ESPIONAGE ENCYLOPEDIA A-E
A
ACCESS: The ability through the possession of appropriate security clearance to obtain classified information.
ACCOMMODATION ADDRESS: A ‘safe’ address - not overtly associated with intelligence activities - used by an agent to communicate with the intelligence service.
ACOUSTIC INTELLIGENCE: ACINT intelligence derived from the collection and processing of acoustic data, especially the noise ‘signatures’ of warships and underwater weapons detected by sonar.
ACTION OFFICER: The case officer designated to perform an operational act during a clandestine operation especially in hostile area.
AERIAL ESPIONAGE*: US surveillance aircraft aren’t the only ones spying over the borders of other nations. With varying levels of sophistication, dozens of countries operate aircraft to monitor their neighbours. Due to advances in technology, outfitting a standard plane with antennae and other surveillance equipment offers a relatively affordable alternative to launching expensive spy satellites. While the USA collects electronic and communications signals from virtually every corner of the globe, most countries tend to focus on their near neighbours.
AGENT: A person acting under control of an intelligence or security service to obtain or help obtain information for intelligence purposes. A person, usually a foreign national who has been recruited by a staff officer from an intelligence service to perform clandestine activities.
AGENT IN PLACE: Someone who remains in the current position while acting under the direction of a hostile intelligence service in order to obtain information.
AGENT PROVCOCATEUR: An agent who instigates incriminating overt acts by individuals or groups whom the security services already have under surveillance in order to discredit them further.
ANGEL: Slang used by intelligence officers for a member of an opposing service.
ARTIST: An artist trained in forgery working for the CIA’s technical service.
ASSESSMENT: Analysis of the reliability or validity of information, intelligence or a statement resulting from this process.
ASSET: Any resource human, technical or otherwise available to an intelligence or security for operational use.
ATOMAL: Classification used by NATO to identify Restricted Data provided by the USA to NATO.
ATTACHÉ: Military and naval attachés are officers assigned to foreign capitals as liaison with those nations’ armed forces. Their duties include the overt collection of information and, if appropriate, intelligence gathering. These officers may be intelligence specialists or general service officers; however, typically all Soviet-Russian attaches are GRU or military intelligence officers.
AUDIO SURVEILLANCE: Clandestine eavesdropping procedure usually with electronic devices.
B
BABYSITTER: Intelligence slang for a bodyguard.
BACKSTOPPPING: Verification and support of COVER arrangement for an AGENT in anticipation of enquiries or other actions to test the credibility of that cover.
BANG AND BURN: Demolition and sabotage operations.
BASIC INTELLIGENCE: Fundamental, factual and largely permanently accepted information obtained from OSINT sources about a nation’s main characteristics such as its physical, social, economic, political and cultural properties.
BIOGRAPHIC LEVERAGE - BLACKMAIL: Use of secret background information to induce or blackmail a person to work for an intelligence service or a particular covert operation.
BLACK: In espionage terms, ‘black’ usually means ‘black-bag job’, slang for the surreptitious entry into an office or home to obtain files or materials illegally. Such activities have commonly been used by the major intelligence services, often to install electronic and over surveillance devices.
BLACKLIST: Counter-intelligence listing of hostile collaborators, suspects, sympathisers or politicians viewed as threatening the security of a nation of its allies.
BLACK OPS: Clandestine or covert operations not attributable to the organization carrying them out.
BLACK PROPAGANDA: Propaganda that purports to emanate from a source other than the true one and designed to undermine morale or to create tensions that can seriously destabilise an enemy nation.
BLIND DATE: A meeting by an intelligence officer with an agent at the time and place of the agent’s choosing. These are potentially dangerous, as the officer could be set up for capture or an attempt be made to ‘turn’ him.
BLOWBACK*: A disinformation or deception programme carried out by an intelligence service in a foreign country deliberately to mislead with the intention of the deception being picked up in the country of origin. Here it would further mislead; usually aimed at newspapers and broadcasters, but sometimes even at the Government itself.
BLOWN: Exposure of personnel, facility or other elements of a covert activity. The phrase is also used to describe a network of agents which has been infiltrated.
BONA FIDES: Establishing an operative’s true identity, affiliation or intentions.
