r/AskReddit • u/lordchesterfield187 • 10h ago
What's a real spy or espionage fact that sounds fake but is 100% true?
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u/Richard_Wharfinger
7h ago
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The Russian inventor Leon Theremin, who is best known for the electronic instrument that bears his surname, designed a bugging device that had no external power source or electronic parts, but would become active if a particular radio frequency were beamed at it. It was concealed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States and presented to the then U. S. ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, by a group of Soviet schoolchildren in 1945. The ambassador hung it in his office, since the standard sweep for bugs showed nothing concealed inside. It wasn't discovered until 1951, and only by accident when a British radio operator at the British Embassy was overhearing American conversations over an open Soviet Air Force radio channel and quickly decided that something was a bit amiss here.
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u/PokeCaptain 4h ago
Even when they found out, the Americans kept the bug for a while and intentionally had conversations that would be overheard in instances where they wanted the Soviets to know they were being truthful.
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u/StarshipGoldfish 1h ago
As someone who's at this point heard a LOT of the good trivia already, here is the fun fact. Had no idea. V clever.
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u/Informal-Fee-4956 3h ago
Yup, "The Thing". A lot of information about how these work actually came out due to Snowden. No shit. The name I mostly know them as now are "retroreflectors". The way they work is a radio frequency is aimed at them, it excites and energizes the circuit and then sends out radio waves. That is why sweepers couldn't find it. It only transmits when you deliberately transmit waves TO it. On top of that, there was the belief that any bug battery would die fairly quickly; but this doesn't even use a battery.
Also fun fact, you can actually make these. The ones being used are described in what is known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog
Some people made some of them years ago based on the information. https://nsaplayset.org/ They can be picked up by some relatively inexpensive radio devices called SDRs (software defined radios). /r/rtlsdr
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u/C0RDE_ 2h ago
Can almost guarantee that the British Radio Operator will have used either that exact phrase "something is a bit amiss here" or something equally as understated to describe such a serious problem. If it had been the President's office, it might have had to be upgraded to "a bit of a pickle".
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u/DonWon1543
10h ago
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In WWII, British intelligence dressed a dead guy up as a military officer, gave him a fake girlfriend, love letters, and a briefcase full of bogus invasion plans, then dumped him off the coast of Spain hoping the Nazis would find him. They did, believed every word, and moved troops away from the Allies’ actual target. The operation was called Mincemeat. They literally catfished Hitler with a corpse.
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u/Phantommy555 10h ago
Not just any dead guy, a homeless Welshman named Glyndwr Michael
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u/_DuranDuran_ 2h ago
The crazy thing was they needed someone who could pass for a drowning victim.
He was squatting in a disused warehouse and ate some food laced with rat poison, which led to a similar effect on the lungs.
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u/dixbietuckins 7h ago
How the fuck do you say that? Knowing Welsh, its probably just Glenn or something isnt it?
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u/TheAltarOfMyDownfall 41m ago
Glin-doo-uh is the best phonetic translation I can give.
Source: am Welsh
Caveat: I'm from Cardiff and suck at speaking Welsh.
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u/danfay222 7h ago
I’m not welsh so someone can correct me, but I’m pretty sure it’s basically Glin-door. “W” (or more specifically ŵ) in welsh is basically just a “oo” sound in english
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u/lebowski_37 59m ago
I think they also honored him with a military memorial for his role as, well, a dead guy that actually did have an impact on the outcome of the war.
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u/Mal_Funk_Shun 5h ago
Well, what's his story?
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u/EVERYONESTOPSHOUTING 2h ago
A gard'ner come from Cardiff to London Out of desperation Born on the wrong side of the tracks A life lived on the line No family left to mourn him or wonder Just a lonely soul What happened when he fell through the cracks
Ate rat poison and died m, ended up at the morgue at the right time for the operation
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u/acoustic11 3h ago •
The musical Operation Mincemeat is incredible and on Broadway and the West End right now and the story there is also wild.
It was written as a community theater bit by four writers, one of them wrote the entire score and doesn’t act in it, but they pulled in two others to act, so it’s five people total and between them they play almost a HUNDRED parts.
It was their first ever production. They wrote the parts for themselves and suddenly they’re all on broadway because it kept moving up and up.
It moved up from 40 seat community theater to Jak Malone winning a Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actor for the song Dear Bill in his first major performance.
And one of the writers (Felix Hagan) has also been the duolingo owl voice.
Truly an amazing group of people and an improbable story that’s turned into absolute magic.
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u/maquis_00 8h ago
There's an awesome book called "Operation Mincemeat" about this. I read it probably a decade ago, and it was amazing.
