The Cold War spy thriller is one of Hollywood's favorite genres. But how much do we know about the rules that real world spies had to follow during the Cold War? You might be surprised.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00The Cold War spy thriller is one of Hollywood's favorite genres. But how much do we actually
00:05know about the rules that real-world spies had to follow during the Cold War? You might
00:10be surprised.
00:11Beyond basic ideas like don't get caught, information isn't easy to find about super-secret
00:16spy stuff, so figuring out what other rules spies had to follow during the Cold War can
00:20be difficult. But we do have some specifics about how the CIA operated thanks to Tony
00:25Mendez, the guy Ben Affleck's character in 2012's Argo was based on.
00:30According to the NGA, Mendez's official job title was Chief of Disguise and Chief of the
00:34Graphics and Authentication Division in the Office of Technical Service. So, yes, there
00:40were disguises. And Mendez's title tells us a lot about organizational structures within
00:44the CIA that we'll never fully know about.
00:47And we do have a list of 10 CIA Cold War rules. That's because Mendez wrote these previously
00:53unwritten rules down in his 2019 book, The Moscow Rules. These were implicit rules that
00:58he called dead simple and full of common sense. The rules.
01:03Assume nothing. Never go against your gut. Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
01:08Do not look back. You are never completely alone. Go with the flow. Blend in. Vary your
01:14pattern and stay within your cover. Lull them into a sense of complacency. Do not harass
01:19the opposition. Pick the time and place for action. Keep your options open.
01:24Bear in mind that even though Mendez's book is called The Moscow Rules, that's just a
01:28nifty SEO title. As the U.S. chief intelligence gathering and espionage agency, the CIA conducted
01:34operations everywhere from East Germany to Cuba and Chile.
01:38If the CIA operated outwardly, engaging in espionage abroad during the Cold War, the
01:43FBI operated internally within the United States. This is especially true under J. Edgar
01:48Hoover's counterintelligence program, which launched in 1956. The program lasted for 15
01:53years and involved agents infiltrating domestic groups that Hoover considered threats, like
01:57anti-war protest movements, student groups, left-wing political organizations, and unions,
02:03as well as hate groups like the KKK. This means that FBI agents posed as members of
02:08such groups to gather intelligence, disseminate disinformation, and undermine Hoover's political
02:12enemies, like Martin Luther King Jr.
02:15The FBI, under director J. Edgar Hoover at the time, had been investigating Martin Luther
02:19King Jr. for years at this point in the hopes of finding damaging information.
02:23While the CIA's unwritten Moscow Rules probably still apply to FBI agents, we don't have any
02:29specific rules issued by the FBI during the Cold War. But we do know that their code of
02:33conduct involved flaunting legalities. You know where this is going.
02:38U.S. agencies, including the FBI, employed at least 1,000 former Nazis who switched sides
02:44after World War II. And we're not talking about run-of-the-mill Nazis. According to
02:48The New York Times, the FBI recruited Nazis who they knew had committed war crimes, believing
02:53their usefulness against possible Soviet sympathizers outweighed questions of morality or justice.
02:59Along with the CIA, they continued to protect their former Nazi assets from arrest or prosecution
03:04into the 1980s and 90s.
03:07According to some sources, spies on both sides of the Cold War followed unwritten rules of
03:12Ironically, this only came out in the press after those rules of etiquette were broken.
03:17Sergei Skripal worked as a double agent during the Cold War for the United Kingdom and the
03:21Soviet Union. In 2018, his daughter journeyed from Russia to visit him at his home in Salisbury,
03:26England. While she was there, the two were targeted for assassination using an incredibly
03:30powerful nerve agent. The pair survived, but not everyone was so lucky. A perfume bottle
03:36was later found with enough of the poison in it to potentially kill thousands of people.
03:41One woman died after handling it.
03:43Mark Gagliotti, senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, told
03:48The Guardian that such attacks would never have happened during the Cold War because,
03:52quote, there was an understanding about what was and what was not acceptable. But Oleg
03:56Kulugin, a former KGB agent of 32 years, told The Guardian that this idea of honor among
04:01spies was absurd, saying,
04:04I am not familiar with any such spy etiquette.
04:06No one ever leaves the KGB.
04:10Tales of the KGB depict an organization without a shred of gentility or propriety. The organization
04:15was known by many different acronyms — the OGPU, GRU, NKVD, MVD — until it settled
04:22on KGB in 1954, and it was known for absolute ruthlessness. While still known as the NKVD
04:29during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, for example, they arrested around one and a half million
04:33Soviet citizens and political dissidents between 1937 and 1938. About half were murdered,
04:39and the rest were sent to gulags.
04:41The KGB prowled until 1991, gathering intelligence abroad, engaging in sabotage and subterfuge,
04:47surveilling its own citizens, censoring Soviet critics, arresting them, coercing them, imprisoning
04:53them, torturing them, and more. While the KGB's tactics were brutal and sound completely
04:59lawless, the organization itself adhered to an absolute strict hierarchy of power and
05:03positions. Operations were divided into different divisions, each responsible for a specific
05:08segment of spying, such as internal operations, counterintelligence, foreign operations, etc.
05:14Presumably, each had their own rules. But ultimately, as Kalugin told The Guardian,
05:18the KGB only had one rule — to win at all costs. This included creating secret KGB poison
05:25laboratories that he suggests were never shut down.
05:29Even though the Cold War largely featured the United States vs. the Soviet Union, plenty
05:32of other nations across the globe got roped into the conflict. NATO was formed in 1949
05:37and parted as a buffer against westward Soviet incursions. It incorporated a host of nations
05:42like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Norway, and many more. And even though the
05:47treaty said,
05:48"...an armed attack against one or more shall be considered an attack against them all,"
05:53each nation retained sovereignty over its affairs. They had their own espionage agencies
05:57with their own rules. Take the case of the United Kingdom, which by the 1970s found itself
06:02overwhelmed with Soviet spies at a ratio of five KGB spies in London to one SIS spy in
06:08Moscow. These KGB agents were allowed to go about their business mostly unchecked, thanks
06:13to what Aspects of History calls political feebleness. The U.K. eventually kicked them
06:18out. They even informed the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow of their intention
06:22to do so ahead of time. This might seem like a bizarre move for spies, but the U.K. abided
06:28by some of those same unwritten rules of spy etiquette, rules that everyone understands
06:33but never speaks, and most of which we'll never know.