It's True! Your Cat Could Be a Spy Read online

  but didn’t know where or when it would happen.

  The Magic Gang built 2000 fake tanks from painted canvas and wood, while one thousand real British tanks

  were somewhere else, disguised as trucks. The Magic

  Gang also built a false railway line, which the Germans

  thought was to transport troops. German pilots also

  saw the British busily building a (fake) water pipe, as

  if to supply the troops along the way. From what they

  could see, the German commanders were certain the

  British wouldn’t be able to attack before November.

  They were wrong. The British attacked in late October

  and from an unexpected direction. Thousands of

  German soldiers died and the German campaign in

  Africa was wrecked. Jasper Maskelyne helped to change

  the course of World War II.

  Jasper Maskelyne told his story in a book called

  Magic: Top Secret, but after the war there was no longer work for a stage magician. He died years later in Kenya.

  CRACKING THE CODE: ENIGMA

  Spies send messages in code so the enemy can’t read

  them. Cracking codes was a key part of the war effort

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  for the British and their allies. During World War II,

  Britain employed many people as cryptographers.

  They worked at a place called Bletchley Park, trying

  to translate German messages. Huge computers,

  called Colossus, were built to help. One of their great

  achievements was the cracking of Enigma.

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  The Enigma machine looked like a typewriter

  with some add-ons and worked like a basic computer,

  turning messages into code or translating codes back

  into readable messages. The German Navy had used

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  it for its secret communications since 1925. By the

  time World War II began in 1939, the British knew the

  machine existed. The trouble was, they didn’t have the

  codebooks and manuals they needed to understand

  how it actually worked. It wasn’t just a matter of

  finding out what a single message said, because next

  time the machine would have been re-set to a new

  code. The same combination of letters in the next

  message might mean something completely different.

  In 1940, the British had a stroke of luck. Their

  ship, Griffin, captured some papers from a German navy ship disguised as a fishing trawler. The German

  crew threw two bags of papers overboard and Griffin’s gunner dived overboard to get them. He managed to

  grab one, while the other sank.

  The documents in the bag had a few days’ worth

  of useful information in them, enabling the Bletchley

  cryptographers to read German messages for those

  days. It wasn’t enough, though. The cryptographers

  had to know how the Germans changed their settings.

  The Germans made one mistake: they used real

  fishing trawlers to deliver weather reports to their

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  navy. The navy then replied using Enigma. That meant the trawlers had to have Enigma machines – and

  codebooks – on board, so they could translate the

  navy’s messages.

  In June 1941, the British destroyer HMS Tartar

  found a German weather ship north of Iceland.

  Tartar’s gun crew fired – but carefully avoided hitting the target. The German crew abandoned ship, leaving

  the British free to board. The British didn’t bother

  taking the Enigma machine, but they did make off with

  their papers. A Naval Intelligence officer, Allon Bacon, sorted through the papers and finally found what he

  wanted: a diagram with instructions for changing

  settings inside the Enigma machine. The puzzle was

  closer to being solved. Later, codebooks were taken

  from a German submarine, and cryptographers could

  set to work cracking codes.

  After the war, the British government destroyed the

  Colossus, to keep the work done at Bletchley Park secret.

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  6

  COOL CATS

  AND COLD WAR

  DISASTERS

  Imagine people chatting at a cocktail party at a

  government embassy. A glossy cat is slinking around

  people’s legs as they drink and talk. Nobody takes

  much notice of him, but that cruising cat is more than

  he seems . . .

  In the 1960s, someone in the CIA had the idea of

  a cat ‘spy’. Operation Acoustic Kitty was a

  plan to wire a cat for sound. They would

  implant a microphone into a cat and an

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  antenna in his tail, and then train him to obey orders.

  It was a costly project and a big mistake. Anyone

  who has ever owned a cat knows it won’t do anything it doesn’t want to do. When the cat got hungry, he went

  for a snack. If a female cat wandered past, he went

  after her. Then, when the CIA sent him off to spy on

  people in the park, poor

  Acoustic Kitty was

  knocked over by

  a car on his first

  day. A CIA agent

  rushed over to get back the

  equipment from his insides.

  This is only one of the

  crazy ideas dreamed up by spy

  agencies during the 1950s and 1960s – a period known

  as the Cold War. Up until a few years ago, the CIA’s files from this time were top secret – no one was allowed to

  see them. Now the files are open and they tell us some

  interesting things.

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  SO, WHAT WAS THE COLD WAR?

