How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight

https://www.wired.com/story/mastermind-cia-disguise/

by Quanttek • 8 years ago

131 74 8 years ago

nodesocket• 8 years ago

Interesting. "We can turn a women into a man... But it's almost impossible to turn a man into a women."

azinman2• 8 years ago

We all start out female in the womb, and then some of us turn make given the right chromosomes. If you look at those who have transitioned their genders, female to male almost always look more “correct” than male to female... it’s hard to remove the effects of testosterone, but easy to add it.

Nasrudith2• 8 years ago

True although paradoxically there is one aspect that is reversed - genital surgery is harder and less functional to construct a functioning penis from a vagina than to create a more or less functional vagina from a penis. Put crudely but succinctly as 'it is easier to make a hole than build a pole'.

Reminds me of the one bit of weirdness with birds - they have the opposite convention of sex assignment being based upon ZW where males are ZZ and females are ZW. Females also have two ovaries but only one of them is active and the inactive one produces testosterone - meaning that if the primary one lost functionality they would start spontaneously masculinizing.

blfr• 8 years ago

Maybe but I think it's mostly because there's more variability among men so it's easier to pass as a man because we're used to men coming in all shapes and sizes.

porpoisely• 8 years ago

I see this repeated so often on the internet, but it is scientifically false. We start out as male or female at conception. XY and XX are determined at conception.

As a matter of fact, women who go through the IVF path can actually choose the sex of the embryo they want implanted in their womb. The womb has nothing to do with the sex of the baby and the female is certainly not the default. A woman can literally choose the sex of her embryo outside the womb and implant it.

collectibles3• 8 years ago

Based on my own transition, and a huge number of conversations I’ve had with trans folks, I don’t think that comparison is relevant.

It’s true that trans men often face a “faster” hormonal transition than women, but this is predominantly due to to the impact of testosterone on facial hair and vocal pitch. But on the assumption that these agents aren’t actually being put on HRT (the whole point is that it’s reversible, right?) going in either “direction” with cosmetics and vocal training is pretty difficult.

Conversely, it’s certainly true that it’s a lot easier to build up someone’s apparent height or facial dimensions than it is to reduce them, again assuming agents aren’t actually receiving cosmetic surgery. But most transitions happen after skeletal differentiation in puberty has already slowed or stopped, so neither men or women get any benefit from that difference during transition.

The effect ‘blfr alludes to probably has much more of an impact, although I don’t agree about the cause. We’re used to cultures where male is the prototype, and female is the marked gender. When those markings are ambiguous, the default assumption is male.

My lived experience is that once you do mix-and-match enough markings to be seen as female, folks will eagerly accept that and ignore whatever “contradictory” signs might be there. Looking at height, for example, it’s not any weirder to see a 95th percentile woman than a 5th percentile man. If you already check the “F” box, no one will look twice.

Lastly, if you’re still with me, maybe take this as a reason to reevaluate how confident you should be WRT who looks like what. If you spend any amount of time interacting with strangers in a US metropolitan area, it’s quite likely you’ve exchanged words with a woman you didn’t realize was trans. We’re really not that rare; we just don’t look like the people you see on TV.

sctb• 8 years ago

Not interesting by Hacker News' standards. We're not here to have dumb flamewars, but that's what follows comments like this.

Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bsamuels2• 8 years ago

this article is blogspam for an AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a32j7e/im_jonna_mende...

Operyl2• 8 years ago

Is it still blogspam given that they organized the AMA?

bsamuels2• 8 years ago

the article is an abstract of a piece of source material with ads on it, so yes.

the level of detail on the ama is way better than the article

huhtenberg• 8 years ago

The AMA is based around the video made by Wired and featured in a linked article.

jorgesborges• 8 years ago

An interesting quote from the AMA:

"I have difficulty separating my life from the work at CIA. This is true for a lot of my colleagues. Early on I found that the men in my office, upon retirement, had an average life-span of 18 months. Eighteen! Their work was their life, and most of them didn’t have outside interests. They literally lived their careers inside the CIA. We changed our retirement procedures to deal with this problem and it got better. Tony Mendez used to say that working at CIA was like drinking from a firehose and that retirement was like jumping from a moving train."

I wonder what it is about the work. This must be true in other professions as well. But at least in computer software after retirement you can still build things and practice your craft.

mabbo• 8 years ago

My father grew up in Oshawa, Ontario where there was a big GM factory making cars. Hard work with decent pay but good pensions- if you lived long enough to enjoy them.

As the stories went, a lot of guys, they put in their 25 years at the plant, retire, and drop dead within 2 years. The only thing worse for you than two and a half decades of hard labor is suddenly stopping.

AndrewKemendo2• 8 years ago

In a different life of mine, a long time ago, my surveillance team and I were doing a multi-day follow of a non-us person of interest in a major city.

I recall one day in particular, this person, who didn't know we had significant camera coverage of their route, changed clothing twice, right in front of our cameras. Like the short article described, it was pretty easy to don stuff, like a hat with built-in wig, reversible backpack/carrying case and obvious accessories.

So you'd be surprised how little it takes to fool a team of trained people following one person in a crowded area. We were lucky that our coverage caught everything, because had we not caught the person in the act of changing, we would have probably lost them.

Anyone who has a kid will recognize this phenomena from what happens at a crowded playground.

sandworm101• 8 years ago

I had some connection to the flip side of the urban spy game. Cops trying to tail a man on a motorcycle in British Columbia (drugs). On a mountain highway. He meets another biker at a lookout where they trade bikes/helmets jackets ... or maybe they didn't. Then he gets onto a drive-on-drive-off ferry (bikes are filtered to the front) and they've lost him.

When two spies want to get together without tails, it isn't at a downtown coffee shop. It is deep in the woods on a quiet road. It is somewhere surrounded by people in helmets and driving generic vehicles. They drive the vehicles that cops don't. Motorcycles. Bicycles. A vespa scooter can out-maneuver any car attempting to follow it.

Want to get really hollywood. I've heard a legend about two russian spooks having a meeting while surfing. Alone out in the waves, nobody can see the exchange.

Spearchucker• 8 years ago

There are two very useful books on the subject - Surveillance Tradecraft by Peter Jenkins, and Close Protection by Richard J Aitch. Read those two and you should have no problem surveilling or following someone whilst remaining undetected, and similarly no problem in not being surveilled/followed.

faster• 8 years ago

Amazon has 'Close Protection' for $1229 and 'Surveillance Tradecraft' for $54. My library has neither book, which is not terribly surprising. Sadly, that means I'm unlikely to get a chance to read either one.

goseeastarwar2• 8 years ago

Buy it from the source for 65 GBP http://www.cpbook.co.uk/

nappy2• 8 years ago

Check ILL, talk to your local librarian - I've been sent books from overseas before.

anigbrowl• 8 years ago

It's hard to find really good books on this topic. Thanks for the recommendation.

rudolfwinestock• 8 years ago

Reminder: Any CIA or MI6 agent who lasted more than a week in the Soviet Union had diplomatic cover. The NKVD and KGB caught all of our deep cover agents within days; in some cases within hours.

The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the Russians have been top-notch at humint for a long time.

guildwriter• 8 years ago

The existence of moles both within the CIA and MI6 had a little bit to do with that.

remarkEon• 8 years ago

Which further speaks to his point about the Russians excelling at HUMINT.

dragonwriter4• 8 years ago

The United States excels at sigint and aerial/orbital recon, but the Russians have been top-notch at humint for a long time.

Maybe, but there's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state (which is why in a liberal democracy, the counterintelligence services are often trying to simulate a totalitarian police state.)

whatshisface• 8 years ago

Maybe, but there's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state

You could just as easily argue it in the opposite direction, it is much easier to co-opt the corrupt Russian government than it is to co-opt the less corrupt American government. An individual corrupt unaccountable person of interest in a totalitarian police state is far more valuable than an individual corrupt person of interest that is being watched like a hawk by the public in a liberal democracy.

I think a much more reasonable explanation for why government organizations are always trying to become more totalitarian is simply that the officials would rather have more power than less power. The only difference between here and there are the checks placed on them to limit what they can do.

JamesBarney3• 8 years ago

I think the U.S. is just an especially easy place to send a deep cover agent.

It has a high standard of living so it's easier to recruit someone to be willing to live here for long periods of time.

It's not uncommon for someone to have a social circle made up entirely of people they've only known a few years. This seems to be much less the case in other places in the world, especially Russia.

It's much more culturally heterogenous so it's easier for someone to blend in.

travmatt2• 8 years ago

That probably contributes, but that can’t be the entire story. A previous post on HN discussed the means by which the soviets excelled at identifying CIA agents working under diplomatic cover - it turns out that American tradecraft was hardly as great as we believed - their sloppiness meant that CIA agents under diplomatic cover had unique payscales, tour lengths, working hours, socialization habits, and many other attributes that allowed their covers to be blown. If you can uncover the handlers by their sloppy tradecraft, surveilling and rolling up their assets isn’t going to be that hard - the lack of constitutionally guaranteed protections just meant that those networks could be rooted out quickly once uncovered, but it didn’t necessarily have to contribute towards their discovery.

