BiAS 7 – The Bible and Politics in Africa
usually a Director who heads the command center of this organization.
Assisting the Director are usually Deputy Directors and then comes
various other high-ranking offices to minor ones. Depending with one’s
background and the training one got, each secret agent is assigned to a
particular task within the agency. The spy, as argued by Ed Grabi-
anowski, is usually not in contact with anyone else except with the con-
troller. He/she may thus never come to learn the names of any other
spies or officials and this is known as compartmentalization. The pur-
pose of such compartmentalization is that if he/ she is captured and
interrogated, he/ she cannot reveal vital information or the identities of
other spies.^7 Those specialized in certain fields may be sent abroad and
operate from there. In these foreign missions such spy agents usually
take on a cover identity so that the countries they would be spying may
not know the secret work they would be doing.
Information gathering technics and the execution of missions
- Spy Planes and Satellites
Before the advancement of technology countries had to resort to spy
planes equipped with cameras in spying each other. Such surveillance
planes were often exposed to danger for they were made to fly directly
over the enemy. Grabianowski reports of a U-2 spy plane which the U.S.
President Eisenhower authorized in 1960 to fly over the Soviet Union.
The plane was, however, shot down by a Soviet missile and the pilot,
Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to safety. While the U.S. President had
first argued that it was a weather research mission gone astray, the
United States was forced into admitting that it was indeed a spying plane
when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev revealed the pilot’s capture
and the cameras recovered from the plane.^8 Now with modern advanced
technology countries are relying on Satellites equipped with cameras
and modern day spy satellites are able to take photographs with a high
precision even enough to read the headline on a newspaper.
- Small technological devices
On surface to surface missions spies rely on a wide assortment of tech-
nological devices. Among them we find the use of super-sensitive mi-
(^7) Cf. Grabianowski, How Spies Work.
(^8) Cf. Grabianowski, How Spies Work.