  During World War II, the United States and the USSR

  (now the Commonwealth of Independent States,

  including Russia) fought together to defeat Nazi

  Germany. But the Americans and the Russians were

  never on friendly terms. The USSR was communist

  and the Americans thought communism was

  anti-democratic and dangerous. Afterwards, both

  countries spied on each other and stockpiled weapons

  in case the other side attacked. This armed truce was

  known as the Cold War because no shots were actually

  fired. The most famous modern spy stories happened

  during this time.

  The race to get into space was a part of this ‘war’.

  The USSR got there first, in 1957,

  with a satellite called Sputnik.

  Much later, both sides sent up

  satellites to spy on each

  other from space.

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  THE OLD EXPLODING CIGAR TRICK

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA was trying

  to defend democracy from any communist threat.

  Fidel Castro was president of the communist country

  of Cuba, which is right on the United States’ doorstep.

  The CIA wanted to get rid of Castro.

  Castro was famous for his bushy beard and his

  fondness for cigars. Both were used against him.

  There was a silly plan to make a powder that would

  cause his beard to fall out. And another plan was to

  send him an exploding cigar. We don’t know if the CIA

  got these anywhere near him, but Castro didn’t lose

  his beard. The next bright idea was to pump a drug

  into a studio where Castro was to give

  an interview, making him appear

  si
lly. That didn’t work either.

  The ‘Make Castro Look a Fool’

  project was a flop.

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  The CIA got

  serious then, with

  a plan to kill him.

  Castro loved scuba

  diving, so someone

  thought, ‘Aha!

  Let’s give him a

  poisoned wetsuit!’

  But the American

  diplomat who was supposed to deliver it wisely decided

  his country couldn’t afford the trouble it would cause.

  He handed over a clean wetsuit instead.

  So the CIA didn’t succeed in killing or embarrassing

  Fidel Castro.

  SPOOKY IDEAS

  The USSR was Enemy Number 1 as far as the CIA was

  concerned. The agency tried to use Californian psychics

  to tell them what was going on there. Why send spies

  into danger when mind-readers could close their eyes

  and ‘watch’ another country without leaving home?

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  Well, in the test run, the psychic who was asked to ‘see’

  a particular place in Russia got the details wrong.

  The CIA did another test on its own employees,

  to see if drugs would help in questioning captured

  enemies. But the drug could make people hallucinate,

  and one poor CIA worker jumped out of a window.

  THE CAMBRIDGE DOUBLE AGENTS

  The Cold War was a scary time, whether you lived in

  the USSR or in America or Britain. Both sides were

  stockpiling weapons and

  making atom bombs, and

  war was a real possibility.

  People believed spies

  were everywhere, and

  there was a lot of

  spying going on.

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  In Britain the ‘Cambridge

  spies’ were recruited at

  England’s Cambridge

  University in the 1930s.

  These men were double

  agents, spying for the

  USSR while working

  for British Intelligence.

  In fact, one of them, Kim

  Philby, was high up in Britain’s

  MI6 agency, in charge of spying on Soviet spies when

  he was giving information about Britain and the US to

  Russia. Kim Philby escaped to Russia in the 1950s.

  EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF:

  THE ROSENBERGS

  There was such a fear of communism in America in the

  1950s that sometimes innocent people were accused of

  spying. Among these were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,

  a married couple who were charged with having sold

  secrets before the Cold War began. They would not

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  admit to spying for the USSR, even though they had

  two young children and a confession might have saved

  their lives.

  Julius and Ethel claimed to be innocent, but they

  were sent to the electric chair in 1953.

  People accused of working for the USSR couldn’t

  just confess, they had to accuse someone else if they

  wanted to receive a lighter sentence. Ethel Rosenberg’s

  brother, David Greenglass, was a soldier. When he

  was charged with giving nuclear secrets to the USSR,

  he said Ethel and her husband had been involved.

  Julius Rosenberg insisted he knew nothing about it.

  He had been a Communist before the war, but it wasn’t

  illegal then.

  Some Russian files have been translated that

  suggested that Julius, at least, might have been spying

  for the USSR at one time, but had probably not

  committed the crime for which he was executed.

  Ethel was accused in order to force Julius to pass on

  more names of communist spies.

  Later, David Greenglass admitted he had accused

  his sister to save his own wife and himself.

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  DON’T TRUST ANYONE . . .

  After World War II, Germany was divided. West Germany

  was a democracy and East Germany was communist.

  In East Germany, many ordinary people were

  encouraged to spy on their family and neighbours,

  reporting any ‘suspicious’ behaviour to the Stasi, the

  secret police. The Stasi kept secret records on a huge

  number of people. In the two years before Germany

  was finally reunited in 1991, the Stasi shredded these

  records to remove the evidence of who had been

  spying. There were 16 000 sacks (180 kilometres)

  of shredded paper! Now 250 have been

  reconstructed – by hand!

  Computer technology

  might help finish off the

  job, which otherwise will

  take 400 years!

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  7

  BEST-SELLING

  SPIES

  Many writers of spy stories had experience as spies

  or intelligence officers. One of the first spy thrillers, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), was written by an

  intelligence officer, John Buchan. Graham Greene,

  author of many exciting novels, including The Quiet

  American, was working for British Intelligence in the Cold War era. Most famous of all was writer

  Ian Fleming, the creator of the daring agent 007,

  James Bond. Ian Fleming worked for British Naval

  Intelligence during World War II.

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  THE SPY WHO DIED AT DINNER

  Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was a playwright

  who lived in London at the same time as William

  Shakespeare. Marlowe was almost certainly a spy

  working for Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Queen

  Elizabeth I.

  The queen had a lot of enemies. Some of her own

  people thought her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots,

  should be queen. Elizabeth needed clever spies to

  protect her position as queen.

  When Francis Walsingham died there were things

  certain people didn’t want the new spymaster to know

  and were afraid Christopher Marlowe might reveal.

  Marlowe’s spying

  came to an end when

  he was stabbed in the

  eye in a pub brawl.

  His killer, Ingram

  Frizer, claimed

  they had argued over

  the bill. More likely

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  he killed Marlowe to keep him quiet. Ingram Frizer

  pleaded self-defence and only spent 28 days in

  prison for the murder.

  Maybe Christopher

  Marlowe

  should

  have stuck

  to writing drama.

  CODENAME ASTREA

  Someone who was definitely sorry she hadn’t stuck to

  writing drama was Aphra Behn. Aphra had a romance

  with a man called William Scot. They called themselves

  Astrea and Celedon, after the main characters of a

  popular novel called L’Astree. These later came in handy as spy codenames.

  Aphra married a Dutch merchant called Behn

  in 1664, but he died the next year, the year England

  went to war with the Dutch. By this time, William

  Scot, Aphra’s old love, was living in Holland. He had

  given the British government important information

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  about the Dutch, but he had killed two British agents.

  The British Government thought he might be working

  for the enemy as well.

  In 1666, Aphra was sent to Holland to contac
t

  William Scot and offer him a royal pardon if he agreed

  to come back to the English side. William agreed.

  He told her that the Dutch were planning a raid on

  London, up the Thames River. At great risk to her own

  life, Aphra smuggled the information to England, but

  the British government didn’t act on it and the Dutch

  raid went ahead. Aphra was furious. Even worse, she

  was stuck in Holland until 1667, and she had to borrow

  money to get home because her spymaster hadn’t given

  her any money for expenses. Then she was jailed in London for being unable to pay debts!

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  Eventually, the government paid off her debts, but

  that was the end of Aphra Behn’s spy career. She spent

  the rest of her life as a best-selling writer instead.

  Some of her books are still in print and her plays are

  still being performed.

  THE FATHER OF THE

  BRITISH SECRET SERVICE

  Daniel Defoe took up spying because he was broke.

  He had spent all his money in 1685 supporting a

  rebellion by the Duke of Monmouth against the king,

  and he was lucky not to be executed when the rebellion

  failed. Daniel became a journalist and wrote an article

  mocking the government . . . and he was put into jail.

  After his release, he wrote to a powerful politician with a proposal for a Secret Service. Daniel would run it and teams of spies would travel around England reporting

  anyone who might be a danger to the government. The

  idea was a success, and Daniel travelled England posing

  as a merchant called Alexander Goldsmith.

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  Daniel was also the editor of a

  Scottish newspaper while he was

  working for the English government.

  Through his writing he managed to

  undermine a movement to get the

  Scottish royal family back into power

  in England.

  By 1720, Daniel was

  writing popular stories and

  making a good living, so he

  quit his spy job. He wrote his famous story Robinson Crusoe at this time. But he was too much of a miser to pay off his debts, and spent the rest of his life

  on the run from people to whom he owed money.

  Nobody came to his funeral.

  POPOV THE SPY

  ‘So, what can you tell

  me about Popov?’

  asked the British Naval