Boris L. Slocum's Blog, page 3
September 18, 2019
The Truth
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell
― George Orwell
July 29, 2019
Red Read
Okay, it's finally time to start. I've been on pins and needles.
Woohoo!
July 17, 2019
Love this music
I started listening to this guy a year or so ago. Fantastic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsx-J...
v/r
Boris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsx-J...
v/r
Boris
July 15, 2019
Oh, Jeez
It's been more than a month since I posted here. It's becoming obvious what people mean when they talk about too much social media. Sorry that I've spread myself so thin.
Hope all of you who are following are well.
I'm up to not much. I've been reading up on copyright law in my day job, have a second book back from my editor (woohoo), and I'm shopping around for a few new things to read.
With that in mind, does anyone have a book by an Indie author they would recommend? I keep promising myself I'll read more Indie and small press writers.
Let me know, and I'll try to post regularly in the future.
v/r
Boris
Hope all of you who are following are well.
I'm up to not much. I've been reading up on copyright law in my day job, have a second book back from my editor (woohoo), and I'm shopping around for a few new things to read.
With that in mind, does anyone have a book by an Indie author they would recommend? I keep promising myself I'll read more Indie and small press writers.
Let me know, and I'll try to post regularly in the future.
v/r
Boris
June 11, 2019
Annual Reading
I'm not much for how-to books, especially on something as personal and delicate as writing, but every writer should read this essay at least once per year.
It's a reminder how easily our own voices can be corrupted by the easy, the trite, and the vague.
Don't fall for it.
June 1, 2019
Dark Fantasy
Wergild: A Heartwarming Tale of Coldblooded Vengeance
A dark fantasy novella of blood and friendship set in a distant land in a time of great trouble and turmoil. Deirdre wants nothing more than to avenge the killing of her loved ones. But is her only ally in this desperate quest a creature she can trust?
A dark fantasy novella of blood and friendship set in a distant land in a time of great trouble and turmoil. Deirdre wants nothing more than to avenge the killing of her loved ones. But is her only ally in this desperate quest a creature she can trust?
May 17, 2019
Hello!
Comrades,
Sorry I haven't posted in a few weeks. It's not for want of interest. I enjoy dropping the occasional note. In fact, sometimes in the next week I will have another installment or three of my ongoing series, Espionage: A Writer's Guide.
Until then, have a great one!
Boris
Sorry I haven't posted in a few weeks. It's not for want of interest. I enjoy dropping the occasional note. In fact, sometimes in the next week I will have another installment or three of my ongoing series, Espionage: A Writer's Guide.
Until then, have a great one!
Boris
April 29, 2019
Espionage: A Writer's Guide IV
The Cycle: How intelligence works.
Requirements-Collections-Analyses.
Understanding the intelligence cycle is important to understanding how intelligence collection works. It’s so important, in fact, that it’s worth talking about it in a bit more detail. It consists of three steps.
1. Collection Requirements: First, policy makers formulate a requirement: in other words, the Bigwigs have a question to which they want or need an answer. And if what they seek is the kind of information that can’t be gathered thru more conventional channels (the Library, diplomacy, Google), they task intelligence agencies to collect this information, either through overt or covert methods. This tasking (as it sometimes is called) can come in any form, written or verbal. (Such things might be called Collection Requirements (CR) or sometimes Intelligence Requirements (IR). The fact is that any number of names might be applied to such taskings, so, again, don’t get hung up on terminology.)
Collection requirements change often, as the need of the policymaker changes, but there also are continuing requirements that policymakers might find important. Continuing requirements, which are long-term and change only rarely, consist of things national leaders and senior security officials invariably would want to know, things such as a) imminent attacks against national assets abroad, b) foreign troop movements near international borders, c) the location of specific military units of rival nations, d) coup attempts against friendly governments. The list goes on and is nigh endless. The nub is this: the policy maker (an elected official, cabinet secretary, senior military officer, etc.) needs a piece of information, and they issue a formal order for the intelligence assets to whom they have access to seek that information out.
2. Collection: It is worth mentioning again: Contrary to what one sees in the movies, intelligence officers almost never find a silver bullet, a single earthshaking piece of information that prompts a ‘Eureka’ moment in the Intelligence Community. Such finds occur only once in a blue moon. Intelligence almost always is collected by tiny little nuggets at a time.
Imagine the whole collection process is sort of like going out and finding pieces of an enormous and ever-changing jigsaw puzzle. Intelligence collection is merely the finding of jigsaw pieces, most of them mundane and only a few of them highly classified secrets of foreign governments.
Intelligence agencies find these jigsaw puzzle pieces (i.e., they fulfill collection requirements) by using a variety of tools, including those mentioned in the previous section (HUMINT, SIGINT, etc.). Choosing how to address the collection requirement is a decision on which policy makers usually defer to intelligence agencies, since such agencies are the ones with the knowledge and experience. Often, a multi-disciplinary approach is adopted.
For example, let’s imagine a scenario. It goes like this:
Jack Rassendyll—you’ll get to know more of Jack, later—works for the Operations Division (OD) of the Ruritanian Directorate of Intelligence (RDI), one of many national intelligence agencies in the world. Currently, Jack is assigned to an OD HUMINT team operating under diplomatic cover in the Ruritanian Embassy in Vienna, Austria.
