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This article is for everyone that pictures James Bond when they hear the word spy
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 cont…
For a (hopefully entertaining) rundown of her exploits, you can watch this 22m video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdGS5ia2OQ
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 cont…
Another incredible agent in WWII was Virginia Hall, aka the limping lady, who managed some pretty incredible feats, escapes, and rescues and did so with only one leg. For a (hopefully entertaining) rundown of her exploits, you can watch this 22m video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdGS5ia2OQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Hall
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> regular citizen Almost, but not quite. She had royal blood on both sides of her father's family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Inayat_Khan Not that this takes away anything from what you wrote, I just happened to be in one of my pedantic moods :)
royal blood is one of them ideas even worse than the notion of race
This is pure gold, and still works on the internet to get the specs for PLA tanks: > If she wants to know something specific, but doesn’t want people to notice her asking questions, she should simply make incorrect statements while in the company of experts. Her companions will correct her, especially if they’re men.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah...Declare one person special by birth, and suddenly everyone remotely related claims they're elite too, spreading hierarchy through society...:-) I recognize only one sovereign:...The Burger King
My heart aches for you. As does, no doubt, your stomach.
Highly recommend watching The Americans, an incredible show about Soviet spies pretending to be a regular American family. Based somewhat on real people, and very well-researched.
And Slow Horses on Apple TV+
Is anyone else burned out of these headlines? Doing X for fun and profit Everything we knew about X is wrong I did X for $timespan and Y happened
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 rul…
If the adversary discovers the book that your spy is using - through any trivial surveillance method - then all communication which that spy has participated in, and will participate in, just got compromised. Part of the appeal of a real one-time pad is that no previous communications can be deciphered again, even by the agents themselves.
You also don't have to send an encoded message in every letter. If you have plenty of plaintext correspondence with a distant friend, and only some of it has any special meaning, then it will be less suspicious in the first place.
The whole idea is to blend in and not attract surveillance in the first place. Your counter-argument is based on the premise that blending in has already failed, in which case you're right - the game is up and the spy is compromised. Worse, it's possible to intentionally feed them bad information without them knowing (which happened multiple times in WWII). But this entire article (and the book it discusses) is about preventing that entirely.