
How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight - Quanttek
https://www.wired.com/story/mastermind-cia-disguise/
======
stevewillows
Previous discussion --
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18291780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18291780)

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AndrewKemendo
In a different life of mine, a long time ago, my surveillance team and I were
doing a multi-day follow of a non-us person of interest in a major city.

I recall one day in particular, this person, who didn't know we had
significant camera coverage of their route, changed clothing twice, right in
front of our cameras. Like the short article described, it was pretty easy to
don stuff, like a hat with built-in wig, reversible backpack/carrying case and
obvious accessories.

So you'd be surprised how little it takes to fool a team of trained people
following one person in a crowded area. We were lucky that our coverage caught
everything, because had we not caught the person in the act of changing, we
would have probably lost them.

Anyone who has a kid will recognize this phenomena from what happens at a
crowded playground.

~~~
sandworm101
I had some connection to the flip side of the urban spy game. Cops trying to
tail a man on a motorcycle in British Columbia (drugs). On a mountain highway.
He meets another biker at a lookout where they trade bikes/helmets jackets ...
or maybe they didn't. Then he gets onto a drive-on-drive-off ferry (bikes are
filtered to the front) and they've lost him.

When two spies want to get together without tails, it isn't at a downtown
coffee shop. It is deep in the woods on a quiet road. It is somewhere
surrounded by people in helmets and driving generic vehicles. They drive the
vehicles that cops don't. Motorcycles. Bicycles. A vespa scooter can out-
maneuver any car attempting to follow it.

Want to get really hollywood. I've heard a legend about two russian spooks
having a meeting while _surfing_. Alone out in the waves, nobody can see the
exchange.

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rudolfwinestock
Reminder: Any CIA or MI6 agent who lasted more than a week in the Soviet Union
had diplomatic cover. The NKVD and KGB caught all of our deep cover agents
within days; in some cases within hours.

The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the Russians
have been top-notch at humint for a long time.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the
> Russians have been top-notch at humint for a long time.

Maybe, but there's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a
liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state (which is why in a liberal
democracy, the counterintelligence services are often trying to simulate a
totalitarian police state.)

~~~
whatshisface
> _Maybe, but there 's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a
> liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state_

You could just as easily argue it in the opposite direction, it is much easier
to co-opt the corrupt Russian government than it is to co-opt the less corrupt
American government. An individual corrupt _unaccountable_ person of interest
in a totalitarian police state is far more valuable than an individual corrupt
person of interest _that is being watched like a hawk by the public_ in a
liberal democracy.

I think a much more reasonable explanation for why government organizations
are always trying to become more totalitarian is simply that the officials
would rather have more power than less power. The only difference between here
and there are the checks placed on them to limit what they can do.

~~~
lsc
>it is much easier to co-opt the corrupt Russian government than it is to co-
opt the less corrupt American government.

Can you give a cold war example of America effecting who ran russia that is as
dramatic as the Trump story in the other direction?

~~~
pessimizer
There's no evidence that Russia had any significant effect on who runs the US,
even if you accept all of the claimed attempts as true, whereas it's
universally accepted and documented that the US got Yeltsin elected:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/03/spinning-
hilla...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/03/spinning-hillary-a-
history-of-america-and-russias-mutual-meddling)

~~~
adventured
I'm fairly certain the thousands of dollars Russia spent on Google and
Facebook ads, overwhelmed the $1.2 billion that was spent in total on the
Clinton election campaign.

~~~
polkapolka
The ads are a red herring (and uncomfortably visible for both parties).

The real activity was on Facebook groups, viralizing anti-immigration and far-
left news, controling the narritive on 4chan pol and /r/the_donald, and botted
up - and downvote brigades.

It was so blatant it was visible to a non-expert on information warfare like
me.

The people doing this probably got paid about as much as a paid advertisement.

~~~
lsc
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/politics/butina-
guilty...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/politics/butina-guilty.html)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/wikilea...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/wikileaks-
trump-mueller-roger-stone-jerome-corsi/576940/)

I suspect we will see more of this sort of thing as the investigation
continues, but of course, the investigation isn't over yet. My point is just
that it was a lot more than 4chan and facebook.

------
Spearchucker
There are two very useful books on the subject - Surveillance Tradecraft by
Peter Jenkins, and Close Protection by Richard J Aitch. Read those two and you
should have no problem surveilling or following someone whilst remaining
undetected, and similarly no problem in not being surveilled/followed.

~~~
faster
Amazon has 'Close Protection' for $1229 and 'Surveillance Tradecraft' for $54.
My library has neither book, which is not terribly surprising. Sadly, that
means I'm unlikely to get a chance to read either one.

~~~
goseeastarwar
Buy it from the source for 65 GBP
[http://www.cpbook.co.uk/](http://www.cpbook.co.uk/)

------
DoreenMichele
Amusingly, when I lived in Germany in my twenties, people never seemed to
assume I was an American military wife and homemaker. They would greet me in
German, assuming I was a local national, or assume I was French or assume I
was a teacher. I apparently didn't read as American.

~~~
personlurking
While in the US, people would often tell me that my style of dress and my
accent was hard to place, which I always found a bit odd since I was
born/raised in the US (to a long line of Americans). And now after 10 yrs
abroad, following that period, I can only guess I've got better at hiding it,
merely through osmosis.