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u/Richard_Wharfinger 7h ago
By Ben Macintyre. He writes excellent nonfiction books about Britain's espionage history. I also highly recommend his A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. I read it in tandem with John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is his fictionalized response to the Philby case. Coincidentally, it was Philby himself who blew le Carré's cover as an MI6 agent, forcing him to retire and take up writing, so if it hadn't been for Kim Philby we might not have had George Smiley.
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u/-Aluminum_Falcon- 9h ago
There's a good podcast called The World's Greatest Con, and they did 5 episodes on this. Definitely worth listening to if you're interested in this.
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u/RustenSkurk 5h ago
It's kind of funny how they coined their podcast title and closing catchphrase "This might just be... the world's greatest con" based on this story. And then they started covering things like rigged game shows, and had to work a lot harder to justify that title.
But the host is such a showman he kinda pulls it off.
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u/Tartan_Commando 3h ago
A plan dreamed up most likely by Ian Fleming - creator of James Bond. It came from a document called the Trout Memo which Fleming and his boss had produced, and which historians agree was probably entirely authored by Fleming.
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u/Madeline_Basset 3h ago edited 1h ago
I always think one of the clever aspects of Mincemeat was that in the chaos of war, it was fairly likely that such a thing would happen for real - a person is killed and their body is found with real secret plans.
However by stinging the Germans this way, it meant they'd subsequently disbelieve any real plans they found. So Operation Mincemeat had the continued ongoing effect of protecting real secrets.
In fact I have a vague recollection that happened - an Allied plane crashed in the Netherlands in 1944. All on board were killed but the Germans found real secret documents in the wreckage. Yet they disbelieved them; they thought it was Mincemeat II.
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u/Whiteums 10h ago
They made a movie
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u/mbarton1000 4h ago
The Man Who Never Was. I remember it a as a b&w movie that appeared on the ABC in Australia periodically when I was growing up.
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u/EthnicSaints 4h ago
This is an excellent musical on the West End right now. Would highly recommend !
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u/firestorm734 6h ago
The CIA once stole a sunken Russian submarine off the bottom of the ocean using an enormous claw. Project Azorian.
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u/ZLUCremisi 5h ago
Plus they fully honor all Russian saliors who they found in the part they recover and after cold war sent the vedio to Russia.
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u/ryszard99 6h ago
Not only that, they invented a pretty cool cover story about deep sea mining and getting these manganese ball things from the ocean floor. The manganese balls are actually real!
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u/Edwardteech 4h ago
The glomar explorer was the ship ised to steal the sub. Fucking neet purpose built ship.
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u/MaddingtonBear 2h ago
Also the origin of the phrase "I can neither confirm nor deny," which is known as the Glomar response.
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u/kalnaren 1h ago
The book Blind Man's Bluff goes into detail in the intelligence world surrounding this event.
Basically, the CIA ignored all the advice they were getting from ONI and the actual experts and fucked it up so bad they got very little usable intelligence from it. It was the last time the CIA was involved in Naval Intelligence operations.
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u/crowislanddive 1h ago
Was that the mission in which they used Howard Hughes boat and made it look like oceanography?
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u/MuchMuch1 9h ago
Spanish dude who hates the nazis so much, he pretended to work for them, made them think he has a network of spies in the UK, even the British were on a manhunt to look for a bunch of spies in London who don't exist. In reality, he's just been chilling in Spain, reading a bunch of newspapers, trolling the germans. Then the Americans were like, tf are you guys doing, why didn't you hire this guy sooner? Then Hitler in his bunker was like, this guy has been so vital to us, give him the best medal we got.
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u/DeiseMorte 2h ago
Reminds me of the German spymaster in Ireland who had a huge spy network all over the country. In reality he had been identified the moment he set foot in the country and every single one of his informants were Irish intelligence. The Irish let their British counterparts know and just fed him whatever they wanted throughout the war.
My favourite part is that possibly the only man stupider than the German spymaster was the American ambassador. British intelligence were adamant to the Americans that he not be allowed learn about it as he was guaranteed to screw it up if he did. So the ambassador spent the whole war outraged about why nobody was doing anything about all these spies running around Ireland. He then went on to be one of McCarthy's main henchmen in the communist witch hunts.
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u/Xenon009 4h ago edited 2h ago
His code name was garbo, MI6 (or SIS as it was also known) loved/loves a good refferential code name. In this case Garbo refered to the actress Greta Garbo, supposedly because they thought of him as the greatest actor in the world.
Other codenames include Dusan Popov's "tricycle" because he regularly bought two women to bed at once
Kurt Goose got the codename "Gander" (a gander is a male goose)
And George Graf got the name "Giraffe" which makes much more sense when you say it aloud.
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u/Hazzardroid13 1h ago
Not to forget that all of the double agents were run by the 20 committee because 20 is XX in Roman numerals and these agents were tasked with double crossing the nazis
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u/SpaceForceAwakens 7h ago
Is there a good biograph book about this guy? He sounds awesome.
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u/Time-Traveller 4h ago
Agent Garbo
Here is his wiki page. The "death" section should be taken with a grain of salt though.....
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u/PrinceHarming 8h ago
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, worked for British intelligence during WWII. He was one of very few men who knew about Ultra and the atomic bomb.
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u/killingjoke96 3h ago edited 34m ago
Fleming based Bond on a few colleagues he knew, Christopher Lee was one of the most famous of them.
But it may shock you to learn that his womanising ways came from the author Roald Dahl of all people. One famous assignment of his had him being sent to the U.S. to spy on and try and coax influential figures out of isolationist viewpoints.
One woman he met during his time there was a Clare Booth Luce; A prominent congresswoman, journalist, and wife of Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce.
They ended up having an intense affair and unexpectedly for Dahl it turned out he was too successful. Luce was apparently a real sex addict. To the point of where Dahl reported back several times begging to be let go. One famous report said the following:
"I am all fucked out. That goddamn woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to the other for three goddamn nights. I went back to the Ambassador this morning, and I said, “You know it’s a great assignment, but I just can’t go on.” And the Ambassador said, “Roald, did you ever see the Charles Laughton movie of Henry VIII?” And I said “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “do you remember the scene with Henry going into the bedroom with Anne of Cleves, and he turns and says ‘The things I’ve done for England’? Well, that’s what you’ve got to do."
Fleming, quite rightly as his friend, thought it was fucking hilarious.
A little additional fun fact, Dahl would later write the screenplay for the Bond film: You Only Live Twice.
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u/StuTheSheep 37m ago
Dahl also wrote the screenplay to "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", which is also based on an Ian Fleming book.
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u/LilyRose9876 6h ago
He was also involved in the same double cross commitee which signed off Operation Mincemeat, mentioned elsewhere in this thread. That was the mission to use the body of Glyndwr Michael (a man who died homeless in London) and dress him as a fake British officer with fake papers to deceive the Germans into moving troops away from Sicily to Greece. The invasion of Sicily was then a success with tens of thousands of lives likely saved on both sides.
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u/Interesting_Ear3982 4h ago
The CIA spent years and reportedly millions turning a cat into a surveillance device. They put a microphone in its ear and an antenna in its tail. It was called Acoustic Kitty, and on its first mission it got hit by a taxi.
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u/Piyaniist 21m ago
This is from the declassified documents. They spent millions for cats and didint think of dogs instead? I refuse to belive that.
CIA is putting microphones on the dogs.
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u/OkPermit9113 48m ago
Imagine spending all that money training a cat for a secret mission just for it to get hit by a taxi. 😭 I feel bad for the poor kitty, but I can't lie, the whole story is ridiculously funny.
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u/killingjoke96 4h ago
There was a really controversial one in Britain a while back with a guy called Bob Lambert.
Lambert was a member of the Met Police's Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) unit. A unit created to infiltrate protest groups in case their activities begin to encroach into dangerous territory.
Lambert was tasked with inflitrating Greenpeace and went under the name "Bob Robinson". Due to his good looks he found a way into the group via the women involved.
He had several relationships during his time spying on Greenpeace and even had a child with one of them. He was married and had children in his actual life already.
He eventually had the house of the mother of his new child raided by Special Branch.
As you can imagine there was a hell of a lawsuit when it all came out. When it was being done a lot of women came forward with similar stories of having whole lives, kids and even marriage with men sent to take them down by the state.
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u/imc225 3h ago
Even though UK, guy was a Method actor.
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u/MP315 1h ago
If this is anyone’s thing, there is a fantastic podcast series about this entire operation called Bed of Lies (it is Season 1) produced by The Telegraph. It profiles several officers and their pseudo relationships as well as their tactics for targeting women and how they acted and maintained cover while in these relationships.
Edit: word
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u/1997Luka1997 28m ago
Damn, this might have been the inspiration for the game Telling Lies, that has a lot of very similar story of an agent infiltrating an environmentalist movement and having a child with one of the woman, until his web of lies collapses on him. Didn't know it happened for real!
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u/MarchPhillipps 10h ago edited 9h ago
Remote control ornithopter made as a 1/1 scale model of a dragonfly, controlled by laser pulse, with the same laser also being used as an uplink for an onboard listening device. And it was built and flown by the agency in the 1970s. They called it the Insectothopter. However the program was shelved by the CIA at the time because it was very hard to control in winds above 5 mph.
The USIC have also used carrier pigeons throughout their history, not only for passing messages, but as convienient and relatively unnoticed platforms for various intelligence collection hardware. It was one of the IC's longest running programs (and still may be).
Now, I'm not sure if there's any correlation, but I've always wondered if the 'birds aren't real' and the 'don't trust birds' people weren't onto something after inadvertently encountering one of our fine feathered friends, and simply misinterpreting what they thought they saw. Then after those initial incidents, and like all good conspiracies, everything took off and snowballed from there.
'Alone and Unafraid'
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u/Spy-Tails 1h ago
Yes to all of this! There was a pretty big focus on testing different animals for espionage, especially by the CIA during the Cold War. It’s all very interesting stuff, and we just wrote a book discussing it all!
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u/LittleMlem 6h ago
I read "alone and unflaired" for a sec and was confused about which sub I was in
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u/pgn674 5h ago
Operation Elster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Elster
During WWII, two German spies were deposited by a u-boat in a remote coastal Maine town, and were quickly identified as suspicious because they wore city clothing and no hats as they walked along a dirt road in falling snow, and their footprints originated from a path that went to the water.
They managed to get to NYC, and the FBI had some idea about them and was looking for them. But they ended up spending all their spy money on personal extravagances, and one turned himself in to the FBI hoping for leniency.
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u/Madeline_Basset 3h ago
Amazing that one of them, William Colepaugh, was a US citizen who'd defected to the Nazi side in 1944.
It was 1944 and he couldn't work out which way the war was going to end!
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u/IronVader501
4h ago
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Half the leadership of the german WW2-Intelligence Service, the Abwehr, was actively sabotaging the Axis War-effort.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, overall leader:
Initially for a Military Dictatorship, but knew Germany couldn't win any war against the Allies and was increasingly appalled by the Nazis behaviour. Was involved directly in SEVERAL coup- and murder-plots against Hitler, absolutely detested Reinhard Heydrich and tried (unsuccessfully) to stop the planned mass-executions of polish jews & poles in general (but did manage to help several dozen flee to switzerland, including Halina Szymańska who later worked as a Spy for britain) and had ordered men under his command to make and keep records of attrocities committed in poland the Soviet Union, many of which were later used in Nuremberg as evidence.
He convinced Hitler to let him send Jews & half-jews as agents abroad (arguing that nobody would suspect them of working for Germany), which got him temporarily fired before it got approved, but was really just intended as a way to get them away fromt he Nazis. Also repedeatly met with british and american intelligence to get their support for a coup against Hitler.
Hans von Dohanyi:
Lawyer & specialist, helped 14 holocaust-survivors escape to Switzerland and was involved in several planned assassination-attempts.
Hans Oster, Canaris right-hand man:
Detested the Nazis even before 1933, grew to hate them even more as time went on. Began by secretly keeping records and documents of Crimes for an eventual process against the Regime, but quickly escalated to being the head of several Coup-plans and leading every bit of military intel he could find to the Allies. In 1938, when he handed the entire invasion-plans for Belgium & the Netherlands to the dutch military-attache, he said this would usualy be treason, but he saw himself as a better german than anyone following hitler, and doing everything to rid Germany and the World of the Nazis was his patriotic duty. He continued leaking intel and coordinating assassination-attempts until 1943, when the Gestapo arrested von Dohanyi for money-laundering (he had stolen large amounts of money to hand the people he had helped escape to Switzerland) and Oster took the blame to prevent them from finding out, putting him into forced retirement.
All 3 of them were executed in Concentration-Camps in April 1945.
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u/ars-derivatia 2h ago
In 1964 the UK has sent one of their officials to Poland (then a communist country within the Soviet sphere of influence, behind the Iron Curtain) to serve as a secretary-archivist for the military attaché at the British Embassy.
Of course their work in the embassy was only part of the story, and served as a cover for their other purpose - gathering intelligence on military installations and whatever other useful information he could get his hands on.
However, it was noted that since his very arrival, he was under a constant covert observation by the State Security agents. There were no leaks, no tip-offs, he didn't do anything suspicious, didn't even had a chance, and yet somehow the Ministry of Public Security was on his tail. This severly limited his efforts.
After some time it was decided that it won't work and he returned to UK.
The official's name?
James Albert Bond
That was already after the Dr. No and From Russia with Love movies, around the time Goldfinger premiered. I don't know what were they thinking :P
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u/killingjoke96 51m ago
Imagine their faces in the State Security meeting when they were informed James Bond was being sent over by the British.
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u/bobs-free-eggs 6h ago edited 6h ago
Has anyone mentioned the Russian secret fleet of specially trained Beluga whale spies? They have the Marine Mammal Program that is run by the Underwater Spy Research arm of their Navy. The program is still ongoing...
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u/Alarming-Rate-6899 5h ago
Didn't USSR tried to honeypot a Philippines Indonesia' leader, and that guy went like "send me some copies, publish the photos, show everyone I'm a stud".
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u/ExtroverTom 4h ago
I've read his autobiography.
He said some things like "Why should I be ashamed? Why would Indonesian would be ashamed to have a president that is a stud like me?"
He was crazy
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u/Carlito_2112 4h ago
He was crazy
Or genius, at least regarding the honeypot operation. Like the saying goes, you can't detonate a bomb that's already exploded.
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u/ExtroverTom 4h ago
As a president of a newly independent country, he was also:
Said fuck you and all your aids to the USA and Soviet
Left UN
Built monuments and stadiums which increase the nation's inflation rate
Had 9 wifes or so
So yeah, he might be a genius, but he definitely was crazy
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u/kiwidude4 5h ago
Black mail?
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u/Alarming-Rate-6899 5h ago
Yeah. USSR sent a bunch of female spies to have sex with him and took photos. They tried to blackmail him threatening the photos be released and ruin his reputation.
Didn't work since his response was to go ahead and release the photos showing how he's still got it.
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u/WallacktheBear 10h ago
The CIA rectal toolkit. A selection of tools to use in the field that you kept in your prison wallet.
From the spy museum
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u/ObviousTie6706 10h ago
I’ve never heard the term Prison Wallet before today, but just like I learned “fucktard” in 2005, I will use it as often as I can for the rest of my life!
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u/Dickulture 10h ago
Prison wallet (and prison purse) are still used today in jail and prison. Usually to hide contraband like drugs and shivs.
No doubt the staff that does regular body cavity searches are those with scat fetish. /s
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u/smellmyfingerplz 10h ago
TIL about the prison purse. That’s not fair the men just get a wallet, not a wallet and a purse!
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u/cathbadh
6h ago
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From WWII:
Virginia Hall's whole story is wild. Organized resistence forces behind Nazi lines, mapped drop zones, and dodged the Gestapo. Eventually she fled and escaped over the Pyranees Mountains.... All with w heavy ass wooden leg.
Actress Audrey Hepburn was an active member of the Dutch resistence forces as a teenager.
Famed chef Julia Child worked for the OSS and invented a shark repellent designed to keep them from setting off our mines and other bombs. She was deployed to China through much of the war. Her time there is what turned her on to food and cooking.
Hedy Lamar was a famous actress. She was once married to an arms dealer and heard talk about military radio comms. She fled that marriage and assisted the Allies during WWII. She went on to invent frequency hopping communications. They were too advanced for the war - way ahead of their time. But the US eventually incorporated it decades later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's also the foundation of all modern communication technologies like Bluetooth, Wifi, and GPS.
Not content to be the mother of modern communications she contributed to modern aviation by moving from the straight wings of WWII planes to the aerodynamic swept wings seen in modern planes
And she had other non military inventions too. This is all on top of being one of the most successful actresses of her time. It would be the equivalent of Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johansen making the early designs for a working space plane, AND quantum communications, AND the modern traffic roundabout AND hydration sticks like Liquid IV, all in their spare time
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u/AmericanAssKicker 5h ago
You had me at roundabouts. Hedy is in my top five for 'If you could go back in time and talk to one person.' She was an absolutely amazing person all around. Glad you mentioned her.
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u/cathbadh 5h ago
She's amazing. Her traffic contribution was something to do with the way lights are timed. Considering the modern obsession with roundabouts, it was the only equivalency I could come up with
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u/Springfield80210 1h ago
There is a book about Virginia Hall called A Woman of No Importance. A great read.
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u/kalnaren 1h ago edited 1h ago
Not content to be the mother of modern communications she contributed to modern aviation by moving from the straight wings of WWII planes to the aerodynamic swept wings seen in modern planes
Can you elaborate on this one? The advantages of swept wings were already known in WWII, but there's reasons they weren't used until aircraft were fast enough to take advantage of them. The Germans were researching them as early as 1935, and experiments with them date all the way back to WWI.
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u/tuan_kaki 5h ago
A male chinese spy managed to convince a french diplomat that he was a woman and they had a 20-years long relationship. Bro even took a random boy and convinced the frenchman that he was their son.
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u/Pmyers225 3h ago
The SR-71spyplane flew so high and fast a great deal of it needed to be made from Titanium... The USSR had massive stockpiles of Titanium, so the US set up companies to buy enough Titanium from the people they were going to be spying on
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u/NotLucasDavenport 3h ago
Tabasco Rats!
During the Cold War the Moscow Station needed something they could hide information in that wasn’t likely to be disturbed or stolen. They realized that their dead drops weren’t effective in part because people will investigate anything that seems out of place in their environment. Through trial and error they discovered that the human sense of disgust will override curiosity. So, CIA operatives gutted rats and put things inside of them. Who would touch a dead rat, right? Predators would. So then, they glued their info to the inside of the rats, covered their rats with hot sauce, and threw them out car windows or dropped them on walks. The CIA gave the world Tabasco Rats.
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u/filanwizard 4h ago
The US embassy in Moscow had a room inside a room. Because the original building used a lot of local materials and labor it was so bugged that they ended up importing stuff to build a sound proofed conference room inside one of the rooms.
Effectively a cone of silence.
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u/Neither-Practice3655 1h ago
During the Cold War, spies could shrink an entire page of secret information down to the size of a full stop in a letter. They called them microdots. That's honestly insane.
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u/kiana-iguana 53m ago
Can you elaborate? Like they would write microscopic sized letters?
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u/kubigjay 36m ago
They had a process to take a picture of a page then shrink it down. The person getting the dot would use a magnifier to read it.
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u/Maat1932 6h ago
Harpo Marx, while on a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, served as a secret courier for the US. He carried secret comminiques in envelopes that he taped to his thigh, carrying messages back and forth from the US embassy in Moscow.
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u/hhggffdd6 9h ago
Honestly if you really look into it it's Sydney Gottleib and MK Ultra. The CIA conducting experiments with LSD, with dosing a lot of the foundational members of the 60's movements, alongside mental patients, prisoners, and "people who could not fight back" (all without consent) being some of the most minor shit there.
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u/apokrif1 7h ago
The Moscow Rules by Antonio and Jonna Mendez:
we conjured up an idea to have a “Johnny Jump Up,” an inflatable silhouette, replace the figure of a passenger in a car escape scenario
At headquarters, the JIB was built out of a Judy doll—a sexy, life-size party doll, blonde, nude, and made of cheap plastic. The CIA bought the Judy dolls from Al’s Magic Shop at Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, within walking distance of our 2430 E Street offices
A very special tailor in Pennsylvania who also worked for the magic industry had assembled the reversible coat, while one of our magic consultants, Will, out in Los Angeles, had developed the pop-up grocery cart
Magic book for CIA officers: https://ia801604.us.archive.org/31/items/cia-manual-trickery-deception-2009/cia-manual-trickery-deception-2009.pdf
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u/mPeachy 10h ago
Folks took stuff from Hitler’s bunker as souvenirs?
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u/crowislanddive 8h ago
I know of an NPR reporter who stole a gold bracelet out of one of Sadam’s palaces which she brought back and gave to her niece for her 18th birthday.
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u/Dickulture 9h ago
Soldiers often grabbed stuff as spoil of war. Flags, uniforms, weapons, even valuable art and gold.
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u/MarchPhillipps 9h ago edited 9h ago
Exactly. Less espionage, more downright 'unauthorized requisition.'
'Alone and Unafraid'
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u/Limbo365 3h ago
NATO figured out that the (then) new BMP2 had a 30mm gun because a member of the British Army Liaison Team saw some sitting on railcars in a yard, grabbed the apple from his lunchbox, hopped the fence, climbed up on the railcar/vehicle and then stuck the apple into the barrel and went back to base and measured the diameter
The shenanigans the Liaison teams got up to were legendary, definitely worth reading about (another one of my favourites was they were required to wear full uniform at all times, so the Soviet teams official uniforms were black leather jackets, blue jean-like trousers and no caps, coincidentally like every other male in West Germany!)
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u/Dickulture 10h ago
Stolen capacitor formula. A dishonest employee took the formula for the liquid electrolyte that goes inside electrolytic capacitor (the tall can shaped components) to more than one competing capacitor factories, but what he stole was an incomplete formula and the resulting liquid tended to cause caps to corrode and leak.
One dishonest employee, few companies not checking if the information is correct and complete, and million suicide capacitors were sold world-wide leading to millions computer and other electronic devices failing prematurely and often within original factory warranty.
Billion dollars mess because of one sloppy espionage attempt.
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u/engimanerd 1h ago
This was such a huge problem not that long ago, then suddenly it was no longer an issue. what a fascinating reason.
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u/The_AluHat_Jedi 5h ago
Operation Brothers. (1981-1984)
A covert mission by Mossad to rescue Ethiopian Jewish refugees from refugee camps in Sudan. Mossad agents leased a deserted holiday village and set up a functioning diving resort as a front while doing it. Real tourists visited and paid for their stays, completely unaware that their diving instructors were spies smuggling refugees onto rescue boats at night.
About 8,000 Jews are said to have been rescued.
