Take a look at this dragonfly. Pretty average insect, huh. Nothing special about it at all. Ha!
You fool! You absolute fool! Hidden inside this high-tech bug is a tiny microphone meant
to eavesdrop on unsuspecting baddies. This spy gadget, known hilariously as the Insectothopter,
was designed by the CIA in the ‘70s and could fly via remote control up to 650 feet.
A flying bug disguised as a bug? Brilliant.
While the Insectothopter was never actually deployed, it is one of many real-life gadgets
and gizmos that were designed to be used by spies. A pipe with a radio hidden inside, a camera inside
of a cigarette pack, a secret transmitter that looks like a dog turd. They’re all real. But,
unfortunately, they represent a somewhat bygone era of espionage that was a *little* closer to
the spy-fiction most of us think of. Today, most spies have turned in their radio pipes for a
boring old computer, and maybe a wiretap or two. Hi, I'm Justin Dodd. On today’s episode of Misconceptions, we’re
talking about the sexy, secret world of espionage. Spoiler alert: it’s not as sexy or secretive as
you might think. Let’s get started. Yeah, they bought it, gathering intel now.
Spies spy on bad guys. That’s like,
the number one rule of spying, according to the book I got at the Scholastic book fair 22 years
ago. If the goal is to painstakingly obtain important intel about
a foreign group, military, or government… it seems like it would be the best use of all those
resources and money if that intel involved a potentially dangerous country. Not like,
you know, one of our closest allies. That hasn’t always been the case, though,
and it’s not for lack of diplomatic maneuvering. Following the end of World War II, the UKUSA
Agreement marked a new era of intelligence operations comradeship. The agreement currently
involves Australia, Canada, New Zealand, The United Kingdom, and the United States,
who are collectively known as The Five Eyes, which is undeniably pretty cool. Basically, these five powers
agreed to share their sensitive intelligence, and in turn, probably not spy on each other.
This agreement was kept so secret that it wasn’t made public until 2010, almost 60 years after its
founding. But for that whole time, these five nations, and specifically the UK and the U.S.,
have worked together and shared their intel for the “greater good.” So, really, why would we ever
spy on allies when we’re all just openly gossiping in our little cliques anyway?
Well, I hate to break it to ya, but even the strongest of friendships come with a healthy
dose of paranoia. Countries spy on their allies all the time, and so do humans when you have a
sneaking suspicion they’re all hanging out without you. This has been a practice since the dawn of
espionage, and it’s never been more relevant than it is today. Intelligence operations are always
most concerned with the safety of their own nation first, so if it’s in their best interest to spy on
a country that’s technically their ally, so be it. The world was outraged when the U.S. was accused
of bugging the German chancellor’s phone less than 10 years ago. But then it was later revealed
that German Intelligence had “accidentally” eavesdropped on the U.S.’s Secretary of State.
Oops! Charles Kupchan, professor of International Affairs at Georgetown, put it simply:
And even the unbreakable bonds of the Five Eyes are not exempt from this practice.
It was revealed in 2013 that the members of the UKUSA Agreement very well might spy on each other,
but not necessarily out of mistrust. Since there are many laws prohibiting governments from spying
on their own citizens, some countries have used shady workarounds to gather such intel. Max Boot,
a writer for Commentary, said, “this intelligence sharing allows them to do an end-run around
prohibitions on domestic surveillance: the Brits can spy on our citizens, we can spy on theirs,
and then we can share the results.” In 2013, the National Security Agency denied these accusations,
saying "Any allegation that NSA relies on its foreign partners to circumvent U.S. law
is absolutely false. NSA does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence
activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself.”
And as we discussed in our episode on The Cold War, even in instances of spying on
enemy governments, it was not always entirely devious or violent. In fact, the other team’s
spies were a welcome part of the not-quite-war. A series of agreements between Western countries
and the Soviets allowed for what was essentially legal spying on both sides of the conflict. These
so-called Military liaison missions were meant to alleviate tensions between the opposing powers
by bringing some of the clandestine activities of the Cold War out into the relative open.
So if your perception of covert operatives only involves secret missions to evil enemy countries
during wartime, you might be giving intelligence agencies more credit than they’re due.
Okay, you probably realize that spycraft didn’t
start with Sydney Bristow. But I do think that most people, when hearing the word spy,
imagine a distinctly modern agent. This could be either the heavily fictionalized James Bond
or the image of a stereotypical Cold War-era spy, trench coats and all. But even limiting ourselves
to the world of literature, this timeline is far off: One of the first examples of modern
spy fiction is a book called, appropriately, The Spy, written by James Fenimore Cooper in 1821. But
American history buffs and fans of the Broadway musical Hamilton know that spies were CRUCIAL
much earlier than that, during the Revolutionary War—George Washington’s Culper Ring helped thwart
British surprise attacks and capture enemy spies, among other things. So it must be
the 18th century that espionage began! Well, I’ll spare you and stop this guessing game now, because
we still have a few thousand years before we reach the first instance of espionage.
We know spies have been around for quite some time, because stories about them appeared in,
of all places, The Bible! In The Book of Numbers, for example, there’s the story of the Twelve
Spies, where Israelite chieftains travel to Canaan to obtain information for Moses.
Many attribute the first use of espionage to the ancient Egyptians.
Pharaohs employed spies to acquire intelligence and protect themselves from foreign enemies.
