An excellent book about a real spy between WWI and II is "Cracking the Nazi Code" by Jason Bell. It's not about encryption, it's about how Canada had someone who understood the German people and how he predicted Hitler's rise to power.
Everything we know about spies is wrong
91–100 of 119 posts
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're in DC, rather than pay to go to the spy Museum with the tourists, etc. go up 95 just south of Baltimore, Washington international Airport and go to the NSA museum. It's free. Enigma galore. You could also go south of DC about 30 minutes to Warrenton, where the cold war museum is. It's also free and run bY Francis Gary Powers Jr.
We've made a bit of a family thing of visiting spy museums, and would say: Visit both! (And if you have the opportunity for some reason, the CIA museum is also fantastic, but not open to the public). The Spy Museum has better flashy interactive exhibits for kids, but underneath all of the sound and light has a _very_ impressive collection. The National Cryptologic Museum is, as one might expect, more focused on the c…
> Stasi-related materials
These days, online mapping and Streetview snapshots could be exhibited in a museum of street surveillance.
https://blog.google/products/maps/street-view-15-new-feature...
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#93Cool 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…
A book is not a one-time pad, because the text is not random. Nevertheless, using text extracted from a book for scrambling the message has one of the two characteristics of the one-time pad, it is non-periodic. Such a substitution cipher with a non-periodic key was called a running-key cipher and it is the precursor of the one-time pad. Running-key ciphers had been used starting from the second half of the 19th cent…
Thanks for sharing all of the interesting history.
Yes, a book is not a one time pad, but in practice is probably more practical for a real spy in historical times, and probably "good enough." But the possibility of retroactively breaking all past communications if your book is seized is a huge problem. However, simply getting caught with a one time pad would essentially prove you were a spy. Nowadays of course, it is both easier to digitally conceal onetime data, e.g. on a regular phone, and easier to brute force a book based cipher, especially if you have access to large digital book archives.
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Title it in any other format and people will say it is clickbait.
But this title is clickbait. It's a lie . It could have been "How real spies were nothing like movie spies."
Yes, yes. I've counted about 15 different submissions today alone that have someone complaining about the title being clickbait. Your complaint makes 16.
It's always clickbait. If the title was your suggestion, someone else would say it's clickbait because spies are somewhat like the movies.
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#95Highly 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.
Not currently on Netflix, for anyone else wondering. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_americans For Amazon Prime it says "subs" which I take to mean it's included in the subscription; everywhere else it says you can only buy it
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#96Highly 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.
Not currently on Netflix, for anyone else wondering. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_americans For Amazon Prime it says "subs" which I take to mean it's included in the subscription; everywhere else it says you can only buy it
It's currently available for streaming on Hulu.
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a heads up Yuri was called out as largely being full of shit by people like Jack Barsky who was basically the IRL version of the TV the Americans. Also I’m not familiar with that second link but it gives me major red flags at first glance. There is some ok stuff out there on that topic. One of the darker ones that comes to mind came out of the 80s when Hezbollah kidnapped the CIA station chief in Lebanon and…
There is a lot of info. on Bezmenov both pro and con and you have to listen to what he says and form a judgement yourself as to whether that is plausible. Everything about him has been muddied (even how exactly he died!) and hence all sources are questionable. The second book on "Brainwashing" is unfortunately named (not to be confused with an older book of the same name by L.Ron Hubbard of Scientology infamy) but th…
I wish I could find the source now where Barsky was very patiently trying to explain to some right wing podcast bro exactly WHY Bezmenov was full of shit because it was fairly definitive for any person with even a basic understanding of intelligence but I assure you it really wasn’t a “both sides” kind of issue.
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#98The 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
I wish Hollywood used these amazing women's stories to give us great movies instead of gender swapping male stories.
There's plenty of people who would love to watch.
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#99Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" contains detailed coverage of Soviet espionage efforts inside the United States, from the exfiltration of secrets from Los Alamos to a much broader program of industrial manufacturing information gathering (note the Soviets were allies so this latter program didn't really cross any lines). https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/s... Anothe…
I appreciate how the comment that takes the subject matter more serious than others (down to the final line) is at the bottom. Thank you for the recommendations.
Re: Everything we know about spies is wrong
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a lot of info. on Bezmenov both pro and con and you have to listen to what he says and form a judgement yourself as to whether that is plausible. Everything about him has been muddied (even how exactly he died!) and hence all sources are questionable. The second book on "Brainwashing" is unfortunately named (not to be confused with an older book of the same name by L.Ron Hubbard of Scientology infamy) but th…
I wish I could find the source now where Barsky was very patiently trying to explain to some right wing podcast bro exactly WHY Bezmenov was full of shit because it was fairly definitive for any person with even a basic understanding of intelligence but I assure you it really wasn’t a “both sides” kind of issue.
Jack Barsky himself is suspect, Nothing is ever definitively "True" to an outside observer in these subjects. The "Deception" book mentioned above says this;
... Rocca now switched to a more conditional and hypothetical tone. "Soviet intelligence had demonstrated with the Trust a capacity for future deceptions." He spoke almost proudly of the Soviet adversary, as if he were discussing what a magician had proven he could do in earlier tricks. "It demonstrated it could control double agents, like Yakushev, in foreign countries and over extended periods of time." Yakushev was the classic "dangle" which, in the invisible intelligence war, is someone who, while loyally taking orders from his own intelligence service, feigns disloyalty to his country to attract the attention of the other side,like the bait on a fish hook. The dangle may even pretend to defect—in which case he is called a "dispatched agent." "Soviet intelligence also showed it could orchestrate events over the better part of a decade so as to turn these controlled agents into sources on which the West relied." This "orchestration" involved simulating evidence to make a fake underground credible ...