Given a lot of the crazy shit I hear come up in the comments here every time the CIA tends to get mentioned in almost any context this might actually be a good resource for a lot of folks here to start separating fact from fiction.
I’ll drop a couple of my favourites here but they must have at least 20 of them by now.
Doug London https://youtu.be/aV9HdJtPbZA
This guy had a really long career at CIA in the particular job that you all think of when you think of a “spy” that spanned around 30 years from memory with 9/11 occurring right in the middle of his career.
He talks a lot about not only how that changed the face of the agency but about all the mistakes that got made along the way and how the wheels fell off the truck with things like the rendition programs etc. Overall, it’s a great self reflective and critical look at the agency from a very senior person on the inside.
Jim Lawler https://youtu.be/AFnfTDbcPOA
This guy is probably the most “spooky” kind of CIA guy I’ve ever seen them interview. Even to the point that he is rather unusual amongst his peers if his reputation is to anything to go by. You can immediately see why he was so good at his job almost from the start. Like Doug he was also VERY senior and at the pointy end of the spear as they say.
The later stage of his career was focused on nuclear non proliferation and its very interesting to hear him talk about things like the decision to invade Iraq for example and once again where things went completely off the rails.
Holden Triplett https://youtu.be/0NSGOJs150w
On the other side of the fence Holden was working to actively catch foreign spies in the US while working at the FBI where he left in mid 2020.
Covers a lot of interesting topics and stories that I think folks would be interested in.
If you don't have time for a 20-hour read, Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece "Are Spies More Trouble Than They're Worth?" is a good 15-minute synopsis: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/are-spies-more...
An incredible source covering more than a century of operations, predating the revolution, and spanning all continents. The first book dives quite deeply into this exact topics, with double, triple and sometimes quadruple crossings. I loved the part about the prep for large-scale sabotage in eastern seaboard of USA in the events of hostilities, something I had no idea about but would have been quite an bold move. There was also a lot of unbelievably dumb stuff.
The book mentions the increased difficulty of doing anything undercover or assumed identity in the modern digitally connected world. All of those undercover things are pretty much the thing of the past now, with OSINT being able to find just about anything about anyone.
What does state of the art facial recognition do to operational technique in China ?
Buyers beware: Mitrokhin books are not an easy reading, so be prepared to chew.
Would you want a communist working in the US government? Clearly they would be far more likely to sympathize with the Soviet Union than a capitalist would.
And they hate them: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tankie
Bannon used to be a performative maoist?
If you can obtain the telephone directory and track it over time and it has job titles you can probably reconstruct the history of IBM, which party is in power, whatever, for the institution which publishes it. And what the role and career progression is for the longterm players. What does it tell you about the short term players? Maybe as much if they come and go. I bet you could identify McKinsey hires coming and going from top 10 institutions by their name as they are attached to the CEOs office and move between roles, if you can get the phone book.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_medical_data_breach
I don’t know if it’s covered in there but these two incidents ended up exposing everyone inside the CIA if I remember the details correctly.
But what if they weren't headhunters ? What if they were... Chinese operatives ?
I also seem to remember that "who is secret service at the embassy" was never an important line of defense against counterespionage, something the article doesn't mention.
All of this is kind of beside the point though, since embassy staff are known, heavily surveilled and guarded by diplomatic immunity. The "real" spies are the local people they recruit, and recruiting and keeping tabs on them without blowing their cover is the actual hard part.
I remember a cultural attaché or two from John le Carré novels ;)
Anyways always remember the difference between diplomatic immunity and consular immunity. The former covers the nuclear family, and includes criminal activity. The latter most decidedly does not.
There was a case where a Brazilian (IIRC) diplomat's kid killed a local in a traffic accident. Off scot-free.
Isn't "passport control officer" the main go-to title for agents working under diplomatic cover?
Only the truly political functions (ambassador and his wife) are not spies per se, but in Soviet times they came from the party and in current times they come from the mafia-services clique.
The CIA did try to recruit him--it had geologists--it had more or less everybody. But it was known for cheaping out on technical staff, offering them a GS-x, then, when the scientist had left the old job and was in town, saying that the budget had been cut--which never, ever, happened in those days--and offering instead a GS-(x-2).
By what I've heard, while the Russian military fell apart in the 1990s, they increased support for intelligence to compensate. I've not heard anything to indicate that they allowed their counterintelligence capabilities to deteriorate. Over the past year, Washington has done a lot of bragging over how much they have penetrated the Russian establishment, but I suspect there is a large element of bluff there.
The reason you hear less about it from a Western perspective is because the Western allies leveraged reconnaissance technologies more efficiently. They had better aerial reconnaissance, a wider satellite network (from the late-70s onward), nearer proximity to Moscow, wider military projection and better code breaking. It is well-accepted that the Soviets, and the Russian successor state, have always had a hell of a time keeping encryption secret long from the combined US, Commonwealth, Israeli and German intelligence.
While the West didn't know everything going on inside, they were able to see almost everything from a birds eye view. It was necessary for the Soviets to have an extensive spy network to get the equivalent viewpoint.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_intelligence_p...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_spies_agains...
So no, it seems like the FSB is doing a poor job compared to the KGB.
“Inserting” someone into a hostile intelligence agency is known as a seeding operation and if you told me that they never were able to pull one off, I believe you.
However, they still had eyes and ears on the inside through a combination of recruiting existing officers already on the inside and via defectors.
Quite a lot has been written on the topic since then but I’d suggest checking out my other comment if you’re looking for some resources on that kind of thing.
In the current war, there is no doubt that NATO enjoys significant signals and imagery capability. It is the claim that they have extensively compromised Russian intelligence internals that I suspect is more propaganda than reality.
Read "Spy Dust" by Tony Mendez. I can't recommend this book high enough.
Is grammatically correct in American English? Sounds weird.
In UK, Aus, you'd ask "How do you explain the ..."
To me, "How to explain the..." is a statement of fact. "I'm going to tell you how to explain...". The "I'm going to tell you" is unwieldy for the title of an article, so it's omitted.
"How do you explain the..." is a question. Saying "I'm going to tell you how do you explain the..." sounds ungrammatical.
https://medium.com/@aaronDfrank/how-to-explain-the-metaverse...
https://www.hiig.de/en/explaining-ai-explain-the-unexplainab...
Or even books like "How to Explain the Trinity"
