ESPIONAGE ENCYLOPEDIA P-T
P
PADDING: Additional words added to the beginning and ending of a coded message to confused enemy decryption efforts.
PATTERN: The behaviour and daily routine of an operative that makes his identity unique.
PAVEMENT ARTIST: Intelligence term for a tail or skilled street surveillance.
PERSONAL MEETING: A clandestine meeting between two operatives, always the most desirable but more risky form of communication.
PHOTOGRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE, PHOTINT: Photographic intelligence; renamed IMINT or image intelligence. Usually involving high altitude reconnaissance using spy satellites or aircraft.
PIPELINER: An intelligence or case officer who has been designated for an assignment to a station such as Moscow and is underdoing specialised tradecraft training.
PIANIST: Western intelligence term for a clandestine radio operator.
PIANO: Western intelligence term for a clandestine radio set.
PLAY BACK: False information provided to an enemy while attempting to obtain accurate information by impersonating a captured spy or by using a turned spy in clandestine radio communications. The British used this in their XX Cross System in WW2 and the Germans called it the ‘Radio Game’.
PLUMBING (PLUMBERS): The work undertaken to prepare a facility or office for a major operation, such as the planting of ‘bugs’, such work is undertaken by ‘Plumbers’.
POACHER: British intelligence term for an enemy spy who is in the area of an ongoing operation.
POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE: Information related to a foreign nation of a movement’s internal operations that could prove of assistance to one’s own government in deciding future policy.
POSTIVE VETTING: British term for a comprehensive Security Check.
PROBER: An operative assigned to test border controls before an exfiltration is mounted.
PRODUCT: The final result of an intelligence operation or espionage effort.
PROFILE: All the aspects of an operative’s or a target’s physical or individual persona.
PROVOCATION: A harassing act or procedure designed to flush out surveillance.
PROVOCATEUR: An operative sent to incite target group to action for purposes of entrapping or embarrassing them.
Q
Q CLEARANCE: US Security clearance necessary for access to restricted nuclear data or weapons material.
R
RADER INTELLIGENCE (RADINT): Intelligence gained from Radar, increasingly seen as a sub-part of Imagery Intelligence (IMINT)
RAVEN: A male agent employed to seduce either males or females in a sexual entrapment operation or sexpionage.
RECONNAISSANCE: Observation mission undertaken to acquire, by various means, information about a target of intelligence interest.
RE-DOUBLED AGENT: A double agent whose activities are discovered and is turned again by his original service.
REPRO: Making a false document.
ROLL-OUT: A surreptitious technique of rolling out the contents of a letter without opening it. It can be done with two knitting needles or a split chopstick.
ROLLED UP: When the operation goes bad and the agent is compromised.
RPV: Remotely Piloted Vehicle such as drone or UAV which is being increasingly used by the CIA, MOSSAD and a host of other countries’ intelligence and military services for relatively low cost unmanned IMINT surveillance of battlefields and sensitive areas. The most advanced RPV can give a virtually real-time image of the target.
S
SAFE HOUSE: A dwelling place or hideout unknown to the adversary. A building considered safe for use by operatives as a base of operations of a building used for interrogations or hiding a defector.
SANCTIFICATION: Blackmail for the purposes of extracting political favours from a targeted victim, often using information on a sexual, perversion or criminal activities for leverage.
SANCTION: Intelligence agency approval for a killing or assassination either for revenge or active countermeasures
SANITISE: To delete specific material or revise a report of document to prevent the identification of intelligence sources and collection methods and to falsify information sources to cover up a mishandled operation.
SCALP HUNTERS: British term for intelligence officers who specialise in defections and in differentiating genuine defectors from fakes and plants.
SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE: To obtain information providing an early warning of important modifications or new developments in weapons and methods employed by a potential or actual hostile nation.
SDR: Surveillance detection run; a route designed to disrupt or flush out counter-surveillance without alerting them to the operative’s purpose.
SECRET WRITING: Any trade craft technique employing invisible messages hidden in or on innocuous materials usually sent through the mails to accommodation addresses. This includes invisible inks and microdots among many other variations.
SECURITY: Measures taken by a military unit, an activity or installation to protect itself against all acts designed to, or that may, impair its effectiveness. With respect to classified matter, it is the condition that prevents unauthorised persons from having access to official information that is safeguarded in the interests of national security.
SETTING UP: Framing or trapping an individual by covert means. Includes sexual entrapment by male (Ravens) or female (Swallows) of diplomatic, intelligence or commercial targets.
SHEEP DIPPING: US intelligence term for camouflaging or disguising the true identity of equipment or individuals especially of miliary assets used in clandestine activities.
SHOE: Russian Intelligence service term for a passport.
SHOE MAKER: Russian Intelligence term for a forger, particularly of fake passports.
SHOPPED: British Intelligence term for an agent or individual who has been deliberately exposed to a hostile security service, occasionally for assassination rather than arrest.
SHOPWORN GOODS: Information offered by a defector or potential defector that is old, outdated or unrelated to the needs of the intelligence service to which it is being offered.
SIGINT (Signals Intelligence)*: Derived from the interception, processing and analysis of communications, electronic emissions or telemetry. Complementary to the worldwide ECHELON system and because of the nature of the sites, the SIGINT networks have remained largely unknown.
…Most of this network of stations target long-range high frequency (HF) radio. A powerful HF radio transmitter can transmit right around the world, which is why HF radio has been a major means of international communications and is still widely used by military forces and by ships and aircraft. Other stations target short-range communications - very high frequency and ultra high frequency radio (VHF and UHF) - which, among other things, are used extensively for tactical military communications within a country.
SIGNAL SITE: A prearranged fixed location - usually a public place - where an agent or intelligence officer can place a predetermined mark in order to alert the other to operational activities. The mark made at the signal site - such as a chalk marking or a piece of tape - may let one of the parties know, for example, that the dead drop has been loaded.
SILVER BULLTER: The special disguise and deception tradecraft techniques developed under Moscow rules to help the CIA penetrate the KGB’s security perimeter in Moscow.
SITREP: Situation report sent in to HQ during an operation or crisis.
SLEEPER: A deep penetration gent placed in the target country, but who does not engage in espionage activities until activated many years later and only when promotion to a sensitive position or change of work provides the right opportunity. Term used by KGB and indeed Western Intelligence Services until replaced by the use of the less specific ‘Mole’.
SOAP: Nickname for the so-called truth drug Sodium Pentothal usually known for short as ‘so-pe’.
SOURCE: Any person who furnishes intelligence information either with or without the knowledge that the information is being used for intelligence purposes. In this context, a controlled source is the employment or under the control of the intelligence activity and knows the information is to be used for intelligence purposes.
SPECIAL TASKS: Russian term for assassination, kidnapping, murder and sabotage operations.
SPONSOR: Term for an intelligence service, which provides the finance and controls an operation carried out by a friendly intelligence service or freelance agents.
SPOOK: Generic and popular term for a spy.
SPY/SPIES: Any member(s) of an intelligence agency, security or other organization engaged in covert intelligence-gathering activities on behalf of another country.
SPY SWAP: The arranged exchange of agents and intelligence officers who have been caught and then imprisoned by a hostile nation.
STAGE MANAGEMENT: A vital component to a deception operation, managing the operational stage so that all conditions and contingencies are considered; the point of view of the hostile forces, the casual observers, the physical and cultural environment etc.
STATION: A CIA base of field operations usually in a foreign location.
STEPPED-ON: Deliberate interference with radio traffic.
STERILISE: To remove material used in a clandestine operation which may compromise the sponsoring service.
STRINGER: A low-level agent who passes on useful information only when the opportunity arises.
STROLLER: An agent operating with a walkie-talkie or wired-up for a covert street surveillance operation.
SUCKING DRY: Russian term for the prolonged debriefing of an agent following an operation.
SURREPTITIOUS ENTRY UNIT: A unit in the CIA’s Technical Services whose speciality was opening locks and gaining access to secure facilities in support of audio operations.
SWEEPER: Term for an electronic-technician who examines or ‘sweeps’ an office or facility to determine whether the building as been ‘bugged’.
SWALLOW: Russian intelligence term for a female agent used for sexual entrapment in a ‘Honey Trap’ operation.
T
TACTICAL INTELLIGENCE: Intelligence for planning and conducting tactical operations at the small unit level.
TALENT SPOTTER: Performs personal reconnaissance for recruiters.
TARGET: Person, service or facility against which intelligence operations are directed.
TARGET OF OPPORTUNITY: Person, service or facility against which intelligence operations unexpectedly.
TAXI: British intelligence term for a ‘jacksie’ or a homosexual member of a sexual entrapment operation. Now most are called ‘Ladies’, ‘Sisters’ or even ‘Swallows’, using these terms in a bi-sexual way.
