SPHERE OF SPIES
newsletter
Sherri Bigbee and Steve Hicok, a sister and brother writing team, have collaborated on the Chase Brandon espionage series.
Sherri is a TV cameraman who has a bent for obscure high tech. Steve with his
offbeat humor is currently teaching film. And Chase Brandon in LAKE OF SPIES
pushes his limits tracking a madman through Europe.
SPY CRAFT
: a current collection of tech-facts"…demands an adventurous spirit."
Think it’s impossible to become a spy? Think again. Travel the web to the C.I.A.’s web site (www.cia.gov) and click on employment. Up comes an ad for Clandestine Service. It reads:
"For the extraordinary individual who wants more than just a job, we offer
a unique career--a way of life that will challenge the deepest resources of your intelligence, self-reliance, and responsibility. It demands an adventurous spirit, a forceful personality, superior intellectual ability, toughness of mind, and a high degree of personal integrity, courage, and love of country. You will need to deal with fast-moving, ambiguous, and unstructured situations that will test your resourcefulness to the utmost."
Skip down to the Professional Trainee Program. The position is always open. It’s the one you want if you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a secret agent. Or, if you prefer the safety of your living room chair, try reading LAKE OF SPIES.
RoboFly
The Office of Navel Research is building the latest espionage gadget. It’s a flying robot about the size of a housefly, which will be used for clandestine surveillance. These micro mechanical flying ‘insects’ will be airborne, buzzing around airports seeking terrorists by 2004. The sun will power origami, paper-thin stainless steel bodies floated on Mylar wings. Piezoelectric actuators will flap its four wings (houseflies have just two wings) 180 time a second creating backspin and air vortices that create lift. And, like the common fly, it can take off and land in any direction, even upside down and can change course in just 30-thousands of a second. These chips on wings will have "smart dust" – tiny silicon motes that pack computing power, communicators and sensors. Someday, the RoboFly will become standard issue to covert agents assigned to surveillance. Defense developers will be well advised to start counter measures with a 75-cent plastic fly swatter.
Written on egg shells…
Covert inks are common in espionage. Spies not only acquire information, they
also have to transmit it to their handlers, and this is the most risky part of
the mission. 9 out of 10 agents are caught not when they unearth information,
but rather when they try to pass it on to their organizations. Lengthy
communication is always dangerous – codes get broken. Invisible ink is the
solution, because it looks as if no message has been sent at all.
During WWII censorship offices were highly successful in looking for secret
writing on letters. Although they weren’t able to pick up on the sophisticated
solutions of invisible inks they used a trick. When a suspected letter was
placed in a tin oven filled with iodine vapor, minuscule crystals of iodine
would settle along the jagged, rough edges produced by scratches of a fountain
pen, and thus messages could be seen.
Today, secret inks have been made to
resemble soap, toothpaste, perfume and medicine. British MI6 agents carry
antiseptic pencils used for shaving cuts. The alum in the pencil is mixed with
vinegar and made into ink’s consistency. Locations of IRA terrorists and
explosives are written on shells of hard-boiled eggs with the invisible ink. The
eggs travel with fresh eggs to stores and are bought up by British government
agents who break open the shells to read messages in black on the white of the
egg. How? The iron contained in the antiseptic alum pencil is carried straight
through the shell by the vinegar. As soon as it hits the sulfur contained in the
egg it becomes iron oxide, which is black. It brings a whole new light to
scrambling your message.
CNN’s Flamethrower Cars
CNN news station has reported that flamethrowers are now an option on South African cars. The Blaster casts a man-high fireball, and as the ad reads "With no damage to the auto paint job." It’s without doubt a powerful new weapon with which to stop car-jackers and terrorists alike. This will certainly bring road rage into the 21st century.
Getting harder every day…
The job of being an intelligence agent is getting harder every day. It’s the global move to digital, rather than analog phones that makes eavesdropping harder. $99 encryption software sold in office stores lets even drug lords and terrorists scramble their signals. Fax machine and fiber optic cables are a lot tougher to tap. Agencies are getting fire hosed with information from the Internet – public, not secret – that needs to be analyzed. – The secretive NSA (National Security Agency) also known as ‘No Such Agency’ or the ‘Puzzle Palace’ with its 38,000 employees is having one heck of a time keeping up listening for threats to U.S. national security. Oh, for the days of listening to a glass against the wall.
Ghost in the Machine
The Department of Defense is operating a classified project code named TEMPEST. Forget about someone reading your email or knowing where you go on line. There’s a new worry in town. Someone may be able to read what you’re doing on your computer screen from the next room, or from down the street. It can be picked up through thin air with cheap equipment and reconstructed to show exactly what is on your screen. An old fashioned, directional antenna aimed at a room, even from hundreds of yard away, can capture the unique radio-frequency waves that everyone’s video-display terminal emits. Anything can be replicated word for word. The strange part is that few have heard of this, but it has even been done as a stunt on British TV in the mid 80’s. AND it’s legal. Laws bar intercepting ‘any wire, oral or electronic communication.’ Typing to one’s self is not considered a ‘communication’. Now, I’m not so concerned about talking to myself.
Outside the Box
Russian President, Putin, has merged his security bodies into one organization with powers similar to those of the former KGB. This reverts Yeltsin’s breakup of the agency. Putin was a spy for over 16 years, and a couple of his old buddies, Patrushev and Ivanov, who were also KGB veterans, are tapped to lead the service. In response to this new threat, our CIA is opening a new school of analysis and will also launch a course to train analysts to look at problems from different angles. It’s going to take thinking outside the box to counter a new, improved KGB, which is looming on the horizon. And they say that fraternities never caught on in Russia.
The President’s Morning Coffee
The most important intelligence product of the day is the Presidents Daily Brief (PDB) – a report hardly ever more than eight pages long that contains intelligence and appraisals about overseas concerns. Six days a week it is delivered at dawn to the White House and read with that first cup of coffee. Is that why they call them the classifieds?
NEMP
It’s supposed to end those pesky car chases, but it’s got a problem or
two. The Pentagon’s Army Research Laboratory in Maryland is testing a
high-powered electrical device – the car stopper, or technically, the NEMP –
non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse. Aiming a nemp gun at the hood can paralyze a
speeding car. The intense electromagnetic charge kills the electronic system
that manages most modern engines. But it also kills nearby TV’s, radios,
computers and the occasional heart pacemaker. Counter-measures include using
old-fashioned engines with no electronics. In other words, a NEMP wouldn’t
bother James Bond’s Aston Martin, or a GTO, or a VW bus for that matter. I’m
getting a picture of a bunch of agents on skates.
Phaser Rays
It’s basically harmless; something out of SciFi…and it’s on its way…an ultraviolet laser beam that can immobilize people and animals…a Phaser ray devise that uses two beams of UV radiation to ionize paths in the air along which electrical current is conducted to and from the target. Imagine that the beams are like invisible wires going to and from a person. And here is where it gets tricky. The current within these beams is a close replication of the neuroelectric impulses that control skeletal muscles. The target person won’t know what’s happening. Inside, he feels his muscles are all bunching up. Neural impulses are firing at a rapid rate, and he falls straight down, fast. Muscle fibers are merged into a single sustained contraction causing him to fold into a ball. Reportedly it’s safe…a Non-lethal weapon, which can get any agent out of a tight spot without doing permanent damage. It sounds like a great way to shorten the line at Starbucks.