The Dictionary of Espionage
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The Dictionary of Espionage

Spyspeak into English

Joseph Goulden, Peter Earnest

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eBook - ePub

The Dictionary of Espionage

Spyspeak into English

Joseph Goulden, Peter Earnest

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About This Book

`In this accessibly written book, Washington author Joseph C. Goulden illuminates and defines much of the standard jargon of the intelligence community with refreshing asides about many of spying's urban legends.` — The Washington Times
What's a black bag job, a dead-letter drop, a honey trap? Who invented the microdot, and why do they call Green Berets `snake-eaters`? More than just an alphabetical series of definitions, this volume offers a fascinating insider's view of the lingo and operations of the CIA and the FBI, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, the KGB, and other top-secret organizations.
A compelling overview of the world of espionage from World War II to the present, this reference was assembled by a former intelligence operative. Loaded with anecdotal incidents that provide entertainment as well as information, it offers page-turning excitement from the clandestine world of spies and spying. A new Foreword by Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, presents up-to-date insights.

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Information

Year
2013
ISBN
9780486296302

S

SAFE HOUSE

A house or apartment rented by a person with no discernible connection to an intelligence agency and used for clandestine meetings with agents and other contacts. The normal guise—both for CIA and KGB—was a small apartment hired by an out-of-town businessman who travels frequently and who needs a modest place for occasional overnights. The preferred location for CIA safe houses during the 1970s (and before) was in Washington, D.C., apartment buildings in the canyons of Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues, and in suburban Northern Virginia.
One problem endemic to safe houses is the suspicious neighbors who mistake odd hours and sporadic traffic as evidence of smuggling, gambling, or vice operations. (A U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps officer in Munich once put off an inquiring landlady by stating, yes, he indeed was a homosexual, and he needed the apartment; she raised the rent 50 marks but agreed to remain silent.) An agent can give a semblance of activity to a safe house by arranging for a constant flow of junk mail (clipping a postcard in Fortune that offers a hundred or more corporate annual reports) interspersed with an occasional personal letter.
During the late 1960s, custodians of one CIA safe house put it to frequent use with girlfriends, as a cost-effective alternative to motels in Northern Virginia. One of the girls, an Agency analyst, unthinkingly used the phone to call a parent long-distance. A fiscal clerk questioned the charge, made inquiries, and referred the matter to the Agency security office. A directive issued shortly thereafter warned that safe houses were to be used only for official business.
A prearranged safety signal—a drawn window blind, a flower pot on the balcony, the positioning of a vase in a window—tells whether there is any possible danger in the meeting.
For an officer working covertly abroad, a safe house serves as a refuge where he or she can spend some quiet time—reading, listening to music, whatever—and forget for a time the nerve-twanging business of spying. I have been told by several Clandestine Services officers that they expect two important things in a safe house: that both the bar and the library be amply stocked.

SAND HOG

An MI6 officer specializing in intelligence about petroleum; so named because much of their work is done in arid Middle East nations.

SCATTER MOVE

See COUNTERSURVEILLANCE.

SCHCHIT

A two-layered film developed by GRU that will “permit secret documents to be photographed at high exposure on top of innocuous snapshots,” according to British intelligence expert Robert Moses. If the film happens to be processed by someone unwitting of its nature, only the holiday snapshots appear. (The word means “shield” in Russian.)

SCHPICK

Derogatory KGB term for a novice operative.

SDECE

Service de Documentation Exterieure et Contre-Espionage (pronounced “see-deck”), the French agency that performs both intelligence and counter-intelligence functions—often under rules of its own making. SDECEs reputation for ruthlessness makes it unpopular even with agencies of nations with which France is supposedly friendly. In the words of a retired American spook, “SDECE on an everyday basis makes Hoover’s FBI look like an elementary school.” Ideologically adaptable, SDECE has performed equally efficiently under left, center, and right-wing governments.
SDECEs offices on the Boulevard Mortier overlook the public swimming pool in the Pare des Tourelles, hence another nickname for the French service—la piscine, for “the swimming pool.”
SDECE’s name was changed by the Mitterand government to DGSE (Direction Generale de la Securitie Exterieure), but professionals still refer to it by the old name.

SECRET RESTRICTED DATA

Term used by the Department of Energy referring to information “revealing the theory of operation of the components of a thermonuclear or fission bomb.”

SECRET VOTE

A stratagem employed by the British Foreign Office since its founding in the 1770s to provide “deniability” for its involvement in intelligence activities, especially those directed against friendly government. The sum required each year is approved by Parliament without explanation of how it is to be spent; such “oversight” as exists is by the prime minister and his staff. When the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was founded in 1909, a government committee said that through use of the Secret Vote for its financing, “our N[aval] and M[ilitary] attaches and Government ofiicals would not only be freed from the necessity of dealing with spies, but it would also be impossible to obtain direct evidence that we had any dealings with them as at all.” [See also “deniability.” (During its first decade, SIS was known as the Special Intelligence Service.
At the insistence of Commodore Sir Mansfield Cumming, the first MI6 director, officers’ salaries paid with secret funds were “paid free of Income Tax.… It was undesirable that their names & connection with S. S. [Secret Service] should be known to anyone.” According to Keith Jeffrey, who in 2010 published an authorized history of MI6 1910–1949, “This privilege, agreed to by the Foreign Office, was zealously guarded by the Service for decades to come.”
For decades, CIA and other elements of the intelligence community had Congressional approval for concealing its spending in various military appropriations bills. The legislative turmoil of the 1970s led to the creation of intelligence committees in both branches of Congress who must approve spending.

SECURE TELEPHONE

A telephone connection equipped with scramblers or other devices so that conversations cannot be overheard.

