Not actually a spy, but a guy I used to work with got busted when the Russian agents he thought he was selling Secret material to turned out to be FBI agents.
I was working on a USAID funded election project in Ukraine in the mid 90s. We were supporting free and fair elections. Long story short, this guy came in off the street to try and give me ‘compromising’ files on the candidates. Basically, it was a set up, if I had taken them, I would have been arrested and American NGOs would be shown to just be American spies. I kicked him out without touching the files. One of my staff told me he was a Ukrainian security agent after the fact.
My dad did occasional business with a guy who did CIA work. He owned a small educational supply company in California, which for *some *reason had an office in Vienna. :rolleyes:
So called outlaw; think Hell’s Angels image in your brain.
Not for a foreign government, but for the US. Basically he said he “worked for the State Department” in places like Angola, Nicaragua, etc. It was kind of creepy.
What a fascinating story. Who were you working for at that time?
I used to work for a retired, fairly highly placed CIA gentleman, and i mingled socially with his wife, who was also former CIA. she was remarkably elegant and …calming to be around. i was told that her position had been related to debriefing agents. He had had a lot of assignments in various places, but i never learned details (from him) but … there were questions that were raised in my mind.
I dont understand why say 20 years later they cant talk about what they did?
Because 20 years later some of the other covert personnel they were in touch with might still be in sensitive roles.
Because they take the oaths they swore seriously.
I forgot to mention that I met a Soviet spy. Although he wasn’t a full time KGB agent that I know of like most other visitors from the Soviet Union in this country at the time he was working with the KGB.
Wait, a part time spy? How did that work? What areas was he spying on?
I was in the military, attached to the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security division.
I reckon that this doesn’t really count: but at school in the UK in the early 1960s, it was rumoured that the (British) schoolmaster who taught us German, had been a spy for Britain in Germany, shortly before and / or during World War II. He never said anything about this (even had it been true, at that time anyway he would probably have been forbidden to talk about it): from what I remember, it was purely conjecture – most likely, schoolboys giving free rein to their imagination, and talking rubbish. I like to picture it as actually having been the case – I feel that the chap would have had a good cover, in that he came across as rather a foolish little man, whom people would be unlikely to imagine as being up to anything “dodgy”.
If someone tells you they are a spy, they’re just padding their resume.
Depends on how you define “spy”. My sister’s job in the Air Force was electronic eavesdropping on Warsaw Pact forces in Europe. That count?
I’m almost certain that I have. When I was a teen living in Jakarta, Indonesia, I worked for an institution affiliated with the US embassy. In the course of my job as a gate guard, I knew all of the embassy personnel and had met them many times. I would be absolutely surprised if one of those folks wasn’t a spy.
Also, several of my school mates had parents in the diplomatic corps for their respective countries, including one guy whose dad was either the Russian ambassador or the #2 guy. All of those kids had bodyguards with suspicious bulges under their suit jackets. (Seriously. Suit jackets, in one of the hottest and most humid climates in the world.) They may not have been actual spies, but I’m pretty sure they could have gone all James Bond on someone who tried to harm their charges.
Most embassy personnel are functionaries (administrative staff such as personnel, finance, maintenance, security, communications, etc). It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone at that level would be a spy, as there is the requirement to have knowledge and training of how to perform practical work tasks. Next level up are what are called “reporting officers”, or the diplomatic corps. Of the actual officers, most are career diplomats working in legitimate capacities as economic, consular, and political capacities, along with the ambassador and deputy chief of mission. There also may be ancillary agencies that are often present in embassies, such as the Defense Attache Office (DAO), CIA and others. These are people who the host government is fully aware of and who are presented as what they are. That’s not to say there aren’t clandestine agents who are working in the guise of, say, an economics officer, but these are very few in number.
I don’t know if you would officially call them spies but on both of my deployments I had contact with several alphabet agencies. Most of them were pretending to be from different alphabet agencies as cover.
I had a great uncle who worked for the CIA long ago, we are about 95% certain he was some flavor of covert spy type. He spoke like 11 languages and was out of the country like 75% of the time despite being based/living near Langley.
We were only about 50% sure until he retired after 2 serious injuries on trips to Poland and Romania.
He ended up being an unholy terror of a private investigator in Wisconsin for the rest of his days.