This document, billed as a US government secret history of a surveillance tunnel dug in Berlin during the cold war (“Clandestine Services History: The Berlin Tunnel Operation 1952-1956“, CS document #150), tells of a difficult moment for the surveyors: The lack of an adequate base line made the surveying problem especially difficult. The engineers decided […]
Tag: spy
‘Know-It-All’s Security Quiz’
When it comes to issues of national security and the handling of sensitive data, are you a ‘Know-It-All’? If that’s the way you would choose to describe yourself, the Research & Sponsored Programs department of Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, US, has a publicly available online quiz, just for you (and anyone else who’s interested). […]
Numbers Stations – an anachronism ahead of their time?
It’s 1963, the height of the Cold War. Safely out of sight and earshot, an international espionage agent sits furtively huddled over a short-wave radio, listening intently for strings of seemingly random numbers. Despite the high levels of static interference, they’re painstakingly written down, one by one, and later tabulated against a ‘one time pad‘ […]
On the presumed competence of British (and other) spies
Adam Curtis, writing for the BBC, assembled a narrowly focused history of British spying agencies. He focuses on the question of competence: The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they – and all the reactions to them – had one enormous assumption at their heart. That the spies know what they are […]
The Lodger Who Watched Them Eat
Confident that no one would notice what he was doing, Michael Nicod spent months in the homes of families he did not know, making detailed notes about everything they ate. Nicod was performing research for Britain’s Department of Health and Social Security in 1974. He and his colleague, University College London professor Mary Douglas, wrote a report […]
Turkey captures bird (not a turkey) alleged to be a spy
Spying birds get smaller and more sophisticated. Last year a vulture (Gyps fulvus) made the news after it was caught in Saudi Arabia, wearing a GPS-transmitter marked ‘Tel Aviv University’ and last week, the BBC reports, an other alleged Israeli spy was found dead near the town of Gaziantep in southern Turkey. The bird, an […]
Esther the Cold War Kitty
Today we look back at the apocryphal story of Esther the Cold War Kitty (from the Sept/Oct 2004 special Cats issue of the Annals of Improbable Research). First, a bit of introduction: The book Esther the Cold War Kitty is legendary. Written at the height of the Cold War, it was intended as propaganda for children in […]
Mossad agent X63: the first pictures
We have discovered the identity and images of the alleged Israeli spy — a bird who was captured earlier this week by locals in the Hail area of Saudi Arabia. Local authorities publicly declared the bird to be an Israeli spy. The bird (a griffon vulture Gyps fulvus) is, according to the tag on the […]
In Memoriam: James Bond
James Bond, the ornithologist whose name was purloined and bestowed upon a fictional spy, is more than 20 years gone. Bond’s life and work were celebrated in the monograph “In Memoriam: James Bond,” by Kenneth Parkes, Auk, vol. 106, October 1989, pp. 718-20. (Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)