Clandestine HUMINT operational techniques

An intermediate approach has the officers clearly working for their country but without diplomatic immunity and with a cover role that does not immediately suggest intelligence affiliation.For example, the Soviet GRU covered some intelligence officers under the TASS news agency, or as part of a trade or technical mission, or even as diplomats.The pattern of having groups that are self-organizing and have preexisting ties, making them virtually impossible to infiltrate, has survived the GRU and is common in terrorist networks.Suvorov uses a medical metaphor of quarantine designed to contain infection to describe separating agents for improved security.They also may be assumed to be going there, based by analysis of flight departure times, aircraft type, duration of trip, and their passengers or cargo.The account of the harlot Rahab sheltering Israelite spies and betraying the city of Jericho might be the first documented instance of a "safe house.Another usage refers to mailing addresses (postal and electronic) and telephone numbers, to which messages can be sent with a reasonable chance of not coming into the awareness of counter-intelligence.Soviet intelligence practice was to avoid such people in the actual clandestine operations, regarding them at most useful as distractions to the counterintelligence services.the Venona project communications intelligence exposes that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, accused of Communist sympathies, were indeed Soviet spies.This term usually is reserved for the first or most sensitive recruitments, although specialized support personnel, such as radio operatives acting alone, are called singletons.Headquarters, aware of all joint operations with a given service, can give advice from a broader viewpoint without compromising the need for local initiative.Nevertheless, some agents, especially trained intelligence officers like Robert Hanssen, will almost never meet, but provide material good enough to prove their bona fides.At every meeting with an agent one should study him and obtain new data on his potential and talents, thereby providing a better basis for judging his sincerity and deciding how much trust to place in him.More challenging versions are reminiscent of passing a baton in a relay race, and would be most commonly done with small objects such as a photographic film cartridge.While this technique obviously takes better manual dexterity and is more prone to error, it has the countersurveillance advantage that the operatives are not carrying anything after the transfer, and can blend into a crowd even more easily.A variation of the brush pass is the live letter drop, in which one agent follows a predefined route, on foot, with a prepared report hidden in a pocket.In some cases, if a car can drive slowly down a street or driveway not easily observed, a courier can toss a message container into an open window, making the transfer method intermediate between a brush pass and a dead drop.At one time, invisible ink, a subset of steganography, was popular in espionage communications, because it was not visible to the naked eye without development by heat or chemicals.Another technique, for hiding content that will resist casual examination, is to reduce the message to a photographic transparency or negative, perhaps the size of the dot over the letter "i" in this article.The very knowledge that a dead drop exists can cause it to be trapped or put under surveillance, and the member of a brush pass that carries it will be hard-pressed to explain it.[17] It is extremely difficult for a nonprofessional to develop a cryptosystem, especially without computer support, that is impervious to the attack by a professional cryptanalyst, working for an agency with government resources, such as the US NSA or Russian Spetssvyaz.For example, the final attack order for the Battle of Pearl Harbor came in a radio broadcast of the Japanese phrase, "Climb Mount Niitaka".[18] The modern equivalent is a small, low probability of intercept radio transceiver, using a directional antenna aimed at an orbiting satellite communications relay.More stable agents may be happy with termination bonuses, and perhaps a future emigration opportunity, that do not draw attention to their own side's counterintelligence.In World War II, Spanish security services, while officially neutral, often passed information to the Germans, which, in this case, is exactly what the British wanted done.In the present political context of Western democracies, the sensitivity, and separation, of clandestine and open contacts do not lend themselves to the process of building agents of influence.One is the Soviet ability to mesh overt and covert influence activities through centralized coordination of party, government, and ostensibly private organizations dealing with foreigners.Other major differences are in scope, intensity, and importance attributed to active measures and covert action, and in immunity from legal and political constraints."Returning to KGB doctrine, presumably still present in the SVR, "Influence operations integrate Soviet views into foreign leadership groups.Certain services, such as name checks, communications, cover identities, and technical support may reasonably be combined, although the requirements of a particular field network should be held on a need-to-know basis.