Policy makers in Ruritania are interested in information on troop movements along that country’s border with the Republic of Fredonia during a time of heightened political tension. Such information might be collected in a number of ways. For example, Jack’s bosses at the RDI might task officers of Ruritanian Signals Intelligence (RSI), which is Ruritania’s SIGINT branch, to listen for radio and telephone chatter and identify the GPS coordinates of communication devices know to belong to the Army of Fredonia; or the RDI may have the Ruritanian Imagery Intelligence Office (RIIO) create a set of reports on the results of satellite and drone flyovers of the area in question.
Likewise, RDI might task OD HUMINT teams worldwide to begin answering a set of Collection Requirements about Fredonia’s capabilities and intentions along the Ruritania-Fredonia border.
Jack’s small HUMINT office would receive a set of Collection Requirements over classified electronic channels. The CR would provide the specific set of information the RDI is seeking and would give suspense date (which you might call an expiration date) indicating the date after which the information collected is no longer useful. Jack’s team then would have a specific amount of time a) to find one or more sources (people) to answer this CR, b) to plan an engagement with that source, c) to execute that plan, and d) to draft and submit any reports to RDI on what they’ve collected for analytical review. (FYI, intelligence collectors like Jack positively hate short suspense dates. Despite how it is portrayed in Hollywood movies, successful Human Intelligence requires time and meticulous planning. But sometimes speed is essential.)
Let me take that example a little further.
The tasking Jack’s team receives from headquarters of RDI on the Fredonia problem has a short suspension date (the policy maker needs the information within one week), so they have little time to plan, a situation that all HUMINT collectors hate, and they can’t come up with much: none of their current intelligence sources have knowledge of Fredonian military movements in that area.
After some brainstorming, Jack and his team make a hasty plan and endeavor to monitor and collect information at one or more clubs and taverns they happen to know are frequented by army officers assigned to the military attaché’s office at the Fredonia Embassy in Vienna.
Jack and his team have a collection plan consisting of this: Jack and one other HUMINT agent from the embassy, a young woman named Sophie Cloy, encounter three off-duty officers from the Army of Fredonia at a sports bar just off downtown Vienna and chat them up, buy a few rounds, and invite the officers to a game of darts. (It sometimes is that simple.) On its surface, the encounter is a casual meeting, but Jack and Sophie planned and rehearsed the encounter for nearly ten hours, after carefully selecting and casing the site. Still, it is just a one-off, and neither Jack nor Sophie intend to develop a deeper relationship with the three men they meet.
Of course, these three men don’t know Jack and Sophie are intelligence officers, but from their accents, Jack and Sophie are obviously from Ruritania. (Residents of Ruritania and Fredonia speak the same dialect of English with slightly different accents.) Also, the Fredonian officers likely have had numerous briefings on counterintelligence, so they are on their guard about discussing sensitive information around strangers.
But one of the officers does let something slip at the dartboard after a few beers. His brother is a captain in 316th Hussars, a unit of the Army of Fredonia, and the officer was disappointed his brother couldn’t come to party with them in Vienna that weekend because he was helping with a regiment-wide inspection at his home garrison on the days in question.
That piece of information isn’t much—it seems downright trivial, in fact—but it’s the kind of nugget that intelligence officer of all kinds, including HUMINT officers, find on a regular basis. Most intelligence consists of trivial little dribs, drabs, and drams of information.
The beauty is that Jack and his HUMINT collection team at the embassy are not the only ones out there rummaging around in the refuse; other Ruritanian assets are hard at work. And things add up—virtually every little tidbit of information contributes to a larger operating picture within the intelligence community. And all of those tiny little puzzle pieces are funneled to the same analytical shop for comparison, vetting, and analysis.
3. Analysis: So, what happens to all those tiny little nuggets, those thousands of little jigsaw puzzle pieces, including Jack and Sophie’s modest piece, that various intelligence teams collect each year?
All of it goes to analytical cells for processing, vetting, and for the creation of reports for digestion by the policy makers who requested it. (Such reports, unless deemed too highly sensitive, also are circulated throughout the entire intelligence community for comment and for the use of other departments.)
Small analytical cells are located at all echelons and in all offices within the intelligence community. In fact, there is even a billet for an analyst at Jack’s small office at the embassy in Vienna. (Since that slot is unfilled, a HUMINT collector named Arthur Van Dyke, as low man on the totem, ends up getting tasked to do most analytical work in the office.) Most analytical heavy lifting, though, takes place at secure and highly classified facilities like the RDI general headquarters in Strelsau, the capital of Ruritania. Information collected by the RDI and by Ruritania’s Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) also is exchanged freely on a series of classified computer servers to which only RDI, MIB, and policy makers have access.
As is common, Jack happens to know the analyst who covers the political and military situation between Ruritania and Fredonia. When he finishes his tiny report and has his supervisor, Ernst Grocer, review it, he sends it to the analytical bureau via a classified computer network and then gives the analyst in question a short phone call to touch base and make sure he gets the report. The touching base isn’t part of protocol, but it’s something Jack and most collectors do to keep the channels of communication open between themselves and the analysts in the rear. (Such people can make a Human Intelligence collector’s life incredibly easy.)
This particular analyst, Serge Portnoy, a fifty-seven-year-old civil servant who has over thirty years at the same office, lives and breathes his job, which is to work the Fredonia desk. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Fredonia, from its politics and military to its history, art, literature, and sports. He can rattle off the names and credentials of all senior, and many junior, members of the Fredonia government and military by name. He understands the economy better than does Fredonia’s own minister of treasury.
Serge’s job is impressive. He takes Jack’s tiny little report about the captain in the 316th Hussars and compares it to everything he previously knew about that unit of the Army of Fredonia and compares it to the hundreds of other reports that are now flooding his office about the Army of Fredonia and its current operations along the border with Ruritania.
