Just curious what it is spies actually do. What does intelligence look like, at the nuts-and-bolts level? Is it always military data? How is the data transmitted?
How would the spying country use the information?
And what really happens if a spy gets caught?
Bonus points if you can recommend a work, fictional or otherwise, that can shed some light on this discussion.
Thanks.
The answer will be hugely varied, based off of person and situation. To give one example, a Taiwanese spy (technically, a disgruntled Chinese officer who switched sides) passed on info to Taiwan about Chinese missile warheads, gathered around 1996-ish(?). He was executed by China in a very public trial, meant to deter any other Chinese who might have similar ideas.
In another incident, one spy would ‘park’ sensitive documents on a shared email so someone else could download them.
Too late to edit:
It should also be noted that sometimes, when a spy is detected, the nation being spied on will NOT necessarily arrest him immediately, but will in fact continue to let the spy operate so that they can use him by feeding him fake information for him/her to pass back on to the spy’s superiors. The spy then unwittingly becomes an asset of the very enemy he was meant to spy against. When the spy finally reaches the end of his usefulness, the spied-upon nation may at last arrest and execute him.
Two examples of America’s most infamous spies (against the USA, that is,) are Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Ames would simply take sensitive documents that contained info about U.S. spies operating against the Soviets, and pass them on to the Soviets - thus letting the Soviets arrest and execute multiple American spies. Ames is considered to be one of the worst CIA defectors of all time, in terms of the great damage he did to the CIA. Hanssen was FBI, and he would pass on info to Russia, often concealing them outside in the woods/forest in hidden locations so that the Russians could then go to those ‘dead drops’ and harvest the stuff without having to meet Hanssen in person (Hanssen refused to meet the Russians in person, due to risk). The info Hanssen gave Russia was similar to Ames; he was betraying the identity of American spies to Russia so Russia could arrest them.
Frederick Forsyth, a bestselling author and former intel guy himself, commented that the “moment of transfer” is usually when any watching onlookers pounce - it’s the most dangerous moment for spy and handler, the gotcha moment when the cash, documents, or whatever is being handed over.
A good fictional work would be The Devil’s Alternative, by Forsyth. Written in the 1980s, it is about a Soviet woman named Valentina, who works for the Politburo Secretariat (an extremely high-level clerical position.) Valentina passes on tape recordings of Politburo conversations to her former lover, a British intelligence officer named Adam Munro - recordings that reveal that the Soviets are planning to invade western Europe soon. Valentina and Munro meet at various times and places, at one point at 2 AM in a parking lot.
But at the end of the novel, it is revealed that in fact Valentina was a “dangle” all along - someone who pretends to defect to the enemy but in fact still keeps her original loyalty all along. She was always working for the Soviets, because the Soviet president, a pacifist, wanted the West to know about his Politburo’s hardliner plans to invade and attack, so the West could help cooperate to prevent it from happening.
Thanks for your input! I’ll check out that book.
One thing to keep in mind is that people aren’t professional spies. At least, not often. They usually have a job where they have access to information that other countries want. They generally don’t collect any data themselves, they just pass on whatever they can get access to. It’s most likely to be anything related to the effectiveness of the military; nations generally go to great lengths to hide just what they are capable of from other nations, to the point where it hampered the investigation of that Malaysian airplane that for some reason went way off course and is believed to have eventually crashed west of Australia and was never found.
In wartime though, there will probably be more professional spies with cover jobs that will report on pretty much anything that happens since it’s much harder to get local news in a state of war, while in peacetime countries can just send state department people visually surveying for any information that might be useful. I guess you can call such people spies, but the host country knows they’re working for a foreign government so it’s not really the same.
Not necessarily.
Agricultural and industrial production
Scientific and industrial innovation
Finance
Relationships between people in power or of influence.
Relationships of the people in power or of influence.
