The History of Spies with Andrew Hammond

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to a special edition of AMSEcast as we celebrate 250 years of American innovation. With much appreciated support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS, we’re undertaking a series of AMSEcast interviews focusing on American innovations as part of our commemoration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial.

0:54 On this episode, I’m honored to be joined in person at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, by Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum’s historian and curator. Andrew has held many teaching positions and fellowships in institutions like the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and he currently is a fellow at the Global National Security Institute, a veteran of the Royal Air Force with assignments to the British Army and Royal Navy. Andrew is also the author of the upcoming book, Struggles for Freedom: Afghanistan and US Foreign Policy Since 1979. Andrew, it’s an honor to speak with you today. Welcome to AMSEcast. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. You have an amazing museum.

1:34 I toured it this morning. It’s terrific. Thank you very much. I encourage everyone to come and to spend many hours. I admittedly… I always run through museums. I shouldn’t admit that. I love museums, but I’m a—I start and go around, then I go back around. You can spend many, many hours in this facility, that’s for sure. Can you tell our listeners, before we get into the meat of the topic today, tell us a bit about the museum, where it’s located, what its mission is? So, the museum’s located in Washington, DC right off the National Mall. So, we’re in a great location. We’re between all of the Smithsonians on the Mall, and the river has been developed then the past 10, 20 years, so we’re in a very nice spot. We have the world’s largest collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts.

2:20 You don’t have to trust me. It’s on the Guinness records [laugh] book. [laugh] . And our mission is basically to try to help the public understand the very thorny, and difficult, and sometimes opaque world of intelligence and espionage. As a historian, I would say that there’s probably no other topic, no other museum in the country that probably [laugh] has as difficult job as we do because by its very nature, it’s a topic that you’re not meant to know about. And even still, some of the records are still—well, you worked in the National Archives and the presidential libraries—some of the stuff is still classified— Very much.

3:03 —so we don’t know the full picture. So, I think it’s a difficult topic matter. I think it’s a very important topic matter, especially in the modern world. So, it’s really important that the public understands and gets their head around what’s going on. Let’s be honest, what most people know about intelligence and espionage comes from watching movies or TV shows. It’s like, what most people know about my homeland, Scotland, comes from watching Braveheart or Outlander, or— Which is horribly incorrect, historically, I will say to everyone watching, Braveheart, please [laugh] . So, I think you meet people where they are, and then you take them on a journey. There is a connection between fact and fiction.

3:44 Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, worked in British intelligence during World War II. John le Carre worked in British intelligence. Graham Greene. There’s so many different links between fact and fiction. But we basically take people on a journey, try to help them understand the breadth of this topic, why it’s so important, and some of those relationships between fact and fiction, really so that they can feel more informed and educated about the world in which they live. And you do it in a great way, where you show the technology, you use a lot of those great artifacts, but you humanize it as well with people’s stories, and also you assume an identity as you go through. I didn’t use my identity like I should have.

4:25 I’m going to go back and do that. But really, you make a topic very approachable. Though I will say, you know, I saw one of the exhibits said, “Who’s listening?” And the answer was, “The better question is, who isn’t listening,” right [laugh] — [laugh] . —so it makes you feel uneasy. But it’s really an important topic and extraordinarily well presented, so congratulations. I told you before the interview officially started, I’ve been to the previous incarnation of this museum, and it was well done, too, but this is this spectacular, and a perfect location for it. So, all right, let’s dive in a bit to this whole idea of innovation, and spycraft, and what we’ve been focusing on in AMSEcast. So, part of the spycraft world is collecting information. God knows, there’s a lot of information these days.

5:07 There’s always been information that’s important. What are some of the innovative ways that the US in particular has collected, or stolen, or found information on adversaries over the years? Really great, great question. So, I think that the first thing that I would say would be, let’s take a step back and think about the flow of information for our species. So… small question [laugh] . Ah that’s al—let’s see, Matt, we have… [laugh] . So, let’s just look at three touch points: the ancient world: Papyrus. Not many people could read, not many people could afford Papyrus, Papyrus was very time consuming. By sheer necessity, the flow of information is very restricted.

