The end of espionage thriller?

Can't find a decent espionage thriller these days? Don't blame it on Perestroika. Blame it on not reading SpyWriter Jack King:

"The end of the Cold War created a problem  for espionage thriller writers and moviemakers. They faced loss of a built-in backstory needing no explanation, a whole set of strong but realistic motivations for extreme behavior, a pre-fab cast of bad guys, and weighty, global stakes underlying all the action. Perestroika left a generation of writers searching for new conflicts and settings and plot devices.

Today I think the growth of surveillance technology will increasingly create a similar problem for fiction writers. It’s a staple of thrillers and science fiction to have the hero on the run—hounded by the government, evading the police—either because the hero is mistaken as someone bad or because the government is evil. And the government baddies use every technology at their disposal to locate and track their target, while the hero uses tricks and hacks to escape detection.

But the whole cat and mouse game is starting to look kind of problematic, because it’s getting harder to sustain a plausible “man on the run” scenario in the face of surveillance technology.

I like a good airport thriller or science fiction read, and for several years I’ve noticed this problem cropping up: it’s the near future (or later), the hero or heroine is on the run, and I find myself thinking, oh please, if they really had all the advanced technologies featured in this story, they’d certainly have more impressive surveillance capability! We may have more than that ourselves in couple years the way things are going."

From: http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/will-increasing-surveillance-change-fiction

Presidents are chosen, but not elected. The Black Vault. www.SPYWRITER.com

The Bridge of Spies

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The bridge od spies"][/caption]



On June 12, 1985, Marian Zacharski, a Polish spy, was exchanged for 25 American agents.

"Polish-born, Marian Zacharski adopted the guise of a legitimate businessman in the United States in the late 1970s. The reportedly handsome and resourceful agent befriended William Holden Bell, an engineer at Hughes Aircraft. Over the course of three years, Zacharski persuaded Bell to pass along plans for secret radar systems and some of the technology behind early stealth aircraft. Zacharski’s tactics in recruiting Bell were so impressive that they are still studied by the FBI decades later."

More spy exchanges: http://www.history.com/news/2012/02/10/prisoner-exchanges-across-the-bridge-of-spies-from-powers-to-shcharansky/



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Cold War leftovers strike again

Germany is rocked by a Nazi scandal. How is it possible that a Nazi organization could exist in current-day Germany? The answer dates back to:

"Worst of all was the espionage apparatus directed against the Soviet bloc. Nazi spy General Reinhard Gehlen, first used by US intelligence after 1945 to build up its secret network, was then switched to the new West German government. A study by historian Martin A. Lee described how "Gehlen proceeded to enlist thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and SS veterans. Even the vilest of the vile - the senior bureaucrats who ran the central administrative apparatus of the Holocaust - were welcome in the 'Gehlen Org,' as it was called, including Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's chief deputy. SS major Emil Augsburg and Gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as the "Butcher of Lyon," were among those who did double duty for Gehlen and U.S. intelligence ... "It seems that in the Gehlen headquarters one SS man paved the way for the next and Himmler's elite were having happy reunion ceremonies".

"Nearly all these men have died. But their disciples remained, and so did their inclinations. The Gehlen gang and their friends in top army and government offices used the Cold War to justify their return to strong positions."

More: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/the-mystery-of-invisible-terrorists/



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The double agent spy who came back from the dead

Juan Pujol "Garcia, code-named "Garbo" by his MI5 handlers because he was "the world’s best actor," was the man who more than anyone else convinced Hitler that the Normandy landings were a mere diversionary attack, a feint to distract the Wehrmacht from the real assault that was about to take place 150 miles to the north in the Pas de Calais. So successful was Garbo that the Germans were continuing to reinforce the Pas de Calais even after D-Day, and not committing their full resources to countering the Normandy landings. Although the story of the success of the Operation Overlord deception plans are well known, and Garbo’s vital role well established in history, what is not much known about is what Garbo did after the war".

