Spy School

by Denis Bukin

  Exercise

  Retrace the last six months or year of your life in your mind. Remember all the events that occurred in that time with as many details as possible and make up a coherent story from your memories. Use all available materials: documents from a home archive, letters, bills and local newspapers. Ask family, friends and colleagues to supply extra information.

  15 October 1955

  Wonderful news! Alvarez bit and got caught! He was arrested red-handed. He didn’t even have time to put the photocopies down. I was very happy, but tried not to show it. Everyone who participated in the arrest was older and more experienced than I am – everyone worked so well and reliably – it was like they were reciting from memory.

  Even though Alvarez put on a brave face during the arrest and kept calm, when he was searched, when they found the film, he visibly lost hope and started worrying. I think that was when I first smelled the scent of fear coming off another person.

  And it is the smell of victory! How sweet it is!

  ★ Train your brain – Map. Level 3

  Create a route on an unfamiliar map that is now longer and more complicated. Imagine the way the street you are mentally walking along looks. Make note of the turns. How does the way the street looks change? What can you see? Make your mental journey bright and unusual. Add some vivid and fantastic details.

  Memory for odours

  For all living creatures, odour is a source of vital information. The sense of smell is a warning system, alerting us to danger signals, pointing to the proximity of food or another individual. For some species, smell is a means of communication. As humans evolved, our sense of smell got worse, but its influence is still significant.

  Human olfactory memory is much stronger than visual or aural memory. Perhaps this is due to the strong neural connections between the area of the brain that receives signals from the olfactory receptors and the hippocampus, which is responsible for long-term memory. Odours are able to revive long-forgotten memories and the feelings associated with them. For example, the smell of home is remembered forever and recognized at once, bringing back the joys and frustrations of childhood. The perfume of a beloved woman can stir a man’s emotions many years after separation, arousing seemingly extinct feelings.

  Psychologists working with people who suffer from amnesia know that in some cases, important familiar odours can help to restore memory of events. Hypnotists also mentally ‘place’ people into a forgotten situation by helping them to focus on the odours associated with it.

  You can also use the relationship between memory and the sense of smell. To immerse yourself in a situation that you or your informant want to remember, start with the odours.

  Sometimes, smell can enhance memorization. If you want to remember a dinner conversation better, pay attention to the flavour of the food. This flavour, restored from memory, will give an additional association, which will help you to recall the dialogue.

  Exercise

  When you smell something familiar, try to remember where and when you smelled it before. What were you feeling? What were you doing? Who was with you?

  Test yourself

  What are the circumstances that made it reasonable to assume that Kovalev was involved in Bernstein’s disappearance? (You may choose more than one answer)

  A) Bernstein’s friendship with Kovalev

  B) Kovalev’s avoidance of visiting places associated with Bernstein

  C) Kovalev’s sudden concern about the issues of moral evaluation of betrayal

  D) The change of Kovalev’s dissertation topic

  6

  ANALYST

  Unlike agents and operatives, analysts are rarely shown in movies. But that does not mean that the analyst’s job is not important. An analyst is a strategist. All the information collected by agents and operatives eventually trickles to them. They plan operations, they summarize intelligence information and present it to senior state leaders.

  The work of an analyst is almost never dangerous and always very interesting. It is similar to the work of a detective. It is their job to recreate what was going on and determine the causes and effects of events based on scattered and contradictory scraps of information. They even decode foreign intelligence networks from isolated clues.

  The highest class of analytical work is a sophisticated operative game, misleading enemy intelligence services through double agents, passing the truth off as a lie, a lie as the truth, and confusing opponents to gain an advantage.

  An experienced analyst can determine the secrets of another state without leaving his office, using public sources – articles and reports, rumours and slips. Public sources provide 70% of intelligence information, and only a third of it is produced through secret operative work.

  ★ Train your brain – Map. Level 4

  Create your longest and most complicated route. Your task remains the same: retrace the route based on the location of buildings, canals and ponds, parks and gardens.

  Prospective memory

  Prospective memory is the ability to remember intentions or planned actions. Unlike retrospective memory, which is remembering events that really happened in the past, prospective memory has to deal with the future – something that is only intended and has not happened yet.

  The act of remembering the future is initiated differently as there is no associated experience or past memory to be recalled. There is no such cue when it comes to our future intentions and recall is initiated by the person themselves.

  The key difference can be explained with an example:

  Retrospective memory: a wife asks her husband if he has bought bread. It’s easy for the husband to reproduce the last two hours in memory and recall whether or not he has gone to the bakery. An external event indicates the need for recall – the wife’s question. The husband does not need to think about this at a specific moment.

