A Spy at the King's Court
The oldest known classified document is not a treaty or a battle plan. It is a spy's report. The spy was disguised as a diplomatic envoy at the court of King Hammurabi, who died in or around 1750 BC. So hiding a spy behind a diplomat's title is a very old trick.
The ancient Egyptians had a developed secret service, and spying was common across the Greek and Roman world. Two ancient books, The Art of War and the Arthashastra, were the first to argue that spying plays a central role in peace as well as in war.
The Art of War even sorts spies into five types. Local spies are citizens who inform from inside enemy territory. Inward spies are double agents recruited from the enemy's own ranks. Converted spies are defectors turned to work for your side. Doomed spies are expendable fakers sent out to spread disinformation. Surviving spies come back with accurate reports.
Venice Hid Files From Its Own Leader
Western spying changed during the Renaissance. Italian city-states began placing ambassadors in foreign capitals to live there and collect intelligence. Then Venice took things further.
Renaissance Venice became so obsessed with spying that its Council of Ten, the body officially in charge of security, would not even let the doge freely consult the government's own archives. In 1481, the council banned all Venetian officials from contacting ambassadors or foreigners. The reason was trade. To succeed at international trade, Venice had to protect its trade secrets.
England had its spy chief too. Under Queen Elizabeth I, Francis Walsingham served as foreign secretary and intelligence chief. Later, the novelist and journalist Daniel Defoe spied for the British government and even wrote a theory of spying that foreshadowed modern police-state methods. Across the ocean, George Washington was never a spy himself, but he was America's first spymaster, using spy tactics against the British.
Moles, Sleepers and Cut-Outs
Here is a twist: by the American definition, what spy satellites do is not espionage at all. Espionage is one specific kind of HUMINT, meaning intelligence gathered from people. Codebreaking, aerial and satellite photos, and the study of public sources all gather intelligence, but none of them count as espionage.
Spy networks have their own vocabulary. In the U.S. intelligence community, a spy is more often called an asset. A case officer recruits and directs them. A cut-out is a courier who passes messages without knowing the agent or the case officer. Robert Hanssen insisted on never meeting the people who bought his information.
Most recruits already have access to secrets, but a mole is recruited before getting it. Sometimes an outsider slips in with a carefully built fake identity, called a legend. A double agent works for two intelligence services at once, and a triple agent works for three. A sleeper agent lives quietly undercover, in contact with no one, until the day it is activated.
Stealing Recipes, Not Missiles
Not every spy is after military secrets. Spying for business rather than national security is called industrial espionage, and it usually happens between companies. The targets can sound surprisingly ordinary: recipes and formulas, manufacturing methods, customer lists, prices, sales plans and upcoming bids.
The tools include theft of trade secrets, bribery, blackmail and technical surveillance. Spies may even spread false reports about a rival company's ability to bring a product to market. Even governments can be targets, for example over the terms of a contract tender. Canada is reportedly losing $12 billion a year, and German companies are estimated to lose about €50 billion ($87 billion) and 30,000 jobs every year.
Spying is also a big private business. The writer Frederic Lemieux estimated that in 2010, 1,931 private intelligence firms worked within the U.S. intelligence community, employing about 265,000 contractors with top-secret clearances. Yet only about 110 of those firms made up 90% of the market.
James Bond Versus the Real Thing
Spies have long been favorite subjects for novelists and filmmakers. An early example is James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Spy, written in 1821, about an American spy in New York during the Revolutionary War. Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim later described the training of an intelligence agent in 19th-century Central Asia.
James Bond became the most commercially successful spy character, one of many created by intelligence insiders during the Cold War. Other fictional agents include George Smiley and Harry Palmer, played by Michael Caine. Fictional spies are usually loners. That may be a shortcut, since authors already knew how to write lone private detectives, a type that has sold well since the 1920s. Sociable real-life agents like Valerie Plame rarely show up in serious fiction.
Spies also star in video games like GoldenEye 007, Splinter Cell and the Metal Gear series, and in comedies like Get Smart and the Johnny English films. Yet unlike most spy fiction, real-life espionage is described as routine and boring work.