AndrewKemendo2• 8 years ago

Popular saying: Life is short for a NOC

goseeastarwar2• 8 years ago

Any good books on the subject, sounds fascinating.

judahjr88• 8 years ago

The Sword and the Shield

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

The NKVD and KGB caught all of our deep cover agents within days; in some cases within hours.

Uh...how do you know this?

nappy2• 8 years ago

Best comment here. Citation needed on this comment, especially when it can be disproven with a single counter case.

wmeredith• 8 years ago

These are extraordinary and remarkable claims. Source?

AlexCoventry• 8 years ago

Legacy of Ashes is a good source.

DoreenMichele3• 8 years ago

Amusingly, when I lived in Germany in my twenties, people never seemed to assume I was an American military wife and homemaker. They would greet me in German, assuming I was a local national, or assume I was French or assume I was a teacher. I apparently didn't read as American.

personlurking• 8 years ago

While in the US, people would often tell me that my style of dress and my accent was hard to place, which I always found a bit odd since I was born/raised in the US (to a long line of Americans). And now after 10 yrs abroad, following that period, I can only guess I've got better at hiding it, merely through osmosis.

In my time abroad, I've become good enough at Brazilian Portuguese (my 2nd language, learned as an adult) that people in Portugal, where I've been living, often think I'm from Brazil. I always mention quite early on that I'm from the US but, nonetheless, I'm still intrigued with the idea of disguising oneself.

Linguistically, I'm highly doubtful that one can reach C2 status (that is, consistently sounding like a native) in a second language learned as an adult. Of the Brazilians I met in the States, I paid attention to how old they were when they arrived stateside, and judged their cultural/linguistic knowledge with people who were born in Brazil and never left. Anecdotally, I found the age of assimilation (of their home culture/language) was around 16. That is to say, if they arrived in the US at age 14, for example, they'd turn out to be more American than Brazilian by their early 20s. But I wonder how that can be entirely true if I myself don't seem to fit in that box, regarding my American qualities.

DoreenMichele3• 8 years ago

My mother is a German immigrant to the US. I speak a little German and I likely dressed a lot more like a German than an American because my mother had a strong influence on my fashion sense. So it's not real shocking that I would sometimes be assumed to be German.

What was bizarre to me was that it seemed like no one ever pegged me as an American. IIRC, I was on an American military base when someone asked me if I was French.

So this didn't just happen out on the streets of Germany. This happened in spaces where you should by default be assuming that most people there were American.

Granted, a lot of soldiers married foreign nationals, so it wasn't quite that simple. I mean, my dad was a soldier who married a German woman while he was stationed in Germany. But it seemed to me like the guess as to my nationality should skew towards American when I was actually on an American base and not, say, fluently droning on in some foreign language.

graeme• 8 years ago

Fwiw few americans travel abroad, and even fewer outside of major hotspots and tourist locales. When travelling it's somewhat unusual to meet an american around town.

Saw your comment about the military base so there's probably more to it than that, but the base probability of "american" in a lot of places is low.

DoreenMichele3• 8 years ago

Thanks. I didn't realize that.

But the first incident that stuck in my mind was when an American soldier greeted me in German on the sidewalk in front of the McDonald's across the street from the entrance to the American base. I had my very blond baby with me. Yes, I'm half German. Yes, my child is one quarter German.

But he was an American and Americans walked across the street to the McDonald's regularly. It very much weirded me out. Like "Why would you think I'm a German national? You're not. Do I not look American to another American on the sidewalk across the street from the American base??"

cryoshon• 8 years ago

the cynical side of me assumes that they'd only show this information off if they had a new system for disguise which was far beyond what they showed here.

i mean, look at the image of the lady in the mask meeting HW bush -- that image is ~30 years old. they've had 30 years to improve on that...

stevewillows• 8 years ago

Previous discussion -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18291780

foobar19622• 8 years ago

Marking this so I can find it again. The video is excellent.

PavlovsCat• 8 years ago

Quick tip: you can mark stories as favourite with a link at the top of the page, and comments on their individual pages (accessed by clicking on the "x hours ago" link).

You can see your own upvoted stories and comments, as well as favourited stories and comments at the bottom of your profile page.

foobar19622• 8 years ago

Ah thanks.

ourmandave• 8 years ago

The same assholes that posed as Doctors Without Borders so they could gather dna evidence to confirm where Osama Bin Laden was hiding, thus hampering any efforts to eradicate polio because nobody trusts DWB anymore? That CIA?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...

I can only assume they have spooks running around pretending to be the Red Cross.

huxflux• 8 years ago

Former CIA Chief Explains How Spies Use Disguises - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8

How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight

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