Spy Blog from the International Spy Museum

Mark Stout, SPY Historian

Have you ever thought about the CIA’s seal and what it means? The CIA’s website says:

Here’s how we interpret our seal:

• The American Eagle is the national bird and is a symbol of strength and alertness.
• The radiating spokes of the compass rose depict the convergence of intelligence data from all areas of the world to a central point.
• The shield is the standard symbol of defense and the intelligence we gather for policymakers.

In other words, the CIA claims to defend the country by being alert and gathering intelligence information from all around the world.

How about the KGB’s seal?  It looks rather different.  There are actually quite a number of small variations on it, but they all look more or less like this:

The ribbon says in Cyrillic, “VChK-KGB,” indicating that the KGB (the Committee for State Security), which only took that name in 1954, saw itself as the continuation of the VChK, the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage” which was formed in 1917.

The dominant symbols, however, are the sword and the shield.  Indeed, the KGB liked to refer to itself as the “sword and the shield of the Communist Party.”  In other words, the KGB saw itself as an executive agency.  In this metaphor, intelligence is a form of national power, directly defending the party and state and directly striking their enemies.  This is in sharp contrast to the CIA’s claim that intelligence is not itself a form of power but merely supports the application of power by America’s armed forces, diplomats, and others.

The question of whether intelligence is in itself a form of national power, is a subject that scholars of intelligence argue about.  But this is not just an abstract debate among academics.  It is also a question about how intelligence practitioners see their work.

Next time you are at the International Spy Museum have a look at some of the agency seals—which come from all over the world—on the walls in our “Covers and Legends” exhibit area.  What can you figure out about each agency’s mission and its understanding of the intelligence profession?

Mark Stout is the Historian of the International Spy Museum.  He spent more than twenty years working in the national security community, serving in the Defense Department, State Department and CIA and working in a Defense Department think-tank.  Professor Stout has degrees in political science, applied mathematics and public policy from Stanford and Harvard Universities and has recently defended his PhD dissertation in history at the University of Leeds.  He is the co-author of three books and he has published or forthcoming articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Intelligence and National Security, and Studies in Intelligence.

Mark Stout, SPY Historian

The Washington Post’s compelling three-part series on “Top Secret America” has become the topic of water cooler conversation all over the country.  The series portrays a mysterious and murky world of government agencies and contractors that is growing like kudzu and draining our pocket books, unconstrained by meaningful oversight.  This is a world of silence and secrecy, a world of office buildings with no signs on them, a world of impenetrable Oakley sunglasses and lie detectors.

Reading the “Top Secret America” series and looking back on my years inside that world, I am struck by what we might call the banality of secrecy.  There are not many James Bonds or for that matter Fox Mulders here.  These Americans may have a “haunted look” that betrays a fear that “someone is going to ask them something about themselves,” as one Maryland resident who lives on the borderlands of Top Secret America put it, but other than that they are relentlessly normal people.  They are food service workers, police officers, van drivers, mechanics, computer techs, soldiers, and harried professionals who sit behind computers in offices reminiscent of Dunder Mifflin.  They lean Red or Blue, they have mortgages, belong to the PTA, follow the NFL and NASCAR, and hold backyard cookouts.  Americans have a healthy suspicion of government and much that goes with it.  Americans also look askance at secrecy, but it is important to remember that these Top Secret Americans are just like the rest of us.  In fact, they are us.

It is entirely reasonable to ask, however, whether Top Secret America needs to be so big.  The answer is probably no.  According to the Post, there are 854,000 people in the top secret intelligence and security complex producing 50,000 intelligence reports per year at the cost of many tens of billions of dollars.  Existing contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton, L3 Communications, and SAIC, are ballooning and new companies are sprouting like mushrooms.  “Competitive analysis” is a good thing, all other things being equal, more eyes on a problem are better than fewer, but surely some belt tightening is in order.

