Spy Blog from the International Spy Museum

SPY’s Book Specialist, Matt Arnold

SPY Artifact: Handkerchief with Secret Writing

Invisible ink.  Lemon juice, milk, and, for those most desperate, urine are the most commonly known recipes for invisible ink.   These techniques were literally child’s play for many of us.  Yet, when Mata Hari was arrested with a vial of a German issued invisible ink, it was used as evidence of her status as a German spy.   But what use can these potions and methods practiced for centuries still hold for our national security?

Well, quite a bit according to the CIA.  The oldest classified documents in US archives happen to be German invisible ink recipes from 1917 and 1918. As recent as 2002, the CIA successfully defended the classification in federal court fearing the “risk of compromise of…intelligence methods” and of allowing the “more sophisticated methods of secret writing” to fall in terrorists hands.  Perhaps we have Mata Hari to thank for those recipes?

Although the CIA is still protecting the German’s secret recipes, we have our own rich tradition.  George Washington himself was an avid practitioner and dabbler in invisible inks.  Washington instructed the use of “sympathetic stain” developed by Jon Jay’s brother for the transmission of secret information.

In Invisible Ink by John Nagy, we are introduced to the American Revolution as this war of deception waged by British and American forces employing invisible inks, codes, secret rendezvouses, spy rings, and complicated military deception operations.  After their defeat England’s chief of intelligence was reputed to have said, “Washington did not really outfight the British, he simply outspied us!”  I guess tea makes a poor invisible ink…

SPY’s Book Specialist, Matt Arnold, reviews a classic spy film.

In the lobby of the International Spy Museum is a large black and white image of a man bathed in shadow.   Enveloping him in this darkness is post-World War II Vienna, a city up to the task of casting a further level of intrigue into the frame.   Vienna had been spared the worst of what many European cities had suffered during the war.  Yet, the charm and pleasant music of pre-war Austria now came accompanied with ruins, a thriving black market, and refugees attempting to escape from Soviet occupation.  Divided into four zones by the conquering British, French, Americans, and Russians, an international patrol of all four was responsible for controlling and rehabilitating the city.   However, early cold war politics was turning it into a playground for international espionage.

The image is a still from the film The Third Man, written by spy novelist Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed, and with strong contributions from Orson Welles.  With this legendary pedigree, it may be unsurprising that it is widely considered one of the greatest films; included in the AFI top 100 films and ranked the Greatest British film of the 20^th Century by the British Film Institute.  Reed and Greene’s Vienna is a city facing the realities of a world blown apart by one war while witnessing the birth of another.   The man in the shadows too is caught in between these worlds, being plunged once again back into darkness. What better environment to be first introduced to the world of the International Spy Museum?

Listen Here: Ask a Spy, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh Assassination

We go to our own resident SPY and Executive Director, Peter Earnest, to get an operative’s point of view on the breaking news over the spycraft and disguise tactics used in the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. SPY’s Adult Education Director, Amanda Ohlke, talks with Peter as he draws on his more than 35 years of experience in the CIA.

Resources:

Time Magazine’s Top 10 Assassination List

Test your SPY skills in our immersive mission, Operation SPY

SPY speaks with author Shane Harris about his assertion the American government still can’t discern future threats in the vast data cloud, but can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible and illegal just a few years ago.

Mr. Harris will be at SPY next Thursday to answer questions and discuss his book The Watchers- The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.

Q: Who are the Watchers?

