to the same crowd (a la Michael Hastings), but I'm not sure that Assange himself needs offing in the immediate future.

colinbartlett 12y ago

I skimmed through these and they are really fascinating documents with actual useful info for normal tourist and business travelers. If you know what screeners might be looking for, you can avoid making yourself a target unnecessarily, even when your travel purposes are completely legitimate.

GabrielF00 12y ago

The "Surviving Secondary" document is several years out of date, and notes that it isn't designed to provide tactical advice. However, there are a lot of tidbits about screening procedures at specific airports, and this gives me pause. There are several concerns: 1) Does leaking this document give bad people information and tools that they might otherwise not have, that might allow them to travel undetected. 2) Does leaking this document compromise the people or the tools that provided this information. Should we be concerned if countries are less willing to discuss the security of international travel with each other? Should we be concerned that there are sources within these countries that could be compromised? On balance, it's difficult to see the benefit to the public of releasing this information, and easy to see the risks.

spacefight 12y ago
OK I bite. The benefit is to know, that such organisations are present these days on european soil. Another benefit is to know, that certain biometric border checks do not only hassle regular travellers but also them.
- GabrielF00 12y ago
  Those are topics that could be discussed in a newspaper article without releasing the original documents, which contain all sorts of potentially problematic material. Here's a sample from the report: "In an operation to screen for Hizballah members traveling from Venezuela, the Mexican Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) planned to take into secondary screening Venezuelan passport holders without a mastery of Spanish." Casually disclosing what airport security officials know about the travel patterns of terrorist groups, and how they intend to watch for those groups is very troubling.
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Troubling? Why? The docs are multiple years old.
  - furyg3 12y ago
    Screening for people who do not have mastery of the primary language of their nationality seems like something so obvious that leaking it is of little consequence.
    - GabrielF00 12y ago
      It identifies Hezbollah operatives as using a specific country's passport (Venezuela) to travel to a third country (Mexico). It also says that Mexican security officials are on the lookout for Hezbollah operatives. Maybe these are obvious facts. I'm not sure that people on the Internet are in a position to assess that.
      - 12y ago

sauere 12y ago

I am always amazed of the bad quality of these leaked documents. Not just the design but also the contents. Both PDFs have a ton of unsorted, unordered information. It looks like just a bunch of random facts thrown together. Not sorted by country, not sorted by threat-level, no table of contents, no references. CIA, step your game up.

d0ugie 12y ago
Sir, did you just insinuate that the US intelligence community has room for improvement?

tptacek 12y ago

These documents are boring; if you crowdsourced documentation on how to handle security checkpoints at airports to Metafilter, you could expect comparable insight and quality. They're practically brochures. Presumably, every western intelligence agency in the entire world has comparable (or, hopefully, better) brochures. Make sure your passports are in order! Carry the right amount of luggage! Don't fidget! Keep your story straight!

dogma1138 12y ago
This document isn't intended for field operatives. You do realize that the CIA employees people in 1000's of positions ranging from secretaries to architects and doctors? This is a simple guide for people who are not trained for wet work or intended to be deployed as field assets but rather just for office staff who travel to countries for official or non official CIA business. Many countries including US allies would like to pinch a CIA employee even if it's the guy who makes changes the toner.. So yeah if you are some low level analyst who worked for the US diplomatic mission in Egypt, Yemen and Pakistan traveling to Thailand for a vacation following some guidelines in the brochure might prevent you from being halted and be put into a bad situation. So yeah this isn't the instruction manual for an operative who just assassinated the vice president of kirgistan traveling with stolen Romanian passport trough a soviet era checkpoint... ;)

us0r 12y ago

A lot of this is common sense although this stood out "Hotel and car reservations are similarly examined for unusual discounts or government affiliation.". Is this based on providing it to them or the car and hotel chains providing it? Side note: Why don't they just mark the entire document (S//OC/NF)?

dogma1138 12y ago
That's just a fluff the document is ORCON, so although the company that probably charged way too much money to generate this classified it as secret it seems that this is an SBU(Sensitive But Unclassified )/FOUO document at best. ORCON gives the generator of the content full control over the dissemination and classification of the material regardless of the actual content. As for your question probably both, you might be asked for multiple reasons to provide a proof that you have a hotel and that you have a return flight showing that you are indeed entering the country for a "limited" period of time. This is actually quite a common practice in many European countries especially when young people traveling alone or in small groups from out side the EU are involved. If you show them a hotel reservation and they see some odd discount because you booked a hotel trough the US diplomatic mission they might look deeper :)

AdamMickiewicz 12y ago

Are they paid by Putin to do this? Snowden must have been... I mean when you look at it from the time passing perspective: Putin had planned confrontation with the West since at least 2004. From 2004 he was planning to attack Ukraine. His RussiaTV, all the Alex Joneses and others, Snowden, far right in EU -- all of that seems to be KGB sponsored (whether they know about it or not is another matter entirely)