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this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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as a bit of a tangent, this is a great read on the technique developed by Yuri Totrov for identifying spies using statistical patterns that drove CIA nuts
https://www.salon.com/2015/09/26/how_to_explain_the_kgbs_amazing_success_identifying_cia_agents_in_the_field/
and here's the list of identifiers he came up with
https://books.google.ca/books?id=-SmgCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA256&lpg=PA256&dq=%22Agency+personnel+were+frequently+alumni+of+Harvard,+Yale+or+Columbia%22&ots=56nvHTN27B&sig=ACfU3U0w4HRdq8GPeCcz8cz5q-s1QDAonQ&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Agency%20personnel%20were%20frequently%20alumni%20of%20Harvard%2C%20Yale%20or%20Columbia%22&f=false
Some of these points are embarrassingly obvious. Of course your spy's cover as a diplomat is going to suck if he didn't went to the school all diplomats go to and doesn't live up to objective requirements like that of citizenship.
I wonder how amateurish these diplomatic covers are today and if it is only the yanks who are this bad at them.
Somebody should write a comedy/parody of espionage thrillers around this. Owning your opponent so hard they think they're crawling with infiltrators is damn funny.
lol yeah
Well there was also that too lol. The main CIA guy in charge of rooting out KGB moles was, you guessed it, a KGB mole himself.
Something something owning the means of personnel
I remember reading that a lot of the CIA/FBI guys were cocky and refused to believe they could be infiltrated which led to delays in investigations for moles lol. That or they suspected minority agents instead of white ones.
Aldrich Ames, right?
Half of these are so obvious I refuse to believe that's all of it or even is it and Totrov wasn't fucking with the CIA because it would do bad things to my mental health. Gotta say folks, that's bullshit, there's a more shadowy, more competent level of CIA at play that Totrov didn't know about
Big dick move though
I'm becoming the fucking joker here I've had better Opsec than that as a teenager doing dumb shit
The incompetence is absolutely stunning. CIA managed to build up so much mystique around itself, but when you read up on how they actually operate you quickly realize that this org is full of utter clowns.
I see your point but I still refuse to believe "Our last guy got found out, here's his spy job, his spy communications line, his spy car with which you go to the same spy house he did. You also lack 9/10 requirements for having this job on paper. Watch out for moles, the only reason we can imagine that the last guy got found out." is real and no argument can convince me of this for reasons stated above. I'm going full conspiracy theorist here, the truth is too horrifying to me and I instead opt to construct some shadowy cabal that pulls the strings and put this on as a front. I mean what, we couldn't forge some papers here?
I'd retire clothes for like 3 months when I was a drunk teenager stealing road signs for funsies just in case a witness description of "Black hoodie, jeans, average height man (probably)" got out and somebody else saw it and connected it to me revealing I was drunk of my ass near location X at the time. If I believe this, this would've put me in like top 1% of removed, apparently. I refuse to believe entire governemnts get toppled and the course of history changed by a bunch of dudes who couldn't get on the level of OPSEC of an alcoholic teenager, sorry. I now consider the CIA a front organisation putting out chaff to distract from the actual agency, the Even-More-Central-Intelligence-Agency (EMCIA), which is so good at their job none of us know about it
I very much agree that what's being described are just comical levels of incompetence. Small children could run a more competent spy organization than this.
Resident spies tend to be easier to identify. You start off by assuming everyone wearing a suit and lanyard at an embassy is intelligence and you’d be correct 70% of the time. The guys who are gun running, meeting monarchs to traffic children, meeting friends of warlords and drug lords - they tend to be less identifiable.
You give them too much credit. I mean the KGB’s intelligence was the most sophisticated in the world and the USSR got toppled. No amount of intelligence is going to save you from incompetence and malice in more powerful positions. Not to mention, the CIA was communicating with sources through fake websites with passwords hidden in the page elements lol