  Prospective memory: a wife asks her husband to buy bread in the evening. There is no one to remind him to buy bread when he is going home from work. Most likely, he will not forget the request, but due to lack of external motivation, he risks not remembering it until he comes home. In other words, prospective memory consists of two parts: the memory of the intention and recall of the intention at the right time.

  Prospective memory is very thoroughly studied by engineering, aviation and military psychologists. Most accidents and disasters are caused by humans making prospective memory errors: the operator forgets to do something, and it causes a chain of events with negative consequences. Air crash investigations show that pilots and air traffic controllers make most of their critical errors when they switch attention. For example, during a landing, a crew found that the downlock indicator on the dashboard was off. The pilot had had to make sure that the landing gear was down, but did this badly. The blown light bulb (which is what it was later discovered to be) diverted the attention of the crew, and the plane crashed into the ground.

  In aviation, there are a lot of rules that compensate for prospective memory mistakes. These rules organize crucial actions so that they are minimally dependent on the attention and memory of a single person. For example, the stages of aircraft control are regulated by printed checklists and involve at least two crew members: one first performs an operation and reports on his or her actions aloud to the second, who checks the performance. There is a memorized, habitual and unquestioningly performed procedure for any manoeuvre. And yet, despite these measures, pilots sometimes make mistakes.

  Prospective memory failures are very expensive for the intelligence service. A courier who forgets to wait for a countersign to his password jeopardizes his entire agent network. To prevent this, some methods that have long been used in aviation are used in the intelligence service.

  ★ Train your brain – Items on a table. Level 5

  The task has become more complicated: place six objects on a table. Indicate their locations.

  Prospective memory training

  To determine how good yo
ur prospective memory is, answer the following questions:

  • Do you forget birthdays, holidays and anniversaries?

  • Do you forget to make tea after boiling water?

  • Do you forget small requests and assignments and don’t fulfil them?

  • Do you go into a room, get distracted and forget why you went in?

  • Do you sometimes lose your train of thought if you’re interrupted in the middle of a conversation?

  • Do you often forget what you wanted to take with you when you’re leaving the house?

  • Do you miss meetings with people because of your forgetfulness?

  As already mentioned, prospective memory consists of two parts: the memory of the intention and the recall of it at the right time. There are many methods for training prospective memory, and you have already made a step forward by memorizing lists of words. But most mistakes in prospective memory occur in the second part, due to lack of external reminders.

  If you want to improve your prospective memory, use the training method offered by American physiologist Stephen LaBerge. Set ‘targets’ – events that happen to you several times a day. For example, the target may be ‘I see a 7’, ‘somebody is sweeping the street’ or ‘a woman in red is crossing the street’. Your goal will be to notice as many sevens, street cleaners or women in red as you can during the day. Consider how many times you have hit your target, and mark these events in your diary. Analyse the statistics of the hits per week. Train with one target for a few days, and then choose another one. Start with one target, then work simultaneously with two or three. This will strenghten the relationshop between the two parts of your prospective memory.

  Exercise

  Training with target events will develop your ability to remember intentions in response to an external event. However, this is not enough for good prospective memory: you must be able to remember your intention at the right time. An intelligence officer, more than anyone else, is expected to have a great sense of time. First, it will help you recall what you need at the right time without external prompts. Second, you will be able to plan your obligations more precisely, being clearly aware of how long it takes to do your work.

  When constantly relying on a clock, modern humans do not use their internal sense of time, and it is gradually lost. To get it back, you should rely on your intuition more often.

  Exercise

  Note the time on a stopwatch or a watch with a second hand. Not looking at the watch, try to say when a minute has passed. Five minutes. Ten. An hour. Do not count seconds, be engaged with what you are otherwise doing. If your inner clock is slow or in a hurry, check it and try again.

  Exercise

  Spend one day without a watch. It would be even better not to use a cell phone that day. It will make you take a look at how you spend your time.

  Exercise

  When starting a task, try to predict how long it will take. Do not look at your watch while working. When the task is done, compare the actual time it took with your forecast. How far off was your prediction? Did you overestimate or underestimate? Start with small and simple tasks: writing e-mail, cleaning a room. Having achieved a certain precision, move on to larger tasks and projects.

  How to help prospective memory

  Prospective memory is meant to store information about intentions and to remind you about them in time. This section describes practical techniques that can help you to remember things at the right time.

  The easiest method of reminding yourself of anything is to change your environment and make it unusual, and therefore noticeable. For example, you can put your trainers near your toothbrush so as not to forget to do your morning exercises. An unusual way to remember that you have to take something with you is to leave your car keys in the refrigerator. Having found them in an unusual place, you will not forget to bring along a book that you promised to give to your colleague.