TECHINT: Technical intelligence (umbrella term for the technical INTs: IMINT, SIGINT and MASINT).
TELINT: Telemetry intelligence (part of MASINT intercepted telemetry from foreign missile tests).
TEMPEST: ‘Transient ElectroMagnetic Pulse Emanation Standard’. Codename for activities related to van Eck monitoring, and technology to defend against such monitoring. TEMPEST is a short name referring to investigations and studies of compromising emanations (CE). Compromising emanations are defined as unintentional intelligence-bearing signals which, if intercepted and analysed, disclose the national security information transmitted, received, handled or otherwise processed by an information-processing equipment.
Compromising emanations consist of electrical or acoustical energy unintentionally emitted by any of a great number of sources within equipment/systems which process national security information. This energy may relate to the original message or information being processed in such a way that it can lead to recovery of the plain text. Laboratory and field tests have established that such CE can be propagated through space and along nearby conductors. The interception/propagation ranges and analysis of such emanations are affected by a variety of factors, e.g. the functional design of the information processing equipment; system/equipment installation; and environmental conditions related to physical security and ambient noise. The term ‘compromising emanations’ rather than ‘radiation’ is used because the compromising signals can, and do, exist in several forms such as magnetic and/or electric field radiation, line conduction or acoustic emissions.
Which means that with the right equipment ‘they’ can read what you type, read, send or receive, from the radiation your computer gives off. ‘They’ can be outside your office or home, in a van across the road or a passive monitor could be installed covertly. So install van Eck and acoustic screens and encrypt everything you do and hope everyone else does the same. Alternatively use pen and paper.
TIMED DROP: A dead drop that will be retrieved if not picked up by the recipient after a set time period.
TINKERBELL: See TELEPHONE TAPPING
TOSSES (hand, vehicular): A tradecraft technique foe emplacing drops by tossing them while on the move. Usually only carried out in an emergency or when known to be under a degree of surveillance.
TRADECRAFT*: The methods used by the intelligence community to carry out clandestine operations. Tradecraft is any technique or trick that substantiates a view of the work as a skilled occupation or craft.
TRIPLE AGENT: An agent who serves three separate intelligence services simultaneously.
TURNED AGENT: An agent or intelligence officer ‘turned’ into a double agent.
PADDING: Additional words added to the beginning and ending of a coded message to confused enemy decryption efforts.
PATTERN: The behaviour and daily routine of an operative that makes his identity unique.
PAVEMENT ARTIST: Intelligence term for a tail or skilled street surveillance.
PERSONAL MEETING: A clandestine meeting between two operatives, always the most desirable but more risky form of communication.
PHOTOGRAPHIC INTELLIGENCE, PHOTINT: Photographic intelligence; renamed IMINT or image intelligence. Usually involving high altitude reconnaissance using spy satellites or aircraft.
PIPELINER: An intelligence or case officer who has been designated for an assignment to a station such as Moscow and is underdoing specialised tradecraft training.
PIANIST: Western intelligence term for a clandestine radio operator.
PIANO: Western intelligence term for a clandestine radio set.
PLAY BACK: False information provided to an enemy while attempting to obtain accurate information by impersonating a captured spy or by using a turned spy in clandestine radio communications. The British used this in their XX Cross System in WW2 and the Germans called it the ‘Radio Game’.
PLUMBING (PLUMBERS): The work undertaken to prepare a facility or office for a major operation, such as the planting of ‘bugs’, such work is undertaken by ‘Plumbers’.
POACHER: British intelligence term for an enemy spy who is in the area of an ongoing operation.
POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE: Information related to a foreign nation of a movement’s internal operations that could prove of assistance to one’s own government in deciding future policy.
POSTIVE VETTING: British term for a comprehensive Security Check.
PROBER: An operative assigned to test border controls before an exfiltration is mounted.
PRODUCT: The final result of an intelligence operation or espionage effort.
PROFILE: All the aspects of an operative’s or a target’s physical or individual persona.
PROVOCATION: A harassing act or procedure designed to flush out surveillance.
PROVOCATEUR: An operative sent to incite target group to action for purposes of entrapping or embarrassing them.
Q
Q CLEARANCE: US Security clearance necessary for access to restricted nuclear data or weapons material.
R
RADER INTELLIGENCE (RADINT): Intelligence gained from Radar, increasingly seen as a sub-part of Imagery Intelligence (IMINT)
RAVEN: A male agent employed to seduce either males or females in a sexual entrapment operation or sexpionage.