BRIDGE AGNET: An agent who acts as courier or go-between a case officer to an agent in a denied area.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER: Any brief physical contact between a case officer and an agent under threat of surveillance.
BRUSH ENCOUNTER: A brief public but discreet encounter between an agent and their case officer or handler where information, documents or funds are exchanged.
BUGGING: A popular term referring to all manner of eavesdropping from telephone tapping to electronic surveillance devices.
BURN: Slang for the deliberate sacrifice of an agent in order to protect a more important intelligence asset. Quite often an agent will be burned (burnt) when there are indications that he has been compromised and often in such a manner as to reinforce the credibility of a MOLE.
C
CALL OUT SIGNAL: A method for triggering contact between the intelligence officer and the agent.
CANNON: Name given to a professional thief employed by an intelligence agency whose sole purpose is to steal back an ‘inducement’ given to an enemy agent or target in exchange for information.
CASE: An intelligence operation in its entirety or the record kept of a past operation.
CASE OFFICER: An intelligence officer who acts as a controller or handler.
CC&D: Camouflage, concealment and deception.
CELL: The lowest and most expendable group in an espionage network.
CHICKEN FEED: Information knowingly provided to an enemy intelligence service through an agent or double agent. It must be of sufficient quality to convince the recipients of its authenticity and the value of its source.
CLANSIG: Clandestine Signals Intelligence
CLASSIFIED: Classified information is defined as materials owned by, and produced by or for or under the control of, the US government that fall within one or more of the following categories: intelligence sources or methods, cryptology, military plans and vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems, installations, projects or plans relating to national security.
The classification is made by a special authority that determines that its unauthorised disclosure could reasonably be expected to result in damage to national security. Normal levels of classification include: Top Secret: information whose unauthorised disclosure could reasonably result in ‘exceptionally grave’ damage (there are a number of higher levels of Top Secret. such as ‘Cosmic’, ‘Ultra’ and so on); Secret: information whose unauthorised disclosure could reasonably result in ‘serious’ damage; Confidential; information whose unauthorised disclosure could cause damage to national security/ access to classified information at any level may also be restricted by caveats like material that is no releasable to foreign nationals or not releasable to contractors or contractors/consultants.
CLEAN: An agent or intelligence material or facility that has never actually been used for an operation and therefore probably remains unknown to an opposing intelligence agency.
CODES AND CIPHERS: A system used to obscure a message by use of a cipher or by using a mark, symbol, sound or any innocuous verse or piece of music. As important today as in the Middle Ages, they are an integral part of any secret communication, whether military or commercial. Antoine Rossignol, Louis XIV’s personal adviser on security matters, declared, ‘an unbreakable code was probably an impossibility, but a reliable code should take so long to crack that the hidden message would be useless to an enemy by the time this was achieved.’ Today’s computer generated codes, of course, can have so many possibly combinations as to make them effectively unbreakable. Indeed, the NSA devotes considerable effort to ensuring that as many as possible of the commercial codes have a ‘back door’ for government cryptographers to be able to read a wide range of commercial and private electronic communications quickly and easily.
Other commercial coding companies around the world have been brought up by compliant US computer software giants like Microsoft, or persuaded to see the light or just ‘closed down’. The USA and other members of the UKUSA network, have too much invested in the future and too many threats from terrorists and organized crime to let advances in commercial coding companies ‘blind’ the intelligence services with unbreakable codes.
COLD APPROACH: An often-risky attempt to recruit a foreign national as an agent or informer without any prior indication that the person might be receptive to such an offer. Usually made after evidence that the target is in desperate need of money, or is simply greedy or perhaps unhappy in his work or lifestyle.
COMPROMISE(D): When an operation, asset or agent is uncovered and cannot remain secret.
CONCEALMENT DEVICE: Any one of a variety of devices secretly used to store and transport materials relating to an operation.
CONFUSION AGENT: An individual dispatched to confuse the intelligence or counter-intelligence services of another country rather than to collect information.
CONTROLLER: Often used interchangeably with HANDLER. Refers to an agent’s controller, a reasonably senior officer working under diplomatic cover at the local embassy or as an illegal, operative under deep cover as, perhaps, a businessman, who controls the activities of agents or double agents in the target country.
