Mister 8

Welcome to this week’s installment of In their own (code)words, one of a series of Friday posts from myself and Markus Wolf at TheStasi.com, featuring excerpts from the writings of the world’s spymasters.

He’s pulling from Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, and I’m taking from Allen Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence, written in 1963. Dulles (1893-1969) had a long and storied career in intelligence, including a role as the first civilian director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Today’s excerpt deals with the planting of Soviet spies that Dulles calls “illegals”:

…Outside the embassy and buried away under the guise of some harmless occupation, perhaps in a bookstore or a photography shop, was quite another center devoted to the “dirty” operations. This was headquarters of the “illegal residentura,” composed mainly of officers who over a period of years had carefully been turned into personages whom it would be almost impossible to identify as Soviet nationals, much less as intelligence personnel. The illegal, unless apprehended with the agent or betrayed by him, can disappear into the woodwork if something goes wrong. There will be no trail leading to a Soviet diplomatic installation to embarrass or discredit it….

…A man chosen for illegal work in any of its aspects will be sent to live abroad for as many years as it takes him to perfect his knowledge of the language and way of life of another country. He may even acquire citizenship in the adopted country. But during this whole period he has absolutely no intelligence mission. He does nothing that would arouse suspicion. When he has become sufficiently acclimatized, he returns to the Soviet Union, where he is trained and documented for his intelligence mission, and eventually dispatched to the target country, which may be the same one he has learned to live in or a different one. It matters little, for the main thing is that he is unrecognizable as a Soviet or Eastern European. He is a German or a Scandinavian or a South American. His papers show it, and so do his speech and his manners….

…When an intelligence service goes to all the trouble to retool and remake a man so that he can succeed in losing himself in the crowd in another country, it naturally does so in the expectation that the man will stay put and remain active and useful for a long period of time. There is no rotation here of the sort that is common among officials of most diplomatic and intelligence services. Also, for obvious reasons, if the “illegal” has a family, the family does not accompany him. The wives and children cannot also be “made over.” He goes alone, and even his communications to his wife and children must necessarily be limited and must pass through secret channels….

Read about Soviet spies working…um…deep in American territory at The Stasi!