23. The Deception Game, by Ladislav Bittman

From 1964-1966 Department D, the special arm of the Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakian intelligence service, engaged in dirty tricks against their number one enemy, the United States.

Bittman, the major player in this autobiography, said he defected to the West in 1968 because he concluded that Cold War propaganda was a disservice, especially to Czechoslovakia, his own country. The final irony, he said, was watching Soviet and Prague (Czechoslovakia) agents practice black propaganda operations against Czechoslovakia, herself, one of the most successful producers of disinformation and propaganda against the non-communist world. After defection he presented “special operations” the traced in the world press.

Bittman was suspected, and then accused of being a traitor, although he was never informed of the charges against him. Bittman was in Vienna in 1968 when the invasion by Russia began (August 21, 1968) He defected, perhaps to save his own skin more than feeling of guilt, although he claims to have come to an understanding that” the end does necessarily justify the means.”

He did experience the tragedy of his country being invaded by Russia, and the psychological crises of exile in a new political and cultural environment. He was tried in Czechoslovakia, in abstentia..

He did experience the tragedy of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovalialk and the psychological crices of seile in a new political and cultural

Bittman, Ladislav (1972). The Deception Game. London: Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ISBN: 0-345-29808-X [New York: Ballantine Books]

22. Venona

(This entry is a summary of a talk given on July 9, 2010by Nigel West on board Queen Mary 2, headed from New York to Southhampton, UK. Disclaimer: Any errors or omissions in the following are totally my own and should not be attributed to Nigel West.)

This was an Anglo-American cryptographic project that succeeded in decoding more than 2,000 Soviet messages exchanged between Moscow and various diplomatic posts overseas between 1940 and 1949. It had several codenames but is better known as VENONA. [See West, Nigel (2002). Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence. Lantham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, p. 264].

The word VENNONA has no meaning, being a codeword only. The original codeword was BRIDE. Its disclosure brought a chill to many people because it was so closely held (only declassified in 1995. See http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/venona/dated.shtml ] This project was responsible for the identification of scores of Soviet agents across the world and was the key to many famous espionage cases in the United States.

VENONA began in 1943, without mandate, at Arlington Hall Codebreakers had solved the problem of acquiring Japanese traffic and breaking the code. Time-on-hand gave the opportunity to look at other things. The codebreakers turn attention to the “Russian problem,” breaking Soviet codes.

Soviets used commercial cable companies to communicate with Moscow. Messages were encrypted and sent by wire. This was a huge advantage, since a clean (original) copy was retained at the sending office. Acquiring traffic required neither interception nor relying on copies of originals (which could be very difficult to read.)The large amount of traffic, and the clarity of the text, made cryptology much easier.

Soviets used one-time pads (OTP) for encryption. They believed the OTP was unbreakable. The first step was converting letters (Cyrillic) to numbers. Next a page was selected from the OTP. One by one, the numbers of the clear message were modularly added to successive numbers from the OTP. Decryption in Moscow would reverse the process, using modular subtraction to get the clear text.

As discussed in a previous blog, producing OTPs requires generation of random numbers. However machine production of random numbers requires some algorithm (at least in the past. In a previous blog entry a method for producing a truly random distribution was presented where no algorithm is needed.) When there is an underlying algorithm it is conceivable to recover the algorithm and deduce the random sequence.

The Soviets must have had some kind of problem generating random numbers. Added to this, more than one page of OTPs were produced. When the Nazi’s attacked the USSR, production and distribution of pads was difficult. Second, the bills of lading had to be widely used to alert what was on the ships. Thus, having observed multiple uses of OTP pages, and the huge traffic in bills of lading, deciphering the encryptions was given a significant boost.

How or why duplicate pages existed is not known. One may surmise that only a few people had responsibility for producing the pads, since they had to be closely held. Under pressure to produce more and more pads, and the difficulty of producing random numbers, it is likely that a preparer simply used carbon paper to produce multiple pages, then inserted pages in new pads in random order. We have no evidence that this is true but it is a most likely scenario. This was catastrophic for the NKVD, GRU, Naval GRU, since each used OTPs. Trying to match up clear text of manifest with encrypted traffic was a sure way into the messages. A very important clue and entryway were the dates of information on manifests. Gradually, over two years, the encrypted version matched up with clear text. That allowed for teasing out the OTP edition, and results began to appear.

The first cracked NKVD message contained a list of 24 names, people working at Los Alamos. This was extremely important since even the existence of the Manhattan Project was closely held. Soviets discussing the Manhattan project meant there was a Russian spy in Los Alamos.

