Intel ops in History for Essay

[Noble Industries]

Hey gang as part of my Security Terrorism and Counter Terrorism studies degree I have a very cool little class called “Spies, Saboteurs and Secret Agents”. The main essay for the subject is a choose your own topic based on the question below.

Essay must “be a critical examination of a secret intelligence or counterintelligence event in the past, or a critical study of a spy network or of an individual spy or secret agent”

Just thought I’d ask the learned community if anyone had any thoughts on intel ops to look at. I think I’d rather look at an operations/event rather than a network. Have a great library at home but just thought I’d see if anyone had any suggestions.

[davidbfpo]

Not an exhaustive list, just thoughts: Ames @ CIA; Penkoskvy @ KGB; the Walker family in USA (USN?); Professor Khan, Pakistan's nuclear "father"; "Doublecross" scheme in WW2; Stalin's failure to acknowledge German build-up in 1941 and finally since you're in Australia - Japanese espionage in Malaya before WW2.

All are well covered in open sources and often controversial.

davidbfpo

[max161]

You might look at this recent situation in Korea in which a north Korean posed as a refugee and may have become a modern day Mata Hari.

More charges in South Korea's seductress-spy case
Thu Sep 4, 2008 5:52am EDT
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean prosecutors on Thursday charged a North Korean defector with violating national security laws by aiding his stepdaughter, who was indicted last week with spying for the North in a sex-for-secrets scandal.
Won Jeong-hwa, a 34-year-old woman who posed as a defector, is suspected of sleeping with South Korean military officers in exchange for classified information.
Won's stepfather, Kim Dong-sun, also arrested last week, is suspected of helping finance Won's activities, prosecutors told reporters.
Lawyers for Kim could not be reached immediately for comment.
The spy case comes as ties between the Koreas have chilled after President Lee Myung-bak took office in February and angered the North by saying Seoul would stop what once had been a free flow of aid and tie handouts to progress the North makes in nuclear disarmament.
Won, who arrived in South Korea in 2001, is suspected of obtaining information on weapons systems, the areas of key military facilities and even the email addresses of top officers and then passing the information to North Korea.
North Korea in an official media dispatch late on Wednesday denounced Won and her stepfather for leaving the country. It also lambasted South Korea, saying the charges against Won were "a threadbare charade".
"(Won is) human scum crazy for money, vanity and swindling," its KCNA news agency quoted an official with the communist state as saying. The official continued: "As for her step-father ... he is also human scum who betrayed the homeland and the people."
Won is expected to go on trial next week, court officials said.
About 14,000 North Koreans have defected to the South since the 1950-1953 Korean War, with most of them coming in the past 10 years. Spy cases were commonplace for several decades after the war but have become rare in recent years.
(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz and Kim Junghyun)

[William F. Owen]

Japanese espionage in Malaya before WW2.

I don't know most of the details, but there was a British Army spy run by the Japanese in Singapore in 1941. After discovery and interrogation, he was summarily executed by the Royal Military Police. The events were suppressed at the time, but may be better known now.

[Jedburgh]

....a critical examination of a secret intelligence or counterintelligence event in the past, or a critical study of a spy network or of an individual spy or secret agent...

One episode that has all those elements is the joint US-UK effort to infil agents into Albania from '49-'54. The "critical study" can look at the effort itself (to infil and establish an agent network in a hostile state), an individual agent (Kim Philby: from both the intel (Soviet) and failed counterintel (US-UK) perspective). Using the Albania op as the focus, Philby permits not only an assessment of the catastrophic impact he had on that op before the indicators began to pile up, but on how the Soviets recruited him and his upward movement within UK intel (weaving a second study into the fabric of the first).

Just thought I’d ask the learned community if anyone had any thoughts on intel ops to look at. I think I’d rather look at an operations/event rather than a network. Have a great library at home but just thought I’d see if anyone had any suggestions.

If the example above doesn't interest you, the possible choices are endless. If you could narrow your preferences a bit, I could make a couple of decent recommendations:

Intelligence operation/event.....

Prefer US or other nation (or intel op conducted by non-state actor)?

Regardless of national sponsor - do you have a preferred region? (Asia, Europe, the Americas, MENA.....)

In support of combat ops or op conducted during peactime?

Time period - WWI, inter-war, WWII, Cold War, post-Cold War? (there are a few interesting pre-20th century ops with applications that still hold true today - but that would require significantly more work to produce a substantive paper)

[Van]

How far back do you want to go?

