The British intelligence coordinating committee created in January 1941 to supervise the management of MI5’s double agents and give approval to information being passed to the enemy. The name comes from the Roman numeral XX, a visual pun on “double cross.” The XX Committee met weekly and was chaired by J. C. Masterman, his secretary being another MI5 officer, John Marriott. The other membership was made up of staff transferred from the Home Defence Security Executive, the Secret Intelligence Service, and the directors of military intelligence, naval intelligence, and the Home Forces.
During the course of World War II, the XX Committee met weekly 226 times and oversaw the operations of more than 40 controlled enemy agents until it was dissolved in December 1944. The existence of the XX Committee was revealed publicly in 1972 with the publication by Sir John Masterman of The Double Cross System of the War of 1939–45, a slightly abridged version of an account he had been commissioned to write for the Security Service in 1945.
Showing posts with label T. Show all posts
Showing posts with label T. Show all posts
Sunday, November 28, 2010
TRIPLEX
The code name assigned to XXX material—information acquired from the illicit copying of the content of diplomatic bags sent to and from diplomatic missions in London during World War II. Conducted by a joint MI5–Secret Intelligence Service unit dedicated to gaining surreptitious access to the attaché cases carried by
diplomatic couriers, TRIPLEX constituted a major breach of the Vienna Convention and therefore was considered an extremely sensitive source.
diplomatic couriers, TRIPLEX constituted a major breach of the Vienna Convention and therefore was considered an extremely sensitive source.
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS
The discipline of studying wireless traffic to establish patterns and obtain intelligence, a component of signals analysis and signals intelligence. Traffic analysis includes techniques of direction-finding, call-sign analysis, and discrimination—the study of frequencies, wavelengths, and transmission lengths.
Even without being able to solve cryptographically a ciphered text, a skilled analyst may develop significant information about a particular source of radio broadcasts by monitoring the regularity of the signals, their length, frequency, call sign, and origin. For example, the sudden imposition of radio silence may indicate an imminent attack, and the movement of a particular operator may indicate a change in location for his unit.
Perhaps the most significant moment in the history of traffic analysis occurred in 1938 at the end of the Munich Crisis when the German battleship Deutschland, on a goodwill visit to Spain, continued its cruise with a crew of cadets and did not return to her home port.
British direction-finding confirmed the ship’s position, thereby confirming that war was not imminent.
Even without being able to solve cryptographically a ciphered text, a skilled analyst may develop significant information about a particular source of radio broadcasts by monitoring the regularity of the signals, their length, frequency, call sign, and origin. For example, the sudden imposition of radio silence may indicate an imminent attack, and the movement of a particular operator may indicate a change in location for his unit.
Perhaps the most significant moment in the history of traffic analysis occurred in 1938 at the end of the Munich Crisis when the German battleship Deutschland, on a goodwill visit to Spain, continued its cruise with a crew of cadets and did not return to her home port.
British direction-finding confirmed the ship’s position, thereby confirming that war was not imminent.
TRADECRAFT
The specialist techniques used by intelligence professionals to conduct clandestine operations. Tradecraft procedures are used universally. They include the use of safe houses, dead drops, brush contacts, burst transmitters, surveillance countermeasures, the deployment of decoys, and other covert procedures.
Tradecraft will vary, depending on the local security environment in which it is to be employed, and during the Cold War the challenging conditions prevailing in the Soviet Union led the Central Intelligence Agency to prepare a course, known as “pipeliners,” for personnel assigned to operate in denied areas. The objective was to strike a balance between behavior that would identify an individual as an intelligence professional and the need to equip agents with gadgetry, either concealment devices or communications equipment, that would not instantly betray the owner upon discovery. Famously Boris Yuzhin was nearly compromised when he mislaid his cigarette lighter during a meeting in the San Francisco referentura, and it was found by a KGB colleague who, as the rezidentura’s technical expert, recognized it as an ingenious concealment device, thereby indicating to him that there was a spy in the building.
