by Bart King
Lotz moved to Cairo. His cover was as a wealthy horse breeder. It was in this role that the rumor got around that Lotz used to be in the German military. Pretty soon, the Champagne Spy was hanging out with a bunch of Nazis!
Lotz sent information back to Israel by means of a radio transmitter hidden in the heel of his riding boots. Nice! His best adventure might have been when he went spying at an Egyptian rocket base near the Suez Canal. The Israelis thought this launch site was a “dummy” designed to confuse their military.
But to make sure, Lotz and his wife pretended to go fishing. The two of them drove right toward the rocket base and were arrested. Lotz apologized and explained that it was an honest mistake. Even so, the arresting officers took Lotz right ONTO the rocket base, which was obviously NOT fake! (In other words, there were rockets there.)
Lotz (who was in handcuffs) asked the base commander to call an Egyptian general that he knew. The general asked to speak to Lotz and said, “Do you want to rot in jail, or will you pay up with a bottle of champagne?”
Lotz went with the champagne. Aren’t you paying attention? He was the Champagne Spy! Although his cover worked well on that occasion, Lotz was arrested by the Egyptian police in 1965. He was jailed for three years, and then sent back to Israel in a prisoner exchange.
Wow, what a story. Now let me close this chapter with the simplest, most effective disguise that I know of: the finger mustache!
Animal Spies
As we know, the key for any spy is not to look suspicious. And what’s less suspicious than an animal? Well, okay, a plant is less suspicious, but it’s really hard to get a birch tree or even a small shrub to follow orders. And that’s why critters, beasts, and varmints have been used many, many times in the world of espionage.
What—you think animals haven’t won or lost wars before? Ha! About 2,500 years ago, spies from Persia noted that their Egyptian rivals loved cats. So when Persia went to war with Egypt in 525 BCE, the Persians had a secret weapon: cats! As the Persian soldiers marched forward, they held kitty cats.
Since the Egyptians thought cats were the coolest animals of all time, they wouldn’t shoot any arrows at the Persians. And it was hard to win a battle back then without shooting arrows. The Egyptians lost!
This shows that the Egyptians were wrong about two things: how to win a war and what the coolest animal of all time is. You see, the Egyptians SHOULD have focused their attention on...
Dogs!
Almost all people like and trust dogs. That’s why they can be the ideal helpers for a spy! For example, a French agent used a dog as an assistant during World War II. The agent was in a part of Southeast Asia that was under Japanese control. The agent knew that if he were caught sending a secret message to the French, it would mean certain death.
So he shaved his dog!
Then the spy took a pen loaded with indelible (permanent) ink and wrote an intelligence report on the dog’s skin. After that, all he had to do was wait for the dog’s hair to grow back. As soon as Fido was hairy again, the agent just took the dog for a LONG walk and presented the canine to a French spymaster. One shave-job later and—voila—secret message received! This message is now famous as the Dog Skin Report.
Not only can Spot carry spy messages, he can also spot spies! For instance, in 1985, the Russians suspected that their own spy, Oleg Gordievsky, was a double agent for the British. (That’s because Gordievsky WAS a double agent for the British.)
Knowing he was being watched, Gordievsky left his Moscow apartment to go out for a jog—and kept on running! By bus and train, Gordievsky made it almost to Russia’s border with Finland. There, he hid in the trunk of a car being driven by a female British diplomat. The woman drove up to the border, showed the KGB her papers, and got ready to drive through—until a Russian guard dog began sniffing her car’s trunk. That darned dog was going to ruin Gordievsky’s escape!
Thinking quickly, the woman distracted the dog with a meat sandwich. And her incredible plan worked! This led to one of the most famous rules in the history of spying: “A guard dog would rather eat baloney than sniff Gordievsky.”
Speaking of dog smells, one of the strangest products the CIA ever made was a liquid that would attract male dogs and make them howl. The idea was to spray the substance on the doorsteps of suspected enemy spies at night. That way, howling dogs would annoy the agents, and they wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep!
This might lead to the agents being tired and forgetful the next day. Maybe they would do something dumb, like leave their secret documents at the ice cream shop. (Hey, you never know!)
Because spies love disguises, sometimes THEY like to be the dog. Seriously! In the 1970s, the CIA came up with a way for an agent to sneak around in a country without being detected. First, one agent would enter the country with a St. Bernard dog. These colossal hounds can be the size of a small pony!
Then if a spy needed to get somewhere unobserved, he would check in with the St. Bernard’s owner. There, the spy would put on a St. Bernard dog suit and crawl into a portable kennel. The spy would also bring a small tape player and begin playing the sounds a St. Bernard makes: snoring, slobbering, and snoring.
The kennel would then be transported to a veterinarian so the “dog” could get a checkup. Once inside the vet’s office, the spy would get out of the kennel, take off the dog suit, and leave. But he probably wouldn’t bring the tape of snoring and slobbering as it’s unlikely that it would be helpful with his next assignment.
