
The KGB’s success identifying CIA agents in the field - cpete
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/26/how_to_explain_the_kgbs_amazing_success_identifying_cia_agents_in_the_field/
======
AndrewKemendo
_The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic
and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB._

A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the
majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are known
by the host country intelligence services. This is largely because you
generally only take so much risk with ongoing collection efforts, for example
going through customs and attending official diplomatic functions (dinners
etc...) under status is typical and gives the locals a record. What they do in
their "off time" is the real collection work, but even then their chance of
gaining access to well placed contacts that have very specialized intelligence
is low. The majority of officers know this, and it ends up being a political
dance, where if someone gets too risky with their collection they get tagged
and persona-non-grata'd.

The real question here is why the Soviets decided at that time to burn the
officers that it knew about - because that turns into a tit-for-tat across
waters that eats up resources and really strains diplomatic relations. I think
the answer is very clear in that it was the last gasp of a dying system, so
they were doing what they could to purge and wrest power.

Nothing particularly shocking or complicated here if you know how the system
works.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
> A dirty little secret within the world of clandestine operations is that the
> majority of official-status officers (diplomatic or military cover) are
> known by the host country intelligence services.

Do you have a citation that would support this?

~~~
Spooky23
Try Google.

This is pretty widely known phenomena, as in anyone who has read anything
about cold war espionage is aware of it. This article confirms it through a
source from the former KGB.

Here's a 1985 NY Times article detailing Soviet use of this ruse in Mexico:
[http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/23/world/mexico-city-
depicted...](http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/23/world/mexico-city-depicted-as-
a-soviet-spies-haven.html?pagewanted=all)

Here's a 1983 NY Times article "Soviet Orders US Vice Consul Expelled as Spy":
[http://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/13/world/soviet-orders-us-
vic...](http://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/13/world/soviet-orders-us-vice-consul-
expelled-as-a-spy.html)

Key quotes from the 1983 article:

>"The Soviet action against Mr. Augustenborg followed a pattern set twice
earlier this year. In March, when Richard Osborne, a first secretary in the
embassy's economic section, was expelled, and again in June, when Louis
Thomas, an embassy attache, was ousted on spying charges, the Soviet
announcements were issued promptly and said the men had been caught in the act
on Moscow streets. Previously, such announcements had often been delayed or
not made public at all."

>"...no American diplomat had been publicly expelled since 1977, and in that
case, involving Martha Peterson, a vice consul at the embassy, there was no
Soviet statement until 11 months later, after the United States had announced
the arrest of two Soviet employees of the United Nations caught picking up
documents on antisubmarine warfare."

>"The recent Soviet actions against Americans come at a time when Western
counterintelligence services have stepped up their actions against Soviet
agents. Nearly 100 Russians have been expelled for intelligence activities
around the world ... Also in April, the United States expelled three members
of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, including a military attache, Lieut. Col.
Yevgeny N. Barmyantsev, who was reportedly caught retrieving what he thought
were stolen American military secrets from beneath a tree in rural Maryland."

~~~
EdwardCoffin
Unless I missed something, those articles just give specific examples of
agents being uncovered. Nothing is given to indicate how many remained
uncovered. Its a pretty long jump from examples of such to the general
statement that "the _majority_ of official-status officers" being known by
their host countries.

~~~
Spooky23
From the 1985 article:

>"United States counterintelligence specialists estimate that at least _150
K.G.B. officers_ are working out of the embassy under cover as diplomats,
clerks, chauffeurs, journalists and in other jobs."

Just as a point of reference, the US Embassy in Iran during the 1979
revolution and subsequent hostage crisis had something on the order of 75-100
people working there.

Again, Google around, there is a ton of material out there on these topics. If
you read Russian, I'm sure there are similar stories talking about US spies.
(Although the reliability of Soviet media is questionable at best) I was
really interested in this stuff when I was a kid, and recalled these events
vaguely from those days, there's plenty more to find.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
You still haven't provided the evidence needed though to support the
conclusion of a _majority_ given _some_ or even _many_.

Also, we are talking about an endeavour in which deception is the norm, so
even evidence like this is more than a little bit questionable.

~~~
hugh4
What evidence would you like? Embassy payroll documents annotated with "spy"
and "not a spy"?

