The Shop

"The CIA is not in the habit of discussing its clandestine operations, but the agency’s purpose is clear enough. As then-chief James Woolsey said in a 1994 speech to former intelligence operatives: “What we really exist for is stealing secrets.” [...]

That is why by 1955, and probably earlier, the CIA created a special unit to perform what the agency calls “surreptitious entries.” This unit was so secret that few people inside CIA headquarters knew it existed; it wasn’t even listed in the CIA's classified telephone book. Officially it was named the Special Operations Division, but the handful of agency officers selected for it called it the Shop.

[...] in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Shop occupied a nondescript one-story building just south of a shopping mall in the Washington suburb of Springfield, Virginia. The building was part of a government complex surrounded by a chain-link fence; the pebbled glass in the windows let in light but allowed no view in or out. The men and women of the Shop made up a team of specialists: lock pickers, safecrackers, photographers, electronics wizards and code experts. One team member was a master at disabling alarm systems, another at flaps and seals. Their mission, put simply, was to travel the world and break into other countries’ embassies to steal codes"

More: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-CIA-Burglar-Who-Went-Rogue-169800816.html?c=y&page=2

Jack King's new novel: The Black Vault

IFOs - Identified Flying Objects

UFOs become IFOs. Those flying saucers you thought you saw did exist, after all. Schematics declassified:





More: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/the-airforce/



The Election. The Coup. The Black Vault. www.SPYWRITER.com

Espionage Monopoly

"In WWII, agents of the British secret service unit MI9 oversaw the development and distribution of special-edition versions of the board game Monopoly to British POWS held in German camps. These boxes were secretly packed with maps, compasses and other tools that would be helpful to a solider who wanted to escape. The games were one of the items that were permitted by the Germans from humanitarian groups like the Red Cross. Each of the special-edition games concealed silk maps of the areas around known German POW camps, compasses, and real bank notes mixed in with the game money. British pilots were told to look for the games in the event of their capture, and some estimate that the games' secret tools were used by thousands of POWs over the course of the war. Sadly, all the special edition sets known to exist were destroyed after the war."

More: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/gadgets-electronics/stories/4-unbelievable-spy-gadgets

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THE BLACK VAULT by Jack King:
It's the year of election The Coup

Hiding messages in digital images and audio files

"Steganography literally means 'covered writing.' A Greek term, it refers to hiding one message inside another. While the concept has been around for centuries, the marriage of computers and the Internet has brought it to fruition.

Both picture and audio files are ideal for containing hidden messages, he explained; they tend to be very large, and software that substitutes single bits of data at the end of an eight-bit packet creates differences so subtle they can't be detected by the human eye or ear.

In steganography, or stego for short, the visible or audible message is called the carrier, while the hidden message is the payload. Together they form the covert message." More: http://gcn.com/Articles/2005/05/13/Hidden-in-plain-sight.aspx?Page=2

If that isn't enough consider that the hidden text may contain an executable command...