How did Top Secret America become a “hidden world, growing beyond control?”  There are two answers to this question.  First, the US Government, in the absence of good information, almost certainly overreacted and overestimated the threat in the early years of the “War on Terrorism.”  Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has commented that “the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”  Admiral Blair is right and he points to a very American way of approaching problems.

Second, Americans demand total security from their government even as they grouse at the price tag.  In other words, every one of us who votes and, indeed, who contributes to our national culture, is in part to blame.  Americans may be suspicious of government but they also want it to provide them a perfect life and they vote accordingly.  As Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum put it recently:

“Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong.”

Woe betide the politician who tries to deny Americans what they want.  The next time there is an attempted terrorist attack, the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence and the Congress all want to be able to say that they did everything they could to stop it.

Is there any hope that the growth of Top Secret America can be curtailed or even reversed?  The answer is yes.  A little historical perspective might help.

We’ve been down this road before.  When the United States entered World War I in 1917, it had only a handful of intelligence personnel.  At the signing of the Armistice a year and a half later, there were many thousands, plus 250,000 volunteer members of the quasi-official American Protective League, but during the interwar years most of this bureaucracy was demobilized.  The same thing happened during and after World War II.  The Cold War, of course, saw a gradual increase in the size of the intelligence and security communities, but again came a retrenchment after the fall of the Berlin Wall as American voters and politicians clamored for a “peace dividend.”

What does this history suggest?  It suggests that there is hope that Top Secret America can and will be pruned back someday.  However, the War on Terrorism, or whatever we are presently in, will not have a dramatic and definite end like the World Wars and the Cold War had.  We shall have to depend on less dramatic domestic political processes to reign in Top Secret America.  Perhaps the Washington Post’s series will put those processes in motion.

Mark Stout is the Historian of the International Spy Museum.  He spent more than twenty years working in the national security community, serving in the Defense Department, State Department and CIA and working in a Defense Department think-tank.  Professor Stout has degrees in political science, applied mathematics and public policy from Stanford and Harvard Universities and has recently defended his PhD dissertation in history at the University of Leeds.  He is the co-author of three books and he has published or forthcoming articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Intelligence and National Security, and Studies in Intelligence.

Mark Stout, SPY Historian

A high-profile Iranian nuclear scientist may have defected to the United States last year.  And today he may have defected back.  What are the implications for American intelligence?

The case is rife with mysteries.  Shahram Amiri disappeared last June while on a pilgrimage in the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia.  The Iranian government accused the United States of kidnapping him in order to interrogate him about the purported Iranian nuclear weapons program.  In support of this claim, Iranian television last month broadcast a videotape of uncertain origin in which a man claiming to be Amiri said that he had been kidnapped by Saudi intelligence officers and then handed over to the Americans.  Since arriving in the U.S. he claimed to have been “heavily tortured and pressured.”

The American version of the story is quite different.  The United States Government has denied kidnapping Amiri.  In March, ABC news reported that according to anonymous American officials Amiri had defected to the US and that this was a great “intelligence coup.”  Then, the day after Iranian television broadcast its Amiri tape, a video appeared of a man also claiming to be Amiri appeared on YouTube.  This Amiri said that he was in the United States of his own free will studying medical physics but that he remained loyal to Iran.

Clear as mud.  And then today, the press is reporting that Amiri has showed up at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington and asked to be immediately returned to Iran.

At this stage, it appears that Amiri actually did defect and then defect back.  Assuming that to be true, the question arises whether his initial defection was genuine or whether this was a deception or provocation by the Iranian government.  A false nuclear defector could learn a great deal about what the CIA knows about the Iranian nuclear program by taking note of what sort of questions his debriefers asked him.