Given the privileged status of the embassy and the protections offered by
diplomatic status (eg the diplomatic pouch) you'd be crazy _not_ to staff your
embassy with spies, at least in any country worth spying on. You'll probably
get a few actual diplomats to do the actual diplomacy too, and the occasional
low-level passport stamper, but the default assumption should be that they're
pretty much all spies.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
My point is that this _is_ the kind of evidence you would need to support the
original claim. If the top-level comment I was pursuing had, instead of making
the claim that the _majority_ of the spies posing as diplomats were known as
spies to the host nation, had rather claimed that _many_ of them were known, I
wouldn't have pursued it.

Edit: fixed language

------
neurotech1
The problem today is that with LinkedIn and Facebook, some CIA personnel are
stupid enough to actually mention their status with the Agency, or are
friends/connections with known CIA Analysts etc. who do mention their status.

NSA Contractors sometimes mention classified codenames in their LinkedIn page.
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/disco...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/discovering-
names-secret-nsa-surveillance-programs-via-linkedin.shtml)

~~~
gherkin0
That seems like something that competent counterintelligence people should be
monitoring and shutting down.

Hell, they probably should have unit in their new employee orientation
covering this: "Do not list your occupation as 'Spy'" on LinkedIn.

~~~
hugh4
I once read an NSA employee manual which talked about how you should talk
about your work. It said you should be truthful without making it sound
exciting or mysterious.

If asked "where do you work" you say "the department of defense". If asked
what branch you say "the NSA". If asked what you do, you say "research". And
that's it, apparently.

No doubt there are other manuals for other types of employee, but they're not
available on the Internet.

~~~
TheGrimDerp1
We used to just mess with crappy computers all day while doing the equivalent
of memorizing phonebooks. suuuuper boring stuff.

------
EdwardCoffin
> Any Soviet citizen had an intimate acquaintance with how bureaucracies
> function

This makes me wonder whether there is any literature out of the Soviet Union
on topics like this, kind of like how the U.S. produced works like Dale
Carnegie's _How to make friends and influence people_.

~~~
mfisher87
I'm trying to decipher the implication. Is it that Americans have a unique
understanding of friendship and influence?

~~~
GauntletWizard
It's that 'Winning Friends and Influencing People' was a gateway to success,
and an activity the vast majority of the population was trying to be
successful at. Whereas a soviet book on navigating bureaucracy would serve the
same role.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
Thanks yes, that is pretty much what I meant.

------
philsalesses
I wonder if this pattern could still be applied.

For a NOC they'll setup a shell corporation called "Southern Electronics
Corporation, LLC" or some other discrete sounding name and have a real
website, office address and phone number actually manned, but surely they
register the corporations, domains, phone numbers at the same place, staff the
phones with the same voices...

Makes me wonder if they fixed the problem or if it's just hidden one level
deeper.

~~~
kafkaesq
It is absolutely applicable. In fact this is pretty much how the whole
"extraordinary renditions" program was (fairly easily) unravelled by
journalists.

Dummy ("brass-plaque") corporations, recycled aircraft registrations, special
landing permits at military airports... just a matter of connecting the dots,
basically.

~~~
digi_owl
Old school investigative journalism, in other words.

------
migsvult
two thoughts

1\. In the 70's and the 80's our Soviet counter-intel was fairly compromised.
Aldrich Ames and Robert Hassan are just the biggest examples. That probably
does a better job explaining a Soviet CI advantage than 'we looked at the
things agents did and looked for correlations.' I mean, every agency has been
doing that forever.

2\. There are a number of different types of cover, like the article points
out. Diplomatic cover is the 'laziest' and for some (usually very low lever or
very high level) people it's not really meant to fool anyone. There's private
sector cover, with dummy corps and rented office buildings, and genuine P&L
sheets. Private sector cover can be extremely clandestine, and extremely
sophisticated. As AndrewKemendo points out, the things that this article
points out are maybe not very impressive at all.

~~~
obrero
Hanssen was posting stories to Usenet's alt.sex.stories in the late 1990s,
stories of voyeurism about his wife (
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/lI68TqLeJ0cJ)
). He can't be said to have been keeping the lowest of profiles.

------
josu
The pattern isn't described until the second to last paragraph. I'll just c&p:

> _Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the
> differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated
> from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was
> much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine
> FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had
> to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to
> an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign
> Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans
> could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency
> employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear
> in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as
> research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for
> security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of
> work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious
> gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they
> were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one
> working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or
> “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations
> usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office
> space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones
> within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day
> using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening,
> out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to
> observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and
> go as they pleased._

------
unics
This proves American Intelligence is an oxymoron.

