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 […]