Spy time: the hunt for chronophages

ABSTRACT

Time creates issues for the intelligence community in its four basic meanings: as an objective measure of the duration between events; as a subjective experience; as a component of the spacetime coordinates locating a target; and as a temporal sequence that can suggest causality or attribution. Latency measures the freshness of intelligence reports and perishability the time over which the content will be sensitive. The use of intelligence by military command is governed by time considerations as is the application and development of technology to overcome the constraints of time. The digital age, and digital media, pose new problems as well as solutions to these problems.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article had its genesis in a series of seminars on Time organised by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Loughborough University in January 2021.

2. Rovelli, The Order of Time, 15; and Barbour, The Janus Point, 1–21.

3. Chronophage or time-eater is the name given to the spectacular large grasshopper-shaped escapement that sits atop the Corpus Christi College clock in Cambridge by the designer and maker Dr John Taylor. It was the 18^th century clockmaker John Harrison who invented the escapement to measure out equal intervals of time which he compared to a grasshopper devouring time with a snap of its jaws. The Corpus clock hour is tolled by the sound of a chain clanking into a small wooden coffin hidden in the back of the clock representing the passing of time unto death. Every so often the clock runs deliberately slowly by design; at other times the pendulum will stop altogether, or even begin to run backwards. It is designed to be perfectly on time only every five minutes; in this regard it reflects life’s inherent irregularity and, as intelligence officers well understand, the information we have to work with is always incomplete and sometimes wrong.

4. The priority given by the Admiralty to the operations of SIS agents on Norwegian coast watch is described by Jeffery, MI6, 335.

5. Jeffery, MI6, 359.

6. Howard, Strategic Deception, 103.

7. New York Times, 1936.

8. A description of the use of the technique (codename RAFTER) to detect when Soviet agents were operating in the UK is given by Wright, Spycatcher, 93–7.

9. As alleged in the Justice Department indictment of Russian illegal agents including Anna Chapman in 2010.

10. Ferris, Behind the Enigma, 238–43.

11. Hinsley, Volume 2, 655.

12. The most famous case of the former was the defection of cypher clerk Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa in 1945. The bugging of cypher rooms (codename ENGULF) is described by Wright, 111.

13. The relevant decrypts have been declassified and described by Benson and Warner (eds.), Venona, 191.

14. Andrew and Mitrokhin published their results in two volumes covering Europe and the West and the Rest of the World.

15. Simmons, “Adventures with a Time Machine.”

16. Evidence to the independent RUSI commission into surveillance of which the author was a member. RUSI, 2015.

17. Schneier, Applied Cryptography, 1996, 1.2.

18. Attributed to Einstein by the New York Times, 1929, but the story may have been circulating in Germany before then.

19. Barbour, The Janus Point, 324.

20. Corera, The Art of Betrayal, Ch. 4.

21. The dead drop was behind a radiator in the entrance hall of an anonymous Moscow apartment building. Penkovsky’s original diagram of the dead drop is described by Duns, Dead Drop.

22. The UK National Cyber Security Centre has given their explanation on their website.

23. The conclusion reached by Lord Butler in his inquiry into the problems of intelligence before the 2003 Iraq war, ch. 1.

24. Cognitive Flow was conceived and popularised by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

25. Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality ch. 5.

26. According to MIT in 2009.

27. Nagarajan et al., “How Does the Speed of Thought,” 2.

28. Bergson, Time and Free Will, ch. 1.

29. UK Interception Commissioner, 6.

30. Buchanan, The Cybersecurity Dilemma, 61.

31. An example of using time zones as an identicator of cyber activity is explored by Dagon et al.

32. A quip often but probably falsely attributed to Albert Einstein.

33. The UK Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee investigated in detail the timelines for the five serious terrorist attacks suffered by the UK in 2017.

34. Omand, How Spies Think, 9–13.

35. Ibid., 39–67.

36. Pearl, Causality, 26.

37. Urban, The Man Who Broke Napoleon’s Codes, 223.

38. Omand and Phythian, Principled Spying,143–5.

39. As set out in a 2016 analysis of fake news by the RAND Corporation.

40. An opinion put forward by Wired magazine in 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Omand

Sir David Omand is a visiting Professor in the War Studies Department, King’s College London. Previous posts included Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, Director GCHQ, and Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Policy in MOD. He served for 7 years on the JIC. He is an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College Cambridge and the author of Securing the State (Hurst), Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence (OUP) and How Spies Think: 10 Lessons from Intelligence (Penguin Viking)