Tradecraft will vary, depending on the local security environment in which it is to be employed, and during the Cold War the challenging conditions prevailing in the Soviet Union led the Central Intelligence Agency to prepare a course, known as “pipeliners,” for personnel assigned to operate in denied areas. The objective was to strike a balance between behavior that would identify an individual as an intelligence professional and the need to equip agents with gadgetry, either concealment devices or communications equipment, that would not instantly betray the owner upon discovery. Famously Boris Yuzhin was nearly compromised when he mislaid his cigarette lighter during a meeting in the San Francisco referentura, and it was found by a KGB colleague who, as the rezidentura’s technical expert, recognized it as an ingenious concealment device, thereby indicating to him that there was a spy in the building.
TOLKACHEV, ADOLF
Code-named AE/BLIP by the Central Intelligence Agency, Tolkachev volunteered hugely important aeronautical data from “Phastron,” the Research Institute of Radiobuilding, to the CIA in Moscow by leaving a note in a car belonging to a CIA officer. Tolkachev was ideologically motivated and initially had limited himself to distributing subversive literature. When ordered to improve the MiG-25’s avionics following the defection of Lt. Viktor Belenko with his Foxbat Mach-3 high-altitude interceptor to Hakodate in Japan in September 1976, he seized the opportunity to inflict some real damage on the regime by compromising all the fighter’s new avionics.
Later code-named AE/VANQUISH, Tolkachev was paid the equivalent of more than $2 million, mainly in antique Russian jewelry which he pretended he had inherited from his grandmother, in return for details of Soviet radar, electronic countermeasures, and stealth technology, a veritable hemorrhage of secrets that effectively neutralized the feared Foxbat superfighter. Tolkachev’s rather unsubtle initial approach could easily have been a KGB provocation, but with William Casey’s encouragement, the CIA station chief, Gus Hathaway, took the risk and assigned a senior Russian-speaking case officer, John Guilsher, who had a Russian background (and was impressively experienced, having worked in London on the Berlin Tunnel material and transcribed the Penkovsky transcripts in 1962) and he ran the source with two successive case officers with great skill until May 1985 when the engineer was arrested, having been betrayed by an embittered former CIA officer, Edward Lee Howard.
Later code-named AE/VANQUISH, Tolkachev was paid the equivalent of more than $2 million, mainly in antique Russian jewelry which he pretended he had inherited from his grandmother, in return for details of Soviet radar, electronic countermeasures, and stealth technology, a veritable hemorrhage of secrets that effectively neutralized the feared Foxbat superfighter. Tolkachev’s rather unsubtle initial approach could easily have been a KGB provocation, but with William Casey’s encouragement, the CIA station chief, Gus Hathaway, took the risk and assigned a senior Russian-speaking case officer, John Guilsher, who had a Russian background (and was impressively experienced, having worked in London on the Berlin Tunnel material and transcribed the Penkovsky transcripts in 1962) and he ran the source with two successive case officers with great skill until May 1985 when the engineer was arrested, having been betrayed by an embittered former CIA officer, Edward Lee Howard.
THOMPSON, ROBERT
In June 1957 Airman First Class Robert G. Thompson, assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in West Berlin, volunteered to sell information to the Soviets. He continued to do so until he was transferred to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana. Even after he was discharged in 1958, he remained in contact with the Soviets. Thompson was finally arrested in 1965 in New York and was sentenced to 30 years in prison, having admitted to selling between 50 and 100 documents every fortnight for about three months in 1957.
After his imprisonment, Thompson claimed to be a Soviet illegal and pressed for his release in a spy swap, which was eventually granted in July 1969 when he was exchanged for Anatoli Shcharansky. Thompson was resettled in East Berlin under the alias Gregor Best and was employed by the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung as a false flag recruiter, posing as a Central Intelligence Agency officer supposedly anxious to seek help in conducting investigations into the staff of NATO member embassies.