The analyst gets numerous reports on voice intercepts of conversations in Fredonia via Signals Intelligence, he gets drone and satellite imagery on sensitive locations via IMINT, and he gets hundreds of HUMINT reports like Jack and Sophie’s from intelligence collectors who are tapping their sources all over the region, including many who are located in Fredonia itself. He even gets reports about troop movements from MASINT ground surveillance stations and technical reports on air quality along the Fredonia border that measure the amount of diesel exhaust in the atmosphere, attempting to ascertain the number and type of Fredonia military vehicles present.
Some of these reports are more detailed than others, but none of them are definitive by themselves. Serge and the small team of analysts he leads vet those reports and determine which are true, which are simple errors, and which might be bogus information put forward by Fredonia counterintelligence to muddy the waters.
It is a complex and mind-numbing process, one that is never one-hundred percent accurate, but the reports Serge and his team generate provide a much clearer picture for Ruritanian policy makers about the capabilities and intentions of the Army of Fredonia along their shared border.
Also, the feedback Serge and his team provide HUMINT collectors like Jack helps those collectors develop a better sense of how accurate their sources are. Many sources used in HUMINT collection are persons with whom collectors have ongoing relationships, and a constant vetting and assessment of such sources is essential for accuracy and for operational security. Sources sometimes lie, for a variety of reasons, and there is always the possibility information provided to a HUMINT collector has been planted by foreign counterintelligence. (Foreign intelligence assets can even transmit or display false information to be discovered by SIGINT, IMINT, and other technical collectors.)
As it ends up, Serge determined the nugget of information the Fredonian officer let slip to Jack and Sophie was true and, along with a half a thousand other nuggets of information provided via SIGINT and IMINT, convinced Serge and his team that reports of large military buildups along the Fredonia-Ruritania border were what intelligence professionals jokingly refer to as RUMINT (simple rumors). There was no military buildup, planned or otherwise.
But the intelligence cycle goes on, and the information policy makers gathered from this episode prompted an entirely new set of questions that formed new Collection Requirements, new Collection Operations by intelligence assets, and new Analytical products.
The Intelligence Cycle never ends.
Thanks for reading. Next time we'll talk a little about Operational Security and Counterintelligence. You won't want to miss that.
Until then.
Requirements-Collections-Analyses.
Understanding the intelligence cycle is important to understanding how intelligence collection works. It’s so important, in fact, that it’s worth talking about it in a bit more detail. It consists of three steps.
1. Collection Requirements: First, policy makers formulate a requirement: in other words, the Bigwigs have a question to which they want or need an answer. And if what they seek is the kind of information that can’t be gathered thru more conventional channels (the Library, diplomacy, Google), they task intelligence agencies to collect this information, either through overt or covert methods. This tasking (as it sometimes is called) can come in any form, written or verbal. (Such things might be called Collection Requirements (CR) or sometimes Intelligence Requirements (IR). The fact is that any number of names might be applied to such taskings, so, again, don’t get hung up on terminology.)
Collection requirements change often, as the need of the policymaker changes, but there also are continuing requirements that policymakers might find important. Continuing requirements, which are long-term and change only rarely, consist of things national leaders and senior security officials invariably would want to know, things such as a) imminent attacks against national assets abroad, b) foreign troop movements near international borders, c) the location of specific military units of rival nations, d) coup attempts against friendly governments. The list goes on and is nigh endless. The nub is this: the policy maker (an elected official, cabinet secretary, senior military officer, etc.) needs a piece of information, and they issue a formal order for the intelligence assets to whom they have access to seek that information out.
2. Collection: It is worth mentioning again: Contrary to what one sees in the movies, intelligence officers almost never find a silver bullet, a single earthshaking piece of information that prompts a ‘Eureka’ moment in the Intelligence Community. Such finds occur only once in a blue moon. Intelligence almost always is collected by tiny little nuggets at a time.
Imagine the whole collection process is sort of like going out and finding pieces of an enormous and ever-changing jigsaw puzzle. Intelligence collection is merely the finding of jigsaw pieces, most of them mundane and only a few of them highly classified secrets of foreign governments.
Intelligence agencies find these jigsaw puzzle pieces (i.e., they fulfill collection requirements) by using a variety of tools, including those mentioned in the previous section (HUMINT, SIGINT, etc.). Choosing how to address the collection requirement is a decision on which policy makers usually defer to intelligence agencies, since such agencies are the ones with the knowledge and experience. Often, a multi-disciplinary approach is adopted.
For example, let’s imagine a scenario. It goes like this:
Jack Rassendyll—you’ll get to know more of Jack, later—works for the Operations Division (OD) of the Ruritanian Directorate of Intelligence (RDI), one of many national intelligence agencies in the world. Currently, Jack is assigned to an OD HUMINT team operating under diplomatic cover in the Ruritanian Embassy in Vienna, Austria.
Policy makers in Ruritania are interested in information on troop movements along that country’s border with the Republic of Fredonia during a time of heightened political tension. Such information might be collected in a number of ways. For example, Jack’s bosses at the RDI might task officers of Ruritanian Signals Intelligence (RSI), which is Ruritania’s SIGINT branch, to listen for radio and telephone chatter and identify the GPS coordinates of communication devices know to belong to the Army of Fredonia; or the RDI may have the Ruritanian Imagery Intelligence Office (RIIO) create a set of reports on the results of satellite and drone flyovers of the area in question.
Likewise, RDI might task OD HUMINT teams worldwide to begin answering a set of Collection Requirements about Fredonia’s capabilities and intentions along the Ruritania-Fredonia border.
Jack’s small HUMINT office would receive a set of Collection Requirements over classified electronic channels. The CR would provide the specific set of information the RDI is seeking and would give suspense date (which you might call an expiration date) indicating the date after which the information collected is no longer useful. Jack’s team then would have a specific amount of time a) to find one or more sources (people) to answer this CR, b) to plan an engagement with that source, c) to execute that plan, and d) to draft and submit any reports to RDI on what they’ve collected for analytical review. (FYI, intelligence collectors like Jack positively hate short suspense dates. Despite how it is portrayed in Hollywood movies, successful Human Intelligence requires time and meticulous planning. But sometimes speed is essential.)
Let me take that example a little further.
The tasking Jack’s team receives from headquarters of RDI on the Fredonia problem has a short suspension date (the policy maker needs the information within one week), so they have little time to plan, a situation that all HUMINT collectors hate, and they can’t come up with much: none of their current intelligence sources have knowledge of Fredonian military movements in that area.
After some brainstorming, Jack and his team make a hasty plan and endeavor to monitor and collect information at one or more clubs and taverns they happen to know are frequented by army officers assigned to the military attaché’s office at the Fredonia Embassy in Vienna.
Jack and his team have a collection plan consisting of this: Jack and one other HUMINT agent from the embassy, a young woman named Sophie Cloy, encounter three off-duty officers from the Army of Fredonia at a sports bar just off downtown Vienna and chat them up, buy a few rounds, and invite the officers to a game of darts. (It sometimes is that simple.) On its surface, the encounter is a casual meeting, but Jack and Sophie planned and rehearsed the encounter for nearly ten hours, after carefully selecting and casing the site. Still, it is just a one-off, and neither Jack nor Sophie intend to develop a deeper relationship with the three men they meet.
Of course, these three men don’t know Jack and Sophie are intelligence officers, but from their accents, Jack and Sophie are obviously from Ruritania. (Residents of Ruritania and Fredonia speak the same dialect of English with slightly different accents.) Also, the Fredonian officers likely have had numerous briefings on counterintelligence, so they are on their guard about discussing sensitive information around strangers.
But one of the officers does let something slip at the dartboard after a few beers. His brother is a captain in 316th Hussars, a unit of the Army of Fredonia, and the officer was disappointed his brother couldn’t come to party with them in Vienna that weekend because he was helping with a regiment-wide inspection at his home garrison on the days in question.
That piece of information isn’t much—it seems downright trivial, in fact—but it’s the kind of nugget that intelligence officer of all kinds, including HUMINT officers, find on a regular basis. Most intelligence consists of trivial little dribs, drabs, and drams of information.
The beauty is that Jack and his HUMINT collection team at the embassy are not the only ones out there rummaging around in the refuse; other Ruritanian assets are hard at work. And things add up—virtually every little tidbit of information contributes to a larger operating picture within the intelligence community. And all of those tiny little puzzle pieces are funneled to the same analytical shop for comparison, vetting, and analysis.
3. Analysis: So, what happens to all those tiny little nuggets, those thousands of little jigsaw puzzle pieces, including Jack and Sophie’s modest piece, that various intelligence teams collect each year?
All of it goes to analytical cells for processing, vetting, and for the creation of reports for digestion by the policy makers who requested it. (Such reports, unless deemed too highly sensitive, also are circulated throughout the entire intelligence community for comment and for the use of other departments.)
Small analytical cells are located at all echelons and in all offices within the intelligence community. In fact, there is even a billet for an analyst at Jack’s small office at the embassy in Vienna. (Since that slot is unfilled, a HUMINT collector named Arthur Van Dyke, as low man on the totem, ends up getting tasked to do most analytical work in the office.) Most analytical heavy lifting, though, takes place at secure and highly classified facilities like the RDI general headquarters in Strelsau, the capital of Ruritania. Information collected by the RDI and by Ruritania’s Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) also is exchanged freely on a series of classified computer servers to which only RDI, MIB, and policy makers have access.
As is common, Jack happens to know the analyst who covers the political and military situation between Ruritania and Fredonia. When he finishes his tiny report and has his supervisor, Ernst Grocer, review it, he sends it to the analytical bureau via a classified computer network and then gives the analyst in question a short phone call to touch base and make sure he gets the report. The touching base isn’t part of protocol, but it’s something Jack and most collectors do to keep the channels of communication open between themselves and the analysts in the rear. (Such people can make a Human Intelligence collector’s life incredibly easy.)
This particular analyst, Serge Portnoy, a fifty-seven-year-old civil servant who has over thirty years at the same office, lives and breathes his job, which is to work the Fredonia desk. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Fredonia, from its politics and military to its history, art, literature, and sports. He can rattle off the names and credentials of all senior, and many junior, members of the Fredonia government and military by name. He understands the economy better than does Fredonia’s own minister of treasury.
Serge’s job is impressive. He takes Jack’s tiny little report about the captain in the 316th Hussars and compares it to everything he previously knew about that unit of the Army of Fredonia and compares it to the hundreds of other reports that are now flooding his office about the Army of Fredonia and its current operations along the border with Ruritania.
