Rules That Spies Followed During The Cold War

"Well, hello there! Have a seat and ... yes, right there. Great. So: Welcome to spy camp! I know, right? So many poison-tipped pens. Not yours, of course! Anyway. Right there you'll find your super secret special spy guide which outlines all of our division's rules. Most of it is common sense, like 'Don't tell someone you're a spy' and 'Always keep your collar popped when you're wearing your fedora.' Sound good? Okay! Let's head over to HR and get your fingerprints removed."

No, it didn't happen like that. We're talking about spies. "Spy" isn't a job title like "assistant to the assistant's regional managerial assistant." It's more of a role, like "desk monkey," but with a much higher possibility of death and torture. That's why spies can't and couldn't get caught, especially during the Cold War, which lasted roughly from the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hey, that's a rule. But, it's more of an unspoken, obvious point than anything prescriptive.

Although the Cold War prominently featured the United States vs. the Soviet Union in a stalemate of will-they/won't-they nuclear strikes, every nation involved in the conflict employed spycraft to meet their objectives. Or more accurately, "espionage" — either abroad or at home. Government agencies like the CIA, FBI, KGB (which Russian President Vladimir Putin worked under), and more all had different regulations for agents posted as feet-on-the-ground "spies." Beyond rules of a specific mission and who reports to who, we're mostly talking common sense guidelines rather than any kind of formal written rules.

Beyond big-picture ideas like "Don't get caught," information isn't extremely forthcoming about super secret spy stuff. But we've got some specifics about the CIA thanks to Tony Mendez, the guy Ben Afleck's character in 2012's "Argo" was based on. According to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Mendez's official job title was "chief of disguise and chief of the Graphics and Authentication Division" in the Office of Technical Service. So yes, there were disguises. And Mendez's title tells us a lot about organizational chart-type regulations that we'll never fully know about.

But as far as feet-on-the-ground spy stuff is concerned, we've got a list of 10 CIA Cold War rules that Mendez writes about in 2019's "The Moscow Rules." These were unwritten, implicit rules that he called "dead simple and full of common sense." Worth citing in full, they are: "Assume nothing," "Never go against your gut," "Everyone is potentially under opposition control," "Do not look back; you are never completely alone," "Go with the flow, blend in," "Vary your pattern and stay within your cover," "Lull them into a sense of complacency," "Do not harass the opposition," "Pick the time and place for action," and, "Keep your options open." 

Bear in mind that even though Mendez's book is called "The Moscow Rules," they could apply to many locations. As the U.S.' chief intelligence-gathering and espionage agency, the CIA conducted operations everywhere from East Germany to Cuba and Chile.

If the CIA operated outwardly, engaging in espionage abroad during the Cold War, the FBI operated internally within the United States. This is especially true under J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program), which launched in 1956. The program lasted for 15 years and involved agents infiltrating domestic groups considered threats, like anti-war protest movements, student groups, left-wing political organizations, unions, and hate groups like the KKK. This means that FBI agents posed as members of such groups to gather intelligence, disseminate disinformation, etc.

It stands to reason that an FBI agent isn't likely to face the same kind of danger in domestic groups as, say, a CIA agent posing as a German citizen in East Germany. Nonetheless, the same unwritten common sense rules that Tony Mendez laid out in the Moscow Rules almost certainly applied to FBI spies, too. With that said, we don't have any specific "do" rules for FBI spies during the Cold War. Rather, we could say that FBI rules involved flaunting legalities. 

Much has been made of the FBI's impropriety on domestic soil during the Cold War. U.S. agencies like the FBI, for instance, employed at least 1,000 former World War II Nazis during the Cold War as intelligence assets connected to Soviet sources, particularly during the 1950s. Per The New York Times, even just one of them — a former SS officer — said he likely committed "minor war crimes" during this time. Overall, the FBI operated by a simple overarching rule: Get the job done at all costs. 

In keeping with our theme of "unwritten rules," spies of all stripes abided by some code of etiquette or honor during the Cold War — at least according to some. We can use Russian double agent Sergei Skripal to illustrate. Skripal worked as a double agent during the Cold War for the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. In 2018, he was targeted for assassination in Salisbury, England using some kind of nerve agent. CCTV even captured a scene straight from a movie, showing a blonde woman (a wig, maybe) carrying a "large scarlet bag" and walking away from the scene of the crime, as The Guardian says.

Mark Galeotti, senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, told The Guardian that such targeted attacks would have never happened during the Cold War because "there was an understanding about what was and what was not acceptable." Bear in mind that the attack targeted Skripal's daughter, too. It also happened in broad daylight in a convenience store when Skripal was buying milk and lottery tickets — an uncouth move, to say the least. 

At the same time, Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB agent of 32 years, calls this idea of honor amongst spies absurd. "I am not familiar with any such [spy] etiquette," he dryly told The Guardian. Nonetheless, data seems to bear out the idea of etiquette, at least in one respect: No defectors to the U.S., Europe, or Russia have ever officially been targeted for assassination. Until Skripal, that is.

No matter any talk of spy etiquette, tales of the KGB depict an organization without a shred of gentility or propriety. Going under many different acronyms — the OGPU, GRU, NKVD, MVD — until 1954 when it adopted the name Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the KGB was renowned for its absolute ruthlessness. During Cold War dictator Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, for example, the KGB (then the NKVD) arrested 1.5 million Soviet citizens and apparent political dissidents in two years across 1937 and '38. About half were murdered, and the rest sent to gulags. The KGB prowled until 1991, gathering intelligence abroad, engaging in sabotage and subterfuge, surveilling its own citizens, censoring Soviet critics, arresting them, coercing them, imprisoning them, torturing them, and more. 

While the KGB's tactics were brutal and sound completely lawless, the organization itself adhered to an absolute, strict hierarchy of power and positions. Divisions included the First Chief Directorate in charge of foreign operations, the Second Chief Directorate in charge of internal operations, the Third Chief Directorate in charge of counterintelligence, and so forth. No doubt there were plenty of rules behind closed doors for each and every agent in each and every division.

But ultimately, as 32-year KGB veteran Oleg Kalugin told The Guardian, the KGB only had one rule: To win. Kalugin, who scoffed at notions of spy etiquette, said that the KGB did whatever, whenever, to achieve its objectives. This included creating numerous "secret KGB poison laboratories" that he suggests were never shut down.

Even though the Cold War largely featured the United States vs. Soviet Union, plenty of other nations across the globe got roped into the conflict. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949 in part as a buffer against westward Soviet incursions. It incorporated a host of nations like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Denmark, Luxemburg, Italy, Norway, and Iceland. And even though the treaty said "an armed attack against one or more ... shall be considered an attack against them all," each nation retained sovereignty over its affairs. They had their own espionage agencies with their own rules.

But because non-superpower nations had limited resources, defensive/protective spywork often took priority. Take the case of the United Kingdom, which by the 1970s found itself overwhelmed with Soviet spies at a ratio of five KGB spies in London to one MI5 spy in Moscow. Adherence to a sense of the aforementioned spy etiquette — or "political feebleness," as Aspects of History puts it — allowed these KGB agents to go about their business. The U.K. eventually kicked them out and informed the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow of their intention to do so ahead of time. This might seem like a bizarre move for spies, whose work centers on secrecy and collusion. But the U.K. abided by some of those same unwritten, implicit rules we covered already — rules that everyone understands but never speaks, and most of which we'll never know.