5:49 Let’s jump forward to the Middle Ages. Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, game changer. Much more copies of a book, for example, can be distributed, drives down the cost. Then, if we think about that logically, if there’s all of this supply of books, this feeds into the Protestant Reformation. If you want to read scripture in the original, you need to be able to read, so it has effects on education. Then if we jump forward to say, the digital age, the flow of information now is exponentially larger. So, if we think about those three touch points through the history of our species, the volume and flow of information has increased massively.

6:34 And then if we map the history of the United States, 250 years onto that evolution, we see just absolutely incredible, radical change. So, for most of human history, the technology is relatively static. The past 250 years, it’s just taken off. If you think about, say, George Washington—so let’s go back to the very earliest days—George Washington handwriting a letter, there’d be one copy, it would do the rounds. Then, if we think about where we are now. The Library of Congress, which you mentioned in your kind introduction to me, this is the largest library in the entire world, and I think it’s something like 30 Library of Congresses are created every single day.

7:24 So, the volume of information is staggering. So, if we think about the United States, map it onto that history, one thing we know about the United States as, like, every country you know, the United States has things that it’s stronger on than others, and one thing that it is very strong on is technology and innovation, which you mentioned. So, if we think about this innovation, the computer, United States, you think about satellites, we can think about the telephone, although as a Scotsman, I would say— [laugh] . I was going to say— —Alexander Graham Bell, let’s agree to share him. Right. We’ll do that today.

8:05 We’ll make that official today. We’re sharing him. And just to bring that all back to your question, for every one of those technologies, that is a new opportunity to both betray or unwillingly distribute information, and it’s also an opportunity to capture information. So, the internet means that there’s much more information that can be captured. Phone calls, there’s much more information that can be captured. Whereas before, you would have to track a letter, or you would have to—before you had a recording device, someone would have to be at the door with a glass to their ear or whatever, or be hiding in the room. Now, you can just leave a bug in there, walk away, or you can listen in on a phone call, rather than have to find the letter, steam it open, try to glue it back shut.

8:50 All of those various inflection points you see America and American intelligence getting involved to use each one of them to try to gather more information. We can talk about some of the specific examples, if you want, but I just wanted to take it out of the broadest possible level there before we zoom all the way back in. Well, I think that’s important to do. And there’s two things that come to mind immediately. One is our home of Oak Ridge, Tennessee was created during the Manhattan Project, a secret city totaling eventually about 75,000 people working to process uranium for the atomic bomb, kept very secret. And we often wonder, in this day and age, with the flow of information as it is now, how that would ever be possible again, with that number of people to keep that big of a secret.

9:32 That’s one thing. The other thing I will say, when I was director of the George W. Bush Library, that was the first presidential library that saw the impact of the information revolution, really. So, it went from about, I think, 4 million—and don’t quote me if I’m wrong, presidential library people, please forgive me if I’m forgetting this now—but I think the Clinton Library had about 4 million pages of electronic records, of emails, I should say, of emails. We had about a billion pages of emails at George W. I’m sure it was much more for President Obama. That just shows, right there, just in one subset of information, the amazing growth. So, with that, yes, if we can just jump into American intelligence, things you talk about how we are able now to intercept and utilize information. One other thought that I had when you were talking there, if I think about Oak Ridge, think about the Manhattan Project, I mean, this is an industrial scale operation.

10:22 I mean, that’s very different from Benjamin Franklin. If we think about that era of science where it was gentlemen tinkerers, people that were, you know, self-taught, doing experiments on their own. And then we get to Oak Ridge that is just one constituent part of this whole enterprise that involves so many people, so much money, and then it becomes, of course, more difficult to control the flow of information, as you say. Yeah, big science. Big science. Yeah. Yeah. [crosstalk] . Yeah. So, as our agents in this age and in the past have gone out trying to find that information, whether it is a piece of paper or an email, what are some of the tools that you talk about in the museum, of how they do that?

11:04 If we think again—just taking it back another step—so if we think about the electromagnetic spectrum, as scientists began to understand that in greater detail, that afforded all kinds of opportunities: infrared, X-ray, ultraviolet, all of those things. So, in each one of those different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, American intelligence has been involved, innovating, developing new equipment and so forth. So, let’s just talk about one example: a suitcase radio. So, it’s basically a way to have a covert communication device that you can carry around with you.

11:45 So, it’s shaped like a suitcase, you open it up, you send your message. For devices like that, there’s also ways that you can try to capture what that’s emitting as well. So, we have some examples of that as well: receivers, antenna, radios, transponders, shortwave radios, one-time pads, which are one of the most fascinating things ever. Tell me about those. So, a one-time pad is the only form of covert communication that is unbreakable. Most people haven’t heard of it. So essentially, the idea is that we have a sheet of paper called a one-time pad, and on that, there’s banks of five digit numbers.

12:28 So, we’ve got five digits, a space, five digits, all the way left to right, top to bottom. You have the exact same sheet. So, it may be a booklet of, say, 100 sheets, but we both operate from this very same sheet, and as long as those numbers are randomly chosen and randomly distributed, if we then encipher our conversation—let’s just say the conversation we’re having now—if we encipher that using the one-time pad, then it’s literally unbreakable, as long as you use it one time. That’s why it’s called a one-time pad.

13:09 So, with a shortwave radio that you could pick up for 20 bucks and a one-time pad, you could communicate, let’s just say, God forbid you were a North Korean spy— [laugh] . Right. You could communicate with your handler in North Korea because shortwave radio, the radio waves bounce off of the ionosphere, they would travel all the way to North Korea, and your handler could basically communicate with you. They could send a message back to you. As long as you keep using a fresh sheet from that one-time pad, it’s literally unbreakable. So, that’s the combination of the modern and the old. That’s fascinating. I feel like, though it’s a challenge to our very smart listeners on AMSEcast. [laugh] . [laugh] . So, that’s really interesting.

13:53 Now, of course, as our agent—and tell me, the Spy Museum has a really good website, again, great, great job on that, where you have a kind of a glossary of terms. I want to make sure I use the terms correct. So ‘agent,’ ‘spy,’ what’s the difference between these types of individuals? This is a really good question, and it’s one that can be quite contentious. So, if you think about the surface level, Central Intelligence Agency, well, surely, if it’s an agency, it has agents. If you call a CIA Case Officer—that’s the intelligence officer who goes overseas to steal secrets and recruit spies—if you call them an agent, they’re probably not going to be too happy.

14:36 Okay [laugh] . Duly noted. For them an agent is the person that they recruit to steal the secrets; they’re professional intelligence officers. Officers. Okay. So, it can be very confusing for the average person. Think about the FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation. So Bureau, okay well, we’re not going to call them bureaucrats, but nevertheless, they’re called agents— They’re called agents, yeah. —so, like, why Central Intelligence Agency doesn’t have agents, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation does. So, some of these things are just, like, happenstance. There doesn’t necessarily always have to be some kind of logic, but this is just the evolution of language, right?

15:18 So, we’ve got a spy. So, a spy can be—it depends on what level you want to think about that. So, very strictly speaking, for some people, a spy would just be the person that you recruit to steal your secrets. For other people, a spy is a broader term. So, we have the Spy Museum—this is much broader than just that narrower definition I just gave—or a spy satellite, that’s a much broader understanding of it. So, it’s anything that’s involved in capturing information, stealing information. So, we’ve got a spy, we’ve got intelligence. So, that’s much broader. So, that’s how do we use information to make sense of the world for some kind of decision-making advantage.

16:04 So, if we think about, say, you worked at the George W. Bush Museum, we think about 9/11, gathering intelligence, trying to make sense of it to give George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld some kind of decision-making advantage. Then we have the—we spoke about agents. We spoke about the FBI and the CIA. If you think about espionage, that’s a little bit narrower. So, that’s what people think of, probably, when they think about spies. So, that’s the back streets of Budapest where you’re meeting someone with a top hat and a copy of the Financial Times, that’s espionage. Intelligence is broader. That could be satellites, that could be big technology-capturing information.

16:50 So, this could easily be an entire, sort of, essay, but those are some of the broad ways that you can break this down. Very good. Very interesting. I’m sure I’ll use some of those incorrectly today, but please forgive me, as I’m— I’m sure I still do [laugh] . [laugh] . All right. So, let’s talk a bit about the ways we, over the years, have produced and concealed weapons for those would be officers going into the field, if I’m correct. What are some of the favorite examples you’ve seen of how that’s been done and how that’s documented here at the museum? So, some of the favorite ways that I’ve seen it done is just incorporating some kind of offensive capability, some kind of information-capturing capability, in everyday objects.

17:31 So, it could be an umbrella that’s secretly a weapon, it could be a letter opener, it could be a tie. It could be, you name it, it’s probably being used for espionage in some way. So, if we just think about, you know, both of us, the heel of our shoes, yes, and some bodily cavity—we don’t need to, really— We don’t need—and those are actually spies using those problems. That would be the term for that, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’m getting there. Or we have artifacts that are captured from North Korean assassins, and it’s like a Parker Pen that was used to assassinate someone, a lipstick that was used to commit suicide if you were captured.

18:12 You would put suicide on before, you know… before you were brought up to speak, and commit suicide and so forth. But in terms of the United States specifically, there’s some really interesting examples. Because during the Second World War, the Office of Strategic Services—so that’s one of the forerunners of the CIA, they are involved in all kinds of gadgets, all kinds of improvisations, all kinds of technological developments. And then you see this continue during the Cold War with the CIA’s Office of Science and Technology. Really interesting. I know you mentioned the umbrella. Wasn’t there a famous Soviet example of that in London, right? Georgi Markov, yeah. That was poison.

18:53 Poison. I see. Some of the other ones I’m thinking of are more like, it’s like a gun that fires a bullet, but yeah, they can definitely be used for delivering poison, too. Donovan in OSS is interesting fellow. I see he was in your exhibit, and Bill vanden Heuvel. When I was director at Roosevelt, he was head of the Roosevelt Institute, and had worked with Donovan at one point. So, interesting stories and really fascinating guy, important in our history, for sure. So, kind of related to the weapons, tools of sabotage. What are some of the tools of sabotage we’ve developed here in the US, for use by spies. So, some of the tools of sabotage, one which I particularly like is a piece of coal. So, it’s essentially, it’s like, if you want to think of it, like, a container that has explosives in it, and then you get this kit that comes along with it, so that no matter where you are, you can fashion it to be the right color or the right shape, so that it fits in with the natural environment, then it just looks like a piece of coal.

19:51 You leave it there and you blow something up. Or there’s other examples that look like an old-fashioned Second World War mine, but essentially this mine that was developed by the CIA, it would sit in the water, and it would detect how many ships had went past, how long ago. It would try to essentially work out the optimum time to go off, which would be not when the first ship hit it, but when it was in the middle of a whole bunch of ships, and then it would blow up. So, that’s a great example of a technology being developed. Or yet another one is a picture book that shows you how to, for example, blow up a railway line.

20:36 So, if you think about your IKEA book, those were distributed during the Cold War as part of the conflict with the Soviet Union around the world, and proxy conflicts in other places. So, it would essentially be a booklet on sabotage. Endlessly fascinating, I will say. We talked earlier about information, and let’s talk a bit about how we are able to share information among officers, spies, there and headquarters, secretly and safely. How can we do that? And particularly today, where there’s so many ways, it seems like, to intercept that information? Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think that it’s so central to everything that we do here at the Spy Museum, and also in the world of intelligence and espionage because what’s the point in stealing secrets if you just bleed them away?

21:25 What’s the point and getting some kind of advantage over the adversary if you tap your hand and say, “Here’s my poker card. Feel free to readjust yours on that basis.” So, this is, like, such an important part of it, but it’s one that’s fraught with danger. It’s one that’s fraught—we’ve seen this historically—with all kinds of danger. So, if we think about the First World War, how did America get into the First World War? Well, there’s several ways that we could answer that, but one of the important factors for sure is the interception by the British of the Zimmerman Telegram. And this is encrypted, but there’s ways to attack ciphers. The British used this to gradually bring America into the war.

22:10 And there’s other reasons. That’s not the only reason, but nevertheless it’s an important one. That’s an example there. If we look at the history of cryptography, which is just making codes and breaking codes, if you want to put it simply, up until the 20th century, most of that was done paper and pencil means. It’d be something that, if you sat down, and you had the right training, and you spent long enough, you could probably break it. Then we get to electromechanical machines like the Enigma device that some people will have heard of. So, that’s 157 million, million, million possible permutations. So, it’s getting more complicated. Then we get to where we are now, and we’re talking, you know, just infinitely more numbers.

22:53 But for each one of them, there’s opportunities to try to break them still. The only one, like I say, that cannot be broken is the one-time pad. So, in the history of the United States, we’ve seen this where you send a radio message, and somehow one part of the chain in compromised, people listening into conversations. So, we have a bug that was placed inside a Great Seal of the United States that sat in the study of the US ambassador in Moscow. We have other things along these lines that are used to steal information. So, just to bring that all together, this is actually one of the most critical points in the whole enterprise, trying to communicate securely.

23:35 How do you do that? This is something that people are constantly working on. There’s no foolproof, completely safe way of doing it. The one-time pad, I mean, that sounds great, but there’s a lot of problems with that as well. How do you distribute these pads? How do we make sure we’re both on the same page? It’s very time consuming. It can be done much faster in other ways. So, there’s no real perfect way of doing it, and I guess one of the challenges is, how do different sides respond to technological developments? But one thing that is quite interesting being here in the United States, is the United States is quite often at the forefront of a lot of these technological developments.

24:16 I’m glad you mentioned the Zimmerman Telegram. As someone who studied that quite a bit in my early life, I always thought that was part of the build-up to the war that wasn’t really focused on enough, in terms of the offer by Germany to essentially join in with Mexico, and give back a large part of what had been taken from Mexico. [unintelligible] were really a horrible misstep by Germany. But that’s another podcast altogether. I will say one interesting thing I keep thinking about is when we finally do get to an age of quantum computing, of what that’s going to do to our ability to encrypt and to steal information. It’s going to be, I assume, a much harder challenge at that point. Yeah, yeah. It should be [laugh] much, much harder.

24:58 [laugh] . So, we’ll see that’s a little bit down the road, but I think on the horizon. Just very briefly, I think you make a good point, though, because the Zimmerman Telegram, if you think about it in the context of American history, America’s entry into World War I. Think about World War II, Pearl Harbor: an intelligence failure that brings America into World War II. If we think about Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, if we think about the Iraq War in 2003, if you think about 9/11, intelligence is, like, part of all of these stories. So, every single chapter of American history, intelligence is there. It just might not be as prominent, or it might be silently working away in the background, but it definitely is there.

25:39 And even though we’ve often been at the forefront of innovation in those areas, some of those are defined by failures in intelligence, which you talk about here in the museum, and then have to learn from those and hopefully innovate and not have that happen again. You talk about the Enigma too. Let’s mention that really quickly. I think that’s such a fascinating story of how we were able to, during World War II, to decipher both German and Japanese codes. Can you tell us a bit about how you talk about that in the museum? So, we talk about the Enigma machine because it’s a fascinating machine, and it helps you understand so much about the history of cryptography. So again, just the making and breaking of codes. But here at the museum, we focus, in particular, on Purple, so a Japanese device for encoding information used during World War II, cracked by American codebreakers.

26:33 We also talk about the Enigma code, which gets called Ultra when it’s decrypted. So, Ultra because the British at the time, it was higher than the highest level of classification they had, so it was Ultra intelligence. Now, another one that’s my particular favorite that most people haven’t heard of, is a Japanese code called JN-25. So JN-25, Japanese Navy Code 25, essentially, if you imagine a code book where every word has another word that substitutes for it—so let’s say for ‘Andrew,’ it’s ‘dopehead,’ or something like this, you know— [laugh] . For ‘tank,’ it says ‘Cuthbert.’ For ‘plane,’ it says ‘camera.’ So just, you know, random things.

27:25 So, that’s one. That’s the first part of it. But then what they do on top of that is they turn all of those words into a number, and then with the number, they add another series of random five digits on top, so it’s what’s called double enciphered, so it’s doubly protected. Then they transmit it. And this is done by the Japanese Navy. Of course, the Japanese war in the Pacific, the Japanese Navy is central to the whole enterprise. So, JN-25 is absolutely central to the Japanese ability to prosecute the war, but American codebreakers, diligently, quietly, over a period of time, managed to break the code. And one great example that we discuss here about why that matters is the Battle of Midway. So, this allows a smaller and less experienced American Navy to defeat the Japanese Navy, and of course, as we all know, the Battle of Midway is the turning point and the battle of the Pacific. But without American code breakers breaking JN-25, that’s not going to be possible.

28:32 It doesn’t mean that they’re guaranteed success, but without it, they’re not set up to win that engagement. We speak about JN-25 here, we speak about the Enigma machine, or speak about Purple. All really, really fascinating examples. Without Midway, not only we’ve not had the turning point, but who knows what was next. I mean, the proximity to Hawaii and the West Coast, that a very different outcome, perhaps, to that war, all thanks to breaking that what sounds like an extraordinarily complicated code. I mean, I’m even more impressed now than I was before. I want to note that we can never forget that behind all these tools and innovations are men and women, kind of, utilizing these tools, either here or abroad.

