In this week’s Six Secrets we reveal top spy skills for civilians. We’ll brief you on how intelligence pros travel incognito, hone counter-surveillance skills, and perfect brush passes and dead drops. If you want to play in the big leagues, you'll need all this!
Travel tradecraft
Travel like a spy. Bring your own door stop, ask for a hotel room on the middle floors, and beware of honeytraps. Foreign travel and intrigue go hand-in-hand so find out where you are most vulnerable with SPYSCAPE’s tips from the CIA, MI6, and the world’s top security experts.
Espionage operatives worldwide hone their surveillance and counter-surveillance skills at spy school but you too can apply professional tactics in hostile environments. SPYSCAPE reveals how covert operatives track targets, plan surveillance detection routes (SDRs), and shake off a tail.
The Americans creator and former CIA officer Joe Weisberg trained actors Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys how to perform a great little piece of tradecraft known as the ‘brush pass’, allowing them to collect intel in an aspirin bottle and perform a brush contact at an amusement park. It’s a skill so subtle that even a real-life, trained surveillance team can miss the handover. Are you up for the challenge?
How closely do the silver screen and the spying game overlap? The Night Manager star Alistair Petrie meets former CIA chief of disguise Jonna Mendez in The Spying Game podcast. Presenter Rory Bremner hears it all, from Jonna’s recollections of the real Argo operation to how The Planet of the Apes helped the CIA go full Ethan Hunt.
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Our True Spies operatives bring you the inside story each week on the spy tradecraft 007 made famous, so you too can master the difference between SADRAT and SIGINT, cobblers and case officers. Host Vanessa Kirby brings you inside the world’s most exciting operations teeming with microdots, moles, and Morse code.
FBI agent Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) is tracking KGB spy Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper) in Breach (2007) when the traitor drives to a Virginia park, leaves a parcel of secrets under a bridge, and uses a chalk mark to let Russian handlers know his dead drop is ‘loaded’. Some operatives still use the old-school tradecraft to avoid electronic surveillance, but are you brave enough to slip into the shadows?
