The Big Book of Spy Stuff

by Bart King

  Washington was so terrific at his job that after the war, the head of the British intelligence operations said, “Washington did not outfight the British, he simply out-spied us.” Naturally, George Washington knew that British spies were keeping an eye on his forces. But he didn’t let that worry him! Instead, Washington made his officers and men spread out their camps along the sides of the roads. This sometimes put them miles away from each other, and the soldiers grumbled. But there was a reason for it.

  Imagine that it’s morning. A British spy in costume is walking along the road, when he sees some American soldiers making breakfast. The spy makes a mental note of where they are and then keeps traveling. Over the course of the next five miles, the spy sees groups of American soldiers making their breakfasts the entire way!

  The spy then duly reports that Washington’s army seems to cover five miles—and that made it seem like the army was MUCH larger than it actually was! How George must have laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  [10] I know, that’s a really lame argument. And it’s also the one that spies use.

  Eavesdropping!

  As all spies know, a “bug” is a hidden mini-microphone. And kids love them!

  Kids know better than anyone how fun it is to be sneaky. For example, in 1946, a group of Russian schoolchildren gave the people at the U.S. embassy in Moscow a gift. How sweet! It was a carved wooden wall decoration of the Great Seal of the United States.

  This gift from the Russian children hung on a wall in the ambassador’s home for the next six years. And then a U.S. security team discovered that the carving had a microphone in it. It turned out that Russian agents had been listening in on the ambassador all that time. Those little brats gave us a bug! What made the bug especially hard to detect was that it had no power source and it didn’t send radio signals. That’s not bad technology for way back then!

  Here’s what I love about this story: to solve the bug problem once and for all, the United States decided to have a new Moscow embassy built in 1968. The idea was to carefully watch the Russian workers so they wouldn’t try any funny stuff. The problem was the Russians constructed the walls away from the building site, and then trucked them in to Moscow. And even worse, the Russians even mixed electronic bugs into the concrete mix for the building.

  The result? By the time the new embassy was done, it had so many listening devices, it was just a gigantic radio broadcaster! The United States had to spend $40 million more just to start over. Dang it!

  Once Bugged, Twice Shy

  Because the Russians were so aggressive about bugging, U.S. agents sometimes overreacted. During a high-level meeting in Vienna, Austria, two American agents wanted to sweep a meeting room of any bugs. Investigating the room above the meeting area, the agents found a big brass object in the floor. They didn’t know what it was, but the thing was suspiciously mysterious!

  The two agents worked all night with a toolkit to remove the device. When they unscrewed a rod from inside of it, the brass object finally came free! But as they went downstairs, the agents realized they had made a big mistake. The meeting room couldn’t be used anymore because the huge antique chandelier in its ceiling had just crashed to the floor and broken into smithereens.

  Oops!

  Of course, you don’t need technology to eavesdrop. Sometimes you can just be standing right there. Take Mary Elizabeth Bowser. She was a slave owned by Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. By keeping quiet, Mary was able to gather all sorts of intelligence (especially while serving dinner!), because Davis and his guests assumed she was illiterate.

  Burn on them! Mary was born in 1839 as a slave in Virginia. But after being freed by her owners, Mary attended school and received a good education. Because she was both highly intelligent and a good actress, Mary was enlisted as a spy for the Union.

  In her role as a spy, Mary pretended to be Ellen Bond, a slow-witted servant who worked at the Confederate White House. And she was treated as if she were invisible! So while doing housework, Mary would read the letters and strategies that were left out in the president’s studio. While serving meals, she would listen in on conversations about military strategies and troop movements.

  Best of all, Mary had a nearly photographic memory, so she could repeat what she had read and heard word for word!

  As the war went on, Jefferson Davis knew there was a leak somewhere in his office or home, but he didn’t discover the source until it was too late. It is sad but understandable that after the war was over, the U.S. government destroyed all records relating to its spies in the South, including Mary. This was done to protect them from revenge. And Mary knew a few things about secrets herself, as she then disappeared entirely from the historical record!

  Even though her later life remains a mystery, Mary Elizabeth Bowser was one of the most important espionage agents of the Civil War. And remember that she did her best work just by keeping her ears open!

  Eavesdropping Tip!

  If you have two cell phones, you can listen in on almost anything. First, set one of the phones to “silent.” Then go to the area where you want to eavesdrop. Find a place where you can “plant” the silenced phone. This should be a spot where it won’t be noticed but will be out in the open.

  Now call the silenced phone and answer it to establish a connection. Set the silenced phone to “hands-free” or “loudspeaker” and leave the room!

  Take the phone you’ll be listening in on to another room. If it has a “mute” feature, use it, so you can hear through the other cell phone but any noise you make is blocked. If you can’t do this, just be quiet!

