It's True! Your Cat Could Be a Spy
Page 5
Intelligence official.
The man in the grey suit read from his files.
‘Dusko Popov is a Yugoslav businessman,’ he
said. ‘He likes wine and women and fast cars.
The Germans wanted him to be a spy
for them. He accepted. Then
he came to us and offered to be
a double agent. He could bring in a lot
of valuable information.’
‘Then let’s accept his offer,’ said the
official, whose name was Ian Fleming.
After the war, Fleming wrote a series of thrilling
adventures about a secret agent named James
Bond, which later became hugely successful films.
It’s possible that James Bond was inspired by the
agent Dusko Popov. Popov was very good at spying
and information-gathering. It’s a pity the Americans
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didn’t listen to his warning that the Japanese were
planning to bomb Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where there
were many US warships and planes. The course of
World War II would have been very different if the US
Pacific Fleet hadn’t been attacked on 7 December 1941.
Immediately after the attack the US, which had been
neutral, decided to join the Allies in the war against
Japan and Germany.
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CYBER-SPYING
The heads of spy agencies around the world must
have been thrilled when computers were invented.
For centuries, they’d had to get their information the
hard way – by getting people to break in, pay bribes
and copy secret documents or smuggle them out.
Now with computers, and computer networks, they
could . . . well . . . get people to burgle, bribe and make copies. But the spies didn’t
have to leave home to do it.
No more running the risk
of being taken prisoner or
being forced to say
who’d sent them.
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All they needed now was a computer, a phone line
and a lot of talent. The age of the computer hacker
had arrived.
SO, WHAT DOES A HACKER DO?
Think of a hacker as a
sort of burglar who sits
at home, breaks into
other people’s
computers,
and helps
himself to
information. If the computers have
been networked (linked together), the hacker can poke
around in all the computers in the network, or even
sabotage the system. Hackers can also use viruses to
infiltrate networks all over the world.
Most hackers are computer nerds who like to show
off their skills. Sometimes they are just thieves, out to steal money from bank accounts, or to steal secrets for
a competing business. And then there are the spies . . .
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THE ‘HANOVER HACKER’
In 1986, Clifford Stoll had a job programming
computers at a university laboratory in Berkeley,
California. In those days the Internet existed, but only a few people used it for business. Personal computers
were not as common as they are now, but universities,
governments and businesses were starting to use
networks. Computer users had passwords, but didn’t
yet understand how important it was to be careful
with them.
One day, Cliff was asked to fix a small problem.
The lab kept track of how much time and money was
spent on computer use. Each time someone logged into
the network, the cost was registered by an accounting
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program. A bill was 75 cents more than it should have
been. Cliff expected to fix the problem very quickly.
Then he realised there was something strange
about this ‘mistake’. He tracked the 75 cents to a user
whose log-in name was ‘Hunter’, but ‘Hunter’ wasn’t
on the lab’s official list. Checking further, he found
that ‘Hunter’ had been using the log-in account of a
worker who was overseas and hadn’t used the account
in a year. The intruder had used the account to give
himself ‘system manager’ privileges, which meant he
could not only look around the computer network
for information, but could
make changes.
‘Hunter’ was definitely a
hacker at work.
TRACK THE
HACKER
For months, Cliff Stoll made a note of every ‘visit’.
He printed out everything the hacker typed into
the network, and even set his pocket pager to beep
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whenever the hacker was on-line. The hacker turned
up at all sorts of strange times, so sometimes Cliff
slept under his desk at the lab, much to his girlfriend’s annoyance!
It would have been easy for Cliff to block the
network against the intruder, but Cliff wasn’t satisfied with that. If the hacker was blocked at the Berkeley lab, he’d find another entry point to the network, and then
nobody would be able to track him. Cliff also knew
that the hacker was using the Berkeley computers to
get into other networks, including medical computers.
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He could mess up records, and sick people’s lives might be at risk if he wasn’t stopped.
When he found out that the hacker was after
military secrets, Cliff warned the FBI and CIA,
America’s two intelligence agencies. But neither was
very alarmed. If no money was involved (except the
75 cents) and no actual damage had been done, then
they didn’t see it as their problem. Even the police
weren’t interested.
Eventually, with help from other computer experts,
Cliff discovered that the phone calls connecting the
hacker to the computer networks were coming from
outside the US, from Hanover in West Germany.
Now the CIA and FBI were interested. But they insisted on doing their own investigations and wouldn’t tell
Cliff what was happening.