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u/Ill_Bother2609 3h ago
I literally watched a movie about this yesterday. Never heard about it until then.
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u/arse_raptor 1h ago
Osama bin Laden actually also stayed here in 1991 when he was expelled from Saudi Arabia
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u/franzzzzzzzzzzzzz 10h ago
The whole series about Eli Cohen called "The Spy". Very good story, and surprisingly great acting.
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u/ImACavediver 10h ago
CIA's Project Acoustic Kitty. True story.
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u/Reasonable-Plate2982 10h ago
Saw that program. When they let the cat loose close to the Soviet Embassy, it promptly got run over by a car. They said it cost about 180,000 and was many months in development, lol. Who knows what the truth is.
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u/MarchPhillipps 10h ago edited 9h ago
Actually, the car story was a bad bit of gallows humour from one of the guys on the program years after the fact. The cat was only used on test runs in and around DC, but shelved in pretty quick order. The reason? It's like herding cats.
Anyone that's had cats will probably understand the reference.
They couldn't get the damn thing to actually get close enough to their 'targets' consistently enough. Though, when they did manage, the audio intel was surprisingly good. After the completion of the program, the device was removed and the cat lived a pretty normal life. Supposedly, the little guy was quite loved by the agency's technology development wonks.
I operated with the USIC in the early 2000s, and even then, we liked to bait people with the 'got hit by a car' story as a bit of shock humour.
Even now that most of the program's been declassified, that old story lives on. Longer than the cat, anyway. Pretty wild.
'Alone and Unafraid'
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u/PuzzleheadedShoe9830 8h ago
The idea of turning a cat into a walking surveillance device sounds like something from a cartoon, but the CIA actually spent years trying to make it work.
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u/vincevega87 2h ago
In a very recent case, Russia sent a spy to Serbia to recruit some folks for sabotage/assassinations in the west. Of course the goon didn't speak any Serbian or English, and the Serb that he hired didn't speak any Russian. So they communicated...via Google Translate. Like, laid out all their plans and schemes. Naturally, the NSA clocked it and monitored their activity for months, before eventually exposing the whole network. Absolute fucking cinema
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u/jekyl42 3h ago
For years upon years, Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent leading the hunt for Russian moles in the FBI and CIA, was in fact a mole and spying for Russia.
"[Hanssen] was tasked with studying all known and rumored penetrations of the FBI to find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin; in effect, he was charged with searching for himself."
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u/ksuwildkat 38m ago
The Culper Spy Ring not only helped Washington win the Revolutionary War, some of the operational procedures are still in use today:
Washington never knew the names of any of the spies.
After initially giving the spies pseudonyms, they were then given numerical designations to further obscure their identities.
No Culper spy was ever caught or even unmasked. To this day at least one of the Culper spies remains unknown and with no surviving people with first hand knowledge it is likely the secret has died with the spy....which is how it supposed to be....Looking at you every Navy SEAL writing books!
Today if you pull a copy of an Army promotion list from the congressional record you will see an alphabetical list of names of officers to be promoted. At the end of the list and without comment will be a a bunch of 10 digit numbers. Those 10 digit numbers are people who, for one reason or another, have their association with the US Army masked. Most of those are members of the Great Skills Program.
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u/Someone4350 2h ago
Johnny Cash was the guy that first picked up Russian comms about Stalin’s death.
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u/MyFulllifeCrisis 2h ago
The US lost two nuclear powered submarines, the Thresher and the Scorpion. They knew the general location of the subs, but that general location was the North Atlantic.
Robert Ballard had been trying to raise funds to search for the Titanic. The US Navy came to him and said "we'll pay for you to look for our subs using the cover story that you are searching for the Titanic."
Ballard found both subs so quickly he had funds remaining, used them to actually search for the Titanic and found it in a few days
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u/Navynuke00 1h ago
That's wrong.
Navy already knew where the wrecks were.
Ballard was sent to both wreck sites by the Navy to conduct radiological surveys of the wreck sites because of the nuclear propulsion plants on both boats, and also to make sure the nuclear tipped torpedoes Scorpion had been carrying were still there and undisturbed.
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u/Leather-Run-6533
1h ago
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British intelligence is unbelievably bad at its job
Some highlights:
they have never once caught a spy by their own efforts
Cecil Day Lewis openly published poems calling for a communist revolution in the UK. He then sent the communist party a five pound donation. On the basis of the donation British intelligence followed him for years but were unable to find any evidence he supported communist revolution in the UK.
they had a string of Russian moles at the heart of their organisation throughout the cold war, and despite scandal after scandal they only caught the last one because he stole a bunch of secret documents and posted them through the letterbox of the Russian ambassador who, assuming this must be some sort of trap, returned them.
in 1991 they arrested every single Iraqi national who was doing a PhD in the UK believing they were Iraqi spies. They did this because they found their names on a list in the Iraqi embassy - the list was a list of Iraqi nationals doing a PhD in the UK. None of them were spies.
