In a foreign capital recently, an American spy was facing an unexpected dilemma: how to cancel a clandestine first meeting with a promising new recruit? People were not leaving their homes, so the usually crowded shops, bars, buses, parks, and restaurants were empty, and there was no longer a place to meet without arousing suspicion.
Some of the tradecraft familiar to readers of spy novels and anyone who’s watched “The Americans” — “dead drops, in which flash drives and other material are left in predetermined locations; “brush passes” in which information is exchanged by people bumping into one another; make-up, wigs, changes of clothing and cars — have been complicated in recent years by surveillance cameras, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and other evolving technologies.
For example, in 2017, the CIA was forced to extract, or “exfiltrate” in spy-talk, a longtime U.S. agent from Russia who was privy to some of President Vladimir Putin’s thinking and who helped the Agency conclude in 2016 with “high confidence” that Putin was seeking to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. In part because of the loss of that asset, the current U.S.
Despite having warned of the dangers of a possible flu pandemic for years, working-level intelligence officers in multiple agencies said several of those agencies were ill-prepared to follow those guidelines.
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