In my time abroad, I've become good enough at Brazilian Portuguese (my 2nd
language, learned as an adult) that people in Portugal, where I've been
living, often think I'm from Brazil. I always mention quite early on that I'm
from the US but, nonetheless, I'm still intrigued with the idea of disguising
oneself.

Linguistically, I'm highly doubtful that one can reach C2 status (that is,
consistently sounding like a native) in a second language learned as an adult.
Of the Brazilians I met in the States, I paid attention to how old they were
when they arrived stateside, and judged their cultural/linguistic knowledge
with people who were born in Brazil and never left. Anecdotally, I found the
age of assimilation (of their home culture/language) was around 16. That is to
say, if they arrived in the US at age 14, for example, they'd turn out to be
more American than Brazilian by their early 20s. But I wonder how that can be
entirely true if I myself don't seem to fit in that box, regarding my American
qualities.

~~~
DoreenMichele
My mother is a German immigrant to the US. I speak a little German and I
likely dressed a lot more like a German than an American because my mother had
a strong influence on my fashion sense. So it's not real shocking that I would
sometimes be assumed to be German.

What was bizarre to me was that it seemed like no one ever pegged me as an
American. IIRC, I was on an American military base when someone asked me if I
was French.

So this didn't just happen out on the streets of Germany. This happened in
spaces where you should by default be assuming that most people there were
American.

Granted, a lot of soldiers married foreign nationals, so it wasn't quite that
simple. I mean, my dad was a soldier who married a German woman while he was
stationed in Germany. But it seemed to me like the guess as to my nationality
should skew towards _American_ when I was actually on an American base and
not, say, fluently droning on in some foreign language.

------
cryoshon
the cynical side of me assumes that they'd only show this information off if
they had a new system for disguise which was far beyond what they showed here.

i mean, look at the image of the lady in the mask meeting HW bush -- that
image is ~30 years old. they've had 30 years to improve on that...

------
nodesocket
Interesting. "We can turn a women into a man... But it's almost impossible to
turn a man into a women."

~~~
azinman2
We all start out female in the womb, and then some of us turn make given the
right chromosomes. If you look at those who have transitioned their genders,
female to male almost always look more “correct” than male to female... it’s
hard to remove the effects of testosterone, but easy to add it.

~~~
Nasrudith
True although paradoxically there is one aspect that is reversed - genital
surgery is harder and less functional to construct a functioning penis from a
vagina than to create a more or less functional vagina from a penis. Put
crudely but succinctly as 'it is easier to make a hole than build a pole'.

Reminds me of the one bit of weirdness with birds - they have the opposite
convention of sex assignment being based upon ZW where males are ZZ and
females are ZW. Females also have two ovaries but only one of them is active
and the inactive one produces testosterone - meaning that if the primary one
lost functionality they would start spontaneously masculinizing.

~~~
JamesBarney
This is one of the reasons you see a higher standard deviation for traits in
female birds than male birds. The opposite of humans.

~~~
nicoburns
Am I correct in interpreting your comment as saying that human women generally
have less variance in (gendered?) traits than human men. That's an interesting
observation if it is what you meant.

~~~
Nasrudith
Well part of it is also that any X-linked traits are more likely to tend
dominant with the back-up copy. Look at colorblindness for one. Women would
need a 'bad' gene on both Xs. A man would lack a backup copy on the Y and thus
only needs one for it to express.

------
huxflux
Former CIA Chief Explains How Spies Use Disguises -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8)

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foobar1962
Marking this so I can find it again. The video is excellent.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Quick tip: you can mark stories as favourite with a link at the top of the
page, and comments on their individual pages (accessed by clicking on the "x
hours ago" link).

You can see your own upvoted stories and comments, as well as favourited
stories and comments at the bottom of your profile page.

~~~
foobar1962
Ah thanks.

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ourmandave
The same assholes that posed as Doctors Without Borders so they could gather
dna evidence to confirm where Osama Bin Laden was hiding, thus hampering any
efforts to eradicate polio because nobody trusts DWB anymore? _That_ CIA?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-
vacc...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-
campaign-endangers-us-all/)

I can only assume they have spooks running around pretending to be the Red
Cross.

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bsamuels
this article is blogspam for an AMA
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a32j7e/im_jonna_mende...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a32j7e/im_jonna_mendez_the_former_chief_of_disguise_for/)

~~~
jorgesborges
An interesting quote from the AMA:

"I have difficulty separating my life from the work at CIA. This is true for a
lot of my colleagues. Early on I found that the men in my office, upon
retirement, had an average life-span of 18 months. Eighteen! Their work was
their life, and most of them didn’t have outside interests. They literally
lived their careers inside the CIA. We changed our retirement procedures to
deal with this problem and it got better. Tony Mendez used to say that working
at CIA was like drinking from a firehose and that retirement was like jumping
from a moving train."

I wonder what it is about the work. This must be true in other professions as
well. But at least in computer software after retirement you can still build
things and practice your craft.

~~~
mabbo
My father grew up in Oshawa, Ontario where there was a big GM factory making
cars. Hard work with decent pay but good pensions- if you lived long enough to
enjoy them.

As the stories went, a lot of guys, they put in their 25 years at the plant,
retire, and drop dead within 2 years. The only thing worse for you than two
and a half decades of hard labor is suddenly stopping.