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u/Napauleon101 37m ago
Or... OR... They are so good at being spy's they convinced everyone they are incompetent as a ruse
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u/Ramalamadingdong_II 3h ago
During the second world war, operatives were trained to write hidden messages with invisible ink. While there was specifically made stuff, most often readily available chemicals like lemon juice or vinegar was used. Problem: The german Abwehr would test letters and parcels for hidden messages.
The british Secret Service found out that the common german tests would find hidden messages written with acids, but not those written with .....semen. This method was trained and used for a while until the Germans realised that some letters started smelling in interesting and novel ways when left in a heated room for a day or two. Also apparently you needed a fresh batch of semen for every letter and spies such as Major Richard Holme, who wrote a lot of reports from Copenhagen, complained about a bit of fatigue coming up with all that ink.
Also: The guy behind the semen-writing was called Mansfield Smith-Cumming.
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u/matty_london 2h ago
A south Korean surveillance operation found out that The south Korean conservative party was bribing North Korea to launch attacks against South Koreans near elections so that the South Korean public would elect an candidate that was tough against North Korea.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/meet-black-venus-the-south-korean-spy-who-met-kim-jong-il-1911978
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u/Key_Pumpkin243 3h ago
During the communist era in Poland, Polish secret services were of course spying on western powers. Among many things they were breaking in into embassies located in Poland. To get to the most valuable information they needed to open safes. At some point in order to get the safe combinations they started... bringing in highly radioactive isotopes and "X-rayed" the safes!
Source - book: "Niewidzialni: największa tajemnica służb specjalnych PRL" ("The Invisibles: The Greatest Secret of the Secret Services of the People's Republic of Poland") by Tomasz Awłasewicz.
This video talks about it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z_Jv7vuiqg
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u/arse_raptor 56m ago
During WW2, the OSS planned to airdrop glow in the dark foxes into Japan to freak them out. They experimented on racoons in central park before abandoning the project.
Operation Fantasia
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u/bcoder001 3h ago
"Surprise" deluge of russian women marrying men from western business, political, and cultural elites who then later become involved in various scandals.
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u/cosmic_animus29 4h ago
Mata Hari's story is a crazy one as well. She's the OG wartime honeypot, femme fatale.
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u/AvailableLight2112 3h ago
Swimming/scuba diving in a suit/tuxedo https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/07/19/bonds-neat-tuxedo-suit/ later made it into a James Bond movie, but really happened
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u/No_Tailor_787 3h ago
The A12 Oxcart and the SR71 spy planes were made of titanium because it is lightweight and could withstand the intense heat from sustained Mach 3+ flight.
Since the US couldn't source enough raw titanium to build the airplanes, the CIA set up a multilayered network of phoney companies to purchase titanium from the soviet union, the same country that was the primary target of these spy planes.
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u/Enough_Survey_9404 3h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
Malware specifically designed for Iran's nuclear cerntrifuges.
Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian PLCs, collecting information on industrial systems and causing the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart.
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u/thebigshoe247 1h ago
There's a good Microsoft talk about this floating around online. Highly recommend the watch.
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 2h ago
Operation Pastorius: The Ponte Vedra Saboteurs
4 German spies took a bus to Jacksonville, Florida and planted explosives in the dunes for later deployment. Their counterparts were captured by the FBI in New York and confessed to the plot. All 8 members of both teams were apprehended.
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u/karmonxd 6h ago
the cia spent millions in the 60s putting a microphone and antenna inside a cat. it was called acoustic kitty. the story goes it got hit by a taxi on its first mission
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u/matty_london 2h ago
A danish documentary series managed to infilitrate high levels of the North Korean government by having a unemployed chef pose as an international arms dealer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mole%3A_Undercover_in_North_Korea?wprov=sfla1
The evidence they collected lead to the arrest of seversl individuals for sanctions violations including prominent tankie Alejandro Cao de Benós
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u/Odd-Order7734 4h ago
The CIA once used a fake rock as a secret listening device. Yes, an actual spy rock.
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u/Repulsive-Youth-2631 12m ago
Quite a few people were smuggled out of the East in a modified 3 wheel bubble car. The false compartment effectively wrapped around the single rear wheel/engine in a tiny space behind the seat. Only slim people mind because room was extremely tight.
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u/Darmok47 10h ago
A KGB agent defected to the UK because of his erectile dysfunction. He thought Western medicine could help him.
He later made a life as an acupuncturist under a new name in the UK. One of his clients was Alec Guiness