16 questions · History
In the spring of 1943 a body in British uniform washed up off the Spanish coast near Huelva. Chained to it was a briefcase with letters suggesting that the Allies meant to land in Greece. The Germans fell for it. The dead man had never been an officer; he was a homeless man from London, and the letters had been written by British intelligence. Operation Mincemeat is still a textbook case showing that espionage often has less to do with pistols than with deception, patience and paper. In the same war thousands of women and men sat at the country house of Bletchley Park deciphering the radio messages of the German Enigma. In the Cold War this grew into vast machines: the CIA in Langley, the KGB in Moscow’s Lubyanka, the NSA at Fort Meade, Britain’s MI6, which James Bond works for in the novels, and the Mossad, which hunted down those behind the Munich Olympics attack of 1972. West Germany’s BND sat for decades in Pullach near Munich before moving to Berlin. The Stasi left behind around 111 kilometres of files. The world of intelligence has its own language. A mole rises for years inside a foreign agency, a sleeper waits quietly to be called on, a double agent serves two masters and deceives one of them. Material changes hands through a dead drop without the people involved ever meeting, sometimes on a microdot barely bigger than a full stop. And sometimes everything goes wrong: in 1960 the Soviet Union shot an American U-2 out of the sky, and in the Second World War the Gestapo smashed the network it named the Red Orchestra.
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CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947 as the foreign intelligence service of the United States.
💡 Did you know? The headquarters is named after a former director who later became president, George H. W. Bush.
KGB
The Committee for State Security was foreign intelligence service and secret police at once.
💡 Did you know? The Lubyanka held a notorious prison; Muscovites joked it was the tallest building in town, since you could see Siberia from its basement.
Mossad
The campaign went down in history as Operation “Wrath of God” and lasted many years.
💡 Did you know? Steven Spielberg’s film “Munich” (2005) retells the hunt.
MI6
MI6, officially the Secret Intelligence Service, is Britain’s foreign intelligence service.
💡 Did you know? Bond’s creator Ian Fleming himself worked for naval intelligence in the Second World War.
BND
The BND is Germany’s foreign intelligence service and was founded in 1956.
💡 Did you know? Its Berlin headquarters on Chausseestraße is one of the largest office buildings in Germany.
Stasi
Since 1992 people have been able to read the files kept on them.
💡 Did you know? In 1989 officers tore up files by hand; thousands of sacks of scraps are still being pieced together.
NSA
The National Security Agency intercepts and decrypts radio, phone and data traffic worldwide.
💡 Did you know? For years its existence was so hushed up that the initials were jokingly read as “No Such Agency”.
Dead drop
It can be a hollow stone, a crack in a wall or a hole under a park bench; a chalk mark signals that something is waiting.
💡 Did you know? In 2006 a British “spy rock” with a built-in transmitter, an electronic dead drop, was discovered in Moscow.
Mole
A mole works their way up from within and betrays ever more important secrets.
💡 Did you know? John le Carré made the word famous with “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974); he said he took it from KGB jargon.
Double agent
Double agents give one side real secrets and the other side carefully chosen false ones.
💡 Did you know? The Spaniard Juan Pujol, code name Garbo, deceived the Germans as a double agent about where the 1944 landings would come.
Sleeper
Sleepers build a completely ordinary life, with a job and a family, and wait for the signal.
💡 Did you know? In 2010 a ring of Russian sleepers was uncovered in the United States; the case inspired the TV series “The Americans”.
Microdot
Whole pages fitted onto one dot, which was read under a microscope.
💡 Did you know? FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the German microdot of the Second World War the enemy’s masterpiece of espionage.
Bletchley Park
At its height around ten thousand people worked there, most of them women.
💡 Did you know? Everyone was sworn to secrecy; many did not even tell their families until the 1970s.
Mincemeat
The dead man posed as an officer carrying secret letters that pointed to a landing in Greece instead of Sicily.
💡 Did you know? The basic idea already appeared in a list of deception ideas that Ian Fleming, later the creator of James Bond, had helped to write.
U-2
The U-2 flew so high that it was long thought out of reach, until a Soviet missile hit it.
💡 Did you know? Powers was freed in 1962 on the Glienicke Bridge near Berlin in exchange for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.
Red Orchestra
The Gestapo called the radio operators “pianists” and the whole network, which passed information to the Soviet Union, an “orchestra”.
💡 Did you know? After it was smashed in 1942, dozens of members were executed, many of them women.
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