Tradecraft, Part 7
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This is True Spies. The podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. True Spies. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills?

And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies. The whole point of all this submarine intelligence gathering was to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age. I'm Sofia DiMartino and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. This is your seventh installment of True Spies: Tradecraft.

The stakes were extremely high. They knew that this mission is the first step towards a war that was imminent. And they were at that moment now when they had to attack.

This week we're diving into the archive to revisit some of the best examples of spycraft carried out by our operatives over the last year. Whether it's a moment of individual skill and bravery, a large-scale operation that took months of planning, or a bolt of inspiration that changed the course of history, these are spy skills, otherwise known as tradecraft at its finest.

Let's begin with an example filed under the "Bolt of Inspiration" category. My name is Joseph Assad. I was a operations officer in the Counterterrorism Center for the CIA. Joseph's story featured in the True Spies episode "Terror on the Line." It's 2007, and Iraq is hell on earth.

Stifling hot and brutalized by an incredibly complicated war. Nobody feels as though they're winning. The Americans need to engage the tribes, reconcile with the insurgents and install a government that can serve after they've left. And the CIA have run out of ideas for how to make that happen. The usual tradecraft techniques don't always work in a war zone. However,

Joseph comes up with a very simple but very effective way to make contact with the leader of a terrorist group they have been monitoring for some time: Abu Walid.

He had a previous relationship with Osama bin Laden, with Al-Qaeda. Not only was he in command of the largest Sunni insurgent group, other terror organizations heeded what Abu Walid would say. Abu Walid, not his real name, was one of the top 10 most wanted terrorist leaders in Iraq at the time. You are going to pick up the phone and call a terrorist leader and say, Hey man.

Would you like to come over and have some chai, some tea, and have a little chat? Joseph is going to invite him to meet face to face to discuss him laying down his arms. First step, before you call any terrorist leader, make sure you can't be traced. So I picked up a clean phone, that's an operational phone that's never been used, that would not trace back to the CIA. Second step. I turned the phone on.

And I remember my hands are sweaty. Third step. And I'm dialing in that number for the first time. The phone rings and rings. Joseph gets a sinking feeling. Nothing. Remember your training. Stay calm. He tries again. I couldn't get through. But then finally, Abu-Walid answered the phone.

I said, "As-salamu alaykum, Sheikh." An Islamic greeting. "Peace be upon you, Sheikh." I also refer to him as Sheikh or Sheikhna, our Sheikh or the Sheikh, which is also a term of respect. It acknowledges that he is a sharia and spiritual leader of the group, and that's how his followers would refer to him, both in the religious term, but in terms of their hierarchy, culturally.

The word "Sheikhna" will also hint to Walid that Joseph is Muslim. He's actually a Christian, but he's happy for Walid to believe whatever's most convenient. Remember, the target is always right. I introduced myself. I used an alias. We use aliases in order to protect our identity. That's Tradecraft 101.

It was the weirdest moment of my life. I felt that the biggest accomplishment here was the fact that he answered the phone. Obstacle one is complete. The subject answers the phone and he isn't immediately hostile. Time to face obstacle two. Get him to agree to meet. And I told him I was with American intelligence and I was calling to invite Abu-Walid to meet in Baghdad. Abu-Walid sounded shocked and asked, "How did you get my number?"

I ignored his question. I want to set up a cordial meeting to discuss a ceasefire and reconciliation issue with you. The phone line disconnects. The terrorist leader has hung up on him. Was Joseph a bit too quick to say he was American intelligence? Which understandably spooked Waleed. Either way, it didn't matter.

Joseph's simple idea to phone Abu Walid set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the terrorist leader agreeing to a ceasefire and to the relative easing of combat in Iraq, which allowed US forces to withdraw. It's good to talk, but in this business, it's more important to listen. They were told to guard two things more than even their lives. One was the limpet mines, of course, and the other thing was this radio.

And the radio ended up playing a very important part in Operation Jackpot. Hi, I'm Anusha Nandakumar. I'm a writer-director working in the Indian film industry or Bollywood as you know it. And I'm the author of the book The War That Made Raw. The War That Made Raw is a book about the Bangladesh Liberation War and the little-known role of covert operations in deciding its fate.

