For anyone is into this kind of thing I would suggest checking out The Team House on YouTube which has a lot of very in-depth interviews with some very recently retired CIA folks talking about their experiences in the field.

Given a lot of the crazy shit I hear come up in the comments here every time the CIA tends to get mentioned in almost any context this might actually be a good resource for a lot of folks here to start separating fact from fiction.

I’ll drop a couple of my favourites here but they must have at least 20 of them by now.

Doug London https://youtu.be/aV9HdJtPbZA

This guy had a really long career at CIA in the particular job that you all think of when you think of a “spy” that spanned around 30 years from memory with 9/11 occurring right in the middle of his career.

He talks a lot about not only how that changed the face of the agency but about all the mistakes that got made along the way and how the wheels fell off the truck with things like the rendition programs etc. Overall, it’s a great self reflective and critical look at the agency from a very senior person on the inside.

Jim Lawler https://youtu.be/AFnfTDbcPOA

This guy is probably the most “spooky” kind of CIA guy I’ve ever seen them interview. Even to the point that he is rather unusual amongst his peers if his reputation is to anything to go by. You can immediately see why he was so good at his job almost from the start. Like Doug he was also VERY senior and at the pointy end of the spear as they say.

The later stage of his career was focused on nuclear non proliferation and its very interesting to hear him talk about things like the decision to invade Iraq for example and once again where things went completely off the rails.

Holden Triplett https://youtu.be/0NSGOJs150w

On the other side of the fence Holden was working to actively catch foreign spies in the US while working at the FBI where he left in mid 2020.

Covers a lot of interesting topics and stories that I think folks would be interested in.

For someone wanting a bit more of this with great anecdotes, I direct you to the Mitrokhin Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive) sourced pair of tomes (The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005)).

An incredible source covering more than a century of operations, predating the revolution, and spanning all continents. The first book dives quite deeply into this exact topics, with double, triple and sometimes quadruple crossings. I loved the part about the prep for large-scale sabotage in eastern seaboard of USA in the events of hostilities, something I had no idea about but would have been quite an bold move. There was also a lot of unbelievably dumb stuff.

The book mentions the increased difficulty of doing anything undercover or assumed identity in the modern digitally connected world. All of those undercover things are pretty much the thing of the past now, with OSINT being able to find just about anything about anyone.

Traffic analysis but applied to leave, advancement and record keeping. Second order effects indicative of first order function.

If you can obtain the telephone directory and track it over time and it has job titles you can probably reconstruct the history of IBM, which party is in power, whatever, for the institution which publishes it. And what the role and career progression is for the longterm players. What does it tell you about the short term players? Maybe as much if they come and go. I bet you could identify McKinsey hires coming and going from top 10 institutions by their name as they are attached to the CEOs office and move between roles, if you can get the phone book.

So... I like spy novels and such and I've always wondered how the hell one would keep it a secret which 50% of an embassy are secret service. So many possible patterns! Turns out, one doesn't, unless extremely careful.

I also seem to remember that "who is secret service at the embassy" was never an important line of defense against counterespionage, something the article doesn't mention.

Throughout the Cold War, it was accepted common knowledge around American intelligence circles that our side had never successfully inserted agents into the USSR because their counterintelligence was so effective. I always wondered whether this was really true or whether it was just a cover story spread by our side to give the Soviets a false sense of security. There were known cases of insider espionage, but they were always men who had come to us on their own initiative.

By what I've heard, while the Russian military fell apart in the 1990s, they increased support for intelligence to compensate. I've not heard anything to indicate that they allowed their counterintelligence capabilities to deteriorate. Over the past year, Washington has done a lot of bragging over how much they have penetrated the Russian establishment, but I suspect there is a large element of bluff there.

Another thing worth mentioning is the Spy Dust. A substance that KGB used to track CIA officers which remained a mystery for a long time.

Read "Spy Dust" by Tony Mendez. I can't recommend this book high enough.

They are also easy to spot online

Money

> How to explain the....

Is grammatically correct in American English? Sounds weird.

In UK, Aus, you'd ask "How do you explain the ..."

A friend of mine is a diplomat, and apparently in diplomatic circles it's common knowledge who on the other side is a spy. In Soviet times, the lowest-ranked, blandly-named "member of delegation", typically an older gentleman with a military crewcut, was invariably KGB, while in many embassies including the US the "cultural attache", a position that has minimal qualifications and has almost no real responsibilities, is so commonly a spy that the whole title has become a bit of an in-joke.

All of this is kind of beside the point though, since embassy staff are known, heavily surveilled and guarded by diplomatic immunity. The "real" spies are the local people they recruit, and recruiting and keeping tabs on them without blowing their cover is the actual hard part.

If you ask someone who can't tell you what they do, what they do, they'll give you a quick and really dull answer. Anyone implying that they "can't really talk about that" is most likely a service-desk technician.

In a place I used to work at, I attended a workplace party where I was approached by a newly hired staff member. His many questions was all very leading, along the lines of: 'I like drugs, do you like drugs?' Apart from the clumsiness of his technique, what gave him away was his haircut (very military).

Where did you get this idea? There is a ton of intelligence the US had gained from its intelligence community, along with a ton gained from allied intelligence agencies. There's an entire category on Wikipedia dedicated to well-known defectors[1] and spies[2] in the USSR.

The reason you hear less about it from a Western perspective is because the Western allies leveraged reconnaissance technologies more efficiently. They had better aerial reconnaissance, a wider satellite network (from the late-70s onward), nearer proximity to Moscow, wider military projection and better code breaking. It is well-accepted that the Soviets, and the Russian successor state, have always had a hell of a time keeping encryption secret long from the combined US, Commonwealth, Israeli and German intelligence.

While the West didn't know everything going on inside, they were able to see almost everything from a birds eye view. It was necessary for the Soviets to have an extensive spy network to get the equivalent viewpoint.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_intelligence_p...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_spies_agains...

Worth noting that American intelligence has been on point about Russia for the past year. They alerted everyone else that the Russian army's "manoeuvres" in February were an actual invasion. Even the Ukrainians didn't believe them initially, but were finally convinced. This was critical in allowing them time to get their defence in order before the Russian tanks started rolling.

So no, it seems like the FSB is doing a poor job compared to the KGB.

Just as a heads up you seem to be referring to a VERY specific thing here and might not be meaning to.

“Inserting” someone into a hostile intelligence agency is known as a seeding operation and if you told me that they never were able to pull one off, I believe you.

However, they still had eyes and ears on the inside through a combination of recruiting existing officers already on the inside and via defectors.

Quite a lot has been written on the topic since then but I’d suggest checking out my other comment if you’re looking for some resources on that kind of thing.