

The Spies Next Door - NaOH
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/the-spies-next-door

======
icantthinkofone
True story--

I wrote an article for Byte Magazine around 1980, back when that was a big
deal. It was a technical article about something I won't mention and it got a
lot of good reviews and I made a minor bit of money for it.

A few weeks later, I received a postcard from someone claiming to be a
university professor in Budapest, Hungary. He said he loved the article and
was wondering if I could send him copies of it to read. I was a bit surprised
because Hungary, then, was a communist country and you just didn't communicate
such things to them.

A week or so later, I got another postcard from someone in Budapest making the
same claim and also wanting a copy of the article.

Wanting to be a good citizen and patriot, I felt someone needed to know about
this so I called the FBI. They invited me to their offices in one of the new,
cool Federal buildings so I thought this would be fun. Getting inside, though,
showed they still painted the walls that boring, 50s, pea-green.

In just a few minutes, I was escorted to a back room by an agent. On the table
he had a folder with copies of the postcards and article I had sent them
earlier. He was a nice guy but I noticed the cheap suit he wore; not wool but
nylon or some other "plastic" material.

We talked for a bit about what the article was about and how these Hungarians
may have come across it and why they were writing me. My last name is
Hungarian so that may have been part of it.

He said, this is step one for such people to make contact. If I sent copies of
the article, they may write back and ask me more questions, or ask me about
other articles, technical info, my family, how I'm doin', and so on. One day,
I may get a phone call: "Hi, I'm a friend of that university professor you
were writing and he asked me to stop by and say Hi!" but that would probably
never happen so don't worry about it.

So he asked me to send copies of the article to him anyway just to see what
happens. Wanting to be a good citizen and patriot, I said, "Of course!". I
thought it would be fun!

Weeks went by. My wife went to bed right after dinner with a bad cold. I went
in the other room to watch TV with the sound turned down. The phone rang.

"Hi! Is this, icantthinkofone?". (Not my real name.) The voice on the other
end said he was with a publishing company I had never heard of. He had read my
article in Byte, thought it was very good, and wanted to know if I could write
a book about other technical subjects ... like disk drives.

I felt like someone grabbed my chest with their fist. A pall fell over me and
I started to sweat. There was an article in the EE Times about how the Soviets
were after disk drive technology just the other day. Was this a Hungarian
spy?! I had no way of knowing. I never heard of his company. I asked him to
send me a sample book to examine their writing style. The next day, I called
the FBI.

A week later, I received the book. The FBI confirmed the caller was legit. I
never heard from my Hungarian professors again. The FBI never called me. What
I thought would be 'fun' was one of the most frightening moments in my life.
(And I never wrote the book.)

~~~
0x0
Freaky.

How do you know the caller was legit, just because they sent you a book? :)

~~~
icantthinkofone
It took a couple of days for the FBI to get back to me that he was legit. I'll
edit the story.

------
atemerev
They have omitted the best part of the Glomar Explorer story, the cherry on
the cake (I am Russian, so please excuse me for inevitable bad grammar).

The cover story wasn't just "deep ocean mining". They needed to be more
specific to explain the unusual equipment. CIA has created an entire fake
geological industry for this operation — manganese nodules mining
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule).

Manganese nodules do exist for real, but they never have been easily
recoverable enough for commercial exploitation. CIA had started the operation
to convince the scientific community otherwise. They flooded the geological
and mining industry periodicals with hundreds of fake peer-reviewed papers
describing some details of nodule recovery process, to make it appear doable.
First, it served as the explanation for Glomar Explorer activities; second,
they created a distraction for Russians and other nations, who
enthusiastically started they own nodule mining projects (all abandoned after
the operation details leaked).

Russians bought it fully. In our periodicals, we had many enthusiastic
articles about the future of deep ocean mining and endless sources of rare
metals. Then, it vanished abruptly. I can't even imagine the fury of Russian
intelligence when they had learned the details. And who knows, what other peer
reviewed scientific publications today are just a cover story for some big spy
game?

------
teddyh
With all these tales about people getting involved with spooks, the only thing
that comes to mind is this passage from Chuang Tzu:

 _There was a man who had an audience with the king of Sung and received from
him a gift of ten carriages. With his ten carriages, he went bragging and
strutting to Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu said, “There’s a poor family down by the
river who make their living by weaving articles out of mugwort. The son was
diving in the deepest part of the river and came upon a pearl worth a thousand
pieces of gold. His father said to him, ‘Bring a rock and smash it to bits! A
pearl worth a thousand in gold could only have come from under the chin of the
Black Dragon who lives at the bottom of the ninefold deeps. To be able to get
the pearl, you must have happened along when he was asleep. If the Black
Dragon had been awake, do you think there’d have been so much as a shred of
you left?’ Now the state of Sung is deeper than the ninefold deeps, and the
king of Sung more truculent than the Black Dragon. In order to get these
carriages, you must have happened along when he was asleep. If the king of
Sung had been awake, you 'd have ended up in little pieces!”_

------
spindritf
_And then: “Oh, wait a minute—we haven’t refreshed the closed-circuit TV.”_

 _“They were looking at old images,” Sharp says. “They refreshed the closed-
circuit images and . . . gone.”_

There you go. Working for the CIA is just like web development.

------
spacefight
Some more background on the sunken russian sub recovery mission:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian)
[https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/experience-the-
coll...](https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/experience-the-
collection/text-version/stories/project-azorian.html)