After his imprisonment, Thompson claimed to be a Soviet illegal and pressed for his release in a spy swap, which was eventually granted in July 1969 when he was exchanged for Anatoli Shcharansky. Thompson was resettled in East Berlin under the alias Gregor Best and was employed by the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung as a false flag recruiter, posing as a Central Intelligence Agency officer supposedly anxious to seek help in conducting investigations into the staff of NATO member embassies.
TEUFELSBERG
Amajor signals intercept station located during the Cold War in the British Sector of Berlin, strategically situated on the summit of a man-made mountain constructed over what was intended to be the Third Reich’s military academy. Bombed into total destruction in 1945, the site was used to dump the rubble from 800,000 buildings, and it proved to be an ideal site for a joint National Security Agency–GCHQ listening post which, by virtue of its isolation from the city, offered an almost ideal electronic environment, free from interference. With its tall aerials, it was able to receive signals from Czechoslovakia and 50 miles into Poland to collect Warsaw Pact traffic. The U.S. Army Security Agency Field Station began operating in 1957, when it was known as the 280th ASA Company, and proved its worth by monitoring the military VHF traffic generated by 600,000 Soviet troops during the Prague crisis of 1968. The number of masts and distinctive golfball antennas increased continuously until 1977, when the site was absorbed into the NSA as the U.S. Air Force’s 6912th Electronic Security Group, with more than a thousand Americans and a hundred British technicians from the RAF’s No. 26 Signal Unit and No. 13 Signal Regiment maintaining 24-hour cover in three shifts on East German and Soviet telephone, telex, and radio circuits.
TET OFFENSIVE
The surprise Vietcong offensive on the Vietnamese New Year in 1968 took the Americans completely 
unawares and is regarded as a classic example of an intelligence failure, where clear signs of an impending attack were misinterpreted by analysts.
TERRORISM
Modern terrorism, including suicide bombings and attacks on civilian targets, has its origins in the campaign conducted by the Irgun and the Stern Gang against the British Mandate in Palestine. Both organizations benefited from information provided by the Haganah, the Jewish Agency’s intelligence branch, and combat experience with the British army during World War II, when a Jewish Brigade was raised and armed to fight the Nazis.
The pattern of anticolonialist movements adopting terrorist tactics was to be established by Chinese Communist insurgents in Malaya, who had received wartime training with the Far East branch of Special Operations Executive, Force 136. During the Malaya Emergency, the terrorists depended on weapons donated originally by Force 136 to fight the Japanese occupation, but the insurgency was successfully suppressed with the application of unorthodox strategies, including the deployment of countergangs, developed in Palestine.
The era of anticolonialist terrorism effectively ended with the defeat of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, settlement in Cyprus, and the British withdrawal from Aden, but political radicalism in Europe at the end of the 1960s created a climate in which the Irish Republican Army (IRA), dormant since the previous upsurge in sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in 1956, reemerged. During the 1970s, anarchist groups in Germany, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, and France engaged in uncoordinated terrorism, which manifested itself in political assassination, bomb atrocities, and abductions. Although the Central Intelligence Agency suspected some of the most notorious terrorist leaders—such as Ilych Ramirez Sanchez, alias “Carlos the Jackal”; Dr. George Habbash; and Abu Nidal—were receiving Soviet sponsorship, there was never sufficient evidence to persuade the CIA’s professional analysts, despite intensive studies and political pressure during President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
The university-based terrorist groups of the 1970s, including the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Italian Red Brigade, Action Directe in France, the Angry Brigade in London, the Weather Underground in the United States, and N17 in Greece, all of which had vague political motives, eventually succumbed to law enforcement. However, the separatist movements with territorial objectives—from Armenia (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia), the Basque Country (Euskadi ta Askatasuna), Brittany (Armée Revolutionnaire Bretonne), Corsica (Armée de Libération Nationale Corse), Croatia (Croatian Freedom Fighters), Molluca (Mollucan Liberation Front), Quebec (Front de Libération du Québec), Scotland (Scottish Liberation Army), and Wales (Meibon Glyndr)—proved more enduring. Factionalism within the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Al-Fatah spawned numerous extremist groups, such as Black September, Force 17, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, which in 1970 globalized their activities by seizing airliners, a tactic borrowed from Cuba, which had pioneered a policy of offering sanctuary to the hijackers of U.S. aircraft. Having witnessed the success of air piracy and the strategy of taking passengers hostage, extremists with territorial grievances copied the tactic in such disparate areas as Indonesia, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, and Kashmir. The terrorists saw the advantages of making their disputes international, and often the economic implications encouraged the adversaries to engage in negotiations. Political accommodations achieved peace in Uruguay with the Tupamaros, in Argentina with the Montoneros, in Peru with the Shining Path, in Turkey with the Grey Wolves, and in Northern Ireland with the Provisional IRA. Uneasy truces have also been reached with the Tamil Tigers and the PKK (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan/Kurdistan Workers Party) but in Colombia narcoterrorism—with ostensibly political movements such as MI9 and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) taking control of entire provinces to enhance drug production—contaminated successive legitimate governments with corruption.