Obviously much remains to be revealed about this story, but the full truth is likely to remain a matter of conjecture for a long time, perhaps even within the US and Iranian governments.  There are precedents for this sort of event.  In the 1980s, Vitaly Yurchenko, a senior Soviet intelligence officer defected to the United States.  After extensive debriefings, he eluded his CIA handlers and apparently willingly got on an Aeroflot plane heading back to Moscow.  In the 1950s, Otto John, the head of the German equivalent of the FBI, defected to the East and then came back 18 months later claiming to have been kidnapped.  Both of these cases puzzled practitioners and historians for years.  Amiri may soon join that list of intelligence mysteries.

Mark Stout is the Historian of the International Spy Museum.  He spent more than twenty years working in the national security community, serving in the Defense Department, State Department and CIA and working in a Defense Department think-tank.  Professor Stout has degrees in political science, applied mathematics and public policy from Stanford and Harvard Universities and has recently defended his PhD dissertation in history at the University of Leeds.  He is the co-author of three books and he has published or forthcoming articles in The Journal of Strategic Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Intelligence and National Security, and Studies in Intelligence.

SPY’s Book Specialist, Matt Arnold

Today,  May 6th, Richard Clarke will be speaking  at the International Spy Museum for one of our free noon lunchtime author debriefings and book signing.    From 1992 to 2003, Clarke held several positions within the National Security Council as National Coordinator and Chair for issues dealing with security, infrastructure protection, and most importantly counter-terrorism.  Effectively, he was our counter-terrorism czar.  From this position, he became one the strongest voices arguing in favor of more effective measures against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.  He favored the use of Predator drone strikes to take out Bin Laden and submarine cruise missiles strikes to destroy training camps in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, it took 9/11 before many of these ideas were effectively tried and/or accomplished. In 2003, he would leave government and come to widespread recognition a year later with the release of his memoirs detailing these events and his experiences.  He believed strongly that the public had a right to know what happened on 9/11. 

Now, with his new book  Clarke brings to our attention a new threat to our national security, Cyber War.  Cyber-security was one of the last policy issues he dealt with under the last Bush administration. Unfortunately, the same lack of interest in Al Qaeda that  plagued the days leading up to 9/11, plagued his final days in government dealing with cyber-security.   The Bush Administration seemed content to let the private sector protect the taxpayer as long as the government could protect itself.  That all started to change when the Chinese successfully hacked the Pentagon in June of 2007 along with several other significant cyber-attacks attacks in Germany and Britain.  The margin of error was shrinking. 

Last September, the International Spy Museum launched a new exhibit dealing precisely with many of the issues portrayed in his new book.   This exhibit, called Weapons of Mass Disruption, presents the threat we faced from cyber-terrorists and the significant number of other countries that have developed cyber-warfare capabilities.  According to Clarke, our capabilities as a nation toward cyberwarfare are considerable and probably the best in the world despite.  But, what about our cybersecurity?  You may be prepared to live a week without the Spy Blog, but how about a week without electricity? Given that Richard Clarke has debriefed four presidents,  we should probably all be listening to what he has to say.

To learn more check our Richard Clarke’s book: Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

A contract signed by Josephine Baker in 1944 with the French government confirming her services to entertain the troops

Amanda A. Ohlke, Adult Education Director

This week marks the anniversary of the death of Josephine Baker, one of history’s most famous female spies. We recently received copies of numerous documents from the files of the French Ministere de la Defense related to Josephine Baker.  Baker was an immensely popular African American entertainer who came to prominence in Paris in the 1920s and used her international stardom as a cover to spy for France and the French Resistance during World War II.  The document included here is an agreement between Baker and the Director of Personnel of the “Femin Militaire” signed in Algiers in 1944.  It’s significant that the paper was signed in Africa as Baker was an active member of the French military intelligence service, the Deuxieme Bureau, there.

She was recruited to work for the Deuxieme Bureau by Jacques Abtey.  Initially she merely used her access to international contacts and diplomats to gather information in France, but after the installation of the German-collaborationist Vichy Government in France, she worked with Abtey to smuggle secrets out of France to the Resistance and the Allies.  Baker and Abtey readied “all the information that had been gathered concerning the German Army in France.” Photos, Abtey says, were pinned under Josephine’s dress, and documents were recreated in a new form: “Using invisible ink, we transcribed all fifty two pieces of information onto Josephine’s sheet music.” After crossing a treacherous border, Baker laughed and told Abtey, “You see what a good cover I am!”