29:14 How do you represent their work in the museum? I think that if we just stick to the example of codemaking and codebreaking, there’s a really fascinating couple called the Friedman’s. So, William and Elizebeth Friedman. They’re there around World War I. America at the time doesn’t have an intelligence enterprise in the way that we think of it today, but the two of them get involved in codebreaking. They fall in love. They’re there in the interwar period. Elizebeth Friedman brings codebreaking capabilities to the Coast Guard. William Friedman is one of the main players on American codebreaking during World War II. And they’re just this really sweet, sort of dorky, nerdy couple who send their friends Christmas cards that are, like, encoded, and secret messages, and so forth.

30:04 And William Friedman, very, very stressful codebreaking during a time of war, he has a nervous breakdown. There’s another famous American codebreaker has a nervous breakdown. It can be monumentally stressful. But I think that’s the way to humanize it. Okay, so we’ve got Midway, we’ve got the Battle of the Atlantic and Enigma, but here’s just this couple that met, fell in love, developed a shared passion, were involved in American Intelligence and National Security from World War I through to the end of World War II. Very human love, mental health problems, trying to do their bit for the country. I believe that their families were relatively recent in the country and they felt a sense of gratitude towards America, and it meant a lot to them to put something back.

30:51 So, I think that’s one example of just a nice human story, and almost like it’s like a thing, yeah, of just the we’re coming up in the semi-quincentennial—if I got it right—but over those 250 years, think about all the Americans that have ever lived, every shape, size, from almost every part of the world, and it’s important that we don’t lose a sense of their contribution to the story as well. And sure, it’s about Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and all the biggies, but it’s also just about the Friedman’s, and many other people like them. Yeah wonderful. So, the Friedman’s, and codebreakers, the spies, the officers, how do they get the training to do what they do, and specifically to use some of these devices and so forth that you highlight in the museum?

31:36 Yeah, that’s a really good question, and it’s obviously changed with the technology. So, around the time of the Friedman’s, Elizebeth Friedman was very interested in Shakespeare, and she’d been hired to try to prove the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was actually the author of Shakespeare novels. So, it’s looking for patterns, it’s trying to look for inconsistencies and so forth. William Friedman comes there. It’s actually her that introduces him to codebreaking. So, they get into codebreaking together, and then eventually, when the war breaks out, they get, I guess, contracted to work on some codes. But there’s no real, institutionalized, professionalized codebreaking enterprise, and what is there is, like, pretty small-scale.

32:23 So, during that period, that’s more you learn on the job. It’s like being an apprentice, or for them, there’s not even a tutor for them. It’s more trial and error; you just feel your way into it, and eventually get better at it. But a faster way to do it is to stand on the shoulders of other people’s mistakes. So eventually, between the wars, and then especially with World War II—this is when America becomes a superpower—has realized that, listen, we need something that’s more institutionalized, more professionalized, and eventually, we need to codify this, we need to bank the lessons that we’ve learned, we need to pass them on. The technology is getting more complicated.

33:03 This is not just paper and pencil ciphers; it’s machines, it’s the electromagnetic spectrum, it’s satellites. It’s detecting radioactive isotopes in the air. Then it all gets very complex very quickly. And then that’s when the gentlemen spies of yesteryear, there’s always going to be a place for them, but you know, you need people that have been to Caltech and MIT. You need people that are engineers, mathematicians, scientists. You need all of them, and with all of that comes training. So, it depends on the job you have, it depends on what part of the enterprise you’re in, but I think it’s just a case of now making sure that we learn the lessons from the past and try to pass them on to new people, so that they don’t have to start from scratch all over again.

33:53 So, is that structure we’ve set up post-war—because we were kind of late to the intelligence game, right, in terms of setting up what became the CIA—we’ve been a leader in that, in innovation in that. Does that system explain why we able to do that as a latecomer to it? I think that that’s part of it. I think that during the Second World War, a very close relationship developed within British and American intelligence. So, there’s a good example of this where, for example, the OSS, their counterintelligence arm and their official report after the war, they say, “To do effective counterintelligence, you probably need three decades of building up a registry of relationships, of patterns, of people.” There’s a very particular skill set that you need for counterintelligence. Again, the British have been doing it a bit longer. They’d learned through trial and error.