Whereas conventional, state-sponsored terrorism could be combated by the application of sanctions to those countries such as Libya, Iran, and Syria proven to have supported terrorist groups, transnational movements without any obvious refuge have been impossible to eradicate. While terrorists with territorial goals can be persuaded to abandon the armed struggle through political compromise, those with global cultural or religious motives are harder to contain or eliminate, although following the attack on Manhattan and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001, the United States partially neutralized Al-Qaeda in April 2002 by leading an international coalition that invaded Afghanistan, deposed the Taliban regime, and destroyed Osama bin Laden’s training camps.
The extent to which the war on terrorism declared by President George W. Bush in 2002 really succeeded remains hard to evaluate, but in the four years that followed, a high proportion of the Al-Qaeda leadership was killed or detained, its communications disrupted, its financial support networks dismantled, and its safe havens eliminated. With the West’s huge intelligence advantage gained through the examination of captured documents and computers, the interrogation of prisoners, and the comprehensive intercepting of telephone, email, and internet communications, the Al-Qaeda structure was virtually decapitated, leaving individual sympathizers to develop their own cells and act independently. Major atrocities committed in the four years following 9/11 in Casablanca, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, and London demonstrate that while the United States has escaped any significant terrorist incident on its own territory, interdicting several attempts, Islamic extremists continued in a campaign fueled by a religious zealotry that has taken root in immigrant ghettoes, especially among alienated Muslim youth in Europe. In addition, the continuing insurgency concentrated in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad has served to attract jihadists from across the globe, possibly diverting attention away from the American homeland.
Public attitudes to terrorism have altered since the African National Congress (ANC), founded as a political movement in 1912, embraced sabotage during the apartheid period in South Africa, and when the organization was banned in April 1961 it engaged in terrorism through a surrogate, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
However, as a means of achieving power democratically, the ANC renounced political violence. Counterterrorism agencies have also altered their perspective, and now categorize animal rights extremists,
white supremacist militias, and some fringe antiabortion campaigners as terrorists.
The pattern of anticolonialist movements adopting terrorist tactics was to be established by Chinese Communist insurgents in Malaya, who had received wartime training with the Far East branch of Special Operations Executive, Force 136. During the Malaya Emergency, the terrorists depended on weapons donated originally by Force 136 to fight the Japanese occupation, but the insurgency was successfully suppressed with the application of unorthodox strategies, including the deployment of countergangs, developed in Palestine.
