Mister 8

To paraphrase the immortal Ice Cube, I have to say today was optimal (use of the AK was optional). My wife, knowing that I’ve been under an immense amount of school-related stress lately, forced me to take the day off to go on a number of surprise excursions. We started in the direction of Vermont, where we spent a few hours taking in the majesty that is a New England autumn, celebrated the coming of the moose in Bennington, and on our return home stopped by a hidden used book store that’s only 15 minutes up the road from our house.

Housed in what, from the outside looks to be an old barn, the bookstore turned out to be a bit of a TARDIS, a labyrinth of what had to be hundreds of thousands of books on the inside. I’d already accumulated an armful across two stories and an hour’s worth of searching, and was checking out when I mentioned to the elderly owner that I was disappointed that there wasn’t a paperback thriller section. He smiled and asked if I’d been downstairs yet.

Here’s what I picked up from the store, Dog Ears Antiquarian Books in Hoosick, NY:

Donald Hamilton - The Silencers

Donald Hamilton - Murderer's Row

Donald Hamilton - The Ambushers

Donald Hamilton - The Wrecking Crew

I’m not incredibly familiar with Hamilton — I’ve only read The Interlopers, from the middle of the series — so I grabbed the four titles I was familiar with, namely those who share names with Dean Martin films. I am tempted to say, having looked over the list, that the whole lot were there, and I may go back and pick them up a few at a time until I’ve built the whole collection. I might also do the same for the Edward S. Aarons Sam Durrell series. And I’m already thinking about reviewing these, the movies, and perhaps an episode or two of the show (if I can get my hands on it) somewhere round-about Christmas in a multi-part series called “Helm for the Holidays.”

Yes, I know my plate’s already a bit full, but I can’t pass up that pun, can I?

The Avengers: Too Many Targets

I already had a copy of this one, but couldn’t resist picking up a copy from the first printing on the cheap (this cover is much cooler than the other version I have as well).

Billion Dollar Brain

I FINALLY turned up a copy of this one on the cheap without turning to eBay. Yes, I started the Harry Palmer Files without even owning all of the books, but thanks to the fact that this bookstore owned every book ever, I now have a copy for myself! I also picked up a non “Harry” book Bomber, said to be Deighton’s best by many critics (including Kingsley Amis).

The First Saint Omnibus

While I love the show, I’ve never actually read any of the Charteris books. Thought this would be a good place to start, a nice smelly old edition.

The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier

This looks to be a nice addition to my TV spy reference shelf, and it’s the major 60s-era spy show about which I know the least, for some reason.

The Official James Bond Movie Book

From the era of Living Daylights. Because I can’t turn down cheap James Bond ephemera. (And yes, I’m being lazy and stealing these pictures from other sites).

Allen Dulles - The Craft of Intelligence

And lastly, but certainly not least…ly, a paperback copy of Allen Dulles’ thoughts on the intelligence business in 1963. Chock full of fun and informative bits by the director of the CIA (just after he was ousted actually, following the Bay of Pigs). We’ll be quoting bits of this here in a regular series, as soon as I can think of a witty title. I’m thinking “A Dulles Moment,” or “Mere Dulles Ink.”

All of the above rang up to roughly $15. Not a bad haul, and I’m sure I’ll soon be going back for other books I had to leave behind.

On the way home, I also scored 70 issues of Heavy Metal for mere cents at a garage sale. And then we watched two wonderful films — Toy Story I and II — on the big screen in 3D. What a great day.

Oh, and as I’m typing this, news has come in over the wire that we have a new member of the COBRAS, Rob Mallows of the Deighton Dossier. I’ll give Rob an official welcome tomorrow, but for now…I’m exhausted!

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!

Welcome back to another edition of a weekly series at Mister8 and TheStasi.com, wherein we look at the words of the world’s spymasters. Markus Wolf, my counterpart at TheStasi, is taking excerpts from Ion Pacepa’s fantastically gossipy Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, and I’m looking at Allen Dulles’ rather stolid by comparison 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.

This week, we’re looking at one of the side effects of the espionage game — paranoia. Once you know that not only should you not believe everything, but that you shouldn’t believe most things, and the things that you do believe might be deliberately constructed to look like things that you shouldn’t believe, meaning that you should believe them…well, what can you really believe in at that point?

A short bit from Dulles this week, but it leads into a rather interesting story that’s over at TheStasi:

When one deliberately misleads, sometimes friend as well as foe is misled. And later the deceiver may not be believed when he wishes to be. This is the situation of the Soviets today after Cuba.

Often the very fear of deception has blinded an opponent to the real value of information which accidents or intelligence operations have placed in his hands.

As Sir Walter Scott wrote:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!