Frustrated, Cliff continued on his own. Then his
girlfriend, Martha, had a great idea: since the hacker
wanted military secrets, why not give him false ones?
They set up a phoney military program called SDINET
and invented a secretary who sent and received letters
and documents with tempting military names for the
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program. The ‘secretary’ invited official users to write to her and ask for copies.
Only a system manager could access SDINET, but
ordinary system managers wouldn’t be interested in
military secrets. If anyone wrote, it would have to be the hacker. Cliff and Martha waited . . . would their
trap work?
Someone did reply! But the letter for documents
came from an American address, not from Germany.
Cliff contacted the CIA once more and got results.
Caught!
The hacker turned out to be a man called Markus
Hess, one of a group who had been selling their stolen
secrets to the KGB (the spy agency
of the Soviet Union). The KGB
had asked a man working for
them in the US to send the letter,
to make sure if SDINET was real.
Markus and his hacker mates
w
ere sentenced to two years
in prison, and Cliff wrote a
best-selling book about it all.
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This happened in the days when hackers and viruses
were rare. Now the Internet is used all around the
world. We often hear about a new virus, or someone
caught hacking into banking or military networks
across the world. And spy hackers are probably out
there snooping for secrets . . . The Internet has become a hacker heaven.
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9
SHORT NINJA,
TALL TALES
Silent, mysterious, fast-moving figures
in black . . . leaping over rooftops and
running up walls, a sword at your throat in
an instant . . . They disappear into the shadows
unnoticed and overhear whispered secrets.
They are the ninja – warriors, spies and assassins of
Japan. Today, ninja arts (ninjutsu) are practised
by people who certainly don’t lurk in the
shadows, kill or spy on enemies. ‘Ninja’
comes from Japanese words shinobi-no-mono,
meaning ‘a person who hides his presence’.
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Extraordinary stories were told about the ninja.
People thought they had supernatural powers, but they
were just very, very good at what they did. The ninja
probably encouraged the stories to make
their enemies more afraid.
In one story, a dwarf ninja
supposedly hid in the pit under an
enemy lord’s toilet and stabbed him
when he went to relieve himself!
Probably the lord died of a stroke,
but it’s easy to see how a
story like this would spread.
And it’s only one of many tall
tales about what these skilled
fighters and spies could do.
Japanese warriors, the samurai, had a strict code
of honour. Honour was challenging your enemy and
fighting man-to-man in the open. Ninja behaviour
was the opposite. Ninja used ambushes and surprise
attacks, and often travelled in disguise. No wonder
the samurai thought ninja dishonourable. They were
tortured to death if they were caught.
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Some Japanese warlords trained their own people as
spies. Others hired ninja. After all, ninja were experts.
If you were trapped in a fortress with enemies outside,
you’d be glad to have ninja warriors with you, because
they could escape. There’s a story of one besieged
castle, and in the night a ninja slipped out into the
enemy camp, stole their flag, then flew it from the
castle the next day to mock them.
STRAW DUMMIES AND
NIGHTINGALE FLOORS
Ninjutsu was a family thing.
Young ninja would be trained
from childhood in the
different techniques of fighting,
running, hiding,
swimming and so on. They spent
a lifetime perfecting their skills.
No wonder the lords of
warring clans took so much
trouble to protect themselves!
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In their castles they had traps, including squeaky
floors called nightingale floors because they ‘sang’
when someone stepped on them. The night guards
would be on the scene immediately if they had
unwelcome company.
Ninja were expert at disguise and did their
homework. A ninja dressed as a farmer or priest would
certainly know about farming or the priesthood, so
his disguise would be convincing. He’d also be able to
speak in different local accents to fool ferrymen when
crossing rivers. Some ninja lived and worked inside
an enemy fortress, but they were really ‘sleeper agents’
who were called on when needed.
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Ninja history goes back a long way. In the 1400s,
there were around 70 ninja clans on the main Japanese
island, Honshu. Ninja specialised in espionage.
Their leaders were called jonin. The ‘middle men’ who arranged jobs with the lords were called the chunin.
The fighters were known as the genin. They did the spying and fighting, and often didn’t know who their
boss was.
Some ninja clans worked for just one noble family.
The most famous ninja leader, Fuma Kotaro Nobuyuki,
served a family called the Hojo, as his ancestors had.
