In the 2021 spy novel Damascus Station, David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst, tells a riveting story of a young American spy adept at losing surveillance teams in cities the Agency calls “denied areas.” When I read it last year, I wondered how the author had slipped it past the CIA book readers who have to vet for publication anything written by someone who had a security clearance. Surely, the author was revealing real and classified tradecraft?
Yes, the government has people who read spy stories. People of a certain age will remember that a young Robert Redford played the part of one of those readers in the movie Three Days of the Condor, (based upon the book, Six Days of the Condor by James Grady) co-staring with a stunning Faye Dunaway. In the book the eccentric readers are off-campus, not at CIA, but in a campy townhouse on Capitol Hill, pretending to be members of some sort of literary society. That is where they all get killed, except, of course, Redford. In reality, the readers are less dashing, bureaucrats in cubicles inside cavernous government office buildings.
When I started writing fiction in 2005, I naively asked if my fiction also had to be vetted by the government. My first book, a non-fiction, had taken almost a year to get approval and I did not look forward to that again, to the arguments about what was and what was not still secret. The response was: “Maybe if you write a cook book someday, Dick, we might not need to see it, but even then, maybe…”
I have gotten quite accustomed to the rhythm of security reviews from my books and have some idea about what you can and cannot get away with. It was that background that caused me to wonder what sleight of hand David McCloskey had played on the reviewers. Writing my fifth novel and tenth book, I realized halfway through that I had stumbled upon the answer.
McCloskey was revealing techniques that used to be valuable, but are probably hardly ever employed these days. Until recently, Russia, China, Iran and other surveillance states would put as many as twenty people in teams on the sidewalks and in cars to follow one suspected American spy walking around a city. Our methods of breaking surveillance, loosing the tales, were highly developed. Now, the game has changed.
There are cameras everywhere. Some you can detect. Others are covert. Cameras are on the traffic lights, in the buses, in the subway, even in elevators and in taxis. Some are in the sky on drones. In Baghdad, the US had an advanced multi-camera system hovering overhead in a blimp.
When an Israeli Mossad hit team carried out an assassination in Dubai in 2010, the Emirati authorities were able to go back and stitch together a short film of the assassins from the moment they landed at the airport, through their taxi and elevator rides, to the moment of the hit, and then to their escape. Hundreds of cameras had caught them, each for a few minutes. What the UAE police did not have then, however, was a facial recognition data base that would have told them in real time that the people showing up at Immigration were not who they claimed to be. Therefore, the Dubai camera system was only good at providing after-the-fact proof of what had happened.
Today, if you get off a plane in Beijing, even for a first visit to China, Chinese security will probably know your real name and some of your history by the time you make it to the Immigration booth. The same is likely true in Moscow. Through computer hacking, China and Russia have probably obtained details about many millions of Americans’ identities. Remember the hack of the Marriott hotel chain system? Could there have been images of previous guests’ passports in the database? Do you think for a minute that your state’s Division of Motor Vehicles would know if some state-actor hacked in and copied all of the driver license photos?
For those of us who have had security clearances, much more than our photos have been taken. All of the dirty little secrets about you that are revealed in a background investigation for access to Top Secret data were in the database at the Office of Personnel Management when Chinese intelligence copied it all.
On recent flights out of the US on Delta and then on United, I was asked at the gate to look into a camera before boarding, instead of showing my digital boarding pass. The screen quickly identified me by accessing Homeland Security’s database of US passport holders photographs. Welcome Aboard!
Using facial recognition and ubiquitous cameras, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian security services can follow you around their capitals without ever leaving their air-conditioned operation centers. Using covert microphones, they can hear conversations (such as in elevators) even at a distance and they have trained lip readers for when the audio is poor. The old command of “follow that car!” given to taxi drivers in movies is no longer necessary because Automated License Readers and traffic cameras can track cars through most urban areas and on major highways. In many cities overhead transponders record what cars were where when, not just for collecting tolls.
Although a spy might not carry a mobile phone, almost everyone else does. Not carrying a phone is a “tell” that you are unusual and probably should be followed. With a mobile, however, the tracking is easy. To make it more precise, police around the world have installed their own cell tower repeater stations that allow them to triangulate a mobile phone into an area of a few feet/meters. Fuse the phone data with the surveillance cameras and you can get pretty high confidence that you know where someone is. You can also probably know who is with them in the cafe, in bed, passing them by on the street.
All of this surveillance is good if its done by the US against the Russians, but not so cool if they are doing it against us. In reality, in the US, some surveillance techniques would require a federal court order, likely from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Yes, there is one and its judges have to be convinced that the surveillance they approve is not violating some innocent person’s rights. There is no FISC in Moscow, let alone Beijing.
What is a poor spy to do? No longer can a Russian agent fly in to New York from Moscow, go to a dead letter drop, pick up a micro-dot with stolen secrets left by some mole in the US, have a nice meal and fly home without being known, followed, and maybe arrested.
Spies must resort to wearing disguises, but even that may not work. Everyone has a unique gait or way of walking. Most people can be identified by the unique shape of their ears. Spies may be guided to blind spots where there are no cameras to detect them picking up the goods, but that will not prevent them from being identified on the way to and from the blind spot. Moreover, there may be covert cameras in what they thought was an area without coverage.
Spy agencies may have to resort to disposable spies and couriers, people who go in to a Denied Area only once, people who have never been in a stolen government data base that identifies them by real name and occupation. And while these disposable agents may be able to pick up from a drop, they dare not meet with a mole in the government. Such moles are likely being followed about by the camera system.
What can a spy do? In my latest fiction, our heroes are software engineers who wear special “dazzlers” that confuse camera software, but when that will not work, they hack the systems that are following them, allowing them to disappear, or to appear somewhere they are not. Soldier, Hacker, Trickster, Spy?
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