Acquiring such valuable information showed the value of the VENONA project. Over 2000 messages were broken. From 1941-1948 the BRIDE project continue since so much information was in the traffic. A huge effort was set up to find out who was the spy and identify him. (Actually there were at least two spies, Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs. They may have been more, as many continue to suspect.) The Soviet codeword for the Manhattan Project was found to be ENORMOUS.

In cryptography, a message is seldom entirely broken by itself. Messages are not only encrypted but they are encoded, where codewords are used to further cover something closely held. As more messages are decrypted some of these codewords are also broken, leading to identification of, say specific names. As a codeword was broken all messages containing it were updated. Sadly for historical purposes, we now have only the best versions of the traffic. We cannot see how the information evolved.

We learned to read quite a bit of Soviet traffic from New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and a few more sites. We were able to look at other REZIDENTURA. We shared information with the UK and were able to get much further help from the Brits and from Swedish crypts. The Swedes kept all the traffic the Soviets sent even though they could not read it.

Traffic from Moscow to Canberra was hugely important. [See West, Nigel (2002). Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence. Lantham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, p. 18].

The Australians (with the US) operated a secret installation at Pine Gap, outside Alice Springs. (See http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_pinegap08.htm) The Canberra traffic was contemporaneous and allowed identification of real people. From that, contacts could be identified. Together, efforts led to developing a string or cluster of people involved in the act. The Australians at that time actually had no counterespionage units, until MI5 urged on. As the counterespionage effort there got underway it was identified as “The Case” to conceal the actual source (VENONA).

There was also considerable consternation that scientists passing secrets might be continuing in espionage or that they recruited others to replace them. An unidentified spy BARON (see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1503011/posts) was at Bletchley Park. It never was discovered who it was passing secrets to the USSR. GSHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA of Great Britain; see Nigel West (2002), p. 117)

VENONA also revealed changes in codenames. It took 4.5 years to find REST from Los Alamos. Counterintelligence narrowed it to one person who fit all the data. It was Klaus Fuchs. By the time he was ferreted out (1949) he had returned to the UK to work at Harwell. How could he be dealt with? It was out of the question to use VENONA in court or its value would be lost. MI5 did get Fuchs to self-present. He acknowledged he had passed information. He was arre3asted, pled guilty, believing he was \doing the right thing. He knew that he was already known to MI5 from VENONA.
Donald Maclean was also identified from information from VENONA and known by the codenames GOMER, HOMER, G. He vanished before he could be arrested. Since Maclean was known to be close to Philby, suspicion immediately fell on Kim Philby.

Harry gold (GOOSE) was identified. That led to David Greenglass and his wife (BUMBLEBEE and WASP.) Their interrogations revealed Ethel Rosenberg, married to Julius (ANTENNA and then LIBERAL.) In retrospect the codenames are often semi-transparent to help the handlers remember who the sources are.

Alger Hiss and his wife were also identified. Hiss had attended the Yalta conference and advised President Franklin Roosevelt on spheres of influence. As it happened, and was later determined, there were about 300 spies in the US, many of them around FDR. It was also true in Britain. Two were known as NOBILITY and MONTAGUE. INTELLIGENCE may have been Holbein (also RESERVIST, and MINISTER, never specifically identified.) Many of these are discussed at the NSA website (http://ww.nsa.gov).

The recent identification of 10 Russian sleeper spies in the US shows it never ends. These have been taken out of the picture (as discussed early in this blog.) They may have disclosed some information. Forensics tracing may reveal more. Locking up a spy has no operational value. However, exchanging them gave the US a great advantage, since the Russians sent to us, for example Alexander Zaporozhsky, Gennady Vasilenko, Sergei Skripal, and Igor Sutagin. Some may cooperate to a degree, others have no interest in handing over anything. Zaporshsky helped identify the traitor, Hansen. Vasilenko (a name included by Ames) was totally innocent. He was charged in Moscow with terrorism since he had hunting rifles in his garage. Very unusual for the Russians to sent people as these out of the country. Sutagin is a nuclear scientist, and will be interesting to talk with.

21. The Cambridge Spies

The Cambridge Spies

(This entry is a summary of a talk given on July 8, 2010by Nigel West on board Queen Mary 2, headed from New York to Southhampton, UK. Disclaimer: Any errors or omissions in the following are totally my own and should not be attributed to Nigel West.)

Kim Philby was born 1908 in India. He joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1941. In time he was posted to Istanbul, and, in 1949, to Washington, DC. His cover was blown by Anthony Burgess and Donald Maclean. These three, plus John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt comprised what became known as “The Cambridge Five.”

