Spy Blog from the International Spy Museum

SPY staff member, Abbie,explores the new cyber warfare gallery

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

Computer experts have repeatedly warned about our nation’s vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. These concerns are certainly not unwarranted, given the rising number of cyber incidents registered by U.S. networks, ranging from destructive viruses to spyware. More interesting to me is our government’s offensive capabilities.  

By all accounts, our cyber capabilities are enormous, and the U.S. military has fully embraced this new type of warfare. The Pentagon graduates 80 students per year from its cyberwar school, and the 57^th Information Aggressor Squadron of the Air Force and the Network Warfare Battalion of the Army are diligently war-gaming cyber attacks. Much of the military’s training and strategizing is done in collaboration with the nation’s premier cryptanalytic organization, the National Security Agency.

The United States has already wielded this virtual weapon on several occasions. In the late 1990s, Washington launched cyber attacks on Serbian government and communications systems. Similar assaults were carried out against Iraq in 2003. The Pentagon and the intelligence community even planned to electronically freeze billions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s bank account and cripple his government’s financial system, but the operation was eventually shelved for fear that its execution would wreak havoc across the Middle East and beyond (much of Saddam’s money was tied up abroad).

 As one of the most internet-dependent nations of the world, the United States is well-advised to ponder the unintended consequences of a cyber strike as well as the havoc caused by possible counter-strikes. It will be interesting to see how cyber planners will deal with this issue. But you may rest assured that they are working on a solution as you read this blog.

Nothing is What It Seems.

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

In the Pantheon of spies, George Blake deserves a special place. An SIS (British intelligence) officer recruited by the KGB in 1955, he provided Moscow with prodigious amounts of classified information at the height of the Cold War. He betrayed not only a joint CIA-SIS tunnel project, designed to tap into Soviet and East German communication lines underneath East Berlin, but also the identities of hundreds of British agents, many of whom were consequently executed. “I don’t know what I handed over because it was so much,” he later commented.

Why did he do it? Blake claims his witnessing of U.S. bomber attacks on “completely defenseless Korean villages” in the Korean War converted him to communism. Perhaps, but I suspect an additional, more personal motivation. After World War II, Blake reportedly fell madly in love with an SIS secretary whose father forbade her to marry him because of Blake’s Jewish background. Whether the story is true or not, Blake certainly was keenly aware of, and deeply resented his outsider status in the rigidly class-structured British society.  Decades later, he tellingly said: “To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged.” Was espionage his way of getting back at a society that had never fully accepted him?

Blake’s post-espionage career is no less remarkable than his spying. Betrayed to the West by a Polish defector in 1960, Blake was sentenced to 42 years in prison, after the judge proclaimed his case “one of the worst that can be envisaged in times of peace.” In 1966, sympathizers sprang him from Wormwood Scrubs prison, possibly with KGB assistance, and Blake fled to Moscow. Unlike many Western defectors, who quickly descended into alcoholism and depression behind the Iron Curtain, Blake thrived. He married a Russian woman and was made a KGB colonel—an unusual honor for a Western defector. In 2007, President Vladimir Putin paid tribute to Blake as one of Russia’s greatest spies by conferring the Order of Friendship on him. Today, Blake still lives quietly in a government-owned apartment by Moscow. In his own words, he has led a “very full and, in the end, happy life.”

Nothing is What it Seems

With over 30 years in the CIA, SpyGuy answers frequently asked questions on current issues in the SPY world.

Q.  What’s the story on this retired State Department officer and his wife who were arrested for spying in June, Walter and Gwendolyn Myers?  According the New York Times 19 June 2009 http://bit.ly/VdlpA, the FBI warned the State Department about a suspected mole there in 2006.  And yet the Myers weren’t arrested until three years later.  It seems there’s always a long delay before the FBI makes an arrest in so many of these spy cases.

Reply:  First, we don’t know the basis for the FBI’s suspicion if indeed it did warn State about a suspected mole.  It might have been a leak from the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS), information from a Cuban defector, or even information derived from intercepts of the CuIS transmissions to the Myers.  And we certainly don’t know if the FBI had identified the Myers in 2006.  Even if the bureau had reason to suspect the Myers, it has to develop solid evidence to back up its suspicion to enable the Justice Department to bring a case to trial.

Q.  Don’t you agree that the CuIS didn’t place much value on the Myers as agents since they used such low tech methods to communicate with them, short wave radio transmissions and exchanging shopping carts in the Safeway with their CuIS handlers?