SECURITY EXECUTIVE

The committee responsible for control of British MI5 during World War II. Headed by Lord Swinton, the Security Executive was created after Prime Minister Churchill sacked General Sir Vernon Kell as director of MI5. Churchill was bent on keeping the existence of the Security Executive secret; when several members of Parliament heard rumors of its creation, Churchill replied to Commons that the subject was “not fitted for public discussion.” Privately, Churchill said he would challenge the patriotism of anyone who asked further questions, MP or not. Nothing further was ever said of the Security Executive, which to intelligence insiders soon came to be known as the “Swinton Committee,” after its chairman.

SEKSOT

Russian for informer. Genrikh Grigorievich Yagoda, who ran the Soviet secret police (then the GPU) in the 1930s, once boasted, “We can turn anyone into a seksot… Who is eager to die of hunger? When the GPU works over somebody in order to make him an informant, we already have him under our thumb, no matter how he struggles against it. We take away his job, he won’t find another one without the secret agreement of our organs. And, above all, if a man has a family, wife and children, he is forced to capitulate quickly.” The network of seksots permeates all of Soviet society, by testimony of defected intelligence officers.

SEKTOR

A section in the KGB central office that controls illegals working abroad, or those preparing for assignment.

SEMATEX

A Czech-made plastic explosive that has long been a favorite tool for Mideastern terror organizations. According to Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, “Dark orange in color and clay-like in consistency, Sematex can be detected by trained dogs, but apparently not by existing airport X-ray equipment.”

SENSITIVE COMPARTMENT INFORMATION FACILITY (SCIF)

Rooms, vaults, or even entire buildings that are specially constructed and certified for the handling and storage of classified intelligence information known as “Sensitive Compartmented Information” (SCI), ranging from electronic intercepts to satellite images and agent reports. Pronounced “skiffs.”

SERVICE, THE

KGB officers’ nickname for their organization.

SETTER

A CIA mail-intercept project conducted in New Orleans in 1957 involving the screening and opening of first class international mail via New Orleans en route to and from South and Central America. SETTER started as a result of Congressional protests about the “venomous propaganda” passing through New Orleans. SETTER was abandoned within two and one-half weeks as worthless.

SEVEN “BIG P’S”

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. A mantra taught to fledgling FBI agents at the training facility in Quantico, Virginia.

SEXPIONAGE

The use of lust as a means of gathering intelligence. Although the concept is as old as the urge itself, the term “sexpionage” comes from British journalist David Lewis, whose book by that title was published in 1976. “To use the double bed as a passport to indiscreet pillow talk is a technique of Biblical antiquity,” Lewis wrote. “In the tenth century, B.C., the first recorded sex spy, Delilah, used her charms to destroy the Danite hero Samson.” Beds have continued bouncing ever since, in the name of the national interest.
The femme fatale who seduces statesmen and generals in the service of her country is a cliche of pulp fiction—and a reality of modern intelligence. All intelligence agencies employ sex as an element of tradecraft. In some instances, a person is furnished with a sex partner as a means of keeping him or her happy (as was the case with the late President Sukarno of Indonesia during a state visit to the United States, and the defected Soviet diplomat Arkady Shevchenko in 1978; CIA found the latter’s particular playmate, “Judy Chavez,” through an escort ad in the Yellow Pages of the Washington telephone directory).
Throughout its existence, the Soviet foreign intelligence service made wide use of sex as a tool of intelligence. Loy Henderson, a veteran American diplomat, first went to the Moscow embassy in 1934; he dealt with Soviet affairs for decades. As he observed in his memoir, “A Question of Trust,” published in 1987, after his death, “The [Soviet] secret police had at their disposal a number of exceptionally well-groomed and intelligent young women who apparently had been assigned the task of making friends with both the married and unmarried members of the diplomatic missions and foreign correspondents. It was quite easy for those of us who were acquainted with Soviet intelligence to spot the women who were serving the police. We knew enough about the Soviet system to realize that these young women would not be meeting foreigners or inviting them to their apartments unless they were authorized to do so.”
But sexpionage can also be a brutal form of blackmail used against persons of many sexual persuasions. An oft-repeated warning given Westerners of rank, traveling to Iron Curtain countries, is “Don’t go to bed with anyone other than your spouse, regardless of the temptation.” But Eros often conquers common sense (and especially when given a boost by John Barleycorn).
The most illustrious victim was Sir Geoffrey Harrison, British ambassador to the USSR, who was seduced by a chambermaid, photographed by KGB, and withdrawn from his mission. Uncountable lesser personages have fallen victim to the same sort of trap. Several United States military sergeants served long prison terms for what began as vodka-fueled escapades with complacent women in Moscow, Warsaw, and other Eastern European capitals. Faced with blackmail photos, they agreed to spy for the Soviet Bloc. The friendly women, it proved, were what KGB and its subordinates call “swallows”—prostitutes who are programmed to seduce Westerners. (Male prostitutes, both straight and homosexual, are known as “swans.”)
The Czechs’ secret service seems particularly obsessed with the use of sex as an intelligence tool. Eva Bosakova, several times an Olympics winner in gymnastics, was called by Czech defector Josef Frolik “an agent of long standing, utilized primarily for the production of compromising films of a sexual nature.” Jiri Mucha, the writer, was also an STB agent, according to Frolik, who was used “to compromise members of the Prague diplomatic corps [with] sexual orgies arranged in his apartment.”
According to Frolik, a strikingly beautiful international airline hostess recruited by Czech intelligence in the early 1950s used a unique approach to American officers from whom she sought information: she would casually hand them a calling card bearing her nude photograph, and suggest a “quiet meeting for a drink.” She enjoyed wide popularity among American servicemen in West Germany before being caught and jailed for se...

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