"The LORD spoke to Moses: 2 "Send men to scout out the land of Canaan I am giving to O the Israelites." (Numbers 10)

Scipio brought centurians disguised as slaves with a delegation into Hannibals camp to collect information so the Romans could plan an attack.

Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spy master planned and executed some baroque operations against the Papal States and Mary, Queen of Scots.

George Washington managed a fairly complex network of spys through the American Revolution.

The Pinkertons during the Southern Insurgency/War of Northern Aggression are a case study in outsourcing intelligence.

Baden Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, reconned the Balkans prior to WW I.

For counter intelligence, in ancient Greece, Rhodes had laws expressly forbidding foreigners from going to their shipyards. (Dr. R. Rice, a naval history would be the place to search for more on this.)

Immediately prior to the Peloponnsian War, the tyrannt of Athens locked down the Spartan delegation so they couldn't report before he presented his case to the Spartan assembly.

We could go on, but what era or region is most interesting to you?

[Tom Odom]

For a different wrinkle, look at military attaches and their roles as intelligence officers. Most writers on intelligence ignore the attache field without realizing the amount of high quality intelligence attaches have provided in the past.

Truth in advertising: I was a defense attache twice and it was for me the same as getting a battalion. It was what I sought to do as a froeign area officer and intelligence officer. As a bonus, I got to spend a year with Stan

Tom

[Van]

Originally posted by Tom Odom
look at military attaches and their roles as intelligence officers

Umm... Note my remark about the beginning of the Peloponnesian war... Diplomats have always been spies.

BTW - I got full marks for an essay for "Intelligence in Ancient Military History" using the theme of Attaches in Antiquity.

[John T. Fishel]

the case of "The man Who Never Was" by Ewen Montagu - also a film - but still one of the classics.

Cheers

JohnT

[William F. Owen]

How far back do you want to go?

"The LORD spoke to Moses: 2 "Send men to scout out the land of Canaan I am giving to O the Israelites." (Numbers 10)

I think that may be Numbers 13. Pretty good as an OP Order for Theatre Level Reconnaissance.

[Jedburgh]

I think that may be Numbers 13. Pretty good as an OP Order for Theatre Level Reconnaissance.

It is Numbers 13. Numbers 13:17 is the opord, and Numbers 13:26-31 is a good example of conflicting reporting by men who have seen the same thing, but whose differing perpsectives are driven by individual biases and fears.

This biblical piece is often used as a teaching vignette for HUMINT source ops to highlight the danger of relying on single sources, and to emphasize the value of using multiple sources with different backgrounds (known biases) for single targets to obtain those differing perspectives. It is also commonly used in teaching analysis, with a slightly different twist.

[selil]

I got full marks for an essay for "Intelligence in Ancient Military History" using the theme of Attaches in Antiquity.

You did a paper on Odom? Wowser.

[Tom Odom]

You did a paper on Odom? Wowser.

Yep it was ancient a$$h0les I have known

[Old Eagle]

Joshua 2:1 -- And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of ####tim two men to spy secretly, saying Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and came to a harlot's house, named Rahab, and lodged there. (KJV)

[wm]

. . .in France during WWII, Ex-Pat American women in Manilla, Julia Child (The French Chef) in the OSS. (Old Eagle's post about the 2nd oldest profession set me on this line of thinking)

[selil]

Joshua 2:1 -- And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of ####tim two men to spy secretly, saying Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and came to a harlot's house, named Rahab, and lodged there. (KJV)

You'll notice where they stayed of course. Some things never change.

[William F. Owen]

You'll notice where they stayed of course. Some things never change.

You assume they knew she was a hooker. I can take you to a car park on the beach at Netanya and it's pretty damn hard to hell who is a hooker and who isn't. I guess it wasn't much different in those days!

[marct]

BTW - I got full marks for an essay for "Intelligence in Ancient Military History" using the theme of Attaches in Antiquity.

Outside of whether or not it was Tom (), I would really like to see a copy of that if you wouldn't mind. I'm working on a paper right now on the engagement between Ethnography and the Military in the Roman-Byzantine tradition...

[Noble Industries]

Thanks all so much, there have been some fantastic ideas, I really appreciate the thoughts you have all put out here for me.

I’ll have a think over some of these and perhaps shoot through a few emails.

[Elevation]

World War I has some unique Intelligence subjects that can be breached as well.

Probably not a ton of people know that the Germans ran very successful sabotage missions against American war industry, in the United States.

The close relationship Sir William Wiseman and Woodrow Wilson is also very interesting. Probably the closest relationship a President has ever had with an intelligence agent, and with a Brit no less.