It's no coincidence that the Cold War was the golden age of spying — the peak of the second-oldest profession, the diggers in the dark, the seekers after unclean knowledge and secret wisdom. Prior to 1939, spying of the international kind rather than the sordid domestic variety (let us pass swiftly over the tawdry Stasi archives of sealed glass jars full of worn underwear, kept as scent cues for the police dogs) was a small scale, largely amateurish concern. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it mushroomed. Faced with employment vacancies, the first response of a growing organization is to recruit close to home. Just like any 1990s dot-com start-up, growing as the founders haul in all their friends and anyone they know who has the right skill set, the 1940s espionage agencies were a boom town into which a well-connected clubbable London playboy would inevitably be sucked — and, moreover, one where he might try his hand and succeed, to everyone's surprise. (In the 1990s he'd end up in marketing, with stock options up to here. Sic transit gloria techie.) When the Second World War gave way to the Doomwatch days and Strangelove nights of the Cold War, it entered a period in which the same clubbable fellow might find himself working in a mature organization, vastly larger and more professional than the half-assed amateurism of the early days.
The CIA was born in the shadow of the wartime OSS, and grew into the emblematic Company (traders in secrets, overthrowers of governments), locked in titanic struggle with that other superpowered rival, the KGB (and their less wellknown fellows in the GRU).
The age of the traditional sneak-spies with their Minox cameras gave way to the era of the bugging device. With the 1960s came a new emphasis on supplementing human intelligence (HUMINT) with intelligence from electronic sources (ELINT). New agencies — the NSA in the United States, GCHQ in the UK — expanded as the field of "spyless spying"
went mainstream, aided by the explosion in computing power made possible by integrated circuits and, later, the microprocessor. As telephony, television, telex, and other technologies began to come online, a torrent of data poured through the wires, a deluge that threatened to drown the agencies in useless noise. Or was it the whispering on the deep-ocean cables? Maybe the chatter served to conceal and disguise the quiet whispering of the hidden oracles, dribbling out strange new concepts that warped the vulnerable primate minds to serve their inscrutable goals. The source of the incredible new technologies that drove the advances of the mid-twentieth century was, perhaps, the whispering of an alien farmer in the ears of his herd ...
Times change, and the golden age of spying is over. We've delivered the harvest of fear that the secret masters desired, or maybe they've simply lost interest in us for the time being.
Time will tell. For now, be content that it's all over: the Cold War was a time of strangely rapid technological progress, but also of claustrophobic fear of destruction at three minutes' notice, of the thermonuclear stars coming and bringing madness and death in their wake. Retreat into your soap-bubble universe, little primate, and give thanks.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Bond was a poor archetype for a hero; certainly he couldn't save us from the gibbering horrors of the Cold War, but only cast a shadow beneath their unblinking ground-zero glare. But we found salvation in the end, in the most unlikely place of all: if you turn on the TV you're likely to see one of old Ernst's proteges being held up for praise as an object of emulation.
President of Italy, captain of industry or chief executive of Enron — SPECTRE won and it's their world that we live in, the world of the lesser evil.
Charles Stross Edinburgh, UK February 2006
GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS, ACRONYMS, AND ORGANIZATIONS
Abwehr Foreign Bureau/Defense of the Armed Forces High Command: the German intelligence organization founded in 1921; after WWII, in order to appease the Allies, the organization supposedly focused only on defense, i.e. counterespionage [Germany] AIVD General Intelligence and Security Office: the Dutch domestic counterespionage agency [Netherlands]
APT(N) Atlantic Patrol Task (North): standing Royal Navy patrol in the Caribbean and North Atlantic area [UK]
Black (Pertaining to an organization or project) Secret and off the record, except to governmental intelligence oversight bodies [All]
Black Chamber American cryptanalysis agency, officially disbanded in 1929; predecessor to the NSA; nickname for the contemporary superblack agency dealing with occult intelligence [US]
CESG Communications Electronics Security Group: a division within GCHQ [UK]
CIA Central Intelligence Agency; also known as The Company [US]
The Company Nickname: see CIA [US]
COBRA Cabinet Briefing Office Room "A": where the Civil Contingencies Committee meets and is thus often referred to as COBRA; able to invoke Section Two powers under the Civil Contingencies Act (aka Martial Law) [UK]
COTS Commercial, Off The Shelf: computer kit; a procurement term [US/UK]
DERA Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, privatized as QinetiQ [UK]
FSB Federal Security Service, formerly known as KGB [Russia]
Faust Force Nickname: see GSA [Germany]
GCHQ Government Communications htQ (UK equivalent of NSA) [UK]
GMDI Hughes Global Marine Development, Inc.[US]
GRU Russian Military Intelligence; an intense rivalry existed between the GRU and KGB [Russia]
GSA Geheime Sicherheit Abteilung: contemporary German domestic occult intelligence agency [Germany]
HMG Her Majesty's Government [UK]
HUMINT Human Intelligence: intelligence gathered from human (as opposed to electronic) sources [All]
INTERPOL International Criminal Police Organization: created in 1923 to assist international crim-' inal police cooperation [All]
KGB Committee for State Security, principal Soviet intelligence agency; renamed FSB in 1991 after disintegration of the Soviet Union [USSR]
The Laundry Nickname of the former Department Q of the SOE, dealing with occult intelligence; spun off as a separate black organization in 1945, no publicly known name [UK]
MI5 (originally Military Intelligence Section 5) Security Service, also known as SS, responsible for internal security [UK]
MI6 (originally Military Intelligence Section 6) Secret Intelligence Service, also known as SIS, responsible for external security [UK]
MOD Ministry of Defense [UK]
NSA National Security Agency (US equivalent ofGCHQ)[US]
Number Ten 10 Downing Street, London: the historic office and home of the British Prime Minister [UK]
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence [US]
OSS Office of Strategic Services (US equivalent of SOE), disbanded in 1945, remodeled as CIA [US]
Politburo Political Bureau: the executive organization for the Communist Party [USSR]
Q Division Division within The Laundry associated with R&D [UK]
QinetiQ See DERA [UK]
SAS Special Air Service: British Army Special Forces [UK]
SBS SIS SOE Superblack Territorial SAS TLA Two-One SAS Special Boat Service: Royal Marines Special Forces [UK]
See MI6 [UK]
Special Operations Executive (UK equivalent of OSS), officially disbanded in 1945; see also The Laundry [UK]
(Pertaining to a black organization or black project) Secret and off the record to all, including governmental intelligence oversight bodies [All]
Territorial Army, British equivalent of the US National Guard. Territorial SAS, the part-time weekend soldier arm of the SAS, mostly staffed by veterans [UK]
Three Letter Acronym [All]
21 Special Air Service Regiment; also known as Artists' Rifles [UK]
Charles Stross is a full-time writer who was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He studied in London and Bradford, gaining degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs, including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer and freelance journalist. Find out more about Charles Stross at:
www.antipope.org/charlie/index
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