If you suspect an enemy of constant trickery, then almost anything that happens can be taken as one of his tricks. A collateral effect of deception, once a single piece of deception has succeeded in its purpose, is to upset and confuse the opponent’s judgement and evaluation of other intelligence he may receieve. He will be suspicious and distrustful. He will not want to be caught off guard.

Welcome again to a weekly series at Mister8 and TheStasi.com, where we look at the autobiographies and essays of the world’s spymasters. Markus Wolf, my counterpart at TheStasi, is taking excerpts from Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, and I’m looking at 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.

The topic this week is electronic audio surveillance. Markus has a crackerjack story this week about phone tapping, and my late (I apologize for the tardiness and the lack of posts this week — the time for final papers has arrived!) entry gives a more general overview on taps and hidden microphones, and how they’re planted (as you’ll see, sometimes quite literally!).

A technical aid to espionage of another kind is the concealed microphone and transmitter which keeps up a flow of live information from inside a target ot a nearby listening post; this is known to the public as “telephone tapping” or “bugging” or “miking.” “Audio surveillance,” as it is called in intelligence work, requires excellent miniaturized electronic equipment, clever methods of concealment and a human agent to penetrate the premises and do the concealing.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in early June of 1960 displayed befor the United Nations in New York the Great Seal of the United States which had been hanging in the office of the American Ambassador in Moscow. In it the Soviets had concealed a tiny instrument which, when activated, transmitted to a Soviet listening post everything that was said in the Ambassador’s office. Actually, the installation of this device was no great feat for the Soviets since every foreign embassy in Moscow has to call on the services of local electricians, telephone men, plumbers, charwomen and the like. The Soviets have no difficulties in seeing to it that their own citizens cooperate with their intelligence service, or they may send intelligence officers, disguised as technicians, to do the job.

In early May, 1964, our State Department publicaly disclosed that as a result of a thorough demolishing of the internal walls, ceilings and floors of “sensitive” rooms in our embassy in Moscow, forty concealed microphones were brought to light. Previous intensive electronic testing for such hidden devices had not located any of these microphones.

In Soviet Russa and in the major cities of the satellite countries certain hotel rooms are designated for foreign travelers because they have been previously bugged on a permanent basis. Microphones do not have to be installed in a rush when an “interesting” foreigner arrives on the scene. The microphones are already there, and it is only the foreigner who has to be installed. All the hotels are state-owned and have permanent police agents on their staffs whose responsibility is to see that the proper foreigners are put in the “right” rooms.

…Outside its own country an intelligence service must consider the possible repercussions and embarrassments that may result from the discovery that an official installation has been illegally entered and its equipment tampered with. As in all espionage operations, the trick is to find the man who can do the job and who has the talent and the motive, whether patriotic or pecuniary. There was one instance when the Soviets managed to place microphones in the flowerpots that decorated the offices of a Western embassy in a neutral country. The janitor of the building, who had a weakness for alcohol, was glad to comply for a little pocket money. He never knew who the people were who borrowed the pots from him every now and then or what they did with them.

Welcome back to a weekly series at Mister8 and TheStasi.com, where we look at the autobiographies and essays of the world’s spymasters, which we’re returning to after a short holiday hiatus. Markus Wolf, my counterpart at TheStasi, is taking excerpts from Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, and I’m looking at 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 tracking of illegal radio operators. It’s interesting to recognize how much the technology available to assets and officers has changed, and to wonder how much things like cellphones have affected the game. Over at the Stasi, Markus will be looking at the other side of secret communications — the disguising and placement of micro-transmitters.

Counterintelligence, like most branches of intelligence work, has many technical resources, and one among them has been responsible in the past for uncovering more concealed intelligence networks than any other single measure. This is the interception and locating of illegal radio transmitters, known as “direction-finding,” or D/Fing for short. It employs sensitive electronic which, when mounted on mobile receivers, in a car or truck, can track down the location of a radio signal by indicating whether the signal is getting stronger or weaker as a mobile receiver weaves around a city listening to what has already been identified as an illegal transmitter.

Every legal radio transmitter, commercial or amateur, in most countries today is licensed and registered. In this country the call signal and the exact location of the transmitter are on record with the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC monitors the air waves at all times as a law-enforcement procedure. This leads to the uncovering of enthusiastic “ham” radio operators who haven’t bothered to get a license. It also leads to the discovery of illegal agent transmitters. The latter are usually identifiable because their messages are enciphered and they do not use any call signal on record.