As the war progressed, Baker and Abtey connected with key French Resistance figures and allied intelligence officers.   British Intelligence ultimately put Abtey and Baker in charge of setting up a permanent intelligence liaison and transmission center in Casablanca, Morocco. As they struggled with international red tape to get settled in Northern Africa, Baker’s health landed her in a private clinic in Casablanca.  She was in hospital for 19 months with illness compounded by exhaustion.  Her sickroom served as a perfect cover for American diplomats to meet, at her bedside, Moroccan leaders and share clandestine conversation.  An American vice-consul told Abtey how “happy Washington was with the material [they] had been supplying.”

When she recovered, she began entertaining Allied troops in North Africa.  In the summer of 1943, she covered nine thousand miles, ranging across Tunis, Libya, and Egypt entertaining British troops.  At a grande fête on 13 August of 1943 in Algiers, then the capital of wartime France, the two leaders of the French Resistance were both expected to attend.  De Gaulle led the Free French Forces fighting the Battle of North Africa and General Henri Giraud led the Imperial Council.  While she was performing Baker stopped, unable to go on she said, because, “He is here,” pointing to De Gaulle in his box.  Raymond Boucher, then an officer in the French Navy remembered, “The top-ranking Americans supported Giraud, but when they saw Josephine on the side of de Gaulle, she authenticated, a little bit, the Free French.”   In gratitude, Charles de Gaulle gave her a tiny gold Cross of Lorraine.  On August 24, the U.S. and Britain recognized the French Committee for National Liberation.  Five days later, the Americans, British and Russians, acknowledged De Gaulle as “Chief of the Resistance.”

Baker continued touring and rallying support for De Gaulle. In the words of Abtey, they “were vagabonds of the road in the service of France.” In Beirut she auctioned the cross De Gaulle had given her and raised 300,000 FF for the Resistance.  She spent the rest of the war touring, mixing politics and show business.  Some thought she and Abtey were adventurers; but she was made a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Her grueling schedule landed her back in the hospital in Morocco, and it was there that she received the Medal of the Resistance on October 8, 1946.  The newspapers announced: “Secret Agent of Free France Decorated!

Baker had been a truly effective spy.  Her fame combined with her willingness to take chances had made her a perfect agent. Baker’s celebrity and touring schedule were the perfect cover story allowing her to be an excellent courier, and her fearlessness made it work.  But most of all her commitment to de Gaulle and his demand that the “flame of French resistance must not and shall not die” made her a true heroine of the Resistance.

Baker continued to entertain throughout the rest of her life. In 1961 she was named Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur and presented the Croix de Guerre by the French government for her wartime services.  It was presented to her with attendance from the consuls of Spain, Morocco, the U.S., Italy and Finland.  She died on 12 April 1975 in her sleep after a vigorous and acclaimed nightclub performance.    She was 69 years old.

Our References:

Baker, Jean-Claude and Chase, Chris.  Josephine: The Hungry Heart, Cooper Square Press, 2001

Abtey, Jacques.  La Guerre Secrète de Josephine Baker, La Lauze, 1948.

