EXPULSIONS

Under the terms of the Vienna Convention, the only sanction available to a host country that suspects a foreign diplomat has abused his or her privileges is a declaration of the diplomat as persona non grata with a requirement to leave within a specified period. Expulsions may be ordered on an individual basis or occasionally in larger groups, an example being Operation FOOT in 1971 following the defection of Oleg Lyalin, a KGB officer based in London who revealed the extent of the intelligence professionals operating under diplomatic cover.

EXFILTRATION

The process of the clandestine removal of an individual from a particular country. Exfiltration may require either that the regular exit controls be duped, by use of false documents and disguises, or evaded altogether. Examples of the former include the rescue of American diplomats from hiding in Tehran in 1979 when the U.S. embassy had been occupied by Iranian radicals, and the exfiltration of  Ryszard Kuklinsky  and  Oleg Gordievsky, who were driven out of Poland  and the Soviet Union, respectively, in black operations by intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover.

EPSILON

The code name for a British operation conducted at the end of World War II at Farm Hall, Godmanchester, in Cambridgeshire, to extract information from 10 captured German physicists. The scientists were accommodated for six months in a large country house that had been wired for sound, and the most private conversations conducted among the detainees were recorded for analysis. The transcripts proved the enemy had not come close to developing an atomic bomb, had not misled their interrogators, and had been shocked by the news that the Allies had dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

ENORMOZ

The Soviet code name for the joint NKVD and GRU operation conducted against the Manhattan Project, with the intention of acquiring Anglo-American atomic secrets and thereby assisting the development of a  Soviet weapon. Supervised personally by Lavrenti Beria, ENORMOZ was initiated in 1940 following  information received from the  rezidentura in London indicating that the War Cabinet in Great Britain had decided to embark on a major research program to produce a viable device. Technically unqualified Soviet personnel in London encouraged their sources to supply further material, but in 1943 their colleagues in New York and San Francisco were able to exploit agents, usually members of the  Communist Party of the United States of America, who submitted reports on highly classified work then under way at Oak Ridge, Berkeley, Chicago, and Los Alamos in the United States. The full extent of ENORMOZ became evident only with the  declassification in 1995 of the VENONA texts, which identified the code names of more than 40 participants, among them Ethel and Julius  Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and Ted Hall.

ENIGMA MACHINE

A cipher machine developed by Arthur Scherbius in Germany in 1923 and made available commercially to banks and other financial institutions on the continent. It was adapted by the German military in 1928, and various versions of the electromechanical device were developed and distributed until May 1945. An estimated 40,000 Enigma machines were manufactured for use by the Germans, and it was used as the model  for the British equivalent, the TypeX machine.
Boasting an unbreakable cipher generated by passing an electrical current through three moving,  interchangeable rotors, each with 26 starting positions, and a complex plug board, the Enigma was a portable, easy-to-use machine which, when operated properly, offered an unprecedented level of security. Mere  possession of a machine, without a knowledge of the exact settings chosen for a particular text, made a solution practically impossible, Nevertheless, work undertaken by the Polish Cipher Bureau before World  War II indicated that certain intrinsic flaws (such as the inability of the machine to select an identical letter of  the alphabet as a substitute) and common operator errors could be exploited with the assistance of perforated sheets of paper acting as a rudimentary computer to calculate the original settings of the rotors. Study of the Enigma and a reconstruction of the plug-board wiring enabled British cryptographers to read some Luftwaffe  traffic in 1940, building on a coup with Abwehr signals achieved in 1939 after compromised hand ciphers had been found to have been reencyphered on the Abwehr’s Enigma circuits.
Access to the enemy’s Enigma ciphers gave the Allies a tremendous advantage, which shortened the conflict by an estimated two years. The sanitized summaries, distributed on a very limited basis and code-named ULTRA, had a significant impact on the war, especially in North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, the search for the Kriegsmarine’s surface raiders, and the success of D-Day.
When the Germans recovered British TypeX machines at Dunkirk in 1940, they recognized them as modified Enigma machines and, believing their ciphers to be impregnable, assigned only a handful of cryptographers to work on the British machine cipher traffic. In contrast, more than 15,000 people based at Bletchley Park  concentrated on the Enigma traffic.
At the end of the war GCHQ refurbished many of the enemy’s captured Enigma machines and distributed them to Commonwealth and other countries as a secure means of communication. When Fred Winterbotham revealed the scale of GCHQ’s cryptographic success in The ULTRA Secret (1974), some were still in use by the Nigerians and the Swiss military.

ENGULF

A British code name for a technical breakthrough in which sound recorded on listening devices planted inside the communications room of target embassies assisted cryptographers to read the traffic generated on cipher machines. This methodology proved effective against the Egyptian embassy in London during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and was exploited in a refinement code-named STOCKADE, which helped break French diplomatic  codes.