They’re even credited with using many of the same tactics spies are associated with today, such as
coded messages, clothing with hidden compartments, and disappearing ink.
Many other groups, such as the Hittites in the 13th century BCE,
developed their own espionage networks, sometimes in direct response to Egypt’s growing spy network.
The Greeks and Romans each developed their own spy tactics, which included secret and efficient
communication between city-states, the creation of alliances, and planning surprise attacks.
In 4th century BCE India, the royal advisor Chanakya wrote
Arthashastra, a statecraft manual. It detailed the important processes
of intelligence collection by and for powerful states, with passages giving hilariously specific
details on possible spies, for example:
Feudal Japan used shinobi to spy on their enemies. Shinobi were ninjas,
but the mythical lore surrounding this popular archetype is, additionally, full of many
more Misconceptions. Queen Elizabeth I’s principal secretary
Francis Walsingham became known as her spymaster, employing espionage tactics that would take other
powerful nations years to begin implementing, such as the use of double agents and misinformation.
Over the next few centuries, spies were no longer a mysterious or rare occurrence in government,
they were a given. It was downright irresponsible to not have at least a couple people on payroll
keeping an eye on your enemies. Or, your allies.
Industrial and corporate espionage are
two very active forms of intelligence gathering, because believe it or not, money is a pretty
big motivator to commit crimes. These types of espionage are conducted for commercial purposes
instead of national security, and can include stealing trade secrets, snooping
around for info on industrial manufacturing techniques, nabbing customer datasets,
getting a peek into research and development, finding out about prospective deals, etc.
While industrial espionage has really become rampant in the last few decades thanks to advances
in technology and the nearly universal reliance on the internet and computers, it actually dates
back a few hundred years. Some people claim the first industrial spy was Father Francois
Xavier d’Entrecolles (dawn-truh-call), a Jesuit missionary who was sent from France to China on
a special mission around the year 1700. While it was, to local observers, a typical mission trip,
his superiors were also intensely curious about the Chinese process of making porcelain. The
missionary/spy spent over two decades in China’s porcelain-making capital, sleuthing and learning
all he could about the manufacturing process and secrets. According to historian Robert Finlay, the
letters containing all of his gathered information
Nowadays, industrial espionage is mostly found in the tech world. Given the huge monetary value of
intellectual property like algorithms and other software, Silicon Valley is a popular target. You
better watch out when that curious new mustachioed janitor comes in to wipe down your desk:
He might be stealing all of your company’s data at the request of your biggest competitor.
Or he might just be doing his job, calm down. So if we’ve established that spying is an
oft-used ancient practice with thousands of years of experience under our belts, it’s safe to say
that it’s a surefire and sophisticated government operation. I mean, even Sun Tzu, author of The Art
of War, wrote about the importance of such a critical group of people over 2000 years ago:
“ … to fail to know the conditions of opponents because of reluctance to give rewards for
intelligence is extremely … uncharacteristic of a true military leader … Therefore
no one in the armed forces is treated as familiarly as are spies, no one is given
rewards as rich as those given to spies, and no matter is more secret than espionage.”
But the reality is, professional espionage is not without its failures. History is littered with
very unintelligent uses of intelligence. During World War I, Room 40, the British decrypting
center, acquired useful intel about the enemy fleet during the Battle of Jutland. The intel
was promptly ignored, and the battle, which could have been handily won, came to a costly draw.
In 1941, Russian spy Richard Sorge gained intel about an approaching German invasion of Russia
while sleuthing in Germany’s Embassy in Japan. Stalin rebuked the information, even going
so far as to threaten anyone who believed it. This decision cost an untold number of lives.
There’s even a wild tale from 1914 of French government officials using their
decryption office, the cabinet noir, as a way to embarrass one another for political gain,
and in turn preventing the intelligence officers from doing their actual job—you
know, preventing foreign attacks. The whole thing culminated with the former Prime Minister’s wife,
Madame Henriette Caillaux, walking into the office of Gaston Calmette,
the editor of a newspaper, who was believed to have decrypted messages that threatened
her husband. She promptly drew a revolver and shot him dead. Her claim was that the newspaper
was going to publish scandalous love letters between her and her husband while he was still
married to his first wife, but the real threat was a series of intercepted German telegrams.
It’s all so complicated and silly, it’s like every cut scene from a Metal Gear Solid game.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik described the paradoxical nature of intelligence like this:
And if we’re talking about spy flubs,
I have to mention one of my favorite stories, Operation Acoustic Kitty. We talked in detail
about this feline mishap in our List Show episode about weird weapons from history,
but I’ll give you the short version. In the ‘60s, the CIA developed a radio transmitter
that could be surgically implanted in cats to spy on the Kremlin. Yeah. This is real. And it gets…
so much worse. In the first test mission, the cat reportedly ran across the street (with the intent
of eavesdropping on two men standing outside a building) and was promptly run over by a taxi.
Though CIA sources dispute the dead feline portion of the story, the project was scrapped soon after.
Thank you for your service, Spy Cat. Thanks for watching Misconceptions.
The sexy world of espionage isn’t exactly like a James Bond movie. Or, better yet,
a Johnny Fedora novel, which is a real character I just found out about and
am obsessed with. Johnny Fedora. Incredible. Make sure to subscribe, and I’ll see you next time.