He led about 200 ninja who fought, spied and gathered
information for the Hojo. Fuma Kotaro Nobuyuki’s
most famous action was a night attack on enemy
forces, the Takeda. He had his men fake an attack, using horses with straw dummies as warriors. Meanwhile,
the ninja smuggled themselves into the enemy camp,
hiding along the sides of stolen Takeda horses. Then
they attacked. In the darkness and confusion, the
Takeda were killing each other instead of the Fuma.
This was the ninja way of doing things. Not
‘honourable’, but intelligent!
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NINJA FACTS AND FICTION
Some people say the ninja
* wear black costumes
* throw star-shaped metal knives
* can walk through walls or ‘shape-shift’
* can become invisible
* can fly
* come back as ghosts.
Are these things true?
Well, there is a ninja uniform, trousers and hood in black, brown or dark blue, to help hide at night (or
white in snowy weather), but they didn’t wear it while
they were spying. Imagine a spy walking into an enemy
stronghold in uniform! Mostly, ninja wore whatever
was useful, including chain mail when they fought.
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The star-knives,
shuriken, were used to
help ninja escape when
they were being chased.
They weren’t always
accurate, but were
useful to scare and delay the
pursuer. Ninja carried other
weapons to use in fights, such as
knives and swords.
They couldn’t walk through
walls, of course. In Japanese
houses, which had lots
of gaps and crawl-spaces,
someone who knows the art of movement, and how
to blend in with the landscape, can seem invisible.
They couldn’t fly, either, but they were great acrobats.
One ninja is supposed to have faked
his own death so he could pretend to
be a ghost. If people believe
you’re superhuman, they
might well believe you’re a ghost too!
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Jiro’s justice!
There’s a story about Jiro, a young boy whose ninja
father was killed by the Lord of Kuwana. Jiro was
determined to avenge his father’s death. First he made
friends with the lord’s son and went inside the house.
One day, Jiro hid in an old well and the lord’s son
thought he’d gone home. That night, Jiro climbed into
the roof and drilled a hole into the
ceiling above the Lord of Kuwana.
He lowered a silken thread through
the hole, and he dripped poison
down the thread – right
into the snoring mouth
of
the lord! He went
home, leaving Kuwana
to die.
Kings, queens and emperors have always had spies.
Today governments have intelligence agencies and big
businesses steal information from each other. As long
as people have secrets, there will be spies . . .
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S U E B U R S Z T Y N S K I saw her first spy
movie when she was eight. There was a family
rumour that her cousin had worked for military
intelligence, but Sue didn’t follow in his footsteps.
Instead she writes books about monsters,
astronauts, archaeology, women scientists,
wheels, and fiction books too. She works in a
school library and might be spotted at science
fiction conventions. Sue doesn’t have a cat.
M I t c h V a n e Code-nAMe: The Squid,
becAuse of her use of black ink in many of her
illustrations. Specialises in identikit Pictures,
forgerY, and secret codes.
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THANKS
I would like to thank Nikki White for advice on ninja, Bart Rutherford O’Connor for help on hackers, Anne Watling for checking the text, Gary Pearl, Joanne Davis, Fiona Ellem and the students of Gandel Besen House, Dandenong West Primary School and Charleville State School.
Sue Bursztynski
The publishers would like to thank the following for
photographs used through the book:
istockphoto.com and photographers: Stefan Klein (torn paper, photo frames and folder used throughout text), pages viii, 37 Edyta Pawlowska (magnifying glass), pages i, 51 James Hernandez (paw prints), page viii Sue Colvil (Roman soldier), page 5 Maartje van Caspel (notebook computer), page 20 Dan Brandenburg (soldiers), page 28 Greg Nicholas (negative strip), page 34 George Cairns (meeting place), page 40 Clayton Hansen (dynamite), page 40 Kelly Resener (rat), page 57 Duncan Walker (mysterious man), pages 40, 74 Greg Nicholas (photo frame), page 74 Sean Locke (handcuffed man), page 82 José Manuel Ferrão (ninja), page 82 Slavolijub Pantelic (shuriken), page 83
Bryce Knoll (notepaper), page 86 Gergely Bényi (binoculars); the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division for photographs on: page 16 Harriet Tubman [LC-USZ62-7816],
page 23 Belle Boyd [LC-DIG-cwpbh-01991], page 28 Morse code operators [LC-USW3-035513-D], [LC-USW3-035512-D], page
36 World War II poster [LC-USZC4-2793]; and the National Security Agency, USA for the photographs on page 41 US seal, and page 48 the Enigma, the computer Bombe.