  You can continually remind yourself of an important task, both at relevant and irrelevant times. A good example of this practice is to draw a cross on your hand. People see their hands almost constantly, and the cross will continually remind you that you need to complete an outstanding task.

  Pocket planners and schedules support prospective memory. A to-do list is not just a list of tasks, it is a behavioural strategy. Remembering intentions is associated with the habit of checking your schedule before starting to work and at the end of each task. Thus, a person starts to work after external reminders, which supports the inner impulse of prospective memory.

  Schedules can be used for planning tasks for more than one day. In order not to forget to contact relatives and friends during holidays, write the dates of anniversaries and birthdays in the calendar and make it a rule to check these for the week ahead every Monday. The same calendar can be used for regular medical examinations, pet vaccinations, utility payments, tax filing, etc. It will help you to do everything in time and not to forget the events that occur too rarely to always remember them. Of course, the schedule of anniversaries and birthdays can be electronic, with automatic reminders, but in this case, you are not involved in recall, and it weakens your prospective memory.

  Another behavioural strategy is regularly ‘scanning’ your intentions. If you make it a rule to think about shopping every time you drive past the store, you will not forget to buy food.

  Events and intentions can be linked directly or, on the contrary, in most peculiar ways. The first day of each month is a time to go through all of the bills you have received and to schedule payments of them. Good weather brings to mind thoughts of taking a vacation.

  Test Yourself

  What is the date noted on Andrei Simanov’s first journal entry?

  A) December 1954

  B) January 1954

  C) March 1956

  D) June 1955

  Exercise

  Invent your own rules for scanning tasks that you want to do. Start with one or two. Select events in response to which you will scan your intentions: leaving the house, leaving the office, driving past the store, a pedestrian crossing the street, a specific time or date, a meeting with someone.

  Follow these rules. Make them a habit. Gradually increase the number of rules in accordance with your goals and needs.

  The mnemonic devices described earlier can also be used for prospective memory. Think of an event or an occasion for recalling a planned task. Imagine a bright emotional picture with the event and the task. For example, if you want to buy a collection of lectures by Sigmund Freud, an event for it can be ‘driving past the bookstore’. Imagine that you are driving past your favourite bookstore and get into a traffic jam. Dr Freud himself has created this traffic jam. Smoking a cigar, he is signing books in the middle of the street, causing the traffic jam.

  Finally, the most effective way not to forget things is to follow rules and rituals. There are a lot of such rules in the intelligence service. The art of secrecy follows a set of rules: what to do before, during and after meeting with an agent, what and how to talk about your work, how to answer tough questions and to evade surveillance. Any mistake can be fatal. In this way, the intelligence service is similar to aviation, and so it uses the same techniques that pilots use: regulations and checklists. The only difference is that an intelligence officer does not store documents, but remembers them.

  As mentioned before, prospective memory mistakes occur mainly because of distractions during important procedures. To reduce the number of such mistakes, do not switch to another task after being distracted. Pause. Fix where you were in your memory. Create and mentally play a new plan in which you postpone your first task, then the second, and then return to the first one. Since the task is not competed there will be a mark in memory that will remind you to go back and finish it. Think about the Zeigarnik effect.

  Exercise

  Create rituals and checklists for tasks that you perform often. If you forget to take necessary things with you when leaving, write a list. Memorize it. Wh
en getting ready, recall each item and check whether it is already in your bag.

  Checklists for repetitive actions will save you time and effort. Let your first checklist be for all the things you take with you when going to work.

  Sometimes prospective memory can make very strange mistakes. A person may forget whether or not they have done something important: turning off the iron, locking the car or feeding the cat. This is because the action is carried out habitually, not quite consciously. The fact that it has been completed is not remembered, but the intention to do it remains. There is concern for possible consequences. If something like this happens to you often, set a target event like leaving the house or leaving the car. Connect this event with an action to make sure that all the electrical appliances are turned off. Make a mental note of completing the actions.

  ★ Train your brain – Matches. Level 5

  Continue your practice, but increase the number of matches to fifteen.

  The exercises are very difficult at the final levels. Do not give up if you do not succeed right away.

  ★ Train your brain – Word list. Level 7

  When you master the skill of memorizing lists, the number of words on the list should be of no further consequence. It is important to learn how to memorize words as quickly as possible.

  When training, alternate using the story method and the method of loci.

  Working with information in the intelligence service

  Contrary to popular belief, the intelligence service is not just about securing information through illegal means. First, not all necessary information is confidential. Most of the information is gathered from public sources and by legitimate means: from the press, advertising materials, at conferences and exhibitions and in ordinary professional communication. Facts themselves, which can be conflicting, do not provide anything towards making important decisions. The most important task is the analysis of available data.