If you are going to allow fictional reference works, start with Le Carre’s “A Perfect Spy” and progress through his other works or Peter Wright’s autobiography “Spycatcher”
‘Charlie Wilson’s War’, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, ‘13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi’ and ‘Bridge of Spies’ are fictionalized accounts of actual events and operations involving the CIA. I believe ‘The Good Shepherd’ is also a fairly realistic portrayal of the early days of the CIA. And ‘Munich’ tells a fictionalized story of Israel’s Mossad.
What spies do is collect and analyze information for the purpose of detecting potential threats and anticipating major political events. Or they may intentionally pass information to other parties with the intent to mislead.
The intelligence can look like anything - photos, audio or visual recordings, electronic data, documents, DNA samples, word of mouth.
It doesn’t just have to be military information. Spies also gather data from civilian government organizations and corporations as well. Particularly if those corporations have strategic implications.
These days, it’s fairly easy to transmit encrypted electronic information. But that can be detected and traced, even if the message can’t be deciphered. That low-tech “spycraft” shit you see in the movies is a thing - dead drops, hiding messages in innocuous objects, etc. All that stuff is just a way for someone to pass messages to someone else without an observer being aware that they are doing it.
Let’s say I saw a mid-level government official in a motel carpark with a woman who was not his wife. If I was a spy, rather than a random office gossip, that would be intelligence. On its own it will not crush democracy, but its a factoid to file away for when that official moved up the food chain, and where it combines with someone else’s note that they had seen him lose big a few times on the horses etc etc. And suddenly you have opportunities that you previously didn’t have.
Or you ask a friend you’ve cultivated, who works for a company that handles workers accident lawsuits for a whole range of projects, including some Defence projects, to copy over some music onto a USB stick if he has one spare. You then drop it straight back to the Smersh IT department to see if they can pick up any old files from it.
Intelligence is any data points that build a picture that you can use to create opportunities that you previously did not have. Spies aren’t James Bond, they are anyone who goes through your garbage, keeps note of how much and what brands of booze you buy, or asks your pornstar name so they can get the answers to two password identity confirmation questions.
I have no idea whether its close to reality, but try the 4 ep series Ambassadors with David Mitchell and Robert Webb, set in a British consulate. A lot of the plots revolve around gathering useful intelligence from foreigners in their own country, and joining the dots.
One category of intelligence-gathering that gets commonly overlooked by the layperson is called “open source.” It’s extremely not glamorous, from the popular perspective, and its value is underrated, but it’s pretty significant. The idea behind open-source intelligence is to collect non-classified information from publicly available sources, and assemble the seemingly unimportant bits and pieces into a larger picture through analysis, inference, and intuition.
There are professionals who specialize (or at least make a claim of expertise) in this field. They comb through newspapers, public records, and other materials, searching for and collating anything that might potentially connect to other information, even tangentially. They then assemble dossiers, either for consumption within dedicated agencies, or for sale to private clients. Their results are often not conclusive on their own, but may be indicative for further follow-up by other means.
Extremely simplified example: Innocuous mid-level cloud-services company announces they are breaking ground on a new data center and communications hub, a bit larger than their usual project. A few months later, a mid-level tech-staffing firm begins a wave of hiring, with generic job descriptions plus a background check, and a promise of direct hiring rather than contract placement. A little while later, an elected official who sits on an intelligence committee releases his public calendar which includes a side trip to a district he doesn’t represent, but no agenda of events. The open-source analyst recognizes that all of these are happening in the same location, and writes a speculative conclusion that the cloud facility may include a partitioned function dedicated to secret information gathering, which would then be the focus of further investigation.
This kind of work demands a high level of brute-force collection and evaluation, a very costly and resource-intensive effort compared to the concrete conclusions that can emerge from the work, but it’s nevertheless essential in the field.
