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.

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 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…

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?

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

The Enigma looked like a typewriter and was the Germans’ most prized cipher machine. Germany’s air force, army, navy, and secret services used it from 1928 to encipher and decipher sensitive communication. If Germany’s foes succeeded in breaking the Enigma cipher, they would have unprecedented insight into German thinking and strategy.

The Allies did break the Enigma cipher, and it is commonly assumed that most of the cryptanalytic work was done at Bletchley Park in England during World War II. But in fact, Marian Rejewski of the Polish cipher bureau succeeded in breaking the Enigma long before the war, and it was the Poles’ decision to hand over their knowledge to their French and British Allies in 1939 that subsequently enabled Bletchley Park to decipher increasing amounts of German Enigma traffic.

Director of Adult Education, Amanda Ohlke, outside of the building in Poland’s Pyry Forest where the Enigma code was first broken.

I just returned from a week-long conference held in Warsaw and Bydgoszcz on this very subject. Many of the presenters emphasized the critical—and typically underappreciated—contribution of Polish cryptanalysts to the breaking of the Enigma machine. One Polish participant argued persuasively that for much of the war, the Poles’ groundwork was absolutely essential to Bletchley Park. In fact, he suggested, mathematic principles created by Rejewski were still being used for cryptanalytic purposes during the Cold War.

It seems to me that the arguments brought forth by the Polish conference participants cannot be dismissed lightly. While not ignoring Bletchley Park’s accomplishments in attacking German ciphers, Poland’s role in breaking the Enigma machine can hardly be overestimated. Remarkable as it is—even though Poland succumbed to the combined onslaught of Nazi and Soviet forces in 1939, the wit of Warsaw’s cryptographers provided an important element to Allied victory in 1945.

Nothing is What It Seems.

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

 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

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.

                Espionage can be a dangerous business. Just consider the case of Soviet intelligence defector Walter Krivitsky. Born Samuel Ginsberg in Austria-Hungary in 1899, Krivitsky adopted his nom de guerre when he joined Soviet military intelligence in 1917. His assumed name loosely translates as “crooked” or “twisted”—an irony Krivitksy must have been aware of. After running a number of successful espionage operations in Germany, Austria, and Italy, in 1937 he was posted to The Hague where he managed Soviet espionage operations throughout Western Europe.

                Initially an ardent communist, Krivitsky gradually became disenchanted with Joseph Stalin’s violent and erratic purges. When Stalin’s henchmen killed his friend, Soviet intelligence defector Ignace Porevsky, in Switzerland, Krivitsky himself defected in Paris. With World War II looming, he came to the United States in 1938.

                Even though he dreaded Soviet reprisals, Krivitsky hardly missed a beat before publicly denouncing the machinations of Moscow’s secret service. When a Soviet agent murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, Krivitsky feared he would be next. “If I am ever found apparently a suicide, you will know that the N.K.V.D. [Soviet intelligence] has caught up with me,” he told a group of friends. But largely ignored and unable to fully integrate in his host country, Krivitsky became increasingly despondent.

                About a year later, on 2 February 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in The Bellevue, a seedy Washington hotel (today known as the posh Hotel George), with three suicide notes by his bed. While the police eventually ruled his death a suicide, others claimed he had committed a “Kremlin suicide”—forced by one of Stalin’s henchman to write suicide notes and then kill himself, in return for a promise that his family would be left unharmed.

Whatever happened at The Bellevue, Krivitsky was a haunted man long before his death. A CIA officer once noted that “every defector has just committed emotional suicide.” And whether Krivitsky killed himself or was forced to do so, he was caught in a maelstrom beyond his control and paid the ultimate price for being in the spy business.

Nothing is what it seems.