Philby came under suspicion in November, 1951 with the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, and serious suspicion in 1953, so serious that he defected to the Soviet Union. He died in 1959.

Philby was not recruited at Cambridge University. He was the son of a famous father, the Arabist, explorer, and author, with whom he enjoyed cordial, if distant relations. It was his father who gave him the nickname Kim, alluding to the Kipling story. St John Philby was rumored to have gone in for spying himself. He did resign from government service in 1924 as a protest against pro-Zionist policy, renounced his status as a British subject, and lived as an Arab. Some authors list him incorrectly as Sir John Philby, mistaking his name St. John (pronounced in British English as Senjen) for Sir John.

Philby was a brilliant young man who soon came into huge responsibilities. His father, St. John, married an Indian woman, so Philby was of mixed race, a factor that ultimately had a strong effect on him. Given the British class system there is no way he would have been able to rise to the top of that system. Philby could never have risen to head MI-5 because of his Indian ancestry, his communist leanings, and his wife who was an alcoholic. Further, he had a painful stutter (which oddly, seemed to make him attractive to women.)

He attended Trinity College at Cambridge. He joined the Socialist Party. After graduation he went to Vienna, and then returned to the UK. He became enamored with the Communist Party of the UK (CPUK), but was turned down by the Party. He was able to get in touch with a Soviet agent who was able to get him into the Party later.
An NKVD agent, Otto Deutsch, recruited Philby “in the name of world peace.” Deutsch was an illegal resident in London. By the way, he was a neighbor of Agatha Christie.

Deutsch was a psychologist and wrote profiles of targets for recruitment. He knew very well how to appeal to each target for recruitment. Further, he tried to guide the careers of his recruits in specific directions. He developed a strong relationship with Philby. Philby, in turn, became a talent spotter, and Guy Burgess was one who Philby recommended. Anthony Blunt was also recruited by Philby, as was Donald Maclean. Blunt was also a talent spotter and recruited John Cairncross, a brilliant young Scot.

The NKVD had a path for Philby. They needed him in Spain as a free-lance journalist. Actually, the NKVD wanted to assassinate Franco. That never came off, and Philby never knew of the plot. In Spain, Philby began to contribute to the London Times. Eventually he was made a correspondent.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Philby returned to the UK. In WWII he was sent to France by the government, and had access to classified material.
Under Stalin, a paranoid dictator, huge purges of anyone who might challenge him were carried out. NKVD agents were recalled to Moscow and most of them were executed. Philby discussed this with Deutsch’s replacement who revealed that he too was being recalled. That he was willing to go, even in the face of probable death, impressed Philby.

Philby urged to join the government in cyber service. He was sent to the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) for an interview. The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a British intelligence agency responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance to the UK government and armed forces. Based in Cheltenham, it operates under the guidance of the Joint Intelligence Committee. However, GCCS would not offer Philby a job since he was “so qualified.” He finally got a job teaching Spanish refugees how to do propaganda. He had no stutter at all when speaking Spanish. Finally in 1941 he got an offer to join the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

The British Radio Security Service collected an enormous amount of German traffic, and easily broke the hand cipher they were using. This made it easier to read the corresponding machine ciphers. Most were about German agent movement in Europe. Section V was created as a signals intelligence organization. Philby got this job (in the Siberian section) V-D. He worked very hard and had a natural talent. He was promoted to head a new section – the anti-Soviet section (IX).

In 1949 Philby was posted to Washington. He was briefed on BRIDE (which was the code name for Venona traffic.). BRIDE fingered Ted Hall (Los Alamos) and Klaus Fuchs (also Los Alamos) two people in the Manhattan Project.

Philby was at a huge disadvantage going to Washington. He was supposed to have an NKVD (illegal) contact but did not get one. As a result he had no chance to warn the NKVD about Venona. Anthony Burgess somehow didn’t get the message that this should be taken seriously. The Soviet’s denied having any knowledge of Venona.

No signal ever came to Philby. The new Rezident was a music professor, and lost all interest in continuing his work. In 1951 Philby got word that Venona would get Donald Maclean. Philby warned him, and he subsequently disappeared. Burgess went with him. This implicated Philby, and began to unravel the entire pattern of his life.

20. How Spy Agencies Work

How Spy Agencies Work.
(This entry is a summary of a talk given on July 8, 2010by Nigel West on board Queen Mary 2, headed from New York to Southhampton, UK. Disclaimer: Any errors or omissions in the following are totally my own and should not be attributed to Nigel West.)

