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Everything we know about spies is wrong

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Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong

#3
Reminds me of the joke in Get Smart where they give Max a suicide pill and he asks "How do I get them to take it?"

Also the time when the manager of a supermarket (who looked like an FBI agent from a 1970s movie) thought I was shoplifting (I was going the wrong direction and did look scruffy and had a big bag with an open top) and followed me out holding a clipboard that I'm sure he would have whacked me with and said it was an accident if I'd given him any trouble.

Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong

#4

Reminds me of the joke in Get Smart where they give Max a suicide pill and he asks "How do I get them to take it?" Also the time when the manager of a supermarket (who looked like an FBI agent from a 1970s movie) thought I was shoplifting (I was going the wrong direction and did look scruffy and had a big bag with an open top) and followed me out holding a clipboard that I'm sure he would have whacked me with and sai…

Don Adams and Jonathan Harris were in an earlier 1963 show. They did "Oh, the pain", "Missed it by that much", and "Would you believe?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-jtYPHftfY

When GRU defector Viktor Suvorov was in training, he was told, "This is what a spy looks like:" (shifty man in fedora with his collar turned up) "You are not allowed to look like this."

Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong

#5
The story of Nora Inayat Khan is an affecting tale of incredible bravery, heroism, and selfless sacrifice. She nearly survived the war, but was captured only days before she was due to be extracted, and died at the hands of one of Germany’s most sadistic torturers. Nora Khan was a “regular” citizen who rose to the moment, committed herself entirely to the allied cause, and nearly single-handedly maintained radio contact between Paris and London during a critical stage of the conflict.

Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong

#7
"What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives."

https://youtu.be/lNrjAMV0HJk?si=Fbk3fE-Ufm3ACxgv&t=86

Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong

#9
Cool article. They are saying to use a regular book as a way of numerically referencing your message, but then aren't you limited to some generic phrase from that book?

It seems to me, at least in pre-computer times, that a regular book would work fairly well as a one-time pad. Especially something widely available, innocuous, and very long, like a bible. You'd probably want to add something like an offset, and a rule to skip letters (e.g. use every 3rd letter) so there are no real words to provide predictability. Guessing the book, offset, and skip rule would be a massive space- on the order of billions of possibilities. With modern computers of course, this method would be easy to crack.

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