If anyone was observing all this, the fake dog could be left overnight at the vet’s for observation. Then the spy could return, put the suit back on, and return to the dog-owner’s house the next day!
Pack the right costume.
Sea Lions and Dolphins!
The elite U.S. Navy unit named SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land team) is made up of humans. But the Navy also has a Marine Mammal Program in San Diego that trains California sea lions and bottlenose dolphins. I love dolphins—they’re so cute! But what could these delightful mammals be doing for the military?
Apparently, the dolphins can go “get” enemy divers! One Navy animal trainer said, “We train them to either pull the mouthpiece from the diver’s mouth or push him to the surface.” Apparently, dolphins have been armed with syringes loaded with pressurized gas. And if this syringe were poked into a human diver, it would cause the person to blow up. Blech!
I guess dolphins aren’t so cute anymore.
Along with sea lions, dolphins are both very intelligent and WAY faster in the water than even the best human swimmers. Navy sea lions are trained to carry cuffs in their mouths that are attached to long ropes. If they find a suspicious swimmer, they can clamp the cuff around the person’s leg and the intruder is then reeled in like a big spy fish.
And it turns out that even the most skilled divers usually never even see the sea lion before being clamped and hauled to the surface.
And the sea lion will do all this for some fish! Amazing.
Current plans are for dolphins to patrol the waters off U.S. bases to watch out for terrorist swimmers. If the dolphin on patrol sees an intruder, it activates a powerful strobe light to alert its handlers. The light would then float to the surface, and guards would race to the spot in speedboats.
But these militarized sea mammals are also trained to do more peaceful things. For example, people aboard ships drop things overboard ALL the time.
“Careful with that top secret canister.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I’ve got it—”
*splash*
“Top secret canister overboard!”
This is where having a trained sea lion comes in handy. Not only can a marine mammal locate and retrieve objects lost overboard, it can also look for underwater mines. (Seriously, the animals are trained to do that.)
What if a sea lion or dolphin accidentally triggers the mine and gets blown up? To prevent loss of life, the U.S. Navy developed underwater robots that check for mines.
Called Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV), four of these water robots were put to the test by the Navy in the waters off Virginia. Oops! All four of the UUVs were lost at sea. So who did the Navy send to find them? The same dolphins and sea lions the robots were supposed to replace!
At the end of the 20th century, the CIA built a realistic robot catfish called “Charlie.” To this day, no one knows what Charlie’s secret mission was, but some experts think he was designed to collect water samples close to chemical or nuclear plants.
When Hamsters Infiltrate Your Home
If you have a hamster cage or aquarium in your house, you might be able to pull off this amusing spy trick. See if there’s a spot where you can mount a digital camera behind the cage or aquarium. The idea is that you’re going to take a photo (or series of photos) from that spot, using the camera’s timer. And because the photo will show the room seemingly from inside the animals’ habitat, it will look like the hamster or guppy took the picture!
Assuming you have your camera mount ready and the timer settings correct, simply wait until you hear people coming into the room. Then set the camera and stand back so you don’t block the shot. Be sure to have the flash turned off and the camera sound on “mute” so that others don’t notice when it snaps the photo. If you can only take one shot at a time with your automatic settings, you might have to do this a few times to get the shots you want, but patience is an important part of spy work. (If you’re not that patient, just use a video camera instead and start recording.)
Once you have your shots, the fun part is the way you reveal the footage! If you have photos, print them out and put them in a manila envelope. Then add a note written by the hamster or guppies, maybe something along the lines of “I’ve been spying on you for months. If you don’t want me to tell the authorities about your actions, start giving me better hamster (or guppy) chow. And plenty of it!”
Then mail the letter to your house, or just shove it through your home’s mail slot, and try to keep a straight face!
Cats!
As I noted earlier, cats can be good additions to an espionage plot. After all, cats are known and loved for their intelligence and grace. And they’re also known for their cunning, paranoia, and murderous impulses.
Wait a minute, cats are TOTALLY untrustworthy!
No matter. Back in the 1960s, the CIA recruited cats to be part of their spy program. The felines were going to take part in Operation Acoustic Kitty. (No, I am not making this up.) The idea was that a cat would be trained to follow certain commands. Then it would be outfitted with a little microphone and antenna. When ready, the cat would slink around during a cocktail party and listen in on people’s top secret discussions about nuclear missiles and cheese-on-a-toothpick.
Perhaps you can see the problem with Operation Acoustic Kitty. Yep, it’s the “cat would be trained” part! It turns out that in the history of mankind, no cat has ever been trained to do anything. So if the Acoustic Kitty was released at a party, it was totally unreliable. The program ended when a CIA agent released a spy cat in a park to go eavesdrop on some people. The cat ignored orders and strolled off into the street, where it was hit by a car!