Spying is universally recognized. A euphemistic term is usually substituted, such as military liaison, observer, or attaché. Nevertheless, every country is engaged in it as a matter of necessity, and a form of “gentlemen’s agreement” has evolved as how spying is institutionalized and organized.

In overseas locations where Britain maintained a presence of its government, a “passport control officer” (PCO) was assigned to each embassy and consulate. This position has a set of prima facie and critically important functions:

• See all applications to enter the home country, and issue visas.


• Collect fees for visas (and these fees paid the cost of the control officer position)


• Broadly provide cover for British intelligence.


• Never acted against the host country (the so-called “third party rule,” still valid today)


• Function broke down in the 1940s owing to the Germans knowing all the PCOs in every country. All of them had to be withdrawn.


• Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (http://www.sis.gov.uk/output/sis-home-welcome.html) or SIS, became isolated with only a handful of stations (Helsinki, Stockholm, and Bern)

This model followed by almost all countries,except for the Soviet Union which had no analogous organization to the PCO. In fact, from about 1917-1930 all Soviet intelligence was contained within trade delegations since many countries did not recognize the USSR. The Soviets had a system of “Illegals” sent to a country via a third country to operate without any protection.

A Rezidentura was set up to conduct Soviet intelligence operations. The Rezidentura was headed by the Rezident and was responsible for security and intelligence operations conducted in other countries. A typical rezidentura included officers from the political, scientific and technical, counterintelligence, and illegal support lines. [see Nigel West (2006).Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence. Latham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., p. 216]. In addition there would be security personnel to monitor the local diplomatic community and specially protected cipher clerks to handle communication. Most of what we know about the rezidentura and the resident comes from defectors, supported by physical and technical surveillance.

The British became worried about having all their intelligence eggs in one basket. It was obvious that the PCOs were known to the Gestapo. Illegals were needed, since the “legals” were rendered impotent. A new organization was created. SIS attempted to create a second far more secret intelligence network in Europe, the Z section. Its originator Claude Dansey had little difficulty in persuading “C”, Admiral Sinclair, that SIS officers' normal cover abroad. The Passport Control Officer at the embassy was already well known to all their potential enemies. Although SIS made considerable use of willing journalists and journalistic cover for intelligence officers, this was no substitute for a permanent network.

In the United States the CIA (begun in WW II as the OSS) adopted the British model. “NOCs” were used (non-official cover). As did the British, CIA recruited for front organizations. A recent example is Valerie Plame. NOCs are vulnerable. They have no fall-back protection other than their own wits. Mossad today relies extensively on NOCs since Israel has no diplomatic relations with the countries they are most concerned with in the Middle East.

19. How Intelligence Works

This entry is a summary of a talk given on July 7, 2010by Nigel West on board Queen Mary 2, headed from New York to Southhampton, UK. Disclaimer: Any errors or omissions in the following are totally my own and should not be attributed to Nigel West.

The following is a review of how the intelligence industry works.
First note that intelligence involves three disciplines:

1. Collection (getting data),
2. Analysis (putting data into context), and
3. Counterintelligence (gathering information about other hostile “agents” or agencies in order to neutralize them.

Collection of data comes from a variety of sources.

Sources are classified into about eight categories. Finished intelligence (for dissemination) is a fitting together of pieces from overlapping sources.

1. Open sources. About 85% of information is obtained from open sources, such as newspapers, journals, etc. As an example, in 1938 nuclear fission was observed and published in scientific journals. As soon as the journals reached the United States the science of fission was immediately known and understood. When it was realized that fission might be weaponized all publication on fission ceased. That gave every nuclear physicist in the world the indication that the United States might have a nuclear weapon development program underway.

2. Diplomatic reports. Some are in the open, others obtained by other methods. Such reports give indications of a country’s intentions and plans.

3. Liaison relationships. Attaches are posted by a country to their embassies abroad. They are “legal” spies, and can be helpful not only to their home country but to the country in which they are posted since they provide a direct way of revealing information they want others to know about. Usually they are declared to the host country. It is a myth that liaison operates against the host country. There is the so-called "third-party rule" – whereby the recipient of intelligence from an ally should not share it on with anyone without the originator's consent. MI5 (in the UK) and the US insisted that this is an immutable law of international security. What a U.S. attaché learns in Germany is not shared with any other country other than the US and possibly Germany.

4. Interrogation. Interrogators of POWs or captured agents use a variety of methods to get information. Most simply try to provoke conversations, and may not even use direct questioning. Steps up may include psychological pressure, bugging of cells, sleep deprivation, noise, sounds of torture, and false executions. NATO makes much of the illegal “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.)