RECONNAISSANCE: Observation mission undertaken to acquire, by various means, information about a target of intelligence interest.
RE-DOUBLED AGENT: A double agent whose activities are discovered and is turned again by his original service.
REPRO: Making a false document.
ROLL-OUT: A surreptitious technique of rolling out the contents of a letter without opening it. It can be done with two knitting needles or a split chopstick.
ROLLED UP: When the operation goes bad and the agent is compromised.
RPV: Remotely Piloted Vehicle such as drone or UAV which is being increasingly used by the CIA, MOSSAD and a host of other countries’ intelligence and military services for relatively low cost unmanned IMINT surveillance of battlefields and sensitive areas. The most advanced RPV can give a virtually real-time image of the target.
S
SAFE HOUSE: A dwelling place or hideout unknown to the adversary. A building considered safe for use by operatives as a base of operations of a building used for interrogations or hiding a defector.
SANCTIFICATION: Blackmail for the purposes of extracting political favours from a targeted victim, often using information on a sexual, perversion or criminal activities for leverage.
SANCTION: Intelligence agency approval for a killing or assassination either for revenge or active countermeasures
SANITISE: To delete specific material or revise a report of document to prevent the identification of intelligence sources and collection methods and to falsify information sources to cover up a mishandled operation.
SCALP HUNTERS: British term for intelligence officers who specialise in defections and in differentiating genuine defectors from fakes and plants.
SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE: To obtain information providing an early warning of important modifications or new developments in weapons and methods employed by a potential or actual hostile nation.
SDR: Surveillance detection run; a route designed to disrupt or flush out counter-surveillance without alerting them to the operative’s purpose.
SECRET WRITING: Any trade craft technique employing invisible messages hidden in or on innocuous materials usually sent through the mails to accommodation addresses. This includes invisible inks and microdots among many other variations.
SECURITY: Measures taken by a military unit, an activity or installation to protect itself against all acts designed to, or that may, impair its effectiveness. With respect to classified matter, it is the condition that prevents unauthorised persons from having access to official information that is safeguarded in the interests of national security.
SETTING UP: Framing or trapping an individual by covert means. Includes sexual entrapment by male (Ravens) or female (Swallows) of diplomatic, intelligence or commercial targets.
SHEEP DIPPING: US intelligence term for camouflaging or disguising the true identity of equipment or individuals especially of miliary assets used in clandestine activities.
SHOE: Russian Intelligence service term for a passport.
SHOE MAKER: Russian Intelligence term for a forger, particularly of fake passports.
SHOPPED: British Intelligence term for an agent or individual who has been deliberately exposed to a hostile security service, occasionally for assassination rather than arrest.
SHOPWORN GOODS: Information offered by a defector or potential defector that is old, outdated or unrelated to the needs of the intelligence service to which it is being offered.
SIGINT (Signals Intelligence)*: Derived from the interception, processing and analysis of communications, electronic emissions or telemetry. Complementary to the worldwide ECHELON system and because of the nature of the sites, the SIGINT networks have remained largely unknown.
…Most of this network of stations target long-range high frequency (HF) radio. A powerful HF radio transmitter can transmit right around the world, which is why HF radio has been a major means of international communications and is still widely used by military forces and by ships and aircraft. Other stations target short-range communications - very high frequency and ultra high frequency radio (VHF and UHF) - which, among other things, are used extensively for tactical military communications within a country.
SIGNAL SITE: A prearranged fixed location - usually a public place - where an agent or intelligence officer can place a predetermined mark in order to alert the other to operational activities. The mark made at the signal site - such as a chalk marking or a piece of tape - may let one of the parties know, for example, that the dead drop has been loaded.
SILVER BULLTER: The special disguise and deception tradecraft techniques developed under Moscow rules to help the CIA penetrate the KGB’s security perimeter in Moscow.
SITREP: Situation report sent in to HQ during an operation or crisis.
SLEEPER: A deep penetration gent placed in the target country, but who does not engage in espionage activities until activated many years later and only when promotion to a sensitive position or change of work provides the right opportunity. Term used by KGB and indeed Western Intelligence Services until replaced by the use of the less specific ‘Mole’.
SOAP: Nickname for the so-called truth drug Sodium Pentothal usually known for short as ‘so-pe’.
SOURCE: Any person who furnishes intelligence information either with or without the knowledge that the information is being used for intelligence purposes. In this context, a controlled source is the employment or under the control of the intelligence activity and knows the information is to be used for intelligence purposes.