Of those operations, none was more important than Jackpot, which we covered in the True Spies episode, Beneath the Orange Rain. The mission of the operation was to launch simultaneous attacks in four ports: Chittagong, Mongla,

Chandpur and Narayanganj. The aim was to sink as many ships as possible in a short span. This would help create an impression that the waterways in Bangladesh were not safe for ships anymore. And just like how they banned the airspace travel, India would end up cutting off the water access as well. The stakes were extremely high. They knew that this mission is the first step towards a war that was imminent.

It was just their sheer willpower that had sustained them for over many months. August 1971, deep in the Sundarbans mangrove forest in Bangladesh, the commandos are on their treacherous route to their destination, the Chittagong port.

They have to reach their destination ports via the Sundarban Delta. So they have to go into Bangladesh, traversing India, and the Sundarban Delta is a very marshy and tricky landscape to traverse. For such a long journey, the commandos needed supplies, but they also needed to keep everything as streamlined as possible: enough food rations for survival, and the essential tools for their attack.

Fins, knives, Sten guns, limpet mines, and crucially, those radios mentioned earlier.

The success of the operation depended on all four commander units simultaneously attacking the different ports. But how would these commandos know the date and time for the attack? Because they were all in separate places, not in contact with each other. So it was decided that they would receive the signal to attack via the radio.

Each day, at a predetermined time, the four commando units would tune into the West Bengali branch of All India Radio, listening out for a very specific message. There would be two Bengali songs played for them.

One was a song indicating that they needed to get ready. That means they needed to reach the port for the attack. And the second was known as the action song, which was, that was the time to attack. So the commando leaders carried the radios and guarded them with their life. In the end, the commando units would have to navigate this hostile territory for nearly two weeks before they heard what they'd been waiting for on all India radio.

The first song was a signal song, which in Bengali goes, "Amar putul aaj ke pratham jaabe shoshur badi." Which means, "A doll will go to her in-law's house for the first time today." So this meant that they had to proceed to their target and get ready for the attack. The unit proceeds towards the Chittagong port.

and awaits a second signal from the transistor radio. The second song was, "I ask no reward for the songs I sing to you." This song was their action song. It meant that that was the night for the attack. Each mission went off without a hitch. All four ports were successfully attacked in unison, all thanks in large part to the humble radio.

The route to the ports was treacherous, with danger lurking under every mangrove. But it was also the mangroves that shielded them from detection. But quite often, when a spy is in the field travelling from A to B, there's nowhere to hide.

which is when specialized training comes into force. We owe it to our agents to keep them alive. And if you cannot see surveillance, you are likely to drag surveillance to a meeting and they will arrest him or her, at the very least imprison him or her, and in some cases execute them.

My name is H.K. Roy. I was a staff CIA operations officer for 13 years from late 1983 until late 1996, then received additional specialized counter surveillance or surveillance detection training and was sent to Belgrade, Yugoslavia for the next two years. H.K. Roy starred in the Balkan Betrayals doubleheader. We join him in Belgrade, 1990.

He's on his way to meet an asset, codename Hitch. Hitch is an officer for the SDB, the Yugoslav Security Service, and he's a spy for the Americans. And he would typically provide a sports bag full of top secret Yugoslav government documents.

Their meeting has been weeks in the making. Its location has been chosen based on casing reports, detailed assessments of the venue's suitability as a rendezvous point. In those days we didn't have Google Maps and Google Earth, so we were our own Google Maps and Google Earth, and we drew everything up and photographed the sites, and the agent had the casing report, so he knew exactly where we were going to meet and when.

In Yugoslavia, the surveillance was not as intense as it was in Moscow. They just didn't have the resources. The risk was, because they had so few resources, they would just have people out staked out in street corners or driving around, and so they might glom onto you two hours into your SDR just through bad luck.

SDR? That's a surveillance detection route to you and me. Essentially, I would spend a couple of hours in my vehicle, which had diplomatic tags, so, you know, were easy to spot by the local security service. And I would just make sure that I was black, meaning that I was not under surveillance. If at any point during my SDR I determined that I was not black, that I was under surveillance, I would

go to a store and not do anything to call attention to myself and then just return home, abort the meeting in other words. In a designated denied area like Belgrade, where American spies are unwelcome guests, an SDR is an essential prelude to a brief encounter, a quick and quiet exchange of information between an agent and their handler.

In other words, after we've both conducted our own SDR, surveillance detection routes, for several hours, we meet up late at night somewhere out of view of people and just talk for a few minutes. Long story short, HK's SDR checked out. He got the documents and went on his way. From smuggling state secrets on paper to smuggling them with something completely untraceable.

