Spies have many cunning weapons in their arsenal but none so diabolical as dirty tricks: honey traps, blackmail, smear campaigns, and even assassination. The CIA has a long history of skulduggery during covert ops and the Agency certainly isn’t alone in playing spy games. SPYSCAPE dives into the shadowy arts this week, a world of dark corners and dirty dossiers.
Kompromat
There's nothing quite like incriminating evidence and a well-placed threat to ‘persuade’ an enemy to see things your way. The use of compromising material to discredit a foe is a tactic straight from the Soviet playbook but technology has added a sinister new dimension. SPYSCAPE traces the history of kompromat up to modern-day scandals, a revealing century of the darkest of dark arts.
Spies on the offensive often dabble in Ds - destroy, deny, degenerate, and disrupt to discredit the enemy. The goal is to plant misinformation and shut down the opposition but what exactly was Britain’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group up to back in the early 2000s? Their ‘Effects’ campaign involved cyber attacks, propaganda ops, and a whole lot more.
“We're not Boy Scouts,” CIA director Richard Helms liked to remind critics, a wry understatement from a spymaster described as a ‘gentlemanly planner of assassinations’. Helms was a scorpion, a master of dirty tricks, and the only CIA director ever convicted of lying to Congress. Our deep dive lays bare five of Helm’s most outlandish operations and poses a question: how did he get away with it?
CIA officer Jack Devine felt lucky to be in Santiago, Chile in the 1970s, a hotspot of left-leaning activism. He arrived just before the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in a 1973 coup and helped lay the groundwork for the regime change. Turns out, an $800 payoff can go a long way to help stir up unrest. What Jack didn’t know was that a brutal dictatorship would follow.
Karl and Hana Koecher were an ‘it’ couple in Washington’s social circles during the ‘70s, an era marked by Vietnam, sexual liberation and women’s rights. Karl was also an intellectual, an undercover KGB sleeper agent who excelled at collecting kompromat at ‘swingers’ parties where CIA officers, Pentagon officials, and at least one US Senator traded wives. What could possibly go wrong?
Get a FREE copy of Honest Answers this Story Monday!
Get a FREE copy of a hot thriller, spy story, or crime novel every Monday with a special Story Mondays ticket to SPYSCAPE HQ. Next Monday it's Honest Answers by Lena Sisco. Make sure you never go into an important conversation feeling unheard, unprepared, or uninformed again—apply the proven SISCO method for communication to become a master negotiator, trusted interviewer, and engaging conversationalist. Don't miss your FREE copy when you experience SPYSCAPE HQ next Monday.
Long before claims of hacks and election interference, American politics were the target of spies and lies - cheating, subversion, disinformation, and political warfare were all bedfellows on the campaign trail. Here are 10 of the most notorious scandals of the past 150 years - from the 1880 Morey Letter to the punchy 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot.