The analyst gets numerous reports on voice intercepts of conversations in Fredonia via Signals Intelligence, he gets drone and satellite imagery on sensitive locations via IMINT, and he gets hundreds of HUMINT reports like Jack and Sophie’s from intelligence collectors who are tapping their sources all over the region, including many who are located in Fredonia itself. He even gets reports about troop movements from MASINT ground surveillance stations and technical reports on air quality along the Fredonia border that measure the amount of diesel exhaust in the atmosphere, attempting to ascertain the number and type of Fredonia military vehicles present.
Some of these reports are more detailed than others, but none of them are definitive by themselves. Serge and the small team of analysts he leads vet those reports and determine which are true, which are simple errors, and which might be bogus information put forward by Fredonia counterintelligence to muddy the waters.
It is a complex and mind-numbing process, one that is never one-hundred percent accurate, but the reports Serge and his team generate provide a much clearer picture for Ruritanian policy makers about the capabilities and intentions of the Army of Fredonia along their shared border.
Also, the feedback Serge and his team provide HUMINT collectors like Jack helps those collectors develop a better sense of how accurate their sources are. Many sources used in HUMINT collection are persons with whom collectors have ongoing relationships, and a constant vetting and assessment of such sources is essential for accuracy and for operational security. Sources sometimes lie, for a variety of reasons, and there is always the possibility information provided to a HUMINT collector has been planted by foreign counterintelligence. (Foreign intelligence assets can even transmit or display false information to be discovered by SIGINT, IMINT, and other technical collectors.)
As it ends up, Serge determined the nugget of information the Fredonian officer let slip to Jack and Sophie was true and, along with a half a thousand other nuggets of information provided via SIGINT and IMINT, convinced Serge and his team that reports of large military buildups along the Fredonia-Ruritania border were what intelligence professionals jokingly refer to as RUMINT (simple rumors). There was no military buildup, planned or otherwise.
But the intelligence cycle goes on, and the information policy makers gathered from this episode prompted an entirely new set of questions that formed new Collection Requirements, new Collection Operations by intelligence assets, and new Analytical products.
The Intelligence Cycle never ends.
Thanks for reading. Next time we'll talk a little about Operational Security and Counterintelligence. You won't want to miss that.
Until then.
April 19, 2019
Espionage: A Writer's Guide Part III
Who Does the Spying?
The Various Fields and Disciplines
But who does the collecting?
There are several different disciplines and techniques that are used to collect the raw information that goes to analysts. All of those except Human Intelligence (HUMINT) are some type of technical collection, and some of those technical areas are incredibly complex and ingenious. Here is a very short and dirty description of each broad discipline. Each of those disciplines uses a wide variety of techniques and tools to accomplish its missions.
Human Intelligence (HUMINT):
This is the intelligence field we are here to talk about in this lovely pamphlet, which is the only reason I mention it first. Well, that and the fact it’s the discipline with which everyone is familiar and it is what most folks traditionally would associate with "espionage." Imagine dark and damp nights, trench coats, corny pass codes (“the duck quacks at midnight”) and everything else you’ve ever read in a Graham Greene novel or seen in a James Bond film. (Now ignore about three-fourths of that.) Human Intelligence agents go out and personally shake the trees and kick the bushes looking for information in the form of a) direct encounters with potential sources of information (thru what is known as “elicitation”), b) indirect encounters with persons close to the source of information (“human source operations”), and/or c) interrogation of detained persons.
Signals Intelligence (SIGINT):
In a nutshell, Signals Intelligence consists merely of diverse types of electronic eavesdropping. These range from the direct monitoring of phone calls and intercepting of radio communications and Morse signals—frequently referred to as Communications Intelligence (COMINT)—to a number of different subfields that deal with tracking foreign electronic signatures. It includes Electronic Intelligence (ELINT): tracking electronic signatures, such as radar or sonar. And it includes tracking and identifying Foreign Instrumentation Signals Intelligence (FISINT): control and telemetry signals for such things as adversary weapons systems.
In more technologically-gifted countries, Signals Intelligence is the most robust discipline, outstripping other intelligence efforts in dollars spent and employees hired. SIGINT is also the most sensitive and highly classified enterprise in most intelligence communities. The very existence of cutting edge programs fielded by national governments often is highly classified.
If you write history or historical fiction, information is widely available on historical SIGINT programs dating back more than one-hundred years, and most current SIGINT proponent organizations (the U.S. National Security Agency and U.K. GCHQ, for example) have presences on the Internet. Such research is not daunting.
For those of you writing speculative fiction, your ability to contrive novel SIGINT platforms (as well as IMINT and MASINT) is bounded only by your own imagination and by your willingness to flirt with the outer edges of what is physically and scientifically possible.
Image Intelligence (IMINT) and Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT):
At its simplest, Imagery Intelligence entails the use of high-resolution visual images to help guide analysts in determining a wide variety of things, including the location and disposition of adversary assets on the ground and even at sea. Imagery also can be derived from visual photography, radar sensors, and electro-optics. (Tip: in older parlance, the term Aerial Reconnaissance has often been used instead of Imagery Intelligence, though the two are not precisely the same.)
Geospatial Intelligence takes Imagery Intelligence a level further by providing detailed and layered representations of geographic sites on Earth. Using complex information and computer-enhanced mapping systems, GEOINT enables the analysis and visual representation of security-related activities of virtually any location on the planet. (Imagine layered electronic maps, a souped-up variety of something like Google Earth, to which military intelligence, maneuver, and weapon targeting systems can be linked and coordinated.)
Like SIGINT, Imageries Intelligence is discipline nearly as old as mechanical imagery systems. There is plenty out there to research in libraries and online. And organizations such as the the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) in the United States have websites that provide information on the organization and its history.
Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT):
Measurement and Signature Intelligence is technically derived intelligence data that is not IMINT or SIGINT (although MASINT methods sometimes overlap with both). The name MASINT encompasses all manner of physical sciences. The information collected by this veritable legion of scientific methods results in intelligence that locates, identifies, or describes distinctive characteristics of targets. Examples of this are tools and methods that engage in measuring the seismic footprint of large explosives or gauging the chemical composition of air and water samples. The limits of MASINT are broad.
Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT):
This is publicly available information appearing in print or electronic form including radio, television, newspapers, journals, the Internet, commercial databases, and videos, graphics, and drawings. Virtually any and all intelligence agencies have some sort of OSINT capacity, some of which are available to government agencies on non-classified internet platforms. Even the smallest collection station abroad gets copies of the local newspapers to help guide them in their collection efforts.
These are just the basics, enough to get a fledgling writer off to a start. In the next posting, we'll talk a little bit more about the Intelligence Cycle and how all of these disciplines might be used in concert to collect information and to inform policy makers.
Until next time!
The Various Fields and Disciplines
But who does the collecting?
There are several different disciplines and techniques that are used to collect the raw information that goes to analysts. All of those except Human Intelligence (HUMINT) are some type of technical collection, and some of those technical areas are incredibly complex and ingenious. Here is a very short and dirty description of each broad discipline. Each of those disciplines uses a wide variety of techniques and tools to accomplish its missions.
Human Intelligence (HUMINT):
This is the intelligence field we are here to talk about in this lovely pamphlet, which is the only reason I mention it first. Well, that and the fact it’s the discipline with which everyone is familiar and it is what most folks traditionally would associate with "espionage." Imagine dark and damp nights, trench coats, corny pass codes (“the duck quacks at midnight”) and everything else you’ve ever read in a Graham Greene novel or seen in a James Bond film. (Now ignore about three-fourths of that.) Human Intelligence agents go out and personally shake the trees and kick the bushes looking for information in the form of a) direct encounters with potential sources of information (thru what is known as “elicitation”), b) indirect encounters with persons close to the source of information (“human source operations”), and/or c) interrogation of detained persons.
Signals Intelligence (SIGINT):
In a nutshell, Signals Intelligence consists merely of diverse types of electronic eavesdropping. These range from the direct monitoring of phone calls and intercepting of radio communications and Morse signals—frequently referred to as Communications Intelligence (COMINT)—to a number of different subfields that deal with tracking foreign electronic signatures. It includes Electronic Intelligence (ELINT): tracking electronic signatures, such as radar or sonar. And it includes tracking and identifying Foreign Instrumentation Signals Intelligence (FISINT): control and telemetry signals for such things as adversary weapons systems.
In more technologically-gifted countries, Signals Intelligence is the most robust discipline, outstripping other intelligence efforts in dollars spent and employees hired. SIGINT is also the most sensitive and highly classified enterprise in most intelligence communities. The very existence of cutting edge programs fielded by national governments often is highly classified.
If you write history or historical fiction, information is widely available on historical SIGINT programs dating back more than one-hundred years, and most current SIGINT proponent organizations (the U.S. National Security Agency and U.K. GCHQ, for example) have presences on the Internet. Such research is not daunting.
For those of you writing speculative fiction, your ability to contrive novel SIGINT platforms (as well as IMINT and MASINT) is bounded only by your own imagination and by your willingness to flirt with the outer edges of what is physically and scientifically possible.
Image Intelligence (IMINT) and Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT):
At its simplest, Imagery Intelligence entails the use of high-resolution visual images to help guide analysts in determining a wide variety of things, including the location and disposition of adversary assets on the ground and even at sea. Imagery also can be derived from visual photography, radar sensors, and electro-optics. (Tip: in older parlance, the term Aerial Reconnaissance has often been used instead of Imagery Intelligence, though the two are not precisely the same.)
Geospatial Intelligence takes Imagery Intelligence a level further by providing detailed and layered representations of geographic sites on Earth. Using complex information and computer-enhanced mapping systems, GEOINT enables the analysis and visual representation of security-related activities of virtually any location on the planet. (Imagine layered electronic maps, a souped-up variety of something like Google Earth, to which military intelligence, maneuver, and weapon targeting systems can be linked and coordinated.)
Like SIGINT, Imageries Intelligence is discipline nearly as old as mechanical imagery systems. There is plenty out there to research in libraries and online. And organizations such as the the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) in the United States have websites that provide information on the organization and its history.
Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT):
Measurement and Signature Intelligence is technically derived intelligence data that is not IMINT or SIGINT (although MASINT methods sometimes overlap with both). The name MASINT encompasses all manner of physical sciences. The information collected by this veritable legion of scientific methods results in intelligence that locates, identifies, or describes distinctive characteristics of targets. Examples of this are tools and methods that engage in measuring the seismic footprint of large explosives or gauging the chemical composition of air and water samples. The limits of MASINT are broad.
Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT):
This is publicly available information appearing in print or electronic form including radio, television, newspapers, journals, the Internet, commercial databases, and videos, graphics, and drawings. Virtually any and all intelligence agencies have some sort of OSINT capacity, some of which are available to government agencies on non-classified internet platforms. Even the smallest collection station abroad gets copies of the local newspapers to help guide them in their collection efforts.
These are just the basics, enough to get a fledgling writer off to a start. In the next posting, we'll talk a little bit more about the Intelligence Cycle and how all of these disciplines might be used in concert to collect information and to inform policy makers.
Until next time!
