9/6/2023 0 Comments How to be a real spy agentToday, America fears that Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant that wants to build Western 5 G networks, could help China’s espionage efforts. The KGB would occasionally divert flights by Aeroflot, the Soviet national airline, to collect intelligence from the air. Such clandestine suborning is even simpler for dictators. American spies are also reported to have paid RSA, a security company, $10m to use a flawed technique that made it easier to break a widely used form of encryption (the company denies this). More recently, American telecoms firms have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to co-operate with the government, often going beyond legal obligations to do so the NSA has lauded AT& T for its “extreme willingness to help”. Kim Philby, a Soviet double-agent in MI6, served briefly as this newspaper’s correspondent in the Middle East shortly before his defection. MI6 and the CIA were both reputed to have close dealings with oil companies and the press. In the 1980s Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, ran a Sudanese beach resort that was used to smuggle out thousands of Jews from neighbouring Ethiopia.Īs well as creating sham companies, spies have also cultivated a cosy relationship with the real corporate world. MI6 similarly operated a bogus travel agency that would lure republicans to Spain with free holidays, where they could be recruited as double agents. Not only could soldiers use laundry vans to move around discreetly, but IRA suspects’ clothes could be tested for explosive residue (both operations were eventually exposed and shot up). In the 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, the British Army established a brothel and launderette in Belfast. Some fake firms have been devilishly crafty. It was one of many publishing houses and publications around the world that were covertly subsidised by the CIA and KGB to spread influence. It published political pamphlets and news magazines, forged and real, as well as a lonely-hearts newsletter, a women’s magazine, and even publications devoted to astrology and jazz. “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare”, a forthcoming book by Thomas Rid, describes how the CIA seed-funded and controlled a printing house in Berlin in the 1950s to spread propaganda in the Soviet bloc. The history of intelligence is littered with such front companies, used to collect intelligence or carry out covert skulduggery.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |