Neatorama » CIA

CIA’s Password (“PIZZA”) Hacked

Alex — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:10:13 +0000

It's certainly inconvenient if your password is hacked and your identity stolen. But if the CIA's password is hacked, it may mean a death sentence for its covert operatives.

Recently, there was a huge setback for the CIA when its spies in Iran and Lebanon were caught because their password was cracked. What was that password? PIZZA:

In Beirut, two Hezbollah double agents pretended to go to work for the CIA. Hezbollah then learned of the restaurant where multiple CIA officers were meeting with several agents, according to the four current and former officials briefed on the case. The CIA used the codeword "PIZZA" when discussing where to meet with the agents, according to U.S. officials. Two former officials describe the location as a Beirut Pizza Hut. A current US official denied that CIA officers met their agents at Pizza Hut.

From there, Hezbollah's internal security arm identified at least a dozen informants, and the identities of several CIA case officers.

Link

Movie Consulting from the Department of Defense

Joanna Ong — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:09:25 +0000

Organizations like the CIA and Department of Defense have been assisting with blockbusters like Transformers for years. However, there have been complaints from insiders over potential security privacy leaks, raised during talks over an untitled film about the killing of bin Laden. Whether they have reason to be concerned or not, spokespeople insist there is a pragmatic reason for the comradery between Hollywood and national security: image control.

If you want to make a war film and need a fleet of F-22s, a crowd of Marines, or a Navy aircraft carrier, just call up the Department of Defense’s entertainment media office and they’ll tell you if the Army can spare that M1A1 Abrams tank you’ve always wanted for a day or two of filming.

“The scripts we get are only the writer’s idea of how the Department of Defense operates,” Vince Ogilvie, deputy director of the Defense Department’s entertainment liaison office, told Danger Room. “We make sure the Department and facilities and people are portrayed in the most accurate and positive light possible.”

Dialogue from the XtraNormal video featured on Wired explains things a bit differently:

Secret Agent Woman: “I’m glad you’re going to make a movie about how awesome the Central Intelligence Agency is. Everybody that works here is very smart and we never mess up and most people are extremely good-looking too.”
Michael Bay: “I agree because I want you to help me. Kaboom!”

Link | Image: XtraNormal Video

CIA Escape Kit, Made to Be Hidden Inside the Human Body

John Farrier — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 23:46:38 +0000

You can guess where. Wired has a gallery of gadgets from the history of espionage, including this CIA-issue escape kit from the 1960s.