April 15, 2019
Espionage: A Writer's Guide Part II
Intelligence
The Basics
Even if what the intelligence community does in practice is complicated (which it is), the theory of the whole thing is quite simple: Policy makers and senior leaders need information to help them make better policy and strategic decisions. If you must define intelligence, it would sound something like this: An activity in which professionals a) collect and b) analyze information to help guide and assist leaders and policy makers in their decision making.
The thing that drives intelligence is a leader’s need to know, his or her need to be able to gauge the a) capabilities and b) intentions of enemies and allies alike. Intelligence is the collection of raw information by a variety of techniques, some human and others technical, and the analysis of that information in order to produce cogent and timely information.
It doesn’t sound terribly complicated or nefarious, does it?
A dirty little secret of the intelligence community is this: most information intelligence officers collect is not highly classified foreign secrets. It is mundane minutia that most of us wouldn’t recognize as intelligence at all. It is bridge capacities, lengths of airport runways, hospital bed counts, opinions of foreign policy makers on various events, or something so routine as the fact that a senior military leader might be on holiday on a given weekend—or a million other things.
Do intelligence agencies seek foreign government secrets? Yes, absolutely. That is one reason operational security (OPSEC) and information security (INFOSEC) are so important within intelligence agencies. But there’s another reason: the very fact a government a) doesn’t know the answer to a certain problem, and b) is trying to obtain that information, is itself a secret. It’s a secret because discovering a country’s gaps and weaknesses gives foreign intelligence services (FIS) a look into that country’s intentions and capabilities. When playing poker, you never want another player to know what cards you are holding (or not holding), and you never want another player to know whether you know what cards s/he is holding.
Hence, OPSEC and INFOSEC are paramount. It’s why spies are so bloody obsessed with secrecy. I will go into that in more detail below in a small section called Security and Counterintelligence, but always remember that everything an intelligence officer does, especially while stationed in a foreign country, is done under the shadow of possibly being caught, uncovered, or compromised—or being spied upon by foreign intelligence agents.
So, who engages in espionage?
Mostly, it’s national governments, through a variety of intelligence agencies. Just about every country in the world has some sort of intelligence apparatus, and many have deep and robust ones. Some governments, in fact, are more-or-less extensions of their intelligence services. The people of some countries (such as old East Germany, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and others) were so heavily controlled and surveilled by their own intelligence apparatuses that a significant percentage of the population at any given time either was employed directly by one of those agencies or reported to them as informants.
In open democratic societies, such influence is far less pervasive, but even in a country like the United States there are many hundreds-of-thousands of civilian (federal employees and contractors) and military personnel in the Intelligence Community, spread among more than a dozen agencies, and collectively spending more than one-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year.
Less common are private companies that engage in espionage activities, but such things do exist. Even non-state actors such as terrorist organizations have intelligence arms, some of them quite vigorous.
Of course, none of those counts of personnel include the many confidential sources used and employed by intelligence agencies throughout the world. Such people provide information to intelligence agencies covertly and often illegally and are the bread and butter of HUMINT collection, about which we’ll talk throughout most of this pamphlet.
Where does this all take place?
State intelligence services send their agents to neighboring countries, to trading partners, and to any other countries where that state’s interests might be at stake. Only a few countries have the resources to have a truly global reach, countries like the United States and China. Intelligence agencies even spend a fairly significant amount of resources spying on each other, an activity that doesn’t encompass the broad and vigorous counterintelligence (spies who thwart other spies) activities in which most countries engage.
Next question: What constitutes intelligence? And, equally important, how is it collected, processed, and turned into a useful product?
As I mentioned briefly above, any gap in knowledge to which a policy maker wants an answer is fair game for collection by the intelligence resources who report to that policy maker. Many pieces of information collected by agents in the field (within the IC, the term ‘collector’ far more often is used than ‘spy’ to describe such persons) are mundane and banal, tiny little puzzle pieces of an enormous and multilayered jigsaw puzzle, puzzle pieces often so trivial that most of us wouldn’t recognize them as ‘secrets.’
The many, many thousands of such tiny puzzle pieces gathered by intelligence collectors in the field (and by intelligence officers manning technical surveillance and collection equipment at remote, mobile, or centralized technical stations), are then written up as raw and un-analyzed reports. Such reports then are sent through the collector’s supervisors to analysts, groups of specialists in various fields who usually are located at secure facilities far from where the information was collected. Analysts do all of the comparing and vetting and weighing of information to determine which of the raw data are accurate, and which of it are bunk. They then produce fully-vetted reports for senior policy makers.
Raw intelligence/information becomes vetted and published intelligence through this production-and-analysis cycle, a cycle that is an ongoing and endless process: 1) Policy makers send collection requirements to agencies, 2) human and technical intelligence assets collect the necessary information and push the information via raw reports to analysts, 3) analysts piece together the many tiny puzzle pieces from the raw reports into processed intelligence and provide that information in carefully revised and vetted reports to policy makers, and 4) policy makers read the reports and come up with a new set of collection requirements to replace or augment the old.
And the circle continues.
Every new nugget of information a collector/officer finds raises new questions, and every new piece of information requires some sort of verification, confirmation, or vetting. Throughout this process, called the ‘intelligence cycle,’ the questions of policy makers change and change constantly, as policy makers’ needs and knowledge levels change. The spy business is never-ending.
That's just a quick overview. In later posts, I'll go over some of this in detail. Next post I'll talk a bit about the various intelligence disciplines, the techniques and technical platforms intelligence agencies use to collect raw information.
Until then, thanks for reading.
The Basics
Even if what the intelligence community does in practice is complicated (which it is), the theory of the whole thing is quite simple: Policy makers and senior leaders need information to help them make better policy and strategic decisions. If you must define intelligence, it would sound something like this: An activity in which professionals a) collect and b) analyze information to help guide and assist leaders and policy makers in their decision making.
The thing that drives intelligence is a leader’s need to know, his or her need to be able to gauge the a) capabilities and b) intentions of enemies and allies alike. Intelligence is the collection of raw information by a variety of techniques, some human and others technical, and the analysis of that information in order to produce cogent and timely information.
It doesn’t sound terribly complicated or nefarious, does it?
A dirty little secret of the intelligence community is this: most information intelligence officers collect is not highly classified foreign secrets. It is mundane minutia that most of us wouldn’t recognize as intelligence at all. It is bridge capacities, lengths of airport runways, hospital bed counts, opinions of foreign policy makers on various events, or something so routine as the fact that a senior military leader might be on holiday on a given weekend—or a million other things.
Do intelligence agencies seek foreign government secrets? Yes, absolutely. That is one reason operational security (OPSEC) and information security (INFOSEC) are so important within intelligence agencies. But there’s another reason: the very fact a government a) doesn’t know the answer to a certain problem, and b) is trying to obtain that information, is itself a secret. It’s a secret because discovering a country’s gaps and weaknesses gives foreign intelligence services (FIS) a look into that country’s intentions and capabilities. When playing poker, you never want another player to know what cards you are holding (or not holding), and you never want another player to know whether you know what cards s/he is holding.
Hence, OPSEC and INFOSEC are paramount. It’s why spies are so bloody obsessed with secrecy. I will go into that in more detail below in a small section called Security and Counterintelligence, but always remember that everything an intelligence officer does, especially while stationed in a foreign country, is done under the shadow of possibly being caught, uncovered, or compromised—or being spied upon by foreign intelligence agents.
So, who engages in espionage?
Mostly, it’s national governments, through a variety of intelligence agencies. Just about every country in the world has some sort of intelligence apparatus, and many have deep and robust ones. Some governments, in fact, are more-or-less extensions of their intelligence services. The people of some countries (such as old East Germany, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and others) were so heavily controlled and surveilled by their own intelligence apparatuses that a significant percentage of the population at any given time either was employed directly by one of those agencies or reported to them as informants.
In open democratic societies, such influence is far less pervasive, but even in a country like the United States there are many hundreds-of-thousands of civilian (federal employees and contractors) and military personnel in the Intelligence Community, spread among more than a dozen agencies, and collectively spending more than one-trillion dollars of taxpayer money per year.
Less common are private companies that engage in espionage activities, but such things do exist. Even non-state actors such as terrorist organizations have intelligence arms, some of them quite vigorous.
Of course, none of those counts of personnel include the many confidential sources used and employed by intelligence agencies throughout the world. Such people provide information to intelligence agencies covertly and often illegally and are the bread and butter of HUMINT collection, about which we’ll talk throughout most of this pamphlet.
Where does this all take place?
State intelligence services send their agents to neighboring countries, to trading partners, and to any other countries where that state’s interests might be at stake. Only a few countries have the resources to have a truly global reach, countries like the United States and China. Intelligence agencies even spend a fairly significant amount of resources spying on each other, an activity that doesn’t encompass the broad and vigorous counterintelligence (spies who thwart other spies) activities in which most countries engage.
Next question: What constitutes intelligence? And, equally important, how is it collected, processed, and turned into a useful product?
As I mentioned briefly above, any gap in knowledge to which a policy maker wants an answer is fair game for collection by the intelligence resources who report to that policy maker. Many pieces of information collected by agents in the field (within the IC, the term ‘collector’ far more often is used than ‘spy’ to describe such persons) are mundane and banal, tiny little puzzle pieces of an enormous and multilayered jigsaw puzzle, puzzle pieces often so trivial that most of us wouldn’t recognize them as ‘secrets.’
The many, many thousands of such tiny puzzle pieces gathered by intelligence collectors in the field (and by intelligence officers manning technical surveillance and collection equipment at remote, mobile, or centralized technical stations), are then written up as raw and un-analyzed reports. Such reports then are sent through the collector’s supervisors to analysts, groups of specialists in various fields who usually are located at secure facilities far from where the information was collected. Analysts do all of the comparing and vetting and weighing of information to determine which of the raw data are accurate, and which of it are bunk. They then produce fully-vetted reports for senior policy makers.
Raw intelligence/information becomes vetted and published intelligence through this production-and-analysis cycle, a cycle that is an ongoing and endless process: 1) Policy makers send collection requirements to agencies, 2) human and technical intelligence assets collect the necessary information and push the information via raw reports to analysts, 3) analysts piece together the many tiny puzzle pieces from the raw reports into processed intelligence and provide that information in carefully revised and vetted reports to policy makers, and 4) policy makers read the reports and come up with a new set of collection requirements to replace or augment the old.
And the circle continues.
Every new nugget of information a collector/officer finds raises new questions, and every new piece of information requires some sort of verification, confirmation, or vetting. Throughout this process, called the ‘intelligence cycle,’ the questions of policy makers change and change constantly, as policy makers’ needs and knowledge levels change. The spy business is never-ending.
That's just a quick overview. In later posts, I'll go over some of this in detail. Next post I'll talk a bit about the various intelligence disciplines, the techniques and technical platforms intelligence agencies use to collect raw information.
Until then, thanks for reading.