34:50 They had more opportunities to do it. So— They’ve been around a while. They’ve been around a while. So essentially, the United States gets, I guess, access to the goodies, if you want to put it like that. [laugh] . Right, right. But they’re able to—and this is what you do like in innovation, right? If you join a new field, you learn from the people that are already in the field, you learn from the people that are at the forefront of the field, and then you try to take it off in a new direction. And that’s what happened here. They learned from the British. Not that the British were perfect, of course, by any manner of means, but they had the experience, they had the registry, they had the skill set, that gets passed on to the Americans, and then America has its own je ne sais quoi to the whole enterprise, and one of them is the appliance of science and technological innovation.

35:37 And we think about this period—so ’47, the foundation of the CIA, up until the present, so we’re talking about for most of that period, the Cold War—probably as much as anything, the Cold War, to me, is just a huge R&D competition. And part of the reason why America is so successful is because America is so good at R&D. If we think about Silicon Valley, if we think about all of the emerging and disruptive technology, it’s all coming out of this one place, one thing America has always been good at, just that restless, innovative model of capitalistic development, and that has big effects on the world of intelligence, when we’re talking about the modern age.

36:19 And how we keep that up in the next 250 is a big question. So, let’s talk, as we near our close here, about innovations that you’ve seen in the world of spycraft that made their way into the public life, in the public sphere. What are some of those? So again, if we just go back to earlier, when I was discussing the difference between, like, the spy world and intelligence broadly conceived, so the intelligence broadly conceived, that overlaps much more with the Department of Defense. So, if we think about DARPA and IARPA, think about the DARPANET, so the internet, a lot of that is related to this world. It may not be espionage in the very narrowest sense of the term, but it’s still intelligence, broadly conceived.

37:04 There’s a great book from 1986 called The Cuckoo’s Egg about cyber espionage. So, it’s possible to do it in that realm as well, but the internet would be a good example. Satellites. Think about Google Maps, all of those types of things, a lot of those innovations come from satellites. Well, why are the first satellites sent up? Well, I mean, partly, we’re in the Cold War era. The other side has nuclear weapons. They say that they’re not going to aim them towards us, and they’re not a threat, but we definitely want to be sure because this could wipe out our whole civilization. So, let’s send up satellites. Let’s keep an eye on them. Let’s see what they’re up to. Let’s see where they’re moving their troops. Let’s see where the Northern Fleet is with all of the nuclear submarines.

37:48 Let’s see where their intercontinental ballistic missiles are. Sometimes it’s very direct, other times it’s a bit more indirect. So, satellite technologies developed, then eventually we have, like, all of the, like, wonderful things that we have just now because of satellite. So, there’s so many ways that it feeds into modern American life. Again, it’s always there in the background, even if you don’t see it explicitly. Just one example that I’ll share with you that has recent topical connections is the story of the Glomar Explorer. So, the Glomar Explorer, essentially in the year 1968—now, this is a wonderful story—the year 1968, four submarines go missing: an Israeli submarine, a French submarine, an American submarine—the USS scorpion—and a Soviet submarine.

38:40 So, the Soviet submarine goes down northwest of Hawaii, about 1500 miles northwest of Hawaii. So, if you recall the last time you looked at a map of that region, it’s just blank. So, this submarine is seventeen-and-a-half-thousand feet under the ocean. So, the idea is, well, what if we can get a submarine, and raise it to the surface, and get intelligence from it? So, one of the reasons why submarines are so important during the Cold War is because they’re potential platforms to launch nuclear weapons. So sure, if a nuclear weapon gets launched from Russia to New York, then we’ve got, like, a little bit of time.

39:21 But if you’ve got a submarine a couple of hundred miles off of New York and the Atlantic Ocean that fires nuclear weapons to New York, I mean, the window of opportunity to do anything about it is incredibly small. So, it’s really important to understand where these submarines are, what they’re doing, all of those types of questions. So, the thought is, if we can get this submarine and bring it to the surface, we can find out what the Soviets are up to, what kind of engine technology they have, what kind of sonar technology they have, what about their weapon systems. The only problem is, no one’s ever got a ship or a submarine from seventeen-and-a-half-thousand feet underneath— A bit of a challenge [laugh] . A bit of a challenge [laugh] . So, they came up with this operation—so remember, this is 1968—they came up with this operation.