There's no technology that will thankfully read people's minds. And therefore it's as near perfect of a methodology that I've ever seen. My name is Pete Lapp. I'm a retired FBI special agent.

I worked with the FBI from 1998 until 2020, and I was focused mostly in my career in counterintelligence and espionage. The Montes case for me was a career case. It was an accomplishment that I was a part of that I never topped. Pete is talking about Anna Belen Montes.

From 1985 until her arrest in 2001, she used her position at the US Defense Intelligence Agency to funnel classified documents to Cuba. We covered her story in the True Spy's two-parter, The Queen of Cuba.

We don't know the exact details of the information Anna leaked to the Cubans during her period at the U.S. Intelligence Agency. What we do know is how she did it. And that's what's really remarkable. She's an incredibly bright woman, so academically very, very smart. She figured early on that the most secure way to do the act of espionage was to memorize.

Using techniques like visualization and mnemonic devices, Anna trained herself to process and store reams of data in an unhackable hard drive. Her brain. There's no bag check.

There's no security system. There's no risk of getting caught with a spy camera or standing at the copy machine copying sensitive classified information. There's no putting a disc into a computer system. There's no technology that will thankfully read people's minds. And therefore, it's as near perfect of a methodology that I've ever seen. And it's why her spying went undiscovered for 15 years.

Sometimes the most effective tradecraft is the simplest. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work, and some of the most interesting stories in the world.

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s.

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

Welcome back to part seven of True Spies Tradecraft.

We're in Ontario, Canada, in the late 90s. We're driving down one of the streets in front of all these shops in this town that we're working in. This is Pamela Stevens. She and her fellow operations officer, Kevin Barnum, featured in the True Spies doubleheader Operation Scorpius, an

An extremely dangerous undercover operation to infiltrate the drug dealing arm of a notoriously violent criminal gang. Everybody referred to them as the guys from Montreal and everybody knew that that meant Hell's Angels. The Hell's Angels had been at war with rival biker gangs for several years. For the Canadian police, it was nearly impossible to infiltrate the Angels.

The fully fledged or "patched" members were far removed from street level, using intermediaries to channel the merchandise to local dealers. Often the only way in was by sending officers undercover. Officers like Kevin and Pamela, who in this operation posed as a married couple who had recently moved to the area. They've set up a courier service.

We decided to create a business called Scorpius Messengers. And our theme, we had vehicles for deliveries, but we also did bicycle messenger service with the Timbuk2 bags and biked around town and were seen. And we'd go to the drugstores and fast food and we'd do deliveries. So it was a delivery service we set up and Scorpius Messengers theme was anything, anywhere, anytime.

They also posed as casual drug users and wannabe dealers. So far, so normal when wanting to infiltrate a highly organized drug gang. However, it was the unusual but very effective approach to their cover that lands them a spot in our tradecraft best of. It starts with them getting to know the area they've just moved to, which they do by taking a drive down the high street. And the area's getting to know them too.

Kevin turns to Pamela and says, we need to draw attention to ourselves. This is where it gets not so normal. And I'm like, I thought, you know, shouldn't we be trying to blend? He's like, no, no. Kevin says, here's what we'll do. I'll play the Beach Boys on full volume and you stand on top of the car and pretend to surf down Main Street. I'm like, oh, OK. He's the one with the experience. Sounds good. I do it.

And then he's laughing. He's like, I didn't actually think you'd do it. I was just screwing around with you there. This is what you would call acting natural. You are starting out as a complete unknown. You don't know anyone in that town. They don't know you. But soon, Pamela saw that Kevin's unorthodox way of operating was in fact a genius bit of tradecraft. It makes sense. The less shifty you are, the less suspicious you look.

You do draw attention because they're not expecting you to do that. You know, people have to see us, then they'll see us out at the bars, they'll know who we are. Now settled into the town, Kevin and Pamela get the Scorpius Messenger courier service up and running. They lease a store, hand out business cards and start taking on several big clients. Pharmacies, fast food outlets. But they also take on other clients.

We made it very well known we were open to delivering anything. And it was a real good one when we were dealing with the drug dealers because our business cards, that they could call us at any time if they had something special they wanted to deliver. Within a few weeks, they've made contact with several of their targets, both through the business and through Kevin's outright audacity. We'd walk into a bar

And he would, you know, hit somebody on the back and like make a joke about them or say something that I thought, oh, like this guy is not going to be happy with that. And then two seconds later, the guy's laughing, they're best friends. Like he just has this way that he'd walk into a place and most people just loved him. They loved being around him. Their cover was so good. Pamela and Kevin are now married in real life. Talk about life imitating art.