A: The Watchers are five men who’ve played extraordinary roles in building, and in some cases tearing down, computer systems that can ingest and analyze huge amounts of electronic information about terrorist threats. Their quest is to “connect the dots” about future threats to the United States. Most of these men have worked behind the secretive veil of the intelligence community at some point in their career, but they all share a common thread: Their most important work became the subject of intense public scrutiny, which is rare in the spy world. Chief among the Watchers is retired Admiral John Poindexter, the narrative protagonist of the book. The story begins with him as deputy national security adviser to Ronald Regan in 1983. After a terrorist attack on Marines in Beirut, Poindexter set out to build a system that could detect the signals of impending crises in the databases of government intelligence. He continued that quest after the 9/11 attacks with a controversial program called Total Information Awareness. The other Watchers are Michael Hayden, the one-time director of the National Security Agency; Mike McConnell, ex-director of national intelligence; a software designer named Jeff Jonas, who worked briefly with Poindexter and then became one of his most prominent skeptics; and a former Army major named Erik Kleinsmith, who was the lead analyst on a secret data-mining program code named Able Danger, which may have detected the presence of Al Qaeda operatives in the United States months before September 11, 2001.

Q: Whose watching the Watchers?

A: We have a new generation of Watchers today, and I’m sad to say that they’re mostly watching themselves. The system of oversight we’ve set up in the United States, which is supposed to provide some check on executive surveillance authority, gives tremendous deference to the intelligence agencies to collect information on just about anyone they choose. While there are significant checks to guard against unwarranted monitoring of American citizens’ phone calls or email exchanges, they’re not sufficient for our current data-driven world, in which there are few meaningful impediments–technological or legal–to acquiring information about people. One way or another, the government can get this data. And often, it’s the seemingly innocuous information that is the most revealing. For example, you can learn more about a person’s day-to-day activities and his personal connections by examining his phone logs than by actually listening in on his phone conversations. The former class of data is, legally and technically, easier to get than the latter. The government knows this.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be so concerned about the government’s massive collection capabilities. We live in an era of accessible information, after all. And for the most part, people like that, because it helps us communicate, move about, and shop more easily. Our laws are mostly focused on collecting data, rather than what government agencies actually do with it behind closed doors. And that’s where we need to pay more attention. We should set up new rules for how the Watchers use information about us. And we should employ technology to keep tabs on them. We should, in fact, start watching the Watchers with the very same tools they use to watch us.

Q: Is Admiral John Poindexter the new Dr. Strangelove- or: Should we learn to stop worrying and love Big Brother?

A: It’s tempting to think of him that way. And when I first met him, I was expecting an evil genius character straight out of Cold War fiction. But I quickly realized that he is far more rational, thoughtful, and decent than his most ardent critics have portrayed him. I don’t propose that we stop worrying about Big Brother–but neither does John Poindexter. In fact, when he conceived of his Total Information Awareness system after 9/11, privacy-protecting technologies were at its core. He imagined a system in which all identifying features of the data–names, locations, etc.–would be encrypted, so that an analyst using a TIA program would not know the identities of the people underlying all the information on his screen. If the analyst could form some basis of reasonable suspicion or probable cause that a person in the data was engaged in terrorist plot, then the government would have to get a judge’s approval to “unlock” the encryption and see who was really behind that anonymous information. It was a radical proposal, and it would have built a tangible measure of privacy protection into government surveillance. Sadly, when the Congress pulled the public funding on Poindexter’s programs, and shifted them into the classified intelligence budget, they did not continue the research on privacy. That was a mistake.

Q: Who came up with the idea for the all seeing eye pyramid in Information Awareness Office (IAO) logo?  Clever design or Masonic plot?

A: Not a clever design, definitely not a plot. Robert Popp, Poindexter’s deputy, came up with it. He’d been going back and forth with an artist, whose designs had left Popp uninspired. As Popp told me, his secretary came into his office to deliver a sandwich from a nearby deli. She put the sandwich and Popp’s change down on his desk. Popp looked over and saw a $1 bill, with the Great Seal on the back–a pyramid topped by a large eye. He had a kind of eureka moment. The eye would stand for the letter I in Information Awareness Office. The pyramid was in the shape of an A.  So, he had the first two letters of the acronym. For the O, Popp thought, what better symbol than a globe? Global vision, global security, global awareness. So, “IAO” became an eye atop a pyramid casting its gaze over the world. Popp ran the idea by Poindexter–he liked it. To this day, Poindexter doesn’t see why people reacted so strongly to the image, why they found it so menacing and ominous. I’ve explained the reasons to him several times. He doesn’t agree.

