To get less accessible information is in part the work of professional spies who, by various means, steal government and industrial secrets and arrange for illegal purchases of sophisticated technology. The agencies receive masses of information about a given country from fairly accessible sources such as publications, scientific and business conferences, public meetings, and industrial expositions. Much intelligence work is a slow, painstaking, and tedious business engaged in by the employees of national intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States or the former Soviet KGB. Not all espionage is a secret, furtive activity with the romance and thrills of a “James Bond” novel. There is also a type of intelligence gathering called industrial espionage: the stealing of trade secrets from one company by another in order to profit by the information. The Spy BusinessĮspionage is the secret gathering of information about a rival, but very often the spying is done on friendly or neutral countries as well. There were still many trouble spots in the world that merited attention. But the intelligence-gathering organizations that conducted espionage did not go out of business. With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the excesses of Cold War espionage ended. The embassies and consulates of the United States were used as headquarters for the gathering of military and industrial secrets of other nations, particularly the Soviet Union and its allies. Because the world was divided into hostile camps, dominated by the two superpowers-the United States and the Soviet Union-the Cold War made espionage a vital undertaking in order to protect national security and to help prevent a major war. But these fairly nondescript items are a reminder that the embassies have served as command centers for vast networks of spies working in the United States to funnel information and to arrange for the transfer of technology back to their home countries.Įspionage was a major undertaking for many nations during the era of the Cold War, which lasted from about 1946 until 1990. Anyone walking past many foreign embassies in Washington, D.C., would probably pay little attention to the television antennas, satellite dishes, and other electronic gadgets on the roofs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |