While information from a single source may be untrustworthy, additional sources can be used to corroborate the data. For example, U. They weren't completely sure if they were reading Japan's code word for the island AF correctly, however, so they had troops positioned at Midway to issue a radio alert saying they were running short on fresh water. Shortly, Japanese communications were intercepted that reported that AF was low on fresh water, confirming the target of the coming attack.
The machine functioned somewhat like a typewriter with a maze of complicated mechanical and electronic connections. Any message typed into the machine would be transposed into a code; another Enigma with the identical set-up of wires and rotors could reverse the code and reveal the original message. They shared their knowledge with the British, who used it, along with several captured Enigmas, to decipher an enormous volume of coded Nazi messages, some from Hitler himself.
This information, codenamed ULTRA, was kept under tight wraps so that the Germans would not suspect that their messages were being read. This keeps them guessing, forces them to miscalculate military capabilities and commit forces to the wrong area.
One method of spreading misinformation is the double agent. Imagine that a U. The United States becomes aware that this scientist is spying for the Russians. Instead of arresting him, they allow him to continue feeding information to the Russians. However, they make sure that the blueprints, technical readouts and other data he has access to are altered. The Russians are now getting technical information that is useless. They might spend millions of dollars on research into flawed technology.
Thus, the scientist is an unwitting double agent. Alternately, the United States could confront the scientist and threaten him with a long prison sentence or even the death sentence, the penalty for treason.
To avoid this, he agrees to intentionally turn double agent. Not only does he knowingly supply the Russians with false information, but he works to gain information from his Russian controller.
He might provide the United States with the names of other Russian spies, or intelligence on the level of Russian scientific research. That is, he informs the Russians that the Americans caught him. Now, the Russians know to disregard the technical information that he provides, and in turn, they supply misinformation back to the Americans. If it seems confusing, imagine trying to keep it all straight when a mistake could cost you your life.
Some agents have even gone beyond triple agent, playing the two sides against one another and creating such a tangled web that historians have no idea whose side the spy was really on. Operation Fortitude was one of the grandest and most successful misinformation campaigns ever conducted.
The goal of Fortitude was to fool the Germans into withholding their strongest military units or putting them in the wrong place when the Allies invaded Normandy in Wooden and cardboard airplanes, fake fuel depots and even dummy troops were massed in southern England to make the Germans think the attack would come from there, rather than at Normandy in the north.
A completely fictional U. Army Group , which even had General George Patton leading it. False radio traffic supplemented the deception. The most important element, however, was the misinformation provided to the Germans by double agents. Information supplied by a double agent code-named Garbo convinced Hitler that the attack would come from the south. To keep up the pretense and delay the arrival of German reinforcements in Normandy as long as possible, the day of the invasion even featured a fake landing force with loudspeakers playing the sounds of a giant fleet moving across the English Channel, with radar-reflecting balloons and metal strips dropped by planes creating the radar signature of a large invasion.
Once the attack at Normandy was underway, Garbo told his German handlers that it was just a feint meant to draw German troops away from the "real" attack to the south.
For lots more information on spies, espionage and related topics, check out the links on the next page. Oleg Penkovskiy earned great respect in the Soviet Union for his military career. In the late s, Penkovskiy became disenchanted with the KGB , where he was working to develop contacts that could provide information on western military capabilities. Instead, he provided information on Soviet missiles and other military plans to a British businessman. He was eventually arrested and executed. The father of this article's author served in the U.
Army in the late '60s and early '70s. Part of that time was spent stationed in West Germany, very close to the border of Czechoslovakia. At the height of the Cold War, the U. To confuse the Eastern Bloc, the Americans would sit in their command post at night and use separate radios to engage in fictional conversations involving units that didn't exist or were thousands of miles away. They changed their voices slightly, used fake call signs and described large numbers of troops and tanks, all to create confusion.
Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. How Spies Work. Ideological disagreement with their home country. Survey and photograph. Plant listening devices. The name comes from the black bags burglars often use to carry their tools. These are missions so sensitive they have to be deniable. The people at the top must be able to say they never knew.
If something goes wrong with your covert operation, the consequences for those responsible may be disastrous. A term coined by the CIA. You need to move fast. Get out now, while you can. Your mission or identity has been fully discovered. Good faith? No thanks. This is espionage. Some of the most important meetings in espionage last less than a second. Just enough to exchange something - a word, an envelope, a key. The meeting — a car pick up — begins.
Minor intelligence of no operational worth that an agent or double agent passes to a foreign intelligence service to prove their value. A cipher scrambles your message into nonsense by substituting and adding to the letters in it. A forger of identity documents. Luckily, you and your colleagues have a predefined code - a system of words that represent other words - to protect your communication and yourselves.
Uh oh. Some aspect of your operation, asset, or cover has been uncovered - compromised. You'd better think fast. Need to hide secrets? Put them in something that looks ordinary: a suitcase with a false bottom, a hollowed-out coin, a USB flash drive. The best concealment devices are things that you carry with you every day. They describe you as conscious - in on what they really do. Everyone knows everyone else is spying on them.
So intelligence services devote a lot of energy to counterintelligence: thwarting foreign spying operations which includes flushing out traitors. You need a cover to mask the fact that you work for an intelligence service.
Other times you might need to carry business cards. The last domino falls - but no one saw the first one go. A covert operation is a hidden operation designed to influence events in a foreign, probably hostile, place. Everyone sees the result. But no one knows you created it. The development of a relationship with an intelligence target prior to recruitment during which an intelligence officer explores the target's motivations to spy.
You need to get vital information to someone. So how do you get from A to B? You use C: a cut-out. One way to catch fish involves dangling bait in the water. And one way to collect intelligence involves dangling an officer in front of the enemy. You may also use a dangle to identify enemy officers with the intent of removing them from your country. How about a dead drop site? A secret location where you can leave it for them to pick up later. If you want to get out of your country, you could defect to an opposing one.
Defectors sometimes gain entry to their new country by offering valuable intelligence. So you make it deniable. You set it up in a way that if a higher-up is ever asked, they can plausibly say they knew nothing. The cover gives you a reason for being in the target country as well as diplomatic immunity, including safe passage home, if you get blown. One way to disrupt the activities of an enemy intelligence service is to spread disinformation : falsehoods, rumors, and fake stories.
Not to be confused with misinformation, which is unintentionally false. A very risky position. Dry cleaning gets rid of spots. See also anti-surveillance and counter-surveillance. A hidden mic. A bugged phone. There are many ways to eavesdrop - to listen in to supposedly private conversations.
As an intelligence officer, you need to master the subtle art of elicitation: drawing out valuable information from a target. How do you protect your data? Encrypt it with a cipher. A secret rescue operation to bring an agent, defector or intelligence officer and sometimes his or her family out of immediate danger and into a safe zone. Operations designed to look like the work of another nation. Pirates flew the original 'false flags' to fool the ships they were about to attack into believing they were friendly.
The best smokescreens make no smoke. One way to keep your operations secret is to act through a front organization, usually a business, that no one knows you control. Think George Smiley. Espionage is the act of spying or using spies, agents, assets, and intelligence officers, as well as technology, to collect secret information, usually through illegal means. In , Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged and convicted for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and became the first and only American civilians executed under the Act.
Major parts of the Espionage Act remain part of US law today. In , NSA contractor Edward Snowden was charged with crimes under the Act for intentionally revealing secret national security information. Find out more in the Top Secret exhibit. The clandestine gathering of information from an economic competitor. For millennia, China was a major target, with its silk, tea, and porcelain manufacturing secrets.
Find out more in the Spying in the Marketplace exhibit. Intelligence agencies collect information in many different ways. The oldest method is through human sources HUMINT or human intelligence , relying on spies and intelligence officers using their wits and talents with support from Tech Ops.
But when information is beyond human reach or in places too dangerous or remote , technology is used to intercept messages SIGINT or signals intelligence , conduct overhead surveillance IMINT or imagery intelligence , or even sniff out chemical, biological, and acoustic signatures MASINT or measurement and signature intelligence.
Today, open source intelligence OSINT from non-secret, publicly available sources such as webpages and newspapers, makes up a vast amount of collected intelligence. Find out more in the Stealing Secrets gallery. Spies are recruited via an approach or pitch by a case officer. This often seeks to persuade the individual through appealing to ideology, patriotism, religion, ego, greed, or love, or sometimes by using blackmail or some other form of coercion.
Persuading someone to put their life on the line is one of the hardest tasks for any intelligence officer.
It takes training, patience, and empathy. Officers use a variety of approaches, based on the subject. This depends on the specific individual to some extent.
But some general ways to cultivate trust include using empathy, building a rapport perhaps through shared friends, interests or dreams, or even shared frustrations , and showing vulnerability.
Honesty being open about who you are and what you want may also be used—or, perhaps, false honesty. Intelligence officers often operate abroad under some form of official cover, perhaps as diplomats in an embassy. Others operate without the protection of their government and must create a convincing cover that explains their presence and activities in a country—a businessperson, perhaps, or a student. Face-to-face meetings can be impractical, even deadly—especially if spies are caught red-handed passing or receiving classified information or carrying spy equipment.
Methods include secret writing such as invisible ink or tiny microdots or sending and receiving secure messages using special technology often concealed or even disguised to look like everyday objects. But we know that spying was taking place much earlier than that. They are diplomatic correspondence, recorded on clay tablets, that discuss among other things intelligence and espionage. No, George Washington was not a spy.
During the American Revolutionary War, General Washington fully understood the power of espionage to outsmart and outmaneuver vastly superior forces. He employed spies, relied heavily on intelligence, and made us of codes and ciphers. He even hired Dr. It all started in , when Washington wrote a letter to Nathanial Sackett, a New York merchant active in counterintelligence activities. That network would become the Culper Ring—and it helped steer the colonial army to victory. They undercut a number of intelligence operations and the effect of hunt for them—also known as a molehunt—led to growing paranoia in the UK and US intelligence communities.
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