[...] the story of Garcia’s life of deception did not end with VE Day. After visiting his Abwehr case officer in Spain—who apologized that the Nazis had lost the war and gave him a huge golden handshake in cash, the Iron Cross, and the thanks of the now-defunct Reich—MI5 unsuccessfully tried to recruit Garcia for service against the Russians in the Cold War. The next that anyone ever heard of him was that he had tragically died of a snake bite in Angola in 1949."

Or, did he?

Read More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/27/garbo-the-spy-documentary-on-the-double-agent-who-helped-defeat-hitler.html

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Kim Philby and the woman who made him happy

"Historians still argue why [ Kim] Philby, a British aristocrat and a graduate of the Cambridge University, suddenly chose to work for Soviet intelligence services. Was he a man of no principles who was ready to work for anyone who would pay him well – or did he really believe in the ideas of communism? Well, it looks like the second answer is closer to the truth, for it is known that Philby had a fancy for Marxism when he was a student.

[...] in 1933, Kim Philby started to work for Soviet intelligence services. It is by an order of the Soviet intelligence services that he integrated into the UK secret service in 1940.

Famous writer Graham Greene, known for his pro-Soviet sympathies, who himself used to work for the UK intelligence for some time, said that when Kim Philby was at the top of his career, practically every step and every plan of Western secret services immediately became known to the Soviet services.

“For the last 25 years of his life, Kim Philby lived in Moscow – but, at first, his life here was not simple. The Soviet authorities and Philby himself were afraid that he might be assassinated – and he had to live a very secluded life, until a fair woman appeared"...

More: http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/12/07/61745969.html

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The Tunnel-digging Spy

Peter Lunn, "as a gentleman spy in the early Cold War years, he pioneered the idea of digging tunnels under Soviet-controlled zones to facilitate telephone tapping

After the war Lunn was posted as head of the MI6 station in the divided city of Vienna, with the official title of Second Secretary at the British embassy. Though he was once described by the espionage writer Richard CS Trahair as having a “slight build and blue eyes” and speaking “in a soft voice with a lisp”, every inch the gentleman spy, he also had a razor-sharp mind.

In 1948 Graham Greene, who had also worked for SIS, went to Vienna to research material for the screenplay of The Third Man (1949). He discovered the existence of a force policing a vast network of sewers under the city which allowed agents to pass from one zone of occupation to another.

Lunn too was interested in the city’s subterranean world. According to David Stafford, in his book Spies Beneath Berlin, Lunn realised that “cables linking the Red Army to Soviet units in Austria ran through the British and French sectors [of Vienna]”. If he could tap these communications, “he would be the first to know if Stalin gave the order to invade Western Europe”.

Operation Conflict, as Lunn’s eavesdropping scheme was known, yielded a wealth of intelligence about Soviet operations in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1951."

More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/8939098/Peter-Lunn.html

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A Stasi informant in every family

"This week, the commission for the Stasi files will publish a handbook on the HVA, the Stasi branch that handled foreign intelligence and was run by legendary spymaster Markus Wolf. The book offers new insight into the Stasi's work in West Germany, making clear for the first time just how purposefully and extensively the East German intelligence service had West German politics and society in its sights.

It's now possible to reconstruct in unprecedented detail where and how the Stasi cast its nets. The organization had 149 informants active just in Bonn, the former West German capital. There were 542 in West Berlin.

It seems the HVA recruited most of these spies from industrial sectors, as a way of obtaining Western technological knowledge. It also maintained excellent connections in the center-left Social Democratic Party, where 78 unofficial collaborators and other contacts kept East Berlin up to date, 13 of them serving as sources of information on activities within the party's executive committee. The Stasi was also well informed on internal matters in unions, churches and universities."

Read More: http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-799335.html#spRedirectedFrom=www

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The day Nixon wanted to blow up the world

"For two weeks in October 1969, the Nixon Administration secretly placed U.S. nuclear forces on alert.  [...] Still today, no conclusive explanation for the potentially destabilizing alert can be found. 