  By now, you understand the need for keeping your ears peeled. Sure, it’s painful, but that’s part of an agent’s job. And now for an inspirational tale of surveillance:

  Imagine that you’re an agent stationed in the tropics. Your Spymaster thinks that enemy forces are using a certain jungle trail, so you have to bug the trail! To make sure the bug isn’t found, you have to hide it in something that will not be a tempting place for the enemy to look. What do you choose?

  If you worked for the CIA, you would have picked tiger poop! During the Vietnam War, spy bugs were placed inside real-looking brown clumps. The bugs inside of the fake poop did just what they were supposed to do: they revealed enemy troop movements. (And the enemy troops didn’t move the fake poop because it looked like an enemy bowel movement.)

  Okay, let me share a spy tale with a little more class. When Madeleine Albright was the U.S. Secretary of State (1997–2001), she had her own particular style. For example, Albright wore jewelry pins that reflected her mood. If things were going well, her pins were butterflies and balloons. Not so good? A spider pin or maybe a snake accessory.

  At one point while Albright held office, a sweep of the State Department offices discovered some bugs. Who had planted these listening devices? The Russians! So can you guess what kind of pin Albright wore to her next meeting with the Russians? Yep, a bright bug.

  “They got the message,” Albright said.

  Of course, there have been many times in history when a nation didn’t realize that its enemy was getting its message. For example, at the start of World War I, the Russian army just used regular radio broadcasts to give regular commands. There was no jamming, no codes, no tricks—just orders! Because radios were so new in 1914 that the Russians hadn’t considered that someone ELSE might be listening in.

  As a result of this mistake, the Germans wiped out an entire Russian army at the city of Tannenberg. Double-oops!

  Bugs with Bugs?

  One of the CIA’s greatest listening devices was the “insectothopter.” This was a remote-controlled fake dragonfly equipped with a tiny motor that a watchmaker made. The flying spy would buzz around and set listening devices outside of windows. The insectothopter worked great, too. But it was so small that if it flew into a breeze it was thrown off course and lost.

  Or was it really lost?
/>   Surveillance

  Admit it: you’ve been secretly observing people for years. How else could you pounce on the last piece of pizza every time?

  In spy agencies, this is called “surveillance,” and I’m glad you’ve already had some practice. A good spy like you can secretly observe an individual, a group, a company, or even an entire nation without anyone knowing it. In fact, I’ve been secretly watching the country of Lichtenstein since 2007. (Luckily, it’s not very big.)

  And now, I have a special treat: this is the only surveillance story involving diaper rash that you’ll read in your lifetime!

  In the 1950s, the CIA worked with airplane makers to develop a spy plane called the U-2. It was designed to take high-quality photos from altitudes over 70,000 feet in the air. Back when it was built, that was higher than Russian jets or even missiles could fly. In fact, 70,000 feet up is where outer space begins!

  The U-2 flew so high and on such long missions that its pilots had to wear space suits with built-in diapers. As one spy plane pilot said, “I learned the hard way...that you can get diaper rash from Gatorade”!

  In 1962, U.S. spy planes took photos of new missile-launching sites in Cuba. But since Cuba didn’t have the ability to make missiles, that meant that Cuba’s ally—Russia—had to be the supplier.

  President John F. Kennedy called in a Russian diplomat named Georgi Bolshakov to explain. Bolshakov was outraged! He acted insulted and denied that there were any missiles of any kind in Cuba.

  So, the Russian was shown the spy plane photos. “And what do you think those are?” he was asked. Bolshakov hesitated. Then he smiled and said, “Baseball fields, perhaps?”

  Ha! President Kennedy was too polite to do it, but right then he could have shouted, “That’s the second-worst excuse of all time!” (The worst excuse of all time comes a little later in this chapter.)

  Thanks to spy satellites, surveillance has only gotten easier since. The first U.S. spy satellite was launched into orbit in 1961. But think about it: while those early spy satellites could take pictures of the earth below, there was no easy way for us to get those photos!

  Back then, the spy satellite had to eject its film into a container called a “camera pod,” and then the pod had to be ejected from the satellite. It would plummet down to the earth, and then the pod had to be retrieved, sometimes from the other side of the planet! Finally, the film had to be developed, and by then, a lot of time could have passed. In fact, in 1967, there was a conflict known as the Six-Day War—and that war was already finished before satellite photos of it started to come in!

  Since the 1970s, digital technology has made it possible for satellites to “beam” photographs and other information back to Earth. If you’ve used Google Earth, you know there are now swarms of satellites circling the planet and beaming pictures down to it. That’s a lot more convenient, and it means that today, anyone could be under observation at any time.

  But even though spy satellites can spot an individual person, they still can’t track that last piece of pizza. So, keep your eyes open!

  Freeze-Frame!