40:12 They purpose-built a ship called the Glomar Explorer. The famous Hollywood producer Howard Hughes gets involved. So, there’s a cover story that Howard Hughes is looking for manganese on the ocean floor, which is a thing, but it’s still, you know, one of the beauties about having Howard Hughes is, he’s famously wackadoodle, for want of a better term, and if you’ve got somebody that’s a bit nuts involved in your cover story… everything makes sense because crazy people do things that don’t make any [laugh] sense. [laugh] . So, to cut a long story short, eventually, the ship is built in 1974, it eventually finds its way out to where the Glomar Explorer went down.

40:55 It picks it up. It’s got these huge claws, if you want to think of it like that, it picks it up. It gets it two-thirds of the way up, and it’s almost like when you go to the fairgrounds and you try to win a teddy for your kids or your niece or something like this, two-thirds of the submarine plummets back to the floor of the ocean. But they bring up the one-third. It’s got an internal pool, so it’s not like you’re hoisting it up over the side; it just comes up inside the ship. Comes up inside the ship, they do what they’re going to do with it, try to gather the intelligence. They find some Soviet submariners on board, lay them to rest in a ceremony. A video of this is given to the Soviets after the Cold War ends.

41:38 So, that’s what happens. Then people in the press get wind of this. Eventually they approach the CIA and say, you know, “What’s going on here? Like, what’s happening?” The CIA came up with what’s known as the Glomar response. This is something most of your listeners will have heard of before, but they probably won’t know of it by this term, and it’s, “We can either confirm nor deny that this operation took place.” [laugh] . I like it. The Glomar response. The Glomar response. Very good. So, the perfect answer, non-answer. So, they give the Glomar response, and then to bring the story up to the present day, the CIA’s very first tweet when they set up a Twitter account is, “We can neither confirm nor deny this is our first tweet.” And then to bring it even more up to the present day, was it this year or last year when the—there was the huge catastrophe in Baltimore Harbor with the ship, so the largest crane on the east coast was a crane that was used to build the Glomar Explorer, and that crane was used for the recovery effort for this recent catastrophe in Baltimore.

42:46 Do we know, did they get actionable intelligence from what they were able to bring up? Do we know? There’s a declassified report that still has some redactions, online. We don’t know everything about what they found out, but you know, knowing that intelligence analysts can infer information or intelligence from the mere shred of data, undoubtedly there’s intelligence that they gathered from it. The scope and all the details and how significant it was, are still things that we don’t know, but if you’re able to pull some strings with your colleagues in the National Archives— [laugh] . — [laugh] get it declassified. Yeah. They’ll tell me where to go. But that’s all right [laugh] . [laugh] . That’s really such an interesting story, and so many of those stories you have here in the Spy Museum.

43:30 I know you also host SpyCast, a fellow podcaster. Can you tell us about SpyCast? So, SpyCast has been going since 2006, so it’s been around a while. I guess in podcasting terms, it’s like 2006 is like the Jurassic period. So, it’s been around for a while. It’s grown and evolved over the years. We’ve managed to take it up to last year, we got shortlisted for the People’s Choice Podcast awards in the history category. We had about 2.2 million downloads. We are listened to pretty much all over the world. 50% of the listeners are inside the states, 50% of them overseas.

44:13 I’m the fourth host, I think, of the podcast, so I started in 2020. When I took over, I think I was the first non-American host. You know, everybody brings something different to the table, but I just thought, we’re the International Spy Museum; we should internationalize it. Since then, I’m quite proud to say that we’ve had on a former head of Kenyan intelligence, a former head of Indian intelligence, we’ve had on serving heads of Australian intelligence and New Zealand intelligence. So, we’ve tried to broaden out in that sense. We’ve tried to cover new topics. We’ve tried to cover new ground that we’ve never covered before.

44:54 So, I’m actually going to step away from the podcast at the end of this calendar year because it’s sort of outgrown the role of the historian curator, which is my other job here. But it’s been a real pleasure to do, and I’m sure you feel the same. One of the things that I love about it is that I just get to constantly learn stuff— Oh yeah. —speak to interesting people. Very much the case. I certainly have learned a lot here, Andrew. Thank you so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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