“There are two main after-the-fact explanations: first, that nuclear brinkmanship was designed to convince the Soviets that President Nixon was prepared to launch a nuclear attack against North Vietnam in order to convince Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi to negotiate an end to the war in Southeast Asia” along the lines that previous historians have suggested.

The second proposed explanation is “that the President ordered the alert as a signal to deter a possible Soviet nuclear strike against China during the escalating Sino-Soviet border dispute.”  Consistent with the second interpretation, the FRUS volume provides new documentation of intelligence reports indicating that Soviet leaders were considering a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities.

Astonishingly, even the most senior U.S. military leaders were kept in the dark by the White House about the nature of the alert– before, during and after the event."

More: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2011/10/1969_nuclear_alert.html

UFO and psychological warfare

"Recent information has surfaced that both the U.S. and Soviet governments fancied an interest in faking an alien invasion as a means to induce mass-hysteria in the enemy à la Orson Welles' chaotic War of the Worlds broadcast from 1938.

At least one inter-agency communication from the early 1950s acknowledges the potential disruptive power of a faked alien invasion in both "offensive and defensive" contexts (keeping in mind, the Roswell UFO incident occurred only a few years prior and was followed by a flurry of "flying saucer" sightings around the world).

The following memo was sent from then-director of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith to the unnamed director of the "Psychological Strategy Board."

I am today transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal… in which it is concluded that the problems connected with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations…

I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive or defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes."

More: http://dvice.com/archives/2011/09/investigating-t-1.php

Omnipresence of spies and informants

On the occasion of last month's 50th anniversary of construction of the Berlin Wall the press published pieces on the omnipresence of spies and snitches for dictatorial regimes, such as that of East Germany's, taking aim at Stasi. Its spies and informants penetrated every aspect of society, from professional groups to the bedrooms:

"Just to have an idea of the magnitude of interference, the Stasi used a network of informants in a ration of one in ninety East German citizens."

To illustrate the pervasive nature of Stasi's spy network, the Washington Post quoted the Cold War bureau chief of Associated Press, who doubled as a spy for U.S. intelligence...

Ah, the pervasiveness of spies and informants in dictatorial countries!

Source: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/israel-goodwill/2011/aug/15/berlin-wall-and-stasi-most-powerful-espionage-serv/

Cold War Foe Rebranded

"Back in the Cold War days, the US propaganda ignited fears of Soviet expansionism and espionage in Latin America to frighten the continent's governments into cooperating with Washington in the fight against the fictitious threat posed by the USSR and the Eastern bloc. Under the resulting arrangement, the CIA, FBI, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency used to impose their own long-term agendas on the police and counterespionage agencies of Latin American countries (with the obvious exception of Cuba) and generally kept them on a short leash, while the Soviet missions the countries hosted and individuals deemed to be suspicious faced constant close surveillance.

Washington continues to sell Cold War-era stereotypes - the images of Russia as an evil country and a nuclear-armed monster - to Latin American countries. US-made computer games and movies supplied in quantities to Latin America employ the story line by which the Russian mafia grabs Russia's nuclear arsenal and puts it to work for global blackmail. The message the Empire thus sends to the continent reads that Russians are disreputable and treacherous partners to be be avoided at all costs."

Source and more: http://www.tiwy.com/news.phtml?id=199

What triggers Echelon?

While browsing through some old files I found this little ditty by Kieren McCarthy, from May 31, 2001:

"What are those words that trigger Echelon?  According to various UK media sources today, the buzzwords said to trigger the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand spying mechanism Echelon have been "posted on the Internet". We haven't found the file and it hasn't popped up on the authoritative site for these sorts of things, Cryptome.org, so we'd not put too much weight behind it. However, just for your interest, we give you a quick run-through on what some of the words are. There are the obvious phrases like "Kill the President" which caused two schoolboys from the UK to be quizzed by special branch, "anarchy", "echelon" :-), "nuclear", "assassinate".