5. Aerial observation. Sometimes called Imaging Intelligence (Im-int, or Imint), observation may be made from anything from blimps to satellites. The US has used high-flying, virtually undetectable aircraft, such as the SR70 Blackbird, or the infamous U-2.Countries capable of launching satellites today all have agreed to declare the orbits to the U.N.

6. Signal interception. Known as Sigint, this kind of information may intercept communications (Comint), or electronic emissions (elint). Such information can be quite useful. Comint usually requires decryption and decoding. Enigma machines (Ultra, etc.) are examples of methods of denying communication information from other countries by encryption. During WW II codebreakers radically changed the war by breaking very difficult codes. The Germans used several methods, including Geheimschreiber (secret writer) – the traffic was known a Fish. For some of these machines, the Allies could read the messages almost in real time. Japan had "System 97 Printing Machine for European Characters" or Angōki Taipu-B, codenamed Purple by the Allies. The decrypted traffic was known as Magic. Decryption of Soviet traffic (after WWII) led to the Venona project and identification of several Soviet as well as British and American agents. In current times, the cell phone is an excellent device for counterintelligence. All terrorists carry cell phones. They are trackable, and provide many bits of information, even DNA if they are found abandoned.

7. Measurement and sensing. This deals directly with electronic signals. It is highly classified and gathered by agencies such as NSA, and GCHQ in the UK. This method of gathering data covers the entire electromagnetic spectrum (gamma rays to ultra-long radio waves.

8. Humint. As one would expect, this stands for human sources. It is difficult to acquire (as in present-day Iran), and hard to manage. Further it is extremely difficult to verify validity and reliability of a human source.

18. How 9/11 Changed the World

This entry is a summary of a talk given by Nigel West, at Ground Zero in New York, on July 6, 2010. Disclaimer: Any errors or omissions in the following are totally my own and should not be attributed to Nigel West.

The Al Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, changed everything.Before 9/11 the world dealt witih threats from nation states, organizations that had a "home," or rebel groups with a home base. Al Qaeda, however, is a transnational threat. An attact from this group can come from anyplace and they may attack anyone. How does this change everything:

1. No threat that can be reasoned with. With radical ideologs it is impossible to find a venue to sit down and reason. Nelson Mandella was able to reason with the South African Government. Even during the Korean War, we were able to find a place to talk with North Korea, and Henry Kissinger found a way through backchannels to talk with the North Vietnamese. Not so with Al Qaeda.

2. There's no "return address" for the Al Qaeda threat." Regardless of chest-beating pronouncements by politicians there is no way to effectively retaliate against Al Qaeda. We have tried proxies in Afghanistan and Iraq without success.

How we will deal with future attacks is problematic.

17. Random Numbers

Random Numbers

One-time pads were discussed in an earlier entry. The usefulness of a OTP, and for many other cipher procedures, such as cipher machines, depends on the use of random numbers.


In 1942 the British Government’s Code and Cypher School [part of the British GCHQ, an organization somewhat analogous to the US National Security Agency] found that it was possible to mimic the supposedly random numbers generated by the Lorenz cipher machine used by the German Foreign Ministry as a basis for their OTPs. The related traffic was codenamed FLORADORA, and was read consistently until the end of WWII. Of course, reading the German mail gave excellent intelligence.

During World War II it was also found that the Soviets used OTPs that had identical sheets in OTPs used for many operations. This led to breaking down many of these messages into a source known as VENONA.

The methods used to generate random numbers by the Soviets is unknown. This does raise the question of how secure encrypted messages are that rely on random numbers. A number is random if and only if it has an equal probability as any other number in the population of being drawn. Many experiments have demonstrated that human attempts to call out random numbers produce anything but a random distribution. Most random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, which means they are a generated in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. These can be reverse engineered, as was done for the Soviet VERONA ciphers.

In the case of Soviet WWII OTPs, the pressures of war and limited resources may have induced the preparer of the OTPs to use carbon paper to produce the original and the copy. While making one copy, why not make three copies? New pads could be produced faster by inserting pages from other OTPs. Who would ever know? But someone did know and this provided an enormous entry into highly valuable intelligence.

Today a good source does exist for drawing random numbers, and is found at http://www.random.org
RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music. The service has existed since 1998 and was built and is being operated by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland.

Note 1: The information about OTPs, Venona, and GCHQ is cited from

Note 2: The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a British intelligence agency responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance to the UK government and armed forces. Based in Cheltenham, it operates under the guidance of the Joint Intelligence Committee.