As all good book-collectors know, it's often the smallest, least-interesting books that are the most interesting, if not valuable. This, and subsequent webpages on this site, attest to this quite well. Nestled away in the back of a bookshop in upstate New York was a slim paperback bound in a plain blue cardboard cover. It bears no ISBN, has nothing on it's spine, and it's authorship is unattributed. For all that, though, the cover is certainly memorable:
This ninety-two page booklet, published in 1987 by a major U.S. aerospace defense contractor, is straightforwardly entitled "A Counterintelligence Awareness Primer". It is, simply, a textbook on industrial espionage in the waning days of the cold war. Probably authored by, or certainly with input from, the U.S. government, and written in a straightforward journalistic style, it is a fascinating relic of the days when Russian intelligence services were monitoring most of the telephone calls made in this country. Every page, it seems, cites a dark warning of an American who "betrayed his country" and paid the price for his weakness. Though situations have changed greatly in the twenty years since this was written, much of the information, particularly on recruitment, seems as relevant today as it was back then.
Indeed, merely by changing a few names, we suspect that this booklet could easily be republished today. The enemies may have changed, as have the names of the "surrogates" doing their dirty work, but it would be foolish to suppose that today's ever-growing list of "enemies of freedom" are abstaining from espionage and intelligence-gathering in this country.
Part one, "Espionage", is the "meat" of the volume, and the most interesting. Part two, entitled "Safeguards", contains what would seem to be a great deal of vendor-specific security information that is far less interesting and relevant than part one. The remainder of the volume is a glossary and a self-quiz, covering both parts one and two. Regrettably, there is no bibliography.
We have reproduced part one in it's entirety, each of four subsections on it's own page. The original book was designed to look larger, more authoritative, and more impressive than it is, with huge margins, text broken into two columns, and a lot of inset quotes taken from the body of the text. (A small image of two pages can be seen here.) The text is reproduced in a more conventional format, with the paragraph breaks of the original intact; if it looks unusual, it's because in the original format, one sentance of modest length often takes up half a page.
We have no intentions of reproducing further portions of this handbook; they are either heavily specific to the contractor in question (part two), or no different, let alone better or more interesting, than what is readily available on the internet today (the glossary). We hope you find the pages below interesting; we certainly do.