Reply:  I wouldn’t disparage their use of low tech communications; it worked for almost 20 years.  The CuIS has routinely used similar low tech methods for communicating with some of its most valued agents in the United States including Anna Montes, the senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.  Motivated by her strong feelings for Cuba, she spied for the CuIS for some time before she was arrested in 2001.  She also received direction from the CuIS by shortwave radio.  Many intelligence services including our own still use low tech means for covert communication when it is considered appropriate.   Intelligence services work hard to match the right communications method to a particular agent.

Q.  Was passing information from 200 reports to Cuban Intelligence the only damage they did?

Reply:  Remember that was in just 2007-08.  Having an agent in the State Department’s Intelligence office, INR, would be solid gold to the CuIS.   The public has a pretty shaky grip on what real spies do – and how much damage they can do.  Pop culture in books, TV, and especially Hollywood perpetuate the James Bond myth:  spying is all squealing tires and shots in the night.  No wonder we are shocked – shocked! – when we read about yet another spy in the government.  Walter Myers had the access to provide their CuIS handlers with information about sensitive and classified U.S. foreign policy issues; information and gossip about colleagues: their political leanings and personal weaknesses: and a whole range of information gleaned from his being an insider.  The CuIS regards intelligence about the U.S. as a commodity worth selling and bartering with other intelligence services.  Walter Myers was in an ideal position to deliver valuable product.

 Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

 This week marks the 31^st anniversary of the murder of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident killed in 1978 in London. And even though Markov died over thirty years ago, questions about the circumstances of his death continue to linger.

An outspoken critic of the Bulgarian regime, Markov regularly produced anti-Communist programs broadcast by the BBC and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RL/RFE) into Bulgaria. In retaliation for his propaganda work, Markov was assassinated by Bulgarian intelligence at the direct order of the country’s hard-line ruler, Todor Zhivkov. But who did it, and how?

Numerous media reports have suggested that a Bulgarian agent codenamed PICCADILLY executed Markov. According to these accounts, PICCADILLY used an umbrella that KGB technicians had transformed into a weapon capable of injecting a tiny pellet containing the lethal toxin ricin into the victim’s leg.

 But sifting through newly released Bulgarian documents, a few researchers have recently cast doubt on the established story line. Richard Cummings, a former RL/RFE security director, and Hristo Hristov, a Bulgarian journalist, argue that PICCADILLY with his umbrella may have merely served as a diversion. The actual murder would have been committed by another agent with a small pneumatic weapon, a device much easier to handle than the unwieldy umbrella. 

Whatever the truth, the assassin is likely to get off scotch free. Even though Bulgaria’s 30year statute of limitations for murder was extended for another five years in 2008, the trail seems to have gone cold. There now appears little chance of catching the perpetrator and Markov’s murder is likely to remain one of the great mysteries of the Cold War.

Nothing is What it Seems

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

Seventy years ago, World War II began. Or, more precisely, a German spy created the pretext for Hitler’s premeditated invasion of Poland. To me, this story epitomizes not only the amorality of Nazi Germany; it also serves as a cautionary tale about intelligence abuse for political ends.

Alfred Naujocks was a Sturmbannführer (major) in the Sicherheitsdienst (security service or SD), the intelligence unit of the SS.  In early August 1939, Naujock’s boss, SD Chief Reinhard Heydrich, instructed him personally to simulate an attack by Polish subversives on a German radio station near Gleiwitz, at the Polish border. “Actual proof of these attacks of the Poles is needed for the foreign press, as well as for German propaganda purposes,” Heydrich explained.

Naujocks delivered the goods, literally. The SD had earmarked a dozen convicts to be dressed in Polish uniforms, killed, and left on the spot as “evidence” of Polish aggression. The SD cynically referred to these men as Konserven (“canned goods”). After Naujocks had “captured” the radio station with a small band of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms, a Polish-speaking German broadcast a brief anti-German message. A political prisoner of the Nazis was dressed as a saboteur, received a lethal injection from an SD doctor, was shot several times, and left dead at the scene.

The Gleiwitz incident was part of a series of similarly staged attacks along the German-Polish border. Even though few people outside Germany bought into the Nazi bluff, it provided Hitler with an opportunity to cast the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, as a defensive measure. That was all he needed. Just a few days earlier, he had told his generals: “I shall give a propaganda reason for starting the war; whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”

Nothing is What It Seems.