1. Social Media Covers

Spies no longer just need great covers in the physical world, but they need carefully created social media accounts in their fake names, with tie-ins to their broader cover story. That makes clandestine work more difficult but also offers more opportunity. Take the case of Dickson Yeo, a visiting scholar at George Washington University and a “political risk analyst,” who, just days ago, admitted in court that he was actually working with the Chinese intelligence service and was using LinkedIn to target Americans in the military and government to harvest information from them.

Smartphones and the ability to hack them have made the classic tactic of “dead drops” dangerous because the other side can track your movements and see where you visit regularly. But they don’t necessarily need your device. We’ve all heard of smartphone bugs, but documents released from DARPA in 2016 revealed that the U.S. government’s defense research agency has been trying to perfect insect espionage for decades, and one U.K. company is already rolling them out.

3. Cryptography Race

For decades, U.S. and German intelligence have used Swiss company Crypto AG’s encoding devices to spy on other countries. While the machines were encrypted, it emerged early this year that the CIA and Germany's BND had rigged the devices to crack the codes and intercept thousands of messages. However, the gulf between the crypto haves — the U.S., Russia, China, Israel, U.K. and France — and have-nots is widening.

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Remember the name. The head of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, Kostyukov, 59, leads Moscow’s interference in the 2020 U.S. elections. In 2018, he was sanctioned by the U.S. for his role in the 2016 vote meddling — when he was deputy chief. He’s only become bolder since then, having already targeted Germany’s parliament with cyberattacks. Your social media feed, or even your polling booth’s power supply, could be next.

She’s responsible for stopping Kostyukov. The first woman to head America’s external intelligence agency, the 63-year-old CIA director has kept a low profile — as befits spies — while earning both the support of President Donald Trump and the respect of Democrats in Congress.

3. Thulani Dlomo

His nickname is “Silence,” and for good reason. An ally of former South African President Jacob Zuma, Dlomo led special operations at the country’s State Security Agency and was appointed as ambassador to Japan. Current President Cyril Ramaphosa summoned him back from Tokyo last year, but he vanished — reappearing months later. He’s been fired, but Dlomo is a survivor with connections.

4. Silvia Majdalani

The former No. 2 in Argentina’s intelligence hierarchy under former President Mauricio Macri was known to throw darts in her office. Now the 62-year-old is facing a trial on charges of illegal spying on Peronists who were then in opposition but are now in power.

5. Chen Wenqing

When the U.S. forced China to close down its Houston consulate in July, accusing Beijing of stealing American military and industrial secrets, it was in effect pointing a finger at Chen. The 60-year-old veteran spy heads China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s top intelligence-gathering agency.

6. Rachel Noble

Australia’s first female intelligence chief, Noble must blunt the efforts of Chen and his colleagues, as Beijing and Canberra increasingly cross swords over alleged spying by China in Australia. 

7. Yossi Cohen

After leading the acquisition of Iran’s nuclear secrets that informed Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the 58-year-old chief of Israel’s Mossad is now seen as a potential future prime minister.

8. Bernard Emie

A career diplomat, Emie, 61, heads France’s external spy agency, known as the DGSE. But his real power could well lie in the influence he will wield over the France-led Intelligence College in Europe, a new forum of spy agencies consisting of 23 EU members that could form the basis for a future collective defense architecture.

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1. Blurred Lines

The rule that you are “either in or out” has become a thing of the past. The boundaries between public and private sector intelligence work are blurring, with private contractors making up an essential part of the spy world. Intelligence officers regularly move into the private sector once they leave or retire, eroding the mystique of the dark arts. Case in point? Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who became a private contractor and produced the infamous — factually uneven — Trump dossier about his relationship with Russia.

2. Under the Scanner

Last year, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that decisions from the U.K. surveillance tribunal covering security service spying on individuals must be open to challenge in the courts. Unlike in the past, spymasters in democratic countries have to justify what they do and accept escalating legislative and judicial scrutiny.

3. Chaos Theory

Even before the pandemic — when spies from China and Russia started attempting to swipe other countries’ vaccine research — the world was in upheaval. In an era of swift political change from Belarus to Bolivia, and shifting alliances amid the growing U.S.-China rivalry and the rise of populism, espionage is becoming more important than ever for leaders to make sense of uncertainty and gain an edge.

1. Biblical Allusion

Spycraft is in no way a new phenomenon. In the Bible, we read about Joshua sending out spies, ancient historians such as Plutarch have mentioned spies in their writing, and history tells us how Elizabeth I defeated the Spanish armada with information from her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s code breakers and spymasters helped him defeat the Austrians, and the tsars had the Okhrana to monitor internal and external threats against them. And that’s just to name a few…

Agent 355 is credited as one of America’s first female undercover operatives and was integral to the Revolutionary War efforts. This badass was captured by the British and died on a prison ship, the HMS Jersey, from severe maltreatment. Despite her bravery, her true identity remains unknown more than 200 years later.

3. Social Butterfly

Inspired by the attempted assassination of a Japanese collaborator by the female Chinese spy Zheng Pingru, Eileen Chang’s novella Lust, Caution went on to become an Ang Lee-directed feature film. But Pingru’s life story offers much more. For her intelligence-gathering during the late 1930s as well as an attempted assassination bid on Ding Mocun, the Taiwanese government formally declared the socialite spy a “martyr,” and the Communist Party of China called her an "anti-Japanese heroine." A memorial with a statue of Zheng was unveiled in Shanghai in 2009.

Pham Xuan An knew two things well: how to write good copy and how to trick Americans. In fact, after studying journalism in California, he returned to Vietnam in 1960 as a correspondent with Reuters and then later with Time — the first Vietnamese person on staff there to cover the Vietnam War. Infiltrating the American press was his golden ticket to making Americans believe that they were losing the war. And while An misled his colleagues, he didn’t abandon them.

Morris “Moe” Berg — called “the strangest man ever to play baseball” by Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel — had made a career of being mysterious long before he became a spy in the decades following his 1939 retirement from baseball. The inspiration behind the movie The Catcher Was a Spy worked many missions, including parachuting into Yugoslavia to gather intelligence on groups resisting the Nazis and several trips inside the Soviet Union. He also gained a reputation as a sloppy spy who sometimes forgot to remove his OSS-issued wristwatch before going undercover.

6. Code Name: Madeleine

Indian-origin British spy Noor Inayat Khan may soon be on a set of coins titled “Service to the Nation.” The first radio operator to be sent to Paris to work for the British Special Operations Executive’s resistance network, she stayed put under the code name Madeleine until she was arrested in 1943.

When she was sentenced to death on two counts of espionage, World War II British spy Odette Sansom told her German captors: “You will have to make up your mind on which count I am to be executed because I can only die once!” That’s the kind of sass you expect from a spy. And Sansom had that and more — in fact, she survived torture to make the Nazis pay for their crime. Because wartime valor favors no gender