Monitoring of a suspicious signal may also reveal that the operator has some kind of fixed schedule for going on the air, and this almost unfailingly points to the fact that he is transmitting to a foreign headquarters by prearrangement. At this point the D/Fing process begins. The main difficulty of tracking is that the illegal operator stays on the air, for obvious reasons, only for very short periods. As the mobile D/F experts try to trace his signal across a large city on air waves crowded with other signals, he suddenly finishes, goes off the air, and there is nothing the D/Fers can do until he comes on again some days or weeks later. If the Soviets are behind the operation, the transmission schedule, while fixed, may follow a pattern that is not easy to spot. Also, the transmitting frequency may change from time to time. The only solution is for the D/F headquarters to listen for the suspicious signal all the time and keep after it. But here, too, the technicians have invented new improvements to foil and outwit each other. The latest is a high-speed method of transmission. The operator does not sit at his telegraph key sending as fast as he can. He prerecords his message on tape, then plays the tape over the air at breakneck speed, too fast for any ear to disentangle. His receiving station at home records the transmission and can replay it at a tempo which is intelligible. If the illegal operator is on the air for only twenty or thirty seconds, the D/Fers are not going to get very far in their attempt to pinpoint the physical location of the transmitter.

Welcome back to a weekly series at Mister8 and TheStasi.com, where we look at the autobiographies and essays of the world’s spymasters. Markus Wolf, my esteemed counterpart at TheStasi, is taking excerpts from Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, and I’m, as usual, looking at 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.

Markus and I have been out of touch this week, and so I have no idea if our excerpts will align. Today I’ve chosen to look at the question of why someone would choose to be an agent (not an intelligence officer — note the distinction that Dulles draws). Allen Dulles lets us know in today’s quite political (and sort of one-sided…he doesn’t go into much detail about why a Westerner might betray their country) excerpt:

The intelligence officer engaged in covert intelligence collection described above is a career staff member of the intelligence service, an American citizen, on duty in a particular place, at home or abroad, acting on the instructions of his headquarters. He is a manager, a handler, a recruiter, also an on-the-spot evaluator of the product of his operatives. The man whom he locates, hires, trains and directs to collect information and whose work he judges is the agent. The agent, who may be of any nationality, may produce the information himself or he may have access to contacts and sources “in place” who supply him with information. His relationship with the intelligence service generally lasts as long as both parties find it satisfactory and rewarding.

If the staff intelligence officer succeeds in locating someone who is attractive to the intelligence service because of his knowledge or access to information, he must first ascertain on what basis the potential agent might be willing to work with him, or by what means he could be induced to do the job. If the agent offers his services, the intelligence officer does not have this problem, but he must still ascertain what brought the agent to him in order to understand him and handle him properly; he might, after all, have been sent by the opposition as a penetration.

As motives, ideological and patriotic convictions stand at the top of the list. The ideological volunteer, if he is sincere, is a man whose loyalty you need rarely question, as you must always question the loyalties of people who work chiefly for money or out of a desire for adventure and intrigue.

Actually, ideology is not hte most accurate word for what we are describing, but we use it for want of a better one. Few people go through the analytical process of proving to themselves abstractly that one system of government is better than another. Few work out an intellectual justification or rationalization for treason as did Klaus Fuchs, who claimed that he could take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown and still pass British secrets to the Soviet Union because “I used my Marxian philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments.” It is more likely that views and judgements will be based on feelings and on quite practical considerations. Officials in Communist bureaucracies who are not utterly blind to the workings of the state that employs them cannot fail to see that cynicism and power-grabbing prevail in high places and that teh people are daily being duped with Marxist slogans and distortions of the truth. Communism is a system which deals harshly with all but its fanatical adherents and those who have found a way to profit from it. Every Communist country is full of people who have suffered at the hands of the state or are close to someone who has. Many such people, with only a slight nudge, may be willing to engage in epsionage against a regime which they do not respect, against which they have grievances or about which they are disillusioned.

The man engaged in espionage on behalf of his own country is committing a patriotic act. The man who gives away or sells his own country’s secrets is committing treason. Today we frequently encounter another situation, in which it is usually unjust to speak of treason. The internal political conditions of the Communist nations, as was once the case in the Fascist nations, have caused thousands to flee their homelands, either to save their own lives or because of their vigorous disapproval of the government in power. If an escapee aids his hosts in the country of adoption against the country he has fled, he can hardly be said to be committing treason as that term is generally used.

The ideological agent today usually does not consider himself treasonable in the sense that he is betraying his countrymen. He is motivated primarily by a desire to see the downfall of a hated regime. Since the United States is not imperialistic and makes the distinction of opposing Communist regimes rather than peoples of those countries, there can be a basic agreement in the aims of the ideological agent and the intelligence services of free states.

The more idealistic agent of this type will not engage in espionage lightly. He may at the outset prefer to join some kind of underground movement, if there is one, or perhaps to engage in the political activities of exiles which aim directly at unseating the tyranny which dominates his country.