That was the end of Operation Acoustic Kitty.
Vocabulary
“Walking the cat” is what CIA agents do when an operation goes wrong. The idea is to go back to its beginning, and then walk through the plan again to spot where it went off target.
Parachuting Bears?
Could parachute-wearing bears have sniffed out Osama bin Laden? I mean, a bear’s sense of smell is much more powerful than a bloodhound’s. So why not use bears to sniff out the terrorist?
The Defense Department gets suggestions from the public all the time. Sometimes citizens write in with good ideas. Sometimes the ideas are decent. And sometimes the ideas are insane.
Take this idea about terrorist-hunting bears. It was sent to the Defense Department and written about in a Stars and Stripes article: “Trained bears with GPS and day/night cameras around their necks might be able to hunt down the scent of Osama bin Laden, even in and through any caves and tunnels! Parachute some bears into areas [that bin Laden] might be. Attempt to train [the] bears to take off parachutes after landing, or use parachutes that self-destruct after landing.”
Well, that sounds simple enough! Ooh, and here’s a citizen question for the Defense Department:
“So do you have any top secret information you would to like to tell me? I am doing a project for my senior economics class, and was just wondering...email me back.”
Birds!
Back in the primitive days of the 20th century, there were no cell phones. (Astounding!) So animals were sometimes used to carry important messages. And that’s why British and American forces used hundreds of thousands of messenger pigeons in both the First and Second World Wars. This could be dangerous for the birds. Once, when an American battalion began getting shelled by their OWN forces miles away, they used a pigeon to take word back to the nimrods shooting at them to lay off. The pigeon was named Cher Ami. And that brave little pigeon got his message through despite losing an eye AND a leg on the flight.
Cher Ami was treated like a hero after his mission, but not all of our feathered agents are so lucky. For example, a pigeon in India was recently captured and held under armed guard. Why? It was suspected of being a spy for India’s archenemy, Pakistan!
Indians grew suspicious when they spotted a pigeon with a ring around its foot. And once it was captured, Indian pigeon keepers insisted that the bird was totally suspicious. This was partly because of the Pakistani phone number and address stamped on its body in red ink—and also because the experts said that Pakistani pigeons look totally different from Indian ones!
Sadly, the pigeon couldn’t tell its story. After all, you can’t expect a pigeon to sing like a canary. But if the pigeon is a foreign agent, it’s not going to be returned. This means that Pakistan gave India the bird!
Worms!
You probably already know that silk comes from silkworms. (These are actually moth caterpillars, but whatever.) And these silkworms spin silk out of their butts! That’s a pretty good trick. I’d like to see a sheep try that with wool! (Actually, I wouldn’t.)
Anyway, there was once a day when most of the world didn’t know what silk was, much less where it came from. But then about 1,500 years ago, the ruler of the Byzantine Empire (in southeastern Europe and Turkey) sent spies to China with hollow walking sticks. Their mission was to pretend to be messengers looking for a trade agreement. Actually, they were supposed to be finding and stashing moth eggs in their walking sticks to smuggle home!
It’s not like silkworms are the ONLY worms that have been involved in espionage. During World War I, British spies faced a problem: How could they read maps at night without attracting enemy fire? The solution was to read by the light of glowworms! Sure, the Brits had to strain their eyes by the glowworms’ pale light, but that still beats getting a howitzer shell up the nose.
Sneaking, Following & Escaping!
I got in trouble the first time I went out on a mission. It was just myself and an agent named [name deleted]. As the two of us made dead drops, staked out enemy agents, and stopped for a quick shopping trip (I had a coupon for pickles!), I’d tweet our precise location. (I did this so my mother would know that her favorite child was safe.)
But when [name deleted] found out what I was doing, she was NOT amused. She took away my iPhone, broke my Twitter account, and confiscated my pickle jar.
Luckily, I had another coupon!
Anyway, my theory now is that spies should be like hikers. That’s because when hikers go into the wilderness, their goal is to LEAVE NO TRACE that they were there. Nothing but boot prints—and maybe some buried poop. As a spy, you want to follow that example! (Except for the part about the poop.)
In addition to leaving no trace, remember that escaping the scene of your espionage doesn’t just mean that you get away today. It also means
that you don’t get caught tomorrow or the next day either.
So develop your powers of observation and cunning! Let’s say that you’ve been tipped off about a top secret item that’s in a room. Don’t just go waltzing in to take it! As you approach the room’s door, carefully look at the handle before opening it. Why? It’s possible that someone has sprinkled a small amount of baby powder on the door handle to see if any intruders tried to enter. (I do this all the time at my house.)
The KGB invented a “spy dust” that could be revealed using infrared lights. It was sprinkled on the doorknobs to important rooms. Then guards or officers would shine infrared lights on people’s hands to see if anyone had been sneaking around.
