CHAPTER 1
THE DEFINITION OF SURVEILLANCE IS EASY. It’s multiple sightings at time and distance. That means that you have seen a person or people following you, or watching you, more than once, at different times, and at different places. It could be on the way to work and on the way home from work. It could be while you’re out shopping or going to the gym. It could be in church or at the mall. Surveillance detection is simply the act of spotting that surveillance. You do that by employing an increasingly sophisticated route, coupled with “normal” stops that a person would make in the course of running errands.
So what are the surveillants looking for? Why would they be interested in you? The first thing a professional surveillant will look for is demeanor. Do you look suspicious? Are you looking over your shoulder to see if you’re being followed? What does your body language look like? Are you walking more quickly than anybody else? Are you speeding or driving aggressively? Are you changing clothes in the middle of an SDR? Believe it or not, this can sometimes be a good idea, particularly if you’re trying to lose surveillance. But under normal circumstances, nobody goes into a store wearing a blue shirt and jeans and comes out wearing a red shirt and khakis. Destination also matters. In the intelligence world, a surveillant is interested to know if you’re going to a hotel in the middle of the day or to an obscure restaurant far off the beaten path at an odd time.
Your goal is to act as normally as possible, at least in the intelligence world. The theory is that if you appear to be a normal person, going about your normal business, the surveillants will move on to the next person and leave you alone. Is it really worth their time to spend a day following you to the dry cleaner’s, to a store, to buy groceries, when they could be spending time trying to identify a spy? No way.
I once worked overseas with a woman who was a State Department political officer. Her job was to do normal diplomatic stuff with the host government—“carrying out the diplomatic business of the United States,” they call it. But the host government just automatically assumed that she was a spy. Why? I have no idea. She tended to be very arrogant and that probably rubbed them the wrong way. One evening she was on her way to a diplomatic cocktail party, and she noticed that she was being followed. She thought she’d have fun with the surveillance team, which was almost certainly from the host government’s intelligence service. So she sped through the capital city, driving the wrong way down one-way streets, driving through residential neighborhoods like a bat out of hell, and going all the way outside the city limits and then doubling back. In the end, she arrived at the cocktail party, smiled at the surveillants, and went inside. Cute, right? She certainly thought so. But what she did is convince the local intelligence service that she was a CIA officer. They were on her like white on rice for the next two years. They made her life miserable. Everything she did that night was wrong, wrong, wrong, even if in the end, she diverted the intelligence service’s attention away from CIA officers and onto herself.
In the intelligence world, a surveillance detection route (SDR) is done in advance of three operational acts: 1) An operational meeting, where an operations officer is going to meet with a source. The meeting time and place have been predetermined, either because it was triggered based on protocols or it was regularly scheduled; 2) A brief encounter, where an operations officer quickly passes or receives a message from an agent in a meeting that takes literally seconds; and 3) A dead drop. This is the most difficult and dangerous operational act. There are several phases to a dead drop. First, either you or the source has to signal the meeting. Second, you have to drop something (a message, a thumb drive, or a cell phone, for example). And third, you have to signal that the drop is completed. Every one of these three phases requires an SDR. There is more planning involved with a dead drop than with any other operational act.
Surveillance is not necessarily a couple of guys in a car, following you. It can be a lot of different things. In the intelligence world, surveillance can be a whole bunch of people in a whole bunch of cars following you, dropped off and then picking you back up later. All the while, they’re in touch via walkie-talkie. But surveillance can also be static, that is, stationary. It can be closed circuit television, webcams, or even an apartment building doorman who just stands there and watches cars go by.
There are a lot of different kinds of surveillance and surveillance detection. It can be via car, truck, or motorcycle. It can even be by plane. It is often on foot. Perhaps the best kind of surveillance detection route is multi-modal, especially if you have an operational act that you absolutely have to accomplish and if you don’t care if the bad guys know who you are. CIA officers overseas will often use multi-modal surveillance detection routes. You might start out on foot, make a stop or two, and then take a bus or subway across town. There you might get into a taxi, or even a rental car, and use that to complete your route. As you can see, it’s provocative. But if you really want to lose surveillance, having them all following you on foot when you then get into a car and drive away may be the way to go.
Not all surveillance has to be this sophisticated. Authorities everywhere like things called “red zones.” These are areas where the security and police presence are so prevalent that they don’t even need to follow you. There are cameras everywhere. Cops or private security guards are everywhere. Think the White House, the Pentagon, or CIA Headquarters. If you were engaged in something where you did not want to be detected, you would be a fool to go anywhere near a red zone.
Surveillance can also be non-traditional. A foreign intelligence officer once told me a fascinating story. He said that his service had been tasked with surveilling a nuclear scientist from an enemy country who had arrived to attend an academic conference. The scientist, of course, had been fully briefed by his own country on hostile surveillance. When he arrived, he was practically paranoid, doing a sophisticated surveillance detection route and constantly looking over his shoulder—behavior that was certainly “alerting.” But the local intelligence service was ready for him. There was nobody following him. Literally nobody. Instead, the service had put seventy-five people on the case. But they were all walking toward him. After each surveillant passed, he or she simply doubled back and walked toward the scientist again. Because he was looking behind him, he didn’t notice that all the people walking toward him repeated themselves. In the end, seventy-five people accompanied him to his operational act. The scientist was arrested and expelled. And his local handler from the enemy embassy was identified and expelled.
That’s what successful surveillance detection looks like from the side of the surveillant. Your goal, though, is to make sure that you don’t attract attention to yourself, that you don’t get caught on your way to whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish, and that you are able to go about your business unmolested. This is going to require a lot of planning. And by the end of your SDR, you will be certain that you are either clean of surveillance or you’re being followed. The choice, then, is yours. You can abort your mission, continue on to your meeting, or try like hell to lose the tail. Ninety percent of the work is in the planning.