[spy] Lunik: Inside the CIA’s audacious plot to steal a Soviet satellite … The true story of a Cold War heist. ‘The American and the Mexican made an odd pairing. Dean stood half a foot taller than Silveti, and, while his Mexican counterpart was something of a party animal, the American enjoyed coaching his son’s little league team and doted on Happy, his family’s miniature dachshund, who was heavily pregnant. Yet they needed to work together to ensure the Soviets wouldn’t notice a missing spacecraft.’

[tech] Can a Computer catch a Spy? … The story of an American Spy – Aldrich Ames – and a look at how computers can replace human intuition in the hunt for spies.

It was a $5,000 deposit in cash made on July 5. Three days earlier the chronology read: Lunch with Chuvakhin. Grimes knit her brow and grabbed the last deposit slip. It was for $8,500 in cash, deposited on July 31. And the chronology showed that on the very same day – Ames had had lunch with Chuvakhin.

“That was it for Sandy,” Grimes said, referring to herself by name. “I said, ‘You guys won’t believe it, this is it – you won’t believe it.” She ran down the hall to tell the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence division, Paul Redmond. “I closed the door and I didn’t wait for him, I just said, ‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what’s going on here: Rick is a goddamn Soviet spy.”

[cia] The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge … The astonishing story of how the CIA lost control of it’s arsenal of hacking tools because of an extremely angry, disgruntled employee. ‘Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower. Ayn Rand fanboys are not exactly famous for their doctrinal consistency, and Schulte’s concerns about “Big Brother” don’t appear to have occasioned much soul-searching in the years he spent building surveillance weapons for a spy agency. On an anonymous Twitter account that Schulte maintained, he reportedly expressed the view (in a since-deleted tweet) that Chelsea Manning should be executed. Weber recalled Schulte saying that Snowden deserved the same. Could it be that Schulte had leaked the C.I.A.’s digital arsenal not because of any principled opposition to the policies of the U.S. government but because he was pissed off at his colleagues?’

[spy] ‘Havana syndrome’ and the mystery of the microwaves … A beginners Guide to the mystery of Havana Syndrome. ‘One theory is that Havana involved a much more targeted method to carry out some kind of surveillance with higher-power, directed microwaves. One former UK intelligence official told the BBC that microwaves could be used to “illuminate” electronic devices to extract signals or identify and track them. Others speculate that a device (even perhaps an American one) might have been poorly engineered or malfunctioned and caused a physical reaction in some people. However, US officials tell the BBC no device has been identified or recovered.’

[radio] The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run … profiling a ghostly Russian radio numbers station … ‘In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War. It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues. Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it.’

[twitter] The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter … Is Twitter being used as a numbers station? … ‘GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the “Region of Khabarovsk.” This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?’ [via @qwghlm]

[fun] Numbers Station Bingo … Have you been activated? Find out with bingo and Numbers Stations.

[radio] Tracking the Lincolnshire Poacher — a radio program about Shortwave Numbers Stations. [via qwghlm.co.uk]

[numbers] The Conet Project — Mp3 recordings of Numbers Stations. ‘…a 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government agency that regulates radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, “These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”‘