

How to Spot a Spook - libpcap
http://cryptome.org/dirty-work/spot-spook.htm

======
btilly
Those spooks are meant to be easy to identify. If caught doing something bad
the worst that usually happens is that they are kicked out of the country. No
biggie. Much worse are when under cover agents become easy to identify. The
USA will do nothing to help them, and they face death.

For instance the outing of Valerie Plame brought to fact that the company
Brewster Jennings & Associates was a fake front. After that, a simple Google
search for people with that company on their resume made a lot of undercover
agents easy to identify.

~~~
mustpax
_The USA will do nothing to help them, and they face death._

This sounds a bit exaggerated. The US Government will generally make a good
effort to bring back even its own civilian citizens trapped in foreign lands
(i.e. the reporters in North Korea). It seems unlikely that the government
would not do that and more for its own covert operatives.

One might argue that the government would sacrifice its own agents so as not
to attract attention to their presence, but once the agent is captured the jig
is already up, so to speak. As for press attention, I'm sure most governments
can figure out how to arrange the return of a single person without involving
the public in it.

~~~
btilly
People under cover frequently have covers claiming to not be Americans. And
often compromising their cover will jeopardize other people's covers.

Therefore even though there is a chance that the US will intervene, they must
be prepared for the possibility that the US will not help them.

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crux
The spook that was given as an example in that text, James R. Lilley, sounded
familiar to me. I looked him up and saw that his career continued well after
the time of that article, being made ambassador by Reagan in '86.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lilley>

The article, among other things, confirms that Lilley was a CIA operative. I
don't know for sure but it seems like that information was far from public
knowledge in 1974.

~~~
wingo
There is a close relationship between operative and official. As you probably
recall, GHW Bush was head of CIA at one point.

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stcredzero
In Vietnam, the CIA all had the same spy Rolex to be used as bribery material.
I read an account about how all the cabdrivers knew who they all were and
never needed directions to drive agents to the safe houses.

------
carbon8
Note: this article is from 1974.

~~~
delme
True. That may be the reason why the same website published the following two
days later: State Department Telephone Directory May 2010,
<http://cryptome.org/state-phones.zip> As far as i understand the
abbreviations define "USEO" as "United states Embassy Office" [page A-2],
however nothing in the name listing contains "USEO". The document is
unclassified after all. However it may very well contain past or future
"spooks".

~~~
hugh3
I think we can assume that agents attached to embassies are probably well
known to the local intelligence agencies in whatever country they're in. This
is absolutely fine from the agency's point of view, since the CIA needs a big
operation in Beijing (and conversely the Chinese need a big operation in
Washington) and it makes much more sense to run it semi-openly within the
embassy, since the alternative is to attempt to run a big covert operation
outside the embassy.

I think we can also assume that in countries where it matters there are
probably spies who are _not_ employed by the embassies and who may or may not
be known to the local intelligence agencies.

I guess in conclusion, you shouldn't go around feeling all clever just because
you've figured out some secret that you think some intelligence agency didn't
want you to know. They have layers upon layers of secrets, and some of them
are designed to be discovered.

~~~
delme
>> I guess in conclusion, you shouldn't go around feeling >> all clever just
because you've figured out some secret >> that you think some intelligence
agency didn't want you >> to know.

I understand what you are saying between the lines. The problem still is i
didnt expose a secret when i referenced a unclassified document, which was
uploaded by a third party. Also i didnt say that no agency would want me to
know.

>> They have layers upon layers of secrets, and some of >> them are designed
to be discovered.

I feel this is a good analogy for this audience. [Edit: a good analogy of
people in this audience who work with software stacks.]

~~~
aristus
Yep. Both professions spent way too much time uncovering other people's bugs.

------
d4rt
Could the lists in the article be cross referenced with 'public' data such as
Facebook or LinkedIn to get better results?

~~~
DrJokepu
The article is from 1974. I doubt that many people on that list are on
Facebook or LinkedIn.

------
DanielBMarkham
Historical note: this article was put together about the time that Congress
decimated the CIA's HUMINT programs -- spies on the ground learning stuff. (In
fact the article concludes that the entire agency is not necessary)

Most -- not all, but most -- agency-watchers view the congressional hack-job
in the 1970s to be the reason for many problems later on. The CIA had done a
lot of bad things. A lot of politicians got a lot of mileage on TV defending
the little guy from the evil CIA, and it was very difficult to have a
reasonable conversation about what they _should_ be doing. It was all "Witch!
Witch! Hang the witch!"

I'm not an expert and can't give an informed opinion. I can note from an
organizational standpoint that either killing it or continuing to let it run
HUMINT programs is rational, stripping it of all its power and then blaming it
later for failures due to what you did to it? That's whacked. Yet if I
remember correctly, some of the same politicians that lobbied to take spies
out of the CIA (or kill it completely) lambasted it later for not having
enough spies.

You can argue that they had a much more "nuanced" position than I am
presenting, or you can argue that the CIA was an easy punching bag -- a big
old political Piñata that you kick and votes fall out. Don't know.

------
ericboggs
Clearly the author has never read "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth.

~~~
hugh3
That's not clear to me, because I've never read The Human Stain.

If it provides a different perspective on the same issues, why don't you tell
us about it?

~~~
jseliger
I _have_ read _The Human Stain_ , which is about Coleman Silk, a Classics
professor at a small liberal arts college, who is fired after an innocuous
remark about two students who fail to come to class for the first couple of
weeks. The comment is something like, "Are these guys spooks? Or what?" But
the students turn out to be black, and so does Silk (which we discover later
in the narrative; the administration does not know he is black by most
definitions. Silk is ~72 and having an affair with an apparently illiterate
34-year-old maintenance woman named Faunia Farley.

The novel uses the incident to explore the nature of race in the United States
and reactions to it; academic power; and the relation of the self to one's
past, as Silk tries to erase or ignore his, while the tension with his father
leads to recriminations but also success. Like many of Roth's novels, the
writing is fantastic and the voice strong.

In other words, I have no idea what the grandparent is talking about either.

~~~
hugh3
Hmm, y'know, until this thread I had never heard the word "spook" as a term
for a black person. Anyone know the etymology?

If anything, if you'd told me it was a racial slur I would have assumed it was
for white people, since spooks are ghosts and ghosts are popularly imagined as
being white.

~~~
pyre
I assume because 'black people are harder to spot at night time.'

{update} Confirmed:

<http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spook>

    
    
      > The derogatory racial sense of "black person" is
      > attested from 1940s, perhaps from notion of dark
      > skin being difficult to see at night.
    

Interestingly enough:

    
    
      > Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute during
      > World War II called themselves the Spookwaffe.

~~~
stcredzero
IIRC, Two of those Tuskegee pilots were among the very few Allied pilots to
down Nazi jet fighters. From hearing their own accounts on _Dogfights_ , the
Tuskegee pilots were exceptionally good at spotting, taking, and hitting
opportunistic shots. They were flying early versions of the P-51 Mustang.
Downing jet fighters that totally outclass your _prop plane_ because you can
recognize an opportunity and take it -- I find that awesome!

------
cb33
Just to clarify, this article is about spotting CIA agents... no racist
connotations.

