The Spies Next Door

I wrote an article for Byte Magazine around 1980, back when that was a big deal. It was a technical article about something I won't mention and it got a lot of good reviews and I made a minor bit of money for it.

A few weeks later, I received a postcard from someone claiming to be a university professor in Budapest, Hungary. He said he loved the article and was wondering if I could send him copies of it to read. I was a bit surprised because Hungary, then, was a communist country and you just didn't communicate such things to them.

A week or so later, I got another postcard from someone in Budapest making the same claim and also wanting a copy of the article.

Wanting to be a good citizen and patriot, I felt someone needed to know about this so I called the FBI. They invited me to their offices in one of the new, cool Federal buildings so I thought this would be fun. Getting inside, though, showed they still painted the walls that boring, 50s, pea-green.

In just a few minutes, I was escorted to a back room by an agent. On the table he had a folder with copies of the postcards and article I had sent them earlier. He was a nice guy but I noticed the cheap suit he wore; not wool but nylon or some other "plastic" material.

We talked for a bit about what the article was about and how these Hungarians may have come across it and why they were writing me. My last name is Hungarian so that may have been part of it.

He said, this is step one for such people to make contact. If I sent copies of the article, they may write back and ask me more questions, or ask me about other articles, technical info, my family, how I'm doin', and so on. One day, I may get a phone call: "Hi, I'm a friend of that university professor you were writing and he asked me to stop by and say Hi!" but that would probably never happen so don't worry about it.

So he asked me to send copies of the article to him anyway just to see what happens. Wanting to be a good citizen and patriot, I said, "Of course!". I thought it would be fun!

Weeks went by. My wife went to bed right after dinner with a bad cold. I went in the other room to watch TV with the sound turned down. The phone rang.

"Hi! Is this, icantthinkofone?". (Not my real name.) The voice on the other end said he was with a publishing company I had never heard of. He had read my article in Byte, thought it was very good, and wanted to know if I could write a book about other technical subjects ... like disk drives.

I felt like someone grabbed my chest with their fist. A pall fell over me and I started to sweat. There was an article in the EE Times about how the Soviets were after disk drive technology just the other day. Was this a Hungarian spy?! I had no way of knowing. I never heard of his company. I asked him to send me a sample book to examine their writing style. The next day, I called the FBI.

A week later, I received the book. The FBI confirmed the caller was legit. I never heard from my Hungarian professors again. The FBI never called me. What I thought would be 'fun' was one of the most frightening moments in my life. (And I never wrote the book.)

The cover story wasn't just "deep ocean mining". They needed to be more specific to explain the unusual equipment. CIA has created an entire fake geological industry for this operation — manganese nodules mining (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule).

Manganese nodules do exist for real, but they never have been easily recoverable enough for commercial exploitation. CIA had started the operation to convince the scientific community otherwise. They flooded the geological and mining industry periodicals with hundreds of fake peer-reviewed papers describing some details of nodule recovery process, to make it appear doable. First, it served as the explanation for Glomar Explorer activities; second, they created a distraction for Russians and other nations, who enthusiastically started they own nodule mining projects (all abandoned after the operation details leaked).

Russians bought it fully. In our periodicals, we had many enthusiastic articles about the future of deep ocean mining and endless sources of rare metals. Then, it vanished abruptly. I can't even imagine the fury of Russian intelligence when they had learned the details. And who knows, what other peer reviewed scientific publications today are just a cover story for some big spy game?

There was a man who had an audience with the king of Sung and received from him a gift of ten carriages. With his ten carriages, he went bragging and strutting to Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu said, “There’s a poor family down by the river who make their living by weaving articles out of mugwort. The son was diving in the deepest part of the river and came upon a pearl worth a thousand pieces of gold. His father said to him, ‘Bring a rock and smash it to bits! A pearl worth a thousand in gold could only have come from under the chin of the Black Dragon who lives at the bottom of the ninefold deeps. To be able to get the pearl, you must have happened along when he was asleep. If the Black Dragon had been awake, do you think there’d have been so much as a shred of you left?’ Now the state of Sung is deeper than the ninefold deeps, and the king of Sung more truculent than the Black Dragon. In order to get these carriages, you must have happened along when he was asleep. If the king of Sung had been awake, you'd have ended up in little pieces!”

“They were looking at old images,” Sharp says. “They refreshed the closed-circuit images and . . . gone.”

There you go. Working for the CIA is just like web development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/experience-the-coll...