Q: What should be learn from the case of the  Umar Abdulmutallab, the Chirstmas Day Bomber, about the progress of the Watchers?

A: I’m afraid this case tells us the Watchers are losing ground on their fundamental goal. The government has become very good at collecting the dots about terrorism, but not at connecting them. The Watchers always believed they had to do both. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it became easier to amass huge databases of information than to build sophisticated tools for making sense of that data. This latter challenge has always been harder, and our intelligence agencies are still struggling with it.

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

At the height of World War II, in 1942, the Germans began to produce massive amounts of British counterfeit banknotes. Their goal—bring down the British economy by flooding the United Kingdom with fake money.

The scheme was run by SS intelligence officer Bernhard Krüger, hence its name, “Operation Bernhard.” Upon orders from SS boss Heinrich Himmler, Krüger selected over 140 concentration camp inmates to implement the operation. This course was as ingenious as it was diabolical—while the camps offered a large pool of talent (graphic designers, printers, professional forgers), the selectees could simply be liquidated at the end of the operation to ensure secrecy. Krüger himself always treated his workers kindly—in fact, some testified on his behalf after the war—, but they knew all too well that they lived on borrowed time, and that any day could be their last.

Operation Bernhard was an unparalleled success. Within two years, the inmates produced nearly 9 million pound notes—13 percent of the £1 billion worth of real notes then in circulation. When the Bank of England detected some of the counterfeit notes, it reverently described them “as the most dangerous ever seen.” And even though a lack of German aircraft prevented the notes from being dropped over Britain, and cause financial havoc there, the SS used the notes on a large scale in Europe to buy arms, raw materials, and pay their own spies. The notes also underwrote the liberation of fallen Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in a daring commando operation in 1943.

Operation Bernhard’s most cherished result, however, was that it saved lives. When the war ended, the SS guards in charge of the prisoners simply disappeared. Whether any of the inmates would have survived without joining Operation Bernhard, is highly doubtful.

Operation Bernhard was recently turned into an excellent movie, The Counterfeiters, which won an Oscar as the best foreign (Austrian) film in 2008. The International Spy Museum is pleased to screen it on 4 February, and provide a historical context. For more information, see: http://www.spymuseum.org/programs/calendar_pages/2010/q1/2010_02_04_prog.php

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

Espionage fiction has long influenced people’s notions of intelligence. And there are a good number of first-rate espionage authors to choose from, including John le Carré, Graham Greene, and Ian Fleming. But who did it best?

The answer, of course, depends much on one’s own taste, but my choice is the British writer Eric Ambler (1909-1989). Here is why: Ambler never loses focus, uses unstilted, crisp prose, and simply tells a good story well. His protagonists are believable, and his scenarios are realistic. Many of his novels are set in the interwar period, and as a contemporary of Mussolini and Hitler, Ambler masterfully uses the backdrop of a Europe gripped by totalitarianism, and on the brink of war, to craft powerful stories. Since Ambler’s hero is typically not a professional spy, but someone who accidentally stumbles into a major politico-espionage plot, the reader can easily identify.

If I had to pick one of Ambler’s many excellent novels, it would have to be Journey into Fear. Published and set in 1940, the book describes the flight of an Englishman, Howard Graham, aboard a small Italian steamer from fascist agents. As the vessel is chugging across the eastern Mediterranean from Istanbul to Genoa, Graham discovers with growing horror that his fellow passengers are not what they initially seemed—and that his journey may not lead to safety at all.

Journey into Fear is a relentlessly paced suspense novel. Whether you are interested in espionage, interwar Europe, or simply a good story, you will not be disappointed. Read and enjoy!