SPECIAL TASKS: Russian term for assassination, kidnapping, murder and sabotage operations.
SPONSOR: Term for an intelligence service, which provides the finance and controls an operation carried out by a friendly intelligence service or freelance agents.
SPOOK: Generic and popular term for a spy.
SPY/SPIES: Any member(s) of an intelligence agency, security or other organization engaged in covert intelligence-gathering activities on behalf of another country.
SPY SWAP: The arranged exchange of agents and intelligence officers who have been caught and then imprisoned by a hostile nation.
STAGE MANAGEMENT: A vital component to a deception operation, managing the operational stage so that all conditions and contingencies are considered; the point of view of the hostile forces, the casual observers, the physical and cultural environment etc.
STATION: A CIA base of field operations usually in a foreign location.
STEPPED-ON: Deliberate interference with radio traffic.
STERILISE: To remove material used in a clandestine operation which may compromise the sponsoring service.
STRINGER: A low-level agent who passes on useful information only when the opportunity arises.
STROLLER: An agent operating with a walkie-talkie or wired-up for a covert street surveillance operation.
SUCKING DRY: Russian term for the prolonged debriefing of an agent following an operation.
SURREPTITIOUS ENTRY UNIT: A unit in the CIA’s Technical Services whose speciality was opening locks and gaining access to secure facilities in support of audio operations.
SWEEPER: Term for an electronic-technician who examines or ‘sweeps’ an office or facility to determine whether the building as been ‘bugged’.
SWALLOW: Russian intelligence term for a female agent used for sexual entrapment in a ‘Honey Trap’ operation.
T
TACTICAL INTELLIGENCE: Intelligence for planning and conducting tactical operations at the small unit level.
TALENT SPOTTER: Performs personal reconnaissance for recruiters.
TARGET: Person, service or facility against which intelligence operations are directed.
TARGET OF OPPORTUNITY: Person, service or facility against which intelligence operations unexpectedly.
TAXI: British intelligence term for a ‘jacksie’ or a homosexual member of a sexual entrapment operation. Now most are called ‘Ladies’, ‘Sisters’ or even ‘Swallows’, using these terms in a bi-sexual way.
TECHINT: Technical intelligence (umbrella term for the technical INTs: IMINT, SIGINT and MASINT).
TELINT: Telemetry intelligence (part of MASINT intercepted telemetry from foreign missile tests).
TEMPEST: ‘Transient ElectroMagnetic Pulse Emanation Standard’. Codename for activities related to van Eck monitoring, and technology to defend against such monitoring. TEMPEST is a short name referring to investigations and studies of compromising emanations (CE). Compromising emanations are defined as unintentional intelligence-bearing signals which, if intercepted and analysed, disclose the national security information transmitted, received, handled or otherwise processed by an information-processing equipment.
Compromising emanations consist of electrical or acoustical energy unintentionally emitted by any of a great number of sources within equipment/systems which process national security information. This energy may relate to the original message or information being processed in such a way that it can lead to recovery of the plain text. Laboratory and field tests have established that such CE can be propagated through space and along nearby conductors. The interception/propagation ranges and analysis of such emanations are affected by a variety of factors, e.g. the functional design of the information processing equipment; system/equipment installation; and environmental conditions related to physical security and ambient noise. The term ‘compromising emanations’ rather than ‘radiation’ is used because the compromising signals can, and do, exist in several forms such as magnetic and/or electric field radiation, line conduction or acoustic emissions.
Which means that with the right equipment ‘they’ can read what you type, read, send or receive, from the radiation your computer gives off. ‘They’ can be outside your office or home, in a van across the road or a passive monitor could be installed covertly. So install van Eck and acoustic screens and encrypt everything you do and hope everyone else does the same. Alternatively use pen and paper.
TIMED DROP: A dead drop that will be retrieved if not picked up by the recipient after a set time period.
TINKERBELL: See TELEPHONE TAPPING
TOSSES (hand, vehicular): A tradecraft technique foe emplacing drops by tossing them while on the move. Usually only carried out in an emergency or when known to be under a degree of surveillance.
TRADECRAFT*: The methods used by the intelligence community to carry out clandestine operations. Tradecraft is any technique or trick that substantiates a view of the work as a skilled occupation or craft.
TRIPLE AGENT: An agent who serves three separate intelligence services simultaneously.
TURNED AGENT: An agent or intelligence officer ‘turned’ into a double agent.