  Since you don’t have clearance to the best spy satellites, always carry a camera. And practice being sneaky with it!

  Change the settings on your camera so that it will not automatically flash or make sounds. Nothing is worse than setting up the perfect stealth shot and then giving yourself away with a loud beeep!

  Practice taking pictures while holding the camera at your waist. This means you won’t be looking through the camera’s viewfinder or screen. Experiment with different wrist angles, and remember that most digital cameras require you to push a button halfway down to focus before snapping the picture.

  Once you are decent at “shooting from the hip,” try doing it while covering the camera with a long-sleeved T-shirt, sweater, or coat. (The idea here is to cover the camera but not the lens!)

  Fire away with the camera while not looking right at your target.

  If you think you’ve been spotted, try turning or moving away from the target while still snapping pictures.

  If you’re still worried about being spotted, get a “fake key chain car-lock spy camera.” This small device looks just like a car key lock, but it has a camera built into it. Assuming there are some cars near the thing you want to take a picture of, you just aim and push the button. The device makes a sound as if it were locking a car, but instead, it’s shooting video or taking pictures!

  Sometimes it’s not the camera that prevents you from getting a photo—it’s you. In cases where you need to disappear, plant a camera in a concealed spot where nobody would expect it!

  Spies Are Looking at Your Online Photos!

  Innocent bystanders can gather important intelligence without realizing it. Imagine a tourist in Paris. He is trying to get a shot of his Aunt Ruby by the Eiffel Tower . . . Just as he snaps the photo, foreign agents steal it. No, not the picture—they steal the Eiffel Tower! But just as the criminals commit their very unrealistic crime—*click*—the tourist photographs them.

  Regular people really do take pictures of top secret things all the time. Professional spies call these kinds of photos “Aunt Minnies” because someone’s aunt (or other relative) is often in the picture.

  And that’s why intelligence agents right now are online and looking through people’s Facebook photos. (Seriously.) This job used to be a lot more difficult. During World War II, U.S. agents were sent out on missions to antique stores. There, they would look through photo albums, trying to find good Aunt Minnies. (Seriously!)

  Aunt Ruby in an Aunt Minny

  Talking Trash

  But surveillance isn’t all glamorous hip-shooting and cuckoo clocks. Sometimes you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty! Going through a subject’s trash is a great way to find evidence of what she’s been up to. But don’t actually TAKE the person’s trash away. That would be stealing! (It really is.) However, most experts agree that it’s legal to go through any garbage that’s been set out on the sidewalk or in a dumpster.

  Of course, it looks a little suspicious if you’re seen going through someone’s garbage bags. In 1991, a police officer spotted two men doing just that in Houston, Texas. An investigation showed the men were searching the trash of a technology company bigwig. And more investigation showed that the men worked for the French government. Sacré bleu!

  This led the French Embassy to release the worst spying excuse of all time.

  Yes, the trash collectors were employees of the French government. But, no, they weren’t spying! Instead, the men were “collecting grass cuttings to use as fertilizer in the French embassy’s garden.”

  They should have used that excuse in the garden instead, because it was pure bull manure!

  Garbage Time

  When double-agent Aldrich Ames came under suspicion, FBI agents went through all of his trash every week and then put it all back the way it was for nearly a full year!

  Big candy companies spy on each other all the time. During one of Nestlé’s spy campaigns against the Mars company, agents went dumpster diving outside the Mars headquarters for months. To make sure nobody noticed the missing garbage bags, the agents replaced them with different bags of trash.

  Then the Nestlé agents had to sort through the bags they had taken. Inside were coffee grounds, shredded documents covered in food, and even underwear. (Blech!) The spies had to be tough because their job was to take those soggy pieces of shredded documents and patch them back together!

  Now let’s set our surveillance sights a little higher. Did you know that there are a number of small model helicopters and planes that can be fitted with cameras? Of these devices, my favorite is one that falls off of maple trees.

  Or at least the device looks like it fell off a maple tree. Students at the University of Maryland invented what they call the “world’s smallest controllable single-winged rotocraft.” This micro-vehicle looks like a maple seed and isn’t much bigger. If you�
�ve ever seen a maple seed fall, you know that it has a unique spiral flight due to the “wing” attached to the seed. This camera-fitted rotocraft uses that same movement to take off from the ground and hover. Or you can just hold it in your hand and toss it into the air!

  Comings and Goings: The Stakeout!

  Keeping track of who is where when can be tricky. Let’s say you need to know when a particular person drives away from a certain place. You could stakeout her location , but that might take five minutes...or longer!

  If you have a cheap wristwatch, simply wrap it in duct tape. Then slyly stick it underneath one of the car’s tires that is closest to the curb. At some point, the person will drive off, running over the watch. Later, you can come back and grab it, and the time the hands stopped on the watch is the time your person drove away.