The era of anticolonialist terrorism effectively ended with the defeat of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, settlement in Cyprus, and the British withdrawal from Aden, but political radicalism in Europe at the end of the 1960s created a climate in which the Irish Republican Army (IRA), dormant since the previous upsurge in sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in 1956, reemerged. During the 1970s, anarchist groups in Germany, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Portugal, and France engaged in uncoordinated terrorism, which manifested itself in political assassination, bomb atrocities, and abductions. Although the Central Intelligence Agency suspected some of the most notorious terrorist leaders—such as Ilych Ramirez Sanchez, alias “Carlos the Jackal”; Dr. George Habbash; and Abu Nidal—were receiving Soviet sponsorship, there was never sufficient evidence to persuade the CIA’s professional analysts, despite intensive studies and political pressure during President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
The university-based terrorist groups of the 1970s, including the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Italian Red Brigade, Action Directe in France, the Angry Brigade in London, the Weather Underground in the United States, and N17 in Greece, all of which had vague political motives, eventually succumbed to law enforcement. However, the separatist movements with territorial objectives—from Armenia (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia), the Basque Country (Euskadi ta Askatasuna), Brittany (Armée Revolutionnaire Bretonne), Corsica (Armée de Libération Nationale Corse), Croatia (Croatian Freedom Fighters), Molluca (Mollucan Liberation Front), Quebec (Front de Libération du Québec), Scotland (Scottish Liberation Army), and Wales (Meibon Glyndr)—proved more enduring. Factionalism within the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Al-Fatah spawned numerous extremist groups, such as Black September, Force 17, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, which in 1970 globalized their activities by seizing airliners, a tactic borrowed from Cuba, which had pioneered a policy of offering sanctuary to the hijackers of U.S. aircraft. Having witnessed the success of air piracy and the strategy of taking passengers hostage, extremists with territorial grievances copied the tactic in such disparate areas as Indonesia, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, and Kashmir. The terrorists saw the advantages of making their disputes international, and often the economic implications encouraged the adversaries to engage in negotiations. Political accommodations achieved peace in Uruguay with the Tupamaros, in Argentina with the Montoneros, in Peru with the Shining Path, in Turkey with the Grey Wolves, and in Northern Ireland with the Provisional IRA. Uneasy truces have also been reached with the Tamil Tigers and the PKK (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan/Kurdistan Workers Party) but in Colombia narcoterrorism—with ostensibly political movements such as MI9 and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) taking control of entire provinces to enhance drug production—contaminated successive legitimate governments with corruption.
Whereas conventional, state-sponsored terrorism could be combated by the application of sanctions to those countries such as Libya, Iran, and Syria proven to have supported terrorist groups, transnational movements without any obvious refuge have been impossible to eradicate. While terrorists with territorial goals can be persuaded to abandon the armed struggle through political compromise, those with global cultural or religious motives are harder to contain or eliminate, although following the attack on Manhattan and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001, the United States partially neutralized Al-Qaeda in April 2002 by leading an international coalition that invaded Afghanistan, deposed the Taliban regime, and destroyed Osama bin Laden’s training camps.
The extent to which the war on terrorism declared by President George W. Bush in 2002 really succeeded remains hard to evaluate, but in the four years that followed, a high proportion of the Al-Qaeda leadership was killed or detained, its communications disrupted, its financial support networks dismantled, and its safe havens eliminated. With the West’s huge intelligence advantage gained through the examination of captured documents and computers, the interrogation of prisoners, and the comprehensive intercepting of telephone, email, and internet communications, the Al-Qaeda structure was virtually decapitated, leaving individual sympathizers to develop their own cells and act independently. Major atrocities committed in the four years following 9/11 in Casablanca, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, and London demonstrate that while the United States has escaped any significant terrorist incident on its own territory, interdicting several attempts, Islamic extremists continued in a campaign fueled by a religious zealotry that has taken root in immigrant ghettoes, especially among alienated Muslim youth in Europe. In addition, the continuing insurgency concentrated in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad has served to attract jihadists from across the globe, possibly diverting attention away from the American homeland.
Public attitudes to terrorism have altered since the African National Congress (ANC), founded as a political movement in 1912, embraced sabotage during the apartheid period in South Africa, and when the organization was banned in April 1961 it engaged in terrorism through a surrogate, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
However, as a means of achieving power democratically, the ANC renounced political violence. Counterterrorism agencies have also altered their perspective, and now categorize animal rights extremists,
white supremacist militias, and some fringe antiabortion campaigners as terrorists.
TENET, GEORGE
The son of Greek immigrant parents who settled in New York and opened a restaurant, Tenet was appointed director of central intelligence by President Bill Clinton in July 1997 upon the resignation of John Deutsch. Formerly a congressional staffer, Tenet proved much more popular than his predecessor but was the subject of criticism when he was slow to investigate allegations of security breaches committed by Deutsch, who retained classified material on his home laptop which was connected to the internet. Tenet retained his post when George W. Bush was elected to the White House but resigned in 2004. His former press spokesman, Bill Harlow, was
to have ghostwritten his autobiography, but following his awarding by President Bush of the Medal of Freedom, Tenet announced that he had postponed the project indefinitely
to have ghostwritten his autobiography, but following his awarding by President Bush of the Medal of Freedom, Tenet announced that he had postponed the project indefinitely
TELEMETRY INTELLIGENCE (TELINT)
The interception and analysis of signals transmitted from test-fired missiles. Throughout a flight downrange, a test missile will broadcast information to engineers who monitor its performance. Before the introduction of international verification procedures, countries often encrypted the telemetry to prevent interception. Initially TELINT was picked up by ground stations or surface platforms such as warships, but the development of satellite surveillance technology enabled interception to be conducted from orbiting RHYOLITE platforms.
TECHNICAL OPERATIONS
A generic term used for technical surveillance, dependent on electrical equipment, usually denoting eavesdropping.
TAW
Code name for a secret Central Intelligence Agency operation initiated in 1979 which consisted of a sophisticated tape recorder placed in a sewer on the main landline cable that connected the KGB’s headquarters in Moscow to its communications center at Troitsk, 25 miles south of the capital. Because the site was outside the travel limit imposed on foreign diplomats, the tapes had to be serviced in a black operation by CIA personnel who had to elude their surveillance and adopt a disguise to make the illicit visit. The Soviets discovered the equipment immediately after the first approach to the KGB in Washington, D.C., made by disaffected CIA officer Edward Lee Howard. When a CIA technician was sent to check the equipment in 1985, an integral antitamper device indicated that it had been interfered with, so it was abandoned, leaving the CIA to conclude that the KGB had allowed it to operate for the prior three years, presumably to protect Howard.
TAGGING
Techniques developed to enhance the efficiency of physical surveillance on target individuals. During the Cold War, considerable research was undertaken to create chemical and other formulas that would serve to identify a quarry, sometimes known as a “rabbit,” even when the person’s appearance had been altered, by alerting watchers when the target passed through a channel or choke point, or that would enable tracking to occur from a distance safe enough not to compromise the surveillance. The East Germans experimented with substances that could be sprayed onto the shoes or clothes of a target to increase the scent available for specially trained dogs, while the KGB was known to have applied potentially dangerous toxins onto targets to aid detection by electromechanical devices.
The use of potentially hazardous “spy dust” deployed in Moscow against selected Americans diplomats prompted a diplomatic protest in August 1985.
According to information supplied by a defector, Vitali Yurchenko, the KGB also experimented with insect pheromones, which caused a box of male insects to react when someone sprayed with female pheromones passed nearby.
Documents have also been the subject of tagging. For example, British Admiralty papers have been irradiated to enable sensors to monitor their removal from secure areas.
The use of potentially hazardous “spy dust” deployed in Moscow against selected Americans diplomats prompted a diplomatic protest in August 1985.
According to information supplied by a defector, Vitali Yurchenko, the KGB also experimented with insect pheromones, which caused a box of male insects to react when someone sprayed with female pheromones passed nearby.
Documents have also been the subject of tagging. For example, British Admiralty papers have been irradiated to enable sensors to monitor their removal from secure areas.
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