From dead drops to laser-spying: tradecraft through the decades

When it comes to tradecraft – the techniques and technologies used in modern espionage – our minds often go straight to the not always entirely accurate (or plausible) rocket-firing cigarettes, grenade-launching pens and lazer-beaming watches from the spy films and shows we grew up on. Yet in real life, though some tradecraft is just as fiendishly clever, impressively high-tech and actually out-there as the gadgets and gizmos dreamed up by Hollywood, other examples represent far simpler, trusted techniques that allow agents to capture and share information efficiently and discreetly, with only a steel nerve and a cool facade required.

As Ben Macintyre, author of the New York Times best-seller upon which ITVX psychological drama A Spy Among Friends is based explains, the tradecraft practiced by agents such as Philby and Elliott is “not James Bond-y tradecraft. These are the very subtle signals and techniques that are essential to being a spy and living as a spy. It’s how it’s actually done.”

Indeed, when Soviet agent Arnold ‘Otto’ Deutsch first recruited Kim Philby as a double agent in 1934, it was these rudimental spy skills that he shared – how and where to leave messages, how to detect if a telephone was bugged, how to spot and lose a tail. Here we explore how tradecraft has evolved and developed from Philby and Elliott’s era, and the age-old techniques still being utilised by modern-day agents.

While we might tend to associate spying with suave Sixties special agents, it’s actually one of the world’s oldest professions. Secretly gathering intelligence about your enemies – or your friends, as Philby did – has been practised since time immemorial, and even gets a mention in the Bible, when Joshua secretly sent two Hebrews to scout out the fortified city of Jericho before he attacked it.

Yet while the essence of espionage hasn’t changed, many of its accoutrements have developed remarkably with the march of technology.

Take, for example, the ways in which spies have had to send the information they have gleaned back to their handlers. One of the early (and slightly schoolboyish) ways this was done was by using invisible ink, made from a complex combination of chemicals and liquids, to scrawl messages between the lines of innocuous letters that could be revealed with heat or steam – in A Spy Among Friends, Philby recieves a message written on a cigarette packet which he has to warm up with a lighter to read. During the 1950s the KGB developed a quicker method  – disappearing ink pens – which are now widely available.

Another key tradecraft technique is the ‘dead drop’ – where you leave a message or information in a pre-agreed spot for your contact without actually meeting in person (in person meets are known as ‘live drops’). ‘Covert’ dead drop equipment includes the dead drop spike – a small, spiked, waterproof canister that can be pressed into soft ground. While ‘overt’ dead drop equipment is designed to look like ordinary, innocuous items people wouldn’t give a second thought to – like a hollow bolt, which again could be used to stash key intel in. In A Spy Among Friends, Philby is sent a message from Russia via the beermat handed to him by a waiter, effortlessly subverting the surveillance he is under, and providing key information for his next move.

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