Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LANGUAGE OF ESPIONAGE
The shadow world has inspired and mandated a vivid vocabulary of words and
codenames for secret operations, missions and agents. These words are carefully
chosen to clarify or confuse, depending on the need to know.
Agent
Agent-in-place
Agent-of-influence
Asset
Babysitter
Bagman
Bang and Burn
Birdwatcher
Black Bag Job
Black Chamber
Black Operations
Black Propaganda
Bletchly Park
Blowback
Blown
Bombe
Bona Fides
Bridge Agent
Brush Pass
Bug
Burned
Camp Swampy
Camp X
Carnivore
Cell
Center
Cheka
Defect/defector
Defector-in-place
Disinformation
Discard
Double Agent
Drop
Dry Clean
Ears Only
Echelon
ELINT
Encode
Enigma
Escort
Espionage
Executive Action
Exfiltration Operation
Expats
Eyes Only
FBI
Fist
Flaps and Seals
Floater
Frequency Analysis
Friends
Fumigate
Ghoul
GRU
Handler
Honey Trap
Hospital
Hostile
HUMINT
Illegal
Illness
IMINT
Industrial espionage
Infiltration
Innocent Postcard
Intelligence
Jedburghs
KGB
L-Pill
Legend
Lifting
MASINT
MI-5
MI-6
Microdot
Mole
Music Box
Musician
Naked
Neighbors
Network
NSA
Nugget
Nursemaid
Okhrana
One-time Pad
Open-source
OSINT
OSS
Paroles
Pattern
PHOTINT
Pig
Plaintext
Playback
Pocket Litter
Provocateur
Purple
RADINT
Raven
Recognition signal
Red
Rezident [Resident]
Rolled-up
RQ-1 Predator Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle
Ruse de guerre
Sabotage
Safe house
Sanitise
Satellite
Shadow
Shoe
SIGINT
SIS
Sleeper
SMERSH
SOE
Source
Special Operations
Spook
Sputnik
Spying
Spy master
Spy ring
Stasi
Station
Steganography
Subversive activities
SVR
Swallow
Surveillance
Tail
TECHINT
Terminated
The Take
Throwaway
Timed Drop
Tradecraft
Traffic Analysis
Turned
U-2
Ultra
Uncle
Venona
Walk-in
Wet Job
Window Dressing