Which brings us to our penultimate piece of tradecraft, another masterpiece to hang in the Espionage Gallery. Only this time, it's all about literature. My name is Howard Kaplan. I'm an author of six novels of the Middle East and Russia. In the very early 1970s, associated with the Israeli government, I made two trips into the Soviet Union

As an American student in the early 1970s, Howard had been recruited by an operative of the Israeli government and tasked with smuggling literature in and out of Russia, collaborating with Jewish dissident organizations behind the Iron Curtain. I was spending my junior year in Jerusalem from Berkeley. I was an undergraduate at Berkeley. And there was a young woman from my high school also on the program.

And she met a guy who's an American-Israeli who essentially was recruiting students at the Hebrew University to go to Moscow on their way back home. The USSR tightly controlled the import and export of books. The Soviet state was all too aware of the power of ideas. Ideas had brought down the old Tsar.

You can listen to the whole story in the True Spies episode, The Courier. But in this episode, we're going back to the very start, to Howard's official training while he was working for the Mossad. Mostly we were taught kind of basic elements such as how to get, let's say, in Moscow from your hotel to the apartment of someone who you're going to contact without having to ask directions.

This wasn't the kind of in-depth training that a true officer of the Mossad would undergo. Remember, these are American students, not Israeli intelligence officers, and would be unlikely to face serious consequences if they were captured. But it was one mission that took him to London, where Howard received his unofficial training. Where I met a cell who kind of took me in and helped me with some additional training.

A cell is a group of operatives living in secret within a targeted community, waiting for instructions or an opportunity to act.

This London cell was made up of tough East End Jews who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. They were cab drivers, or they would borrow cabs, and they would queue up to Arab embassies, like the Saudi embassy, and they would rifle briefcases and steal documents as they were taking these people to wherever they needed to go. As you can imagine, it takes some serious sleight of hand to steal classified documents in a moving taxi.

especially when you're the one driving. The London cell wasted no time in bringing Howard up to speed on the finer points of his new trade. So I still today have a copy of The Hobbit where I was taught to write in the book in milk anything that came up or anything that the dissidents' leaders wanted me to do or communicate back.

Milk. Nature's invisible ink. A highly effective tool for your arsenal. As long as you don't mind the smell. And then what they did is, they took an iron, just a normal kitchen iron, and you iron the pages, and the milk burns and becomes readable. A truly ingenious piece of tradecraft to smuggle information.

In the end, Howard was uncovered and sent back to the US. The KGB said if they caught him again, they wouldn't be so "humanitarian" about it. The gathering and transferring of information is the bedrock of the espionage world. Whether it's written in milk in "The Hobbit," committed to memory with mnemonic devices, or transmitted via a cable tap hundreds of feet below sea level.

Instead of the early spy efforts, which were, "Can we see what's being launched from the other guys? Can we watch their bases?" It became, "Can we keep track of their submarines?" In tapping the cables, the U.S. was trying to learn everything it could about the Soviet submarine force, including where the missile subs would be hidden.

This is Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. They wrote Blind Man's Bluff, a book about submarines and spies during the Cold War. Sherry and Christopher featured in the True Spies episode Operation Ivy Bells, which told the story of how one man's hunch led to the de-escalation of a potential nuclear war.

The whole point of all this submarine intelligence gathering was to prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor in a nuclear age. Remember that flash of inspiration Joseph Assad had at the start of this episode? Well, Captain James Bradley of the US Navy had experienced the same thing. The big difference being, Bradley's led to technical advancements in undersea tradecraft and one of the biggest operations in naval history.

But it all started with a hunch. We're on the fifth floor of the Pentagon, HQ of the United States Department of Defense, 1970. It's 3:00 a.m. Most of the lights are off. The last cigarette has been put out, and the officers are quiet. But one room remains brightly lit. Captain James Bradley has his rose-tinted glasses on. And he started dreaming, thinking back to his days as a boy on the Mississippi River.

Bradley is the head of undersea intelligence gathering at the US Navy. The Cold War is escalating and he has a completely outlandish idea. He's going to plant a seed that could blossom into peace and end the Cold War. But if it fails, the consequences could be nuclear.

