Smarter People Always Enjoy This Life

Posted By JennyKettlewell on March 9, 2010

Did you ever suspect that something as mundane as a park bench can be a key instrument in the communications strategy of secret agents and foreign operatives? Next time you sit down to feed the pigeons, check for a suspicious chalk mark or fresh graffiti in the wood. It could mean a handoff of information is happening nearby.

The Dead Drop

Although electronic communication and surveillance is widespread and big business, secret service agents know that the simple ways of passing messages are often the best, and the dead drop is the most simple.

In the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind”, the unbalanced but brilliant mathematician John Nash acts out a spy fantasy in his hallucinations. He imagines that he is using his analytical genius to crack cryptographic messages hidden in newspaper articles. When he leaves his findings in a letterbox at an abandoned house, he demonstrates the dead drop communications strategy fundamental to espionage tradecraft. The theory is that the Intelligence Officer for whom John is an agent will later come and collect the ‘intelligence’ he provides. Unfortunately for John, when he comes round to the idea that his cryptological career might be a delusion, he visits the box and finds months’ worth of his messages mouldering and un-opened.

Caught Red Handed

Although this tradecraft is well-known enough to be shown in the movies, the “dead letter box” is still a real-life strategy for communication between operatives. Famously, in 2006, Russia claimed to have caught four British diplomats exchanging mysterious items under a rock in a suburban Moscow park. Allegedly, the rock was plastic and hollow to enable it to contain a small telecommunications device. This is a great example of a dead drop going wrong; the authorities even caught the exchange on camera.

In the novels of John Le Carr

Categories: Computers and Technology
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