The Spies Among Us
Three sure signs they’re there from an experienced spywatcher
A while back, when I worked overseas, I thought I had a pretty good idea of who the spies were. I’m talking honest-to-goodness real spies here, not your garden-variety nosy Rosies or neighborhood peeping Toms.
For one thing, they were suspiciously fluent in the language, even the obscure local dialect, despite not having been in the country that long and fraternizing only with westerners. In dramatic contrast, there was Exhibit A—me!—engaging in a heroic but failing struggle to learn the language, despite having intense language training from an overly enthusiastic and exacting teacher and plenty of native speakers in my office to practice with. (OK, heroic might be stretching it a bit. I was on the lethargic and procrastinatious (?) side actually. But, in my defense, I had a demanding job, and overseas posts are renowned for fervent off-hours fraternization. All the more reason why language fluency would be highly suspicious.)
For another thing, no matter how many times I tried to pin down what these suspected espionage artists actually did, I never felt like I got anywhere. “So wait,” I’d say. “You travel around the country looking for opportunities to give advice to emerging business enterprises in areas where people can’t read or write and have no money?” Say what? Or “Hold on a minute, Roger. You’re surveying women in a mountain tribe about their needs, when women here won’t talk to any male outside of their family circle?” Say what? Or “C’mon, Doug. You travelled all the way to the border in a four-wheel drive vehicle, over a desert with no roads, accompanied only by a guy with an Uzi, because you wanted to map the water sources in a war zone?” Say what?
A wee sidenote
Don’t be misled by the Uzi in that last sentence, by the way. You have to understand that I regularly went through checkpoints with chronically bored 17 and 18-year-old soldiers holding rifles or machine guns like I was going through a Rexall checkout line. Once I even had a soldier jump in my truck and demand to be driven to someplace outside the city. I just kept shrugging my shoulders, protesting loudly in English that I didn’t know what he was saying, and driving toward my destination. He finally screamed “Stop!” at me in frustration and hopped out. (Everyone in every country of the world knows the word ‘stop’ from watching reruns of Friends and Frasier.) Five minutes later I’m back in my office building, waltzing past a soldier sprawled fast asleep on a couch in the lobby with his rifle aiming in the general direction of the front door. Just another day in the life of an expatriate development specialist in a country engaged in civil war. You know what I’m saying.
OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming….
They’re…here
What I really want to write about, and what you really really need to know, is how wrong I was about the espionage artists in my midst. I thought I was so clever figuring out who they were, when the real spies turned out to be right there in my own damn office. They were right…there. At the next desk, smiling at ignorant little ol’ Type A, takes-the-work-way-too-seriously me. Imagine years later reading an article by an expert who ‘outs’ the very organization you worked for as a known front for a national intelligence agency? It’s downright embarrassing. It’s on my CV, f’crissakes. Not only did I not get promoted, I look like a low-level operative in their international stable of spies. The Gomer Pyle or Inspector Clouseau of neo-colonial spydom.
(Another wee side-rant: I’m not naming organizations here because I don’t want to trigger the security algorithm if I can help it. Not that it makes any difference these days when there’s a dossier on everyone on the planet and we’re all deemed criminals just by existing and breathing out carbon dioxide in a world with only 0.04% CO2. That’ll be 62 carbon credits please, payable in digital currency only. Cash or Bitcoin not accepted. Now back to what I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself.)
OK so, granted, I was (and still am) a naïve rube from a small city in the hinterlands, but it’s a little disconcerting to realize that some of the people I hung out with, even some of my co-workers, were honest-to-goodness spies. It makes me wonder, where are all the espionage artists plying their trade nowadays when so much of the communication and interaction is happening online? No organization on the planet, including a national espionage agency, is going to own up to needing fewer workers and trigger a budget cut. They’re just going to redeploy their ‘assets’. So where did they send them?
I’m guessing that today’s spies are on every social media site and porn platform, conducting ‘research’ and watching out for suspicious characters. Sure, as we know, there are electronic tracking mechanisms searching all online traffic for suspicious keywords and phrases. There are also bots regularly unleashed to stir up trouble and sound the alarm on ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ on Twitter/X, Tiktok, and other social media sites where miscreant elements are known to gather. And yes, I think we can agree that the spying function in all likelihood will soon be turned completely over to your friendly neighborhood AI program. But, in the meantime, those espionage artists who used to be deployed on the ground overseas are probably hanging about on the sites you frequent and posting comments to blend in and seem like ‘just another one of the guys’. Like this handsome fella below (judging by his hand and my imagination).
Three sure signs they’re there
The thing is, it’s loads of fun to figure out who they are. When I lived overseas, my friends and I used to play ‘name the spy’ while getting sloshed in the local watering hole. My favorite candidates for Spy of the Month were: the U.S. political attaché who wanted everything in my files (yawn, so obvious); the Peace Corps volunteer who went so native even the other Peace Corps volunteers disapproved (not so sure about this one, she had a local boyfriend she was gaga over); and the tall, impossibly stylish French couple who walked into the bar as if they were royalty and we their peasants and proceeded to hold court. (I hope they were, because it would give spycraft a real touch of glamor, like Grace Kelly did with Monaco.)
The challenge, my dear friends, based on my hard-won and copious experience, is in knowing how to read the signs. Herewith I share with you my top three signs to identify a lurking espionage artist who’s trying with every bit of spycraft at their disposal to hide in plain sight:
SIGN #1: They disappear and reappear at odd times. When I went halfway around the world to consult to an economic development program, I woke up the day after I arrived to discover that the program manager—the only person who could really tell me how the program operated—had made an urgent trip to Moscow. Say what? To cover for him, the director of the field office sent me to some province to ‘see how things work on the ground’. I never got a straight story on why the program manager had left, even from that manager when he got back. So if you see people on the sites you frequent disappearing in the midst of a big debate and then reappearing when things go back to boringness, they’re probably off meeting with their handler. Or maybe taking a quick trip to Moscow. Or, idk, completing an overdue report. Even spies have to do admin. And these days they have the advantage of being able to catch up with the transcript or the recording in their own sweet time. What that means is beware of the person who’s always entering the conversation after everyone else has left it. They’re playing catch-up after their urgent trip to Moscow.
SIGN #2: They’re too slick and charming. You never suspect the outgoing, funny ones, do you? One of my overseas friends has spent his later career in one of the big development agencies that, to my shock, was recently mentioned in an article as an espionage front. A few years ago he offered me his house to live in, rent-free, while he finished his current assignment. No need for him to be there, key under the potted plant by the side entrance, the neighbors down the street with another key. I showed up at his palatial home to find that he had just gotten Ring security cameras installed everywhere outside and inside the house other than the bedrooms. A bit of a surprise, but he did have a lot of antiques and some guys coming and going to do work on the house. What he didn’t tell me was that the security footage was being collected online for his viewing pleasure. He was so funny and down-to-earth when he emailed me about it, after I forgot and traipsed from the bedroom to the bathroom sans a stitch of clothing. “I hope this doesn’t seem creepy, but…”, he wrote me. Say what? Online you can expect the same charm offensive. These people go to charm school. It’s part of their official training. If someone is your bog-standard argumentative blowhard, they’re not likely to be an espionage artist. It’s the ones who get you to lower your defences by being uber-charming and making weird things seem normal you have to watch out for.
SIGN #3: They suddenly move into a prominent role without the requisite credentials or experience. Here you are, earning every opportunity you get, often being overqualified, and Joe or Jane Shmoe shows up and gets handed a plum role over an overeager parade of top-notch candidates. Say what? How did that happen? What happened to the standard HR process? Of course, this new person is remarkably charming (see #2 above), and of course they’re always rocketing off to Moscow or London or Washington for some ‘family crisis’ (see #1 above). But the really telling sign is, you guessed it—they don’t know how to do their damn job. And guess who gets stuck with picking up the slack? You do, of course. These people seem to have attended the same universities and grad schools, and the big tell is that their dad or mom has a high position in a key government agency. (Like the program manager in #1!) What does this sign look like online? Well, I’m not pointing fingers, but I gotta point out that a certain someone without social media experience recently took control of a major social media site. OK, so he bought it for a shedload of money. Same difference. He’s involved with rockets and he’s articulate and charming. At least I think so. And he had no experience running a social media platform when he bought it. It’s kind of suspicious, don’t you think? I’m just saying, keep in mind that he might be an intelligence asset as he posts here and there on the site, stirring things up. You might want to pull back on your alien-invaders-from-another-planet-are-pretending-to-be-major-political-figures conspiracy theories, if you know what’s good for you.
Get jiggy with it (have fun)
So there you have it. Three signs of the spies among us. But, really, trust your gut. If something happens and your reaction is immediately “Say what?”, that’s all you need. Start watching the watcher and engaging with them to try to trip them up and catch them out. Ask them questions they should know the answer to, like “Hey, since you’re from the Bay Area, why d’ya think Green Day replaced their drummer right before they recorded the Kerplunk album back in ‘91?” Turn the tables on those charming, jet-setting, unqualified, espionage artist lurkers. It’s super fun engaging in spycraft. And if you display a talent for it, who knows but you might actually get recruited to do it in real life. Before the AI programs take over and push all of humanity aside, of course.
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