Then there are ones that are dodgy (cause they fit in with X-file type paranoia) like "Roswell", "Waco", "World Trade Center", "Soros" - after George Soros, "Whitewater". Then there are a suspiciously large number of hacker names: Furby, Bugs Bunny, Bubba the Love etc. But just when we thought it was obviously some script-kiddie hoax, a few interesting words crop up: FRU - the cover name for the SAS in Northern Ireland, Lebed - an ex-Russian general, now a politician, HALO - a type of parachute jump, Spetznaz - the Russian SAS, Al Amn al-Askari - a member of the Iraqi cabinet, Glock 26 - a ceramic handgun that can't be detected by airport scanners (a reader informs us that the Glock 26 is only partly ceramic, the bullets are metal and is can be detected at airports - so we should really shift this one into the X-file list), Steak Knife - the codename for an IRA double agent, And so on and so forth. Go through them carefully to satisfy your paranoid fantasies (you'll be safe under the bed, trust us)."

I don't recall where this piece appeared so the only credit given is the above.

For more on Echelon visit SpyWriter.

Anatomy of CIA recruitment techniques

How Marja-Liisa Linkoaho, a Finnish consular employee, was recruitted by CIA to smuggle agents out of East Berlin:

“When I was going to work in the morning, before nine in the morning, the car was not on Prenzlauer Allee, where I had left it. I was quite desperate. I owed much money, and the money had been invested in the car that was now stolen.”

It was as if someone had been waiting for this determined woman to have a weak moment.

A few days later Linkoaho was contacted by the US Central Intelligence Agency, which offered her an opportunity to work for the CIA. In return she would get some monetary compensation, as well as a Western car of her own.

“The CIA had contacted me a few times before. I always said that I felt that I had enough to do already. I did not want more responsibility, so no thank you.”

Now the situation was different, and Linkoaho agreed to the proposal. Her mission was to be an assistant and a rescuer in case things go wrong. If a CIA agent in East Germany were to need to flee quickly to the West, it would be the task of the Finnish woman to bring the agent across the border hidden in her car.

Now Linkoaho got a 1959 model Opel Rekord beige-coloured car with the registration number IA 61-15.
It was an ordinary Opel, but its twin included American espionage technology. The CIA vehicle had a mechanism installed, which made it possible to hide a person in the back seat. The CIA even had to put a dent in the sister vehicle in the same location where Linkoaho’s car was also dented."

Recapping:

1) CIA tries to recruit the woman several times, but she refuses each time.

2) She borrows money to buy a car.

3) The car gets "stolen", but the debt must be repaid.

4) CIA offers to pay off her debt, if she agrees to spy...

More: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Finnish%2Bconsular%2Bemployee%2Brecruited%2Bby%2BCIA%2Bto%2Bsmuggle%2Bagents%2Bout%2Bof%2BEast%2BBerlin/1135268587387

The Art of Spy Disguise

"What did East German spies wear to work? Archival photographs uncovered by a Berlin-based artist reveal disguises that included fur hats, upturned collars, and, naturally, sunglasses. The images from the Stasi secret police course on the 'art of disguising' provide a sometimes absurd perspective on what the Cold War era spies considered inconspicuous."

Source and more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,777716,00.html

Five Popular Espionage Techniques

Nr 2:

"Live Drops

Live Drops are very similar to brush passes and dead drops. In a live drop, two agents make an exchange, but the exchange is hidden in plain sight.

This is because one of the agents is disguised as someone who commonly exchanges items with the general public.

For example, a man walks up to a hot dog vendor and purchases a hot dog. The man pays for the concession and leaves. However, the man is an agent and has just passed the hot dog vendor, his co-conspirator, a note mixed-in with his money or written on the actual bills.

Transactions such as these took place on city streets across the globe. There is nothing suspicious about someone buying food from a street vendor."