He used to like to ride on the paddle wheel steamers as they went down the river. He suddenly started thinking of the signs he used to see on the shore. Cable crossing, do not anchor, to warn boaters not to put their anchor down and destroy some kind of communications cable. And he always had the idea that there must be

undersea communications cables connecting Soviet naval bases and the leaders in the Kremlin. This is the hunch of all hunches, but he's given a submarine, which has been used for covert operations before, the USS Halibut, to explore this theory.

It looked like the least seaworthy boat ever put out to sea. The Halibut is an old submarine with a huge hump where missiles were once stored. The hump came to be known as the Bat Cave, named after Bruce Wayne's underground crime-fighting base.

Bradley and his team had to go away and develop waterproof tapping devices that could access what was inside the cable without damaging it. They also had to develop a way of laying the tap down from a 5,000-ton submarine, making best use of the Batcave. All that extra space meant that people like Craven and Bradley, who were coming up with these interesting spy missions, had room to put things, had room to put gear, had room to put divers.

The halibut was also carrying a very handy piece of kit, a safety net should things go awry, a DSRV, or Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle.

The submarine would carry its own lifeboat, basically, on its back. If there was an accident, these rescue vehicles could ferry submariners back and forth to safety. The first deep-submergence rescue vehicle that was launched to a lot of fanfare was actually bolted to the back of the halibut. But in the new and improved halibut, appearances could be deceiving.

The DSRV in the end was not a rescue vehicle at all. What it was, was a hidden in plain sight decompression chamber for divers. A decoy. Divers would acclimatize to the depth of the sea, 300 feet down in this secret chamber. Then they'd leave the submarine and lay down the cable tap. The USS Halibut was ready for her mission.

It was October 1971, less than a year after the mission was dreamt up. The submarine was going for a three-month round trip. With the submarine that was laden down with all the gear to accomplish this mission, it took them a month to get there from the Pacific coast of the United States. It was very dangerous. The Navy diving team reached the Sea of Okhotsk. The Halibut moved inside the three-mile exclusion zone around the coast of the Soviet Union.

Clearly it had to go inside the three to be looking for little signs on the beach. Just its presence so close to the shore could cause a nervous Soviet watch to suspect that the Americans were enacting a first strike, lighting the match on the nuclear powder keg.

they moved up the coast, following an S-shaped path to minimize visibility, occasionally performing a move known as a "crazy Ivan", a hard turn to surprise anybody trailing the ship and positioning the submarine to attack. The periscope was extended, and the crew saw something. It was sitting on a beach, far up on the northernmost end of the Sea of Okhotsk. A sign. It reads: "Do not anchor. Cable."

He was right about the signs on the beach and the cable. This is the X that marks the spot. Here be the treasure. The Halibut crew sighted the cable and followed it 40 miles back out to sea, where the seabed was flat. It took a day to maneuver the Halibut next to the line and deploy the divers. They were 300 feet down in the dark as they adjusted to the pressure. They left the decoy hump on Halibut's back and laid down the first cable tap.

Listening in, the divers could hear somebody speaking. This was a wiretap on an industrial scale.

Who would have had the nerve to send a submarine basically inside a Soviet bay up against the Soviet coastline? And who would have had the technology to get people down there who could literally wrap a device around their physical cable and listen? This was their way of speaking without having to worry. It took enormous creativity to come up with a solution that simple and then enormous guts to actually be willing to try that maneuver.

Three feet long, with a recorder filled with big rolls of tape and a lithium-powered battery, the tap required no cutting of the cable. It used induction technology to wrap around and listen in on the signal coursing through it.

The divers left the tape running for hours. All the while, the submarines swayed in the current. The cable was connecting the navy bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula that were across the Sea of Akats from mainland Soviet Union. The Soviets were certain of the cable's secrecy. Why bother encrypting most of their conversations?

It was remarkable that they were able to record for a while and bring these recordings of people speaking in unencrypted Russian back to

Captain James Bradley's daydream, unbelievably, had been correct. His imagination had unlocked the stalemate between the two nations. A month later, they arrived in the U.S., carrying a horde of missile debris and secret tapes home with them. So when the halibut did make it back, the tapes were taken directly from the boat to the NSA.

I've certainly never heard of another intelligence operation of this magnitude that ever started in quite that way. True Spies listeners will know that sometimes the most successful operations are the ones that begin by following your gut. What starts as a daydream, an idle thought, or a simple change of tactics can change everything. I'm Sofia DiMartino.

Join us next week for the eighth installment of True Spies Tradecraft.