Nothing is What It Seems

Listen Here: The Terrorist Challenge

January 8, 2010

Continuing the Spy Museum’s SPYCast®, Peter Earnest, Museum Executive Director and 36 year veteran of the CIA, is interviewed by Museum Historian Dr. Thomas Boghardt on this week’s breaking intelligence news.
The U.S. authorities’ failure to prevent a Nigerian suicide bomber from boarding a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day, and the suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan have roiled the intelligence community. International Spy Museum historian Dr. Thomas Boghardt discusses with SpyCast host and CIA veteran Peter Earnest how these incidents unfolded and their implications for intelligence reform.

Find past SPY Casts here: http://www.spymuseum.org/programs/spycast.php

Q&A Amy Knight author of How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies. Learn more  about Gouzenko and ask the author your questions at SPY on Wednesday January 20th.

Q: Who was Igor Gouzenko?

A:  Igor Gouzenko was a code clerk for the GRU, Soviet military counterintelligence, in Ottawa, Canada.

Q:  How and why did he defect?

A:   He defected in September 1945 with a large number of secret documents by turning himself in to the Canadian RCMP. 

Q:  Why was his defection so important in “starting” the Cold War?

A:   Gouzenko’s defection had a huge impact, contributing to the growing Cold War between the Soviets and the West, because he had clear proof that the Soviets had an extensive espionage operation in North America.

Q:  Beyond the documents Gouzenko defected with, how did the western intelligence agencies utilize him afterward?  Did his training as a cipher clerk provide any unique opportunities?  

A:   Gouzenko’s training as a cipher clerk as such did not offer western intelligence unique technical opportunities to learn more about Soviet espionage, but his broader knowledge about what the Soviets were up to was seen as invaluable to western intelligence.

Q:  What became of Gouzenko in his later years? Did the Soviets ever attempt any known acts of retribution against him?

A:   Gouzenko’s use to the west gradually declined because his knowledge became outdated.  He lived with his large family under an alias in a town near Toronto and became very embittered with Canadian authorities, who he thought did not treat him fairly.  The Soviets never attempted to go after Gouzenko, as far as I know.  Stalin reportedly ordered that Gouzenko be left alone because an act of retribution would make the Soviets look bad.

 Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

In 1894 the French army obtained a letter revealing that a high-ranking officer was selling secrets to Germany. Suspicion fell on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer. Ignoring the fact that Dreyfus’ handwriting did not match the letter, an anti-Semitic court convicted him of treason and imprisoned him on a barren island.

Eventually the truth emerged: the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, a close friend of an officer in the French Intelligence Bureau. But the military ignored this new evidence until public pressure forced a retrial. Once again, Dreyfus was convicted, and only a presidential pardon eventually secured his freedom. But it took another century until French President Jacques Chirac offered an apology for Dreyfus’ maltreatment, and officially rehabilitated him in 2006.

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

Today The Wall Street Journal ran an article revealing that militants inside Iraq have hacked U.S. Predator drones and were able to access real time information used by the military.  

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, are used extensively by the CIA and Pentagon to conduct surveillance, as well as identify and kill insurgents and terrorists. In fact, armed drones have eliminated half of the CIA’s twenty most wanted “high value” targets, including Saad bin Laden, Osama’s oldest son. A few months ago, CIA director Leon Panetta even referred to the drone program as “the only game in town.”

Given the drones’ central role in America’s counter-insurgency and anti-terrorism efforts, it is worrisome to learn that Iran-backed Iraqi insurgents this summer successfully hacked into a drone feed and downloaded large amounts of surveillance footage (which the U.S. military later discovered on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant). To date, there is no indication that any drones have been manipulated, but the implications are troublesome.

As successful as the drones have been tactically, their usage is controversial. Missiles fired from drones have killed numerous innocent civilians—exact numbers are hard to come by—further complicating America’s already difficult relationship with Pakistan, where many of the strikes were conducted. What if someone hacked into a drone and fired a U.S.-made hellfire missile into a major Pakistani city? True, it is a far-fetched scenario, but then again, who would have imagined that insurgents could have downloaded highly classified drone video footage simply by using commercially available software, as happened this summer?

Nothing is What It Seems