EMBASSIES

The highest status of a diplomatic mission is the embassy, headed by an ambassador, largely replacing the  prewar distinction between legations, headed by ministers, and the more senior embassies. Embassy buildings, including the ambassador’s residence, come under the protection of the Vienna Convention and invariably conceal an intelligence function, both human and technical.
Many diplomatic premises contain clandestine intercept equipment to enable skilled operators to eavesdrop on local targets, and the telltale antennas may be disguised as flagpoles or hidden inside fiberglass radomes to prevent detection from neighboring structures.
Intelligence personnel assigned to embassies mask their true role by adopting diplomatic cover, although  internally the Soviet organization was known as the rezidentura, with the British and American equivalents being called stations.

ELLIS, DICK

Born in Australia in 1895, C. H. “Dick” Ellis joined the  Secret Intelligence Service in Paris in 1923, after graduating from the Sorbonne. He was posted to Istanbul briefly and then was attached under Passport  Control Office cover to Berlin, where he also wrote articles for the Morning Post. In 1938 he was brought  back to Great Britain to supervise the technical coverage of the German embassy’s telephone lines. Curiously, within a short period of his appointment, Ribbentrop’s staff began to exercise uncharacteristic discretion in their telephone conversations. He was later dispatched to Liverpool to establish a mail censorship center, and  in 1940 was appointed deputy to William Stephenson at British Security Coordination in New York.
After the war Ellis acted as controller Western Hemisphere and controller Far East, and upon his retirement in 1953 returned to Australia to advise on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. However, in 1966, following a lengthy investigation codenamed EMERTON, William Steedman confronted him with the allegation that he had sold SIS secrets to the Nazis through a contact in Paris before the war. Ellis made a limited confession, admitting his links to the Germans and claiming to have been kept impossibly short of money, but denying that he had ever succumbed to pressure from the Soviets, although he acknowledged it  was likely they had learned of his treachery.
The fact that the SIS had first learned from Walter Schellenberg in 1945 that a man named Ellis had betrayed the organization, but had failed to identify him for two decades, was a major embarrassment for the SIS. Ellis was never charged with any offense and died at his home in 1975.

ELECTRONIC INTELLIGENCE (ELINT)

A specialized category of technical  signals intelligence that includes the collection, processing, and signals or traffic analysis of information acquired from electronic media, usually radio, wireless, or radar emissions.

EICHMANN, ADOLF

The abduction of Eichmann, a former senior Nazi officer, from his home in Buenos Aires in May 1960 by a Mossad team led by Isser Harel was an intelligence coup that helped establish the organization’s reputation  for undertaking daring, highrisk missions and pulling them off successfully. Eichmann had sought refuge in Argentina after World War II, changed his name to Ricardo Klement, and found work at a local  Mercedes-Benz factory.
He was traced by the Israelis, who were determined to place him on trial for war crimes committed during the Holocaust, and was abducted outside his home on Garibaldi Street by a Mossad team that included Zvi Milchman. Eichmann was held for 10 days in a nearby safe house, where he was interrogated to see if he knew the whereabouts of Dr. Josef Mengele. He did not, so he was drugged to make him appear drunk, dressed in the uniform of an El Al steward, and taken aboard an airliner bound for Israel.
Considered an architect of the Holocaust, Eichmann was tried in April 1961, convicted of crimes against  humanity, and hanged in May 1962. Harel later wrote an account of the operation, The House on Garibaldi Street, and Milchman, who adopted the name Peter Melkman, wrote Eichmann in My Hands.

ECHELON

Code name for a signals intelligence discrimination program developed by the National Security Agency and GCHQ that identifies individual target telephone numbers from data streams exchanged between ground stations and geostationary communications satellites. The computer program isolates and analyzes the embedded electronic signals that identify and route international calls, making it possible to concentrate recording resources on specific numbers.

EAST GERMANY

Although a geographically small and economically insignificant state, the East German regime sustained a disproportionately large intelligence apparatus that included the notorious Stasi—an abbreviation of the  Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS; Ministry of State Security)—which employed 90,000 personnel and ran an estimated 150,000–180,000 informants. Within the Stasi, the largest branch was the Hauptverwaltung  Aufklärung (HVA), the overseas collection agency headed until 1986 by Markus Wolf, with a staff of 4,000, and then by Werner Grossmann. Although the HVA concentrated primarily on the Federal Republic of Germany, achieving considerable success in infiltrating agents into the government, it also operated worldwide, often as a surrogate for the KGB, with representatives posted overseas under diplomatic cover, with a special interest in Zanzibar.
Following the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, the Stasi’s massive headquarters on the Normannenstrasse were looted, and a special commission, headed by Joachim Gauck, was created to process the vast collection of files and to declassify them. Keys to the most sensitive, encrypted dossiers were deposited in Moscow to keep them from falling into Western hands, but they were promptly sold to the  Central Intelligence Agency, which code-named them  ROSEWOOD. When word leaked to the Federal Republic that the CIA had acquired the ROSEWOOD data, a formal request was made for access to them, to which George Tenet eventually acceded in 2003.