http://www.cmgww.com/stars/baker/index.php, official site of Josephine Baker

The game we know today as “Clue” in America began in England in 1944 as “Cluedo” in England. Invented by Anthony Pratt, a solicitor’s clerk and part-time clown. The object was to solve the mystery of the death of one of ten house guests at an English manor house.  The victim found himself dispatched in those early days by the far more gruesome or sophisticated means of axe, walking stick, fireplace poker, poison, syringe, or bomb!  You also had the possibility of the murder occurring in eleven different rooms with the inclusion on a cellar and “gun room.”  However, a gun must have seemed too obvious to Mr. Pratt in those days with the far bloodier options available.  The list of house guests included old stand-byes’ Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett with some character adjustments to Mr. Green (formerly the Rev. Mr. Green), Mrs. White (Nurse White), Colonel Mustard (Colonel Yellow), and Dr. Black.  Four characters were eliminated entirely, Mr. Brown, Mr. Gold, Miss Grey, and Mrs. Silver, with Miss Peacock being the only newly introduced character. Aside from disgrace of complete dismissal of the four characters, the demotion of Mr. Green. Dr. Black suffered perhaps the greatest injustice- in America, he became the more aptly named Mr. Boddy.   Yet, despite all these cosmetic changes, the game play remained much the same when widely released in 1949.

Today, Clue remains widely reproduced in this original format with an unlimited variety of addition spinoffs.   You can play “the Office Clue,” “Clue Harry Potter,””Scooby Doo Clue,” the potential options are unlimited.  Clue has also grown far beyond the board game origins to include several electronic formats and even a spoof movie.  Now Clue tackles the Spy Game.  “Clue 24” arrived in stores last year allowing die-hard 24 fans to work with Jack Bauer and prevent an imminent attack on the U.S.  In this instance, you work to prevent the act form happening by “uncovering the ‘WHO’ the Traitor is, ‘WHAT’ kind of attack is planned and ‘WHERE’ inside CTU will it happen.

The newest offering is “CLUE: Secrets and Spies.”  This genre busting board game was launched at the Spy Museum.  In this incarnation of Clue, now ‘Agent Black’ has his revenge.   He is the master spy the former suspects, now agents themselves, must work to thwart.  Through completing missions and attending secret meetings, you gain the intelligence necessary to stop Agent Black.  The game employs little of the original Clue game play but the spirit of the game remains.  Invisible messages and anonymity of character add layers of mystery familiar to the spy game.  The game even has the capability of enabling text messaging.  This wild card aspect can infuse the game with a entirely new level of unpredictability.  This is not your grandfathers Clue, although the bombs are back.

SPY talks with former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, about his experience with the controversy over waterboarding, and the pressures from both inside and outside the agency.

Q: When a former CIA officer goes “public” does the information need to be cleared for its possible sensitivity to national security first?

A: Everything a former CIA officer writes has to be cleared by a panel called the Publications Review Board (PRB).  And I mean everything has to be cleared, from a letter to the editor of House Beautiful magazine to a memoir about a CIA career.  But clearance is not a science and the process can take years, or 18 months, in my case.  An author frequently finds himself in a fight with PRB over language, and there is an appeals process which most authors take advantage of.  In the end, the author and PRB usually can come to an agreement, but with both sides somewhat unhappy.

Q: You have been at times at the center of the debate regarding the effectiveness waterboarding.  Where do you stand on the issue now?

A: I believe now, as I believed in December 2007 when I went public, that waterboarding was morally wrong.  I said then and I maintain now that Abu Zubaydah provided actionable intelligence after being waterboarded.  I was wrong when I said he had been waterboarded once.  That was what I was told.  We know now that he had been waterboarded 83 times.  But there are two separate issues here.  Did waterboarding work (on Abu Zubaydah it did in a limited way, but it did not work on other prisoners, who simply told the interrogators what they wanted to hear), and was it morally right?

Q: It has been suggested your position on waterboarding was part of a deception campaign.  Are you lying to us now?

A: If I said no, would you believe me?  Seriously, I’ve seen a couple of conspiratorial, fringe blogs make that accusation.  It’s ridiculous.  I called it as I saw it.  It made a lot of people angry and started an important national debate.  I stand by my position.

Q: Stephen Colbert has suggested the need to waterboard you to get the “real” truth.  Would this work or have you been trained to resist torture?

A: I feel like I already have been waterboarded!  Repeatedly.  I was never trained to resist torture.  I wish I had had training in press relations, however.

Want to learn more? Read Kiriakou’s book The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror

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