COOKING THE BOOKS: Politicising or slanting intelligence analysis to support a particular political view or objective.
CO-OPTED AGENT: National of a country who assists willingly a foreign intelligence service.
COUNTER ESPIONAGE: Activities taken to protect secrets from foreign intelligence operations, usually in the form of surveillance and other measures taken within your own country against an external threat.
COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE: Activates conducted to disrupt foreign intelligence operations, usually in the form of active measures taken against the service or the country posing the threat.
COURIER: A reliable officer or agent detailed to transport and deliver secret documents, money or other sensitive material. They are also the links between the agents and their intelligence service controllers or handlers. They sometimes serve as ‘cut-outs’ or intermediaries who enable a network or system to work without the necessity of direct contact between the spy and those for whom they are spying. A courier’s task is often dangerous and their fate is of less importance than that of the spy or the controller; it is therefore not unknown for them to be eliminated to avoid the compromise of the controller’s cover or the exposure of the spy network.
COVER: Protective guise assumed by an individual or activity to conceal its true identity and affiliation.
COVERT ACTION OPERATION*: Activities carried out in a concealed or clandestine manner in order to make it difficult, if not impossible, to trace those activities back to the sponsoring intelligence service or nation.
COVERT AGENT: An officer or agent who carries out covert action duties.
CRACKING: Illegally gaining entry to a computer or computer network in order to do harm.
CRYPTANALYSIS: The process of converting encrypted or encoded messages into plain text without initial knowledge of the appropriate KEY.
CRYPTOGRAPHY: The science of secret writing employed in intelligence and espionage activities to send messages in such a way as to conceal the real meaning from everyone but the sender and the intended recipient.
CUT-OUTS: The mechanism or person used to create a compartment between the members of an operation but to allow them to pass material or messages securely.
D
DEAD DROP/DEAD LETTER DROP: A prearranged hidden location used for secret exchanges of packages, messages and payments. A dead drop prevents the intelligence officer and the agent from being present at the same time or a physical location where communications, documents or equipment is covertly placed for another person to collect without direct contact between the parties. Also known as a dead-letter box. These were often in such places as a hole in the wall, a piece of hollow railing or even a niche in a fallen tree trunk.
DEAD TELEPHONE: A signal or code passed via the telephone without speaking.
DEEP COVER AGENT: Permanent well prepared and well constructed cover.
DIRTY TRICKS: A whole range of intelligence operations carried out covertly, to confuse, disrupt or damage an opposing intelligence service. However, the use of dirty tricks does spill over to include the media, political parties and individuals among them. It can range from spreading false rumours about a person’s sex life or financial situation to the ‘elimination’ of a supposedly dangerous foreign leader.
DISCARD: An agent betrayed by his own intelligence service to protect a more valuable source of information.
DISINFORMATION: The creation and disinformation of misleading or false information to damage the image of the targeted nation. Developed by the KGB, such operations frequently involved forged documents designed to undermine the credibility of the USA and its allies.
DOUBLE AGENT: These are officers who turn against the intelligence service that originally recruited them and work for a foreign agency, while at the same time making the original service believe that their loyalty has not altered. There are obvious reasons (see MICE) for this behaviour, but it may indeed by simply to save the officer’s life after falling into an enemy agency’s hands, particularly if their own service remains unaware for the incident. These operations can prove to be a two-edged sword, however. For if the original service is informed by the officer of the offer to spy for a foreign agency or if the original service discover this without the officer’s knowledge then they may be used to supply false or misleading information to the foreign agency. There is a reasonable expectation that any information supplied under these circumstances will be fully accepted by the foreign agency as true.
DROP: The action of placing material in a clandestine location to be picked up by a specific individual.
DRY CLEAN: Actions taken to determine if one is under surveillance by a hostile security service.
E
EARS ONLY: Material that is so highly classified that it cannot be committed to print but only discussed orally in special facilities.
ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE*: Economic intelligence, commercial intelligence or industrial intelligence, corporate espionage or the good old private ‘spook’ are all slices from the same intelligence pie. Economic espionage is as old as greed itself. But with huge sums to be made stealing designs for computer chips and patents for hormones, the threat is growing. Rapid changes in technology are tempting many countries to try and acquire intellectual properties in underhand ways, thus bypassing the enormous costs of research and development. New global phones, faxes, voice transmissions and data on the Internet make this type of spying easier than ever. Industry analysts estimate slightly more than 85 per cent of the world’s companies with a market capitalisation of more than US $1 billion have a formal intelligence programme either to gather information on competitors or protect their own information.
ELECTRONIC WARFARE: Overall term for efforts to detect, locate, exploit, reduce or prevent an enemy’s use of the electromagnetic spectrum. It applies in differing forms to:
• Electro-Optical Intelligence (Electo-OPINT) - intelligence gathered from the optical monitoring of the electromagnetic spectrum from the ultraviolet (0.01 micrometres) through to the far infared (1000 micrometres);
• Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) - electronic intelligence (emissions other than communications, such as radar, but not including atomic detonation or radioactive sources); and
• Electronic Counter Measures (ECCM) - covers any actions taken to retain the effectiveness of one’s own use of the electromagnetic spectrum against hostile Electronic Warfare activities.
ELICITATION: The acquisition of intelligence from a person or group when the collector does not disclose the intent of the interview or conversation.
ESCAPE AND EVASION*: Techniques taught to both intelligence officers and special operations personnel on how best to escape capture in a hostile country.
ESPIONAGE*: Clandestine intelligence collection. Espionage is spying. To historians, it’s the world’s second oldest profession. To criminologists, it’s a crime against national government. To practitioners, it’s the exercise of simple tradecraft.
ESTABLISHED SOURCE: A standard or accepted source of intelligence requiring little further checking.
EXECUTIVE ACTION: Intelligence term for assassination sanction directly by an intelligence agency.
EXFILTRATE (OPERATION): A clandestine rescue operation designed to bring a defector, refugee or an operative and his or her family out of a hostile environment to a place of safety.
EXPLOITATION: Determined attempt to obtain the most information possible from any source.
EYES ONLY: Security restriction applied to documents indicating that they may only be read and should not be discussed orally except in certain restricted facilities.
ACCESS: The ability through the possession of appropriate security clearance to obtain classified information.
ACCOMMODATION ADDRESS: A ‘safe’ address - not overtly associated with intelligence activities - used by an agent to communicate with the intelligence service.
ACOUSTIC INTELLIGENCE: ACINT intelligence derived from the collection and processing of acoustic data, especially the noise ‘signatures’ of warships and underwater weapons detected by sonar.
ACTION OFFICER: The case officer designated to perform an operational act during a clandestine operation especially in hostile area.
AERIAL ESPIONAGE*: US surveillance aircraft aren’t the only ones spying over the borders of other nations. With varying levels of sophistication, dozens of countries operate aircraft to monitor their neighbours. Due to advances in technology, outfitting a standard plane with antennae and other surveillance equipment offers a relatively affordable alternative to launching expensive spy satellites. While the USA collects electronic and communications signals from virtually every corner of the globe, most countries tend to focus on their near neighbours.
AGENT: A person acting under control of an intelligence or security service to obtain or help obtain information for intelligence purposes. A person, usually a foreign national who has been recruited by a staff officer from an intelligence service to perform clandestine activities.
AGENT IN PLACE: Someone who remains in the current position while acting under the direction of a hostile intelligence service in order to obtain information.
AGENT PROVCOCATEUR: An agent who instigates incriminating overt acts by individuals or groups whom the security services already have under surveillance in order to discredit them further.
ANGEL: Slang used by intelligence officers for a member of an opposing service.
ARTIST: An artist trained in forgery working for the CIA’s technical service.
ASSESSMENT: Analysis of the reliability or validity of information, intelligence or a statement resulting from this process.
ASSET: Any resource human, technical or otherwise available to an intelligence or security for operational use.
ATOMAL: Classification used by NATO to identify Restricted Data provided by the USA to NATO.
ATTACHÉ: Military and naval attachés are officers assigned to foreign capitals as liaison with those nations’ armed forces. Their duties include the overt collection of information and, if appropriate, intelligence gathering. These officers may be intelligence specialists or general service officers; however, typically all Soviet-Russian attaches are GRU or military intelligence officers.
AUDIO SURVEILLANCE: Clandestine eavesdropping procedure usually with electronic devices.
B
BABYSITTER: Intelligence slang for a bodyguard.
BACKSTOPPPING: Verification and support of COVER arrangement for an AGENT in anticipation of enquiries or other actions to test the credibility of that cover.
BANG AND BURN: Demolition and sabotage operations.
BASIC INTELLIGENCE: Fundamental, factual and largely permanently accepted information obtained from OSINT sources about a nation’s main characteristics such as its physical, social, economic, political and cultural properties.
BIOGRAPHIC LEVERAGE - BLACKMAIL: Use of secret background information to induce or blackmail a person to work for an intelligence service or a particular covert operation.
BLACK: In espionage terms, ‘black’ usually means ‘black-bag job’, slang for the surreptitious entry into an office or home to obtain files or materials illegally. Such activities have commonly been used by the major intelligence services, often to install electronic and over surveillance devices.
BLACKLIST: Counter-intelligence listing of hostile collaborators, suspects, sympathisers or politicians viewed as threatening the security of a nation of its allies.
BLACK OPS: Clandestine or covert operations not attributable to the organization carrying them out.
BLACK PROPAGANDA: Propaganda that purports to emanate from a source other than the true one and designed to undermine morale or to create tensions that can seriously destabilise an enemy nation.
BLIND DATE: A meeting by an intelligence officer with an agent at the time and place of the agent’s choosing. These are potentially dangerous, as the officer could be set up for capture or an attempt be made to ‘turn’ him.
BLOWBACK*: A disinformation or deception programme carried out by an intelligence service in a foreign country deliberately to mislead with the intention of the deception being picked up in the country of origin. Here it would further mislead; usually aimed at newspapers and broadcasters, but sometimes even at the Government itself.
BLOWN: Exposure of personnel, facility or other elements of a covert activity. The phrase is also used to describe a network of agents which has been infiltrated.
BONA FIDES: Establishing an operative’s true identity, affiliation or intentions.
BRIDGE AGNET: An agent who acts as courier or go-between a case officer to an agent in a denied area.
BRIEF ENCOUNTER: Any brief physical contact between a case officer and an agent under threat of surveillance.
BRUSH ENCOUNTER: A brief public but discreet encounter between an agent and their case officer or handler where information, documents or funds are exchanged.
BUGGING: A popular term referring to all manner of eavesdropping from telephone tapping to electronic surveillance devices.
BURN: Slang for the deliberate sacrifice of an agent in order to protect a more important intelligence asset. Quite often an agent will be burned (burnt) when there are indications that he has been compromised and often in such a manner as to reinforce the credibility of a MOLE.
C
CALL OUT SIGNAL: A method for triggering contact between the intelligence officer and the agent.
CANNON: Name given to a professional thief employed by an intelligence agency whose sole purpose is to steal back an ‘inducement’ given to an enemy agent or target in exchange for information.
CASE: An intelligence operation in its entirety or the record kept of a past operation.
CASE OFFICER: An intelligence officer who acts as a controller or handler.
CC&D: Camouflage, concealment and deception.
CELL: The lowest and most expendable group in an espionage network.
CHICKEN FEED: Information knowingly provided to an enemy intelligence service through an agent or double agent. It must be of sufficient quality to convince the recipients of its authenticity and the value of its source.
CLANSIG: Clandestine Signals Intelligence
CLASSIFIED: Classified information is defined as materials owned by, and produced by or for or under the control of, the US government that fall within one or more of the following categories: intelligence sources or methods, cryptology, military plans and vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems, installations, projects or plans relating to national security.
The classification is made by a special authority that determines that its unauthorised disclosure could reasonably be expected to result in damage to national security. Normal levels of classification include: Top Secret: information whose unauthorised disclosure could reasonably result in ‘exceptionally grave’ damage (there are a number of higher levels of Top Secret. such as ‘Cosmic’, ‘Ultra’ and so on); Secret: information whose unauthorised disclosure could reasonably result in ‘serious’ damage; Confidential; information whose unauthorised disclosure could cause damage to national security/ access to classified information at any level may also be restricted by caveats like material that is no releasable to foreign nationals or not releasable to contractors or contractors/consultants.
CLEAN: An agent or intelligence material or facility that has never actually been used for an operation and therefore probably remains unknown to an opposing intelligence agency.
CODES AND CIPHERS: A system used to obscure a message by use of a cipher or by using a mark, symbol, sound or any innocuous verse or piece of music. As important today as in the Middle Ages, they are an integral part of any secret communication, whether military or commercial. Antoine Rossignol, Louis XIV’s personal adviser on security matters, declared, ‘an unbreakable code was probably an impossibility, but a reliable code should take so long to crack that the hidden message would be useless to an enemy by the time this was achieved.’ Today’s computer generated codes, of course, can have so many possibly combinations as to make them effectively unbreakable. Indeed, the NSA devotes considerable effort to ensuring that as many as possible of the commercial codes have a ‘back door’ for government cryptographers to be able to read a wide range of commercial and private electronic communications quickly and easily.
Other commercial coding companies around the world have been brought up by compliant US computer software giants like Microsoft, or persuaded to see the light or just ‘closed down’. The USA and other members of the UKUSA network, have too much invested in the future and too many threats from terrorists and organized crime to let advances in commercial coding companies ‘blind’ the intelligence services with unbreakable codes.
COLD APPROACH: An often-risky attempt to recruit a foreign national as an agent or informer without any prior indication that the person might be receptive to such an offer. Usually made after evidence that the target is in desperate need of money, or is simply greedy or perhaps unhappy in his work or lifestyle.
COMPROMISE(D): When an operation, asset or agent is uncovered and cannot remain secret.
CONCEALMENT DEVICE: Any one of a variety of devices secretly used to store and transport materials relating to an operation.
CONFUSION AGENT: An individual dispatched to confuse the intelligence or counter-intelligence services of another country rather than to collect information.
CONTROLLER: Often used interchangeably with HANDLER. Refers to an agent’s controller, a reasonably senior officer working under diplomatic cover at the local embassy or as an illegal, operative under deep cover as, perhaps, a businessman, who controls the activities of agents or double agents in the target country.
COOKING THE BOOKS: Politicising or slanting intelligence analysis to support a particular political view or objective.
CO-OPTED AGENT: National of a country who assists willingly a foreign intelligence service.
COUNTER ESPIONAGE: Activities taken to protect secrets from foreign intelligence operations, usually in the form of surveillance and other measures taken within your own country against an external threat.
COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE: Activates conducted to disrupt foreign intelligence operations, usually in the form of active measures taken against the service or the country posing the threat.
COURIER: A reliable officer or agent detailed to transport and deliver secret documents, money or other sensitive material. They are also the links between the agents and their intelligence service controllers or handlers. They sometimes serve as ‘cut-outs’ or intermediaries who enable a network or system to work without the necessity of direct contact between the spy and those for whom they are spying. A courier’s task is often dangerous and their fate is of less importance than that of the spy or the controller; it is therefore not unknown for them to be eliminated to avoid the compromise of the controller’s cover or the exposure of the spy network.
COVER: Protective guise assumed by an individual or activity to conceal its true identity and affiliation.
COVERT ACTION OPERATION*: Activities carried out in a concealed or clandestine manner in order to make it difficult, if not impossible, to trace those activities back to the sponsoring intelligence service or nation.
COVERT AGENT: An officer or agent who carries out covert action duties.
CRACKING: Illegally gaining entry to a computer or computer network in order to do harm.
CRYPTANALYSIS: The process of converting encrypted or encoded messages into plain text without initial knowledge of the appropriate KEY.
CRYPTOGRAPHY: The science of secret writing employed in intelligence and espionage activities to send messages in such a way as to conceal the real meaning from everyone but the sender and the intended recipient.
CUT-OUTS: The mechanism or person used to create a compartment between the members of an operation but to allow them to pass material or messages securely.
D
DEAD DROP/DEAD LETTER DROP: A prearranged hidden location used for secret exchanges of packages, messages and payments. A dead drop prevents the intelligence officer and the agent from being present at the same time or a physical location where communications, documents or equipment is covertly placed for another person to collect without direct contact between the parties. Also known as a dead-letter box. These were often in such places as a hole in the wall, a piece of hollow railing or even a niche in a fallen tree trunk.