Link via Nerdcore | Photo: International Spy Museum

The Craziest CIA Plots to Kill Castro

Alex — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:37:57 +0000

The following is an article from Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. Like the Coyote and Road Runner, the CIA was obsessively trying to kill Fidel Castro in the 1960s. But like Coyote, they just couldn't seem to do it. Was it because Castro was so wiley … or because the CIA was so incompetent? Here are some examples of how the anti-Castro super spies spent their time (and our money). CONCOCTING WEIRD PLOTS Seven plots against Castro that the CIA actually considered. 1. Use agents in Cuba to spread rumors that the second coming of Christ is imminent and that Castro is the anti-Christ. 2. Surprise him at the beach with an exploding conch shell. 3. Put thallium salts in his shoes or cigars during an appearance on "The David Susskind show," to make his beard and hair fall out. 4. Put itching powder in his scuba suit and LSD in his mouthpiece so he would be driven crazy and drown 5. Offer him exploding cigars designed to blow his head off. 6. Shoot him with a TV camera that has a machine gun inside. 7. Spray his broadcasting studio with hallucinogens. EMBARGOING BASEBALLS In its war against Fidel Castro during the 1960s, the CIA literally tried to play hardball politics. "The CIA tried to cut off the supply of baseballs to Cuba. Agents persuaded suppliers in other countries not ship them. (U.S. baseballs were already banned by the trade embargo the U.S. had declared.)" The bizarre embargo was effective. Some balls got through, "but the supply was so limited that the government had to ask fans to throw foul balls and home runs back onto the field for continued play. - Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies CONSULTING JAMES BOND How out-of-control was the CIA in its anti-Castro frenzy? They even took Ian Fleming's jokes seriously. This anecdote from Deadly Secrets, by Warren Hinckle and William Turner, says it all. (Photo: Ian Fleming Publications) "It was, even by Georgetown standards, one helluva dinner party. It was the spring of 1960. The hosts were Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The guest of honor was John Kennedy's favorite author, Ian Fleming. "Kennedy asked Fleming what his man James Bond might do is M. assigned him to get rid of Castro. Fleming had been in British Intelligence … He was quick to answer. According to his biographer, John Pearson, Fleming thought he would have himself some fun … "[He] said there were three things which really mattered to the Cubans—money, religion, and sex. Therefore, he suggested a triple whammy. First the United States should send planes to scatter [counterfeit] Cuban money over Havana. Second, using the Guantanamo base, the United States should conjure some religious manifestation, say, a cross of sorts in the sky which would induce the Cubans to look constantly skyward. And third, the United States should send planes over Cuba dropping pamphlets to the effect that owing to American atom bomb tests the atmosphere over the island had become radioactive; that radioactivity is held longest in the beards, and that radioactivity makes men impotent. As a consequence the Cubans would shave their beards, and without bearded Cubans there would be no revolution. "Fleming was staying at the house of British newsman Henry Brandon. The next day CIA director Allen Dulles called Brandon to speak to Fleming. Brandon said his guest had already left Washington. Dulles expressed great regret. He had heard about Fleming's terrific ideas for doing in Castro and was sorry he wouldn't be able to discuss them with him in person. "It is testimony to the resounding good sense exercised by the CIA during the Secret War that all three Fleming's spoof ideas were in one form or another attempted---or at least seriously considered." __________ Reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - check 'em out!

Lithuanian Horseback Riding Academy was a CIA Secret Prison

Alex — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:45:31 +0000

To many wealthy Lithuanians, it was just a fancy horseback riding academy. But horses aren’t the only things kept in the barn: the CIA had built a secret prison there, where they interrogated (or tortured, your choice of word) suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.

ABC News has the story:

The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.

According to sources who saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."

On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations.

Link

Cracking Kryptos

Alex — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:32:44 +0000

The following is an article from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader It sits just steps away from some of the most brilliant cryptographers in the country, and yet after nearly 20 years of trying no one has been able to unlock its secrets. OBJET D’ART In the late 1980’s, the General Services Administration, the federal agency responsible for building and operating government buildings, started accepting proposals for artwork to decorate a courtyard outside the cafeteria of the CIA’s new headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. One artist who submitted was James Sanborn, a sculptor from the Washington, D.C. area. Sanborn was struck by how CIA agents spend their entire lives keeping secrets from even their closest loved ones. He decided to put himself in their shoes: His sculpture, if accepted, would contain an encoded message- the CIA’s stock-in-trade—and only he’s take the secret with him to the grave, just like a CIA agent. (Photo: Elonka) OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD Sanborn pitches his concept to the GSA and won the commission. But he’s an artist, not a code expert, so he asked the CIA for assistance in coming up with a code that would be difficult for even the agency’s own cryptographers to crack. They put him in touch with Ed Scheidt, chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, and known within the agency as the “Wizard of Codes.” Scheidt coached Sanborn for four months—he was free to teach any technique that did not compromise the agency’s security—and then Sanborn spent two and a half years cutting 865 individual letters, plus some question marks in rows onto a giant sheet of copper that was to be the main part of the sculpture. He names it Kryptos, after the Greek word for “hidden.” The work was unveiled in November 1990; it consisted of a standing petrified log with a sheet of copper flowing out from it, almost like a sheet of paper rolling out of a computer printer. The work also featured several smaller elements: carved stones, smaller sheets of copper, and even a duck pond, located around the CIA campus. GOING PUBLIC Few people would have guessed that Kryptos would attract much public interest. The CIA headquarters is off-limits to anyone who doesn’t have business there, so the public never gets a chance to see the sculpture in person. Nevertheless, as CIA employees began to talk about it with outsiders—the sculpture is apparently one of the few things around the CIA that isn’t top secret—it wasn’t long before photographers, detailed descriptions, and transcriptions of the inscribed letters began circulating outside the agency. All over the country, aspiring code breakers set to work trying to unlock Kryptos’ secrets. The first person outside the intelligence community to make significant progress was James Gillogly, a computer scientist from Los Angeles. In 1999 he announced that the information on the copper scroll was actually four different encrypted passages, not just one, and that he had succeeded in cracking three of them (768 of the 865 characters) using software he had written. Gillogly’s announcement prompted the CIA to admit publicly what had already become well known within the intelligence community: A team of four National Security Agency employees had cracked the same three sections of the code in 1992 using NSA computers, and in 1998 a CIA analyst named David Stein—had been able to crack the last section of the code. AS EASY AS ONE, TWO, THREE As the code breakers discovered, Sanborn encrypted the first two sections, known as K1 and K2 to code buffs, using substitution, a classic technique in which each letter of the alphabet is switched with another. For example, if X substitutes for the letter D, R substitutes for O, and B substitutes for G, then the word DOG is encrypted as XRB. K3, the third passage, was encrypted using another classic technique called transposition. Instead of substituting one letter for another, the existing letters are rearranged according to some systematic pattern. Using transcription, DOG could be encrypted as DGO, OGD, ODG, GOD and GDO. That may sound pretty simple to crack, but is DOG appeared in a larger body of text, the hundreds of thousands of letters, making the code very difficult to solve. ADD’EM UP How do cryptographers identify these codes? One interesting feature of many languages—including English—is that no matter what the text, letters always appear in roughly the same frequency, For example, the letter E is likely to appear about 12% of the time in any passage, more often than any other letter if the alphabet. The letter Q appears least often—only 0.2% of the time. So if the letter X appears in a body of encrypted text about 12% of the time, there’s a good chance that the letter X is substituting for the letter E, and the encryption method used is substitution. But if the letters in the encrypted text appear about as often a you’d expect them to in an unencrypted text—E still appears about 12% of the time—then the encryption method used is likely to be transposition. ENCRYPTION REVEALED The first passage of Kryptos, K1, was decoded to read as follows: BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION (Sanborn deliberately misspelled illusion to make it more difficult to crack; he did the same thing with the other words in K2 and K3.: The second passage, K2, was decoded to read: IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO The graphic coordinates indicate a point on the CIA campus about 200 feet south of the sculpture. Why this point is mentioned in the text, or what the rest of the text is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess. Sanborn hasn’t given up many clues. He has revealed, however, that WW stands for William Webster, who was CIA director when Kryptos was dedicated. (According to CIA legend, Webster refused to pay for the sculpture unless Sanborn handed over a copy of the solution…which is how “WW” seem to know the “exact location” of whatever it is that is “buried out there somewhere”… if there really is something buried “out there.” The CIA’s copy of the solution—if it really does exist—is believed to remain in the CIA director’s safe to this day.) The third passage, K3, decoded: SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q (?) Sanborn created this passage by paraphrasing archaeologist Howard Carter’s description of his opening of King Tut’s tomb in his 1923 book, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. The passage deals with discovery, which fits in with the sculpture’s theme of decoding encrypted texts. Sanborn included the text because it was one of his favorite passages since childhood. So how is K4, the fourth section of the sculpture , encrypted? No one but Sanborn knows. Here’s the encoded text as it appears on the sculpture. Let us know if you get anywhere with it: OBKRUOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSOTWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJK LUDIAWINFBNYPVTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAEKCAR CONCEALED IN PLAIN SIGHT Why is the K4 passage so much more difficult to crack than the other three? It could be that it’s not written in English—Sanborn has used Russia-language codes in other works of art—which would make statistical analysis of the characters much more difficult. He could also have used any number of “concealment” techniques to mask the text. Removing all the vowels before encoding the message is one method of concealment; another is spelling words out phonetically: If a word like”people” is spelled “peephul,” for example, the correct solution may appear to be meaningless gibberish at first glance, causing the code breakers and computer software to discard to correct solution without realizing what it is. The number of people attempting to crack the final Kryptos code grew dramatically after the references to the sculpture appeared on the dust jacket of the bestseller The Da Vinci Code. One website dedicated to solving Kryptos saw its traffic increase from a few hundred hits per month to more than 30,000…but no one has been able to crack the final code yet. There have been hints that Kryptos will be featured in the plot of the sequel to the Da Vinci Code; if so, the sculpture’s fame is just beginning. QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS There may be other clues that will aid in decoding the fourth passage. Some of the letters cut into the copper are slightly higher than others in the same row. Why? And because all 865 letters are cut all the way through the copper, sunlight slows through the sculpture to create interesting patterns of light and shadow on the ground. Do these patterns provide a clue to cracking the code? It’s a big possibility—remember, the first decoded passage reads, “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of Iqlusion.” If the light and shadows around the sculpture do provide a clue, that will make cracking the code very difficult, at least for outsiders, since none of them have been allowed into CIA headquarters to study the sculpture in person. Adding insult to mystery, Sanborn placed a number of large stones around the base of the sculpture. This, and the fact that the copper sheet curves around to form an S Shape, makes it virtually impossible to capture all the encoded text in a single photograph. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE Remember, the copper scroll is only the main part of Sanborn’s work—there are several other mysterious objects scattered around the CIA campus, including stone-and-copper slabs with mysterious messages like “virtually invisible” and “t is your position” engraved into the copper in Morse code. There’s also a magnetic lodestone set on the grounds that appears to be pulling a compass needle carved into a nearby rock away from due North. What does it all mean…and what about the duck pond? Are there clues hidden there, or does Sanborn just like ducks? Denied access to the genuine article, many aspiring cryptographers have visited the other code sculptures Sanborn created since Kryptos. Antipodes, one he created for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., contains a copy of the same encrypted text that appears on Kryptos, Other code crunchers use 3D modeling software to create elaborate models of Kryptos and the CIA grounds and study those for clues. A few pesky diehards have even stooped to calling Sanborn on the phone to beg for hints…but he refuses to play ball. Which of the sculpture’s features provide clues to decoding the fourth passage…and which one hints at the solution to the final riddle within a riddle that Sanborn says can be solved only after all four passages have been decoded? Is there really something buried somewhere in the CIA campus, perhaps a prize of some kind, waiting to be discovered by the person who finally cracks the rest of the code? Only Sanborn and (perhaps) the CIA director know for sure, and they aren’t talking.

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. Proving that some things do get better with age, the latest Bathroom Reader is jam-packed with 600 pages of fascinating trivia, forgotten history, strange lawsuits and other neat articles. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

The Code the CIA Can’t Crack

John Farrier — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:34:58 +0000

In 1988, artist James Sanborn was commissioned to create an outdoor sculpture to adorn the CIA’s facility in Langley, Virginia. So he created Kryptos, a 10-foot high scroll of copper filled with letters. Its 865 characters contain, the artist asserts, a coded message. But even the best CIA cryptologists have been unable to crack all of it. One of the four sections remains a complete mystery. At the link, you can read about Sanborn’s extensive study of cryptology while planning the sculpture and the passion that it has inspired among devoted codebreakers.

Link via Instapundit

Viagra for Afghan Warlords

Miss Cellania — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:34:32 +0000

Money is too obvious and weapons are dangerous, so what is the CIA using to bribe information from Afghan warlords these days? Viagra!

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.

Viagra is only one of the enticements the CIA uses. The drug doesn’t have a particular appeal for younger men. Link -Thanks, Justin!