Source: http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2011/07/five-popular-espionage-techniques-of-the-former-soviet-union/

Albert Camus vs. KGB

Albert "Camus, a philosopher, novelist and journalist, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, died on January 4, 1960, during a road trip from Provence to Paris. Camus had initially planned to accompany his wife and children on a train ride to Paris, but changed his mind at the last minute, after his trusted friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard, offered him a ride in his car to the French capital. That evening, as Gallimard and Camus were driving through the small town of Villeblevin, Gallimard’s Facel Vega FV3B rammed into a tree at high speed. Camus was killed instantly, while Gallimard died in hospital several days later. But an article published last week in one of Italy’s oldest newspapers, Corriere della Sera, claims that the two men may have been killed after Soviet intelligence agents sabotaged Gallimard’s car."

More: http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/01-783/

Why the Soviets Built the Berlin Wall

Here's a take on the reasons behind the erection of the Berlin Wall, a Cold War symbol:

"during the 1950s, American  cold warriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. [...]

The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions"...

Source and more: Consortiumnews.com, July 28, 2011

Cold War spy stole cancer cells

"Intelligence documents recently unearthed in Prague reveal that in the 1980s Jiri Bartek, then a researcher at London’s Imperial Cancer Research Fund, worked for the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret intelligence service.
Operating under the code name Raki, Bartek used his position at the clinic to purloin scientific material and equipment then unavailable in communist Czechoslovakia. Having stolen the items, he gave them to secret agents in London who smuggled them out of the UK.
Medical equipment was stashed in sports bags and living tissue packed into Thermos flasks filled with ice.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/czechrepublic/8623408/Czech-spy-stole-living-tissue-from-London-cancer-clinic.html

Cold War cultural propaganda

"For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash""... source

Let's not forget that Hollywood was a propaganda weapon too, intended, and quite successfully, to spread American values abroad.

The Lost Russian Tsar, one of the CIA's greatest ass[ets]

"Colonel-General Michael Goleniewski is widely credited as being one of the most important Western agents ever to have operated within the Soviet KGB and its satellite agencies. He was the vice chairman of Communist Poland's military intelligence when he escaped to the West in 1960, bringing thousands of Top Secret Soviet documents as well as information identifying hundreds of highly placed Soviet agents in western governments and intelligence agencies. Among the important communist agents Goleniewski exposed were Kim Philby, George Blake, Gordon Lonsdale, Morris and Lona Cohen, Henry Houghton, Ethel Gee, and Stig Wennerström. So strategic, timely, and reliable were his revelations that the House of Representatives of the 88th Congress passed House Resolution 5507 to honor Goleniewski's exceptional contributions to American security."

"Goleniewski later made the claim that he was Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, who, by most accounts, was killed with his family by Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg, Russia on 17 July 1918. Goleniewski claimed that Yakov Yurovsky, one of the assassins, saved the family and helped them to escape. The whole family supposedly traveled to Poland via Turkey, Greece, and Austria. According to his story, the family lived in hiding in Poland. As author Guy Richards (one of Goleniewski's supporters) has pointed out, he was not the first Tsarevich Alexei cliamant to emerge from Poland; several decades earlier, in 1927, a pretender named Eugene Nicolaievich Ivanoff had appeared from the same part of that country and generated a brief flurry of publicity in Europe and North America.

Tsarevich Alexei, who was born in August 1904, was a haemophiliac. Goleniewski, whose identity card gave his date of birth as 1922, making him eighteen years younger than the Tsarevich, claimed that the haemophilia made him appear younger than he really was and he had been "twice a child." He claimed that his haemophilia had been confirmed by Dr. Alexander S. Wiener, who had co-discovered the Rh factor in human blood. This claim was never confirmed.

He met one of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia claimants, Eugenia Smith, in 1963. The meeting was covered by Life magazine. Goleniewski claimed that Smith was his sister Anastasia. Smith also recognized Goleniewski as her brother Alexei, even though she had claimed in her book that she had been the sole survivor at Ekaterinburg.

Goleniewski's claim was an embarrassment to the CIA. He was put on a pension and his employment with the agency was ended in 1964.

In 1942 Wehrmacht soldiers transiting through Lemberg were told that near the town of Radom an old Polish landowner named Goleniewski lived on a large estate guarded by the SS and that he was in fact Tsar Nicholas II..."

sources: 1, 2.