DEAD TELEPHONE: A signal or code passed via the telephone without speaking.
DEEP COVER AGENT: Permanent well prepared and well constructed cover.
DIRTY TRICKS: A whole range of intelligence operations carried out covertly, to confuse, disrupt or damage an opposing intelligence service. However, the use of dirty tricks does spill over to include the media, political parties and individuals among them. It can range from spreading false rumours about a person’s sex life or financial situation to the ‘elimination’ of a supposedly dangerous foreign leader.
DISCARD: An agent betrayed by his own intelligence service to protect a more valuable source of information.
DISINFORMATION: The creation and disinformation of misleading or false information to damage the image of the targeted nation. Developed by the KGB, such operations frequently involved forged documents designed to undermine the credibility of the USA and its allies.
DOUBLE AGENT: These are officers who turn against the intelligence service that originally recruited them and work for a foreign agency, while at the same time making the original service believe that their loyalty has not altered. There are obvious reasons (see MICE) for this behaviour, but it may indeed by simply to save the officer’s life after falling into an enemy agency’s hands, particularly if their own service remains unaware for the incident. These operations can prove to be a two-edged sword, however. For if the original service is informed by the officer of the offer to spy for a foreign agency or if the original service discover this without the officer’s knowledge then they may be used to supply false or misleading information to the foreign agency. There is a reasonable expectation that any information supplied under these circumstances will be fully accepted by the foreign agency as true.
DROP: The action of placing material in a clandestine location to be picked up by a specific individual.
DRY CLEAN: Actions taken to determine if one is under surveillance by a hostile security service.
E
EARS ONLY: Material that is so highly classified that it cannot be committed to print but only discussed orally in special facilities.
ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE*: Economic intelligence, commercial intelligence or industrial intelligence, corporate espionage or the good old private ‘spook’ are all slices from the same intelligence pie. Economic espionage is as old as greed itself. But with huge sums to be made stealing designs for computer chips and patents for hormones, the threat is growing. Rapid changes in technology are tempting many countries to try and acquire intellectual properties in underhand ways, thus bypassing the enormous costs of research and development. New global phones, faxes, voice transmissions and data on the Internet make this type of spying easier than ever. Industry analysts estimate slightly more than 85 per cent of the world’s companies with a market capitalisation of more than US $1 billion have a formal intelligence programme either to gather information on competitors or protect their own information.
ELECTRONIC WARFARE: Overall term for efforts to detect, locate, exploit, reduce or prevent an enemy’s use of the electromagnetic spectrum. It applies in differing forms to:
• Electro-Optical Intelligence (Electo-OPINT) - intelligence gathered from the optical monitoring of the electromagnetic spectrum from the ultraviolet (0.01 micrometres) through to the far infared (1000 micrometres);
• Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) - electronic intelligence (emissions other than communications, such as radar, but not including atomic detonation or radioactive sources); and
• Electronic Counter Measures (ECCM) - covers any actions taken to retain the effectiveness of one’s own use of the electromagnetic spectrum against hostile Electronic Warfare activities.
ELICITATION: The acquisition of intelligence from a person or group when the collector does not disclose the intent of the interview or conversation.
ESCAPE AND EVASION*: Techniques taught to both intelligence officers and special operations personnel on how best to escape capture in a hostile country.
ESPIONAGE*: Clandestine intelligence collection. Espionage is spying. To historians, it’s the world’s second oldest profession. To criminologists, it’s a crime against national government. To practitioners, it’s the exercise of simple tradecraft.
ESTABLISHED SOURCE: A standard or accepted source of intelligence requiring little further checking.
EXECUTIVE ACTION: Intelligence term for assassination sanction directly by an intelligence agency.
EXFILTRATE (OPERATION): A clandestine rescue operation designed to bring a defector, refugee or an operative and his or her family out of a hostile environment to a place of safety.
EXPLOITATION: Determined attempt to obtain the most information possible from any source.
EYES ONLY: Security restriction applied to documents indicating that they may only be read and should not be discussed orally except in certain restricted facilities.