The plot summary you gave of that novel sounds like it could have been inspired by the real life Profumo scandal. It became public in 1963; in that year, it became public that British Secretary of Defence (still called Secretary of War at the time) John Profumo had had, in 1961, an affair with a nightclub dancer named Christine Keeler. Around the eame time, Keeler was involved with aman named Yevgeny Ivanov, who was posted at the Soviet embassy in London as a naval attaché and worked for the Soviet intelligence community. The scandal, which was one of the reasons for the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963, revolved not only about issues sexual morality but also around the question whether Keeler could have obtained confidential information (supposedly about nuclear arms deployed in West Germany) from Profumo and passed it on to Ivanov; a subsequent investigation concluded that this had not been the case.
Years ago, I read a thin book about the career of one Eli Cohen. He was an Israeli (or at least a defector to Israel) who, after some low-level false-flag sabotage and stuff, was eventually recruited by the Mossad to spy on Syria. Definitely a “professional spy”. He pretended to be a wealthy businessman and would invite all the politicians, generals, etc. to parties at his house where they would get drunk and talk. He would transmit the collected information using a secret radio among other techniques.
As for getting caught, according to the book at least, Syrian intelligence knew something was up when the Israelis would often hear stuff before they themselves did. Cohen wanted to terminate his assignment, but his bosses pressured him to stay. Finally they triangulated his transmission and caught him red-handed. Interrogation, torture, military trial, public execution.
ETA I can’t find the name of the book, but that’s OK, I bet a lot more stuff has come to light if you look for a more recent biography; it was obvious stuff was censored from the book I read.
Another thing that tends to get fictionalized in movies and TV is the concept of some “master file” or containing some grand plan that can be stolen. Think James Bond or whoever sneaking into some mountain chalet and stealing some file off a hard drive containing the secret plan to steal the Statue of Liberty.
It usually doesn’t work like that. In fact, one of the main challenges is connecting all those various dots across all the different members of the US Intelligence Community (which consists of something like 16 different independent agencies, including CIA and NSA.
Think of it like this. The NSA (probably) has the capabilities to screen every single phone call in a country in real time. But what does it to with millions of false positives every time someone says they “got bombed last night” or “bombed their algebra test”?
A spy’s normal work is the silent accumulation of information, and the slow cultivation of human sources. The Bond-type, who blows things up and shoots people, is not what they want at all, nor do they want the type who professes to have a taste for this sort of thing.
If you want to know about the glamourous side of spying read about Operation Tamarisk, it was discovered that Russian troops training in East Germany were not being issued with toilet paper and so were using any paper they could get, which sometimes included confidential documents
Western agents would comb through exercise areas after the troops left to pick up anything useful, including these documents that had been used as toilet paper
I believe I read that China (and I’m certain our own intelligence agencies/their contractors too) have gone through and downloaded all publicly available photos they can get their hands on from Facebook, Instagram, etc and they’re using these massive pools of data to train neural networks on things like facial recognition - but also, for example, tracing geolocation tags on pictures that sailors have posted to determine the movement of their ships and even submarines, etc.
As AI continues to develop and can start seeking more and more sophisticated patterns and little bits of background info gleamed from the corner of a photograph or surveillance footage, I fear that privacy may completely disappear.
The Spy on Netflix is a miniseries based on his life
“The name is Bond. James Bond.”
“Why do you smell like shit, Mr. Bond?”
“…no reason.”
Right, and that’s the problem with the whole question. The term “spy” is a conceit of fiction, used by various parties for dramatic effect, but not really meaning anything in and of itself.
Probably the OP, (and everyone responding here) has his or her differing idea of what a “spy” is, but that’s more a product of movies and novels, than anything else. Most data collected for intelligence purposes has traditionally been undramatic, unclassified information as glowacks and Cervise describe, but increasingly now purely digitized data gathered electronically is taking importance.
Fictional, but I found it very gripping: All six seasons of “The Americans”, streaming on Amazon, for free if you have Amazon Prime. Watched the whole thing a few years ago, and by coincidence, I started it again from the beginning a few days ago.