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IMINT is the acronym for Imagery Intelligence. In case you prefer to use maps and to assert big words like coordinates, another acronym is GEOINT, which stands for Geo-spatial Intelligence. Some spies say IMINT, others say GEOINT. Some forswear any acronym in favor of using the word imagery. The word sounds very technical (one in all its charms), but it’s really only a fancy way of asserting intelligence from photographs.

You might think that sexy photographs are found only in magazines, but spies know another source: aerial reconnaissance – photos taken by a spy plane or a spy satellite. That said, what a spy considers to be “sexy” could have nothing to do with sex. (It also means the spy must get a life.) Within the Army and Marine Corps, the word reconnaissance is typically abbreviated as recon, whereas within the Air Force the abridged version is recce. The latter is pronounced WRECK-kee.

“That sounds somewhat ominous.”

Yes, it’s.

Fighter pilots love to call themselves hot stuff. That’s kinda strange, considering what hot stuff really means. Perhaps they’re envious of reconnaissance pilots. Within the early days of propeller airplanes, back within the early twentieth century, the common recce pilot would fly over enemy lines, looking for where the enemy’s troops had gathered that day. He’d wave to them, graciously, they usually waved back. It was very civilized. And upon landing his airplane, the pilot would notify his artillery friends where to try their big guns. BOOM!

Once the shell-shocked foot soldiers made the relationship, they started shooting on the spotter planes. And alas, ultimately even the pilots themselves started shooting at one another. Thus were born fighter planes.

For another approach to aerial reconnaissance, the Germans mounted tiny cameras on harnesses strapped to pigeons. Really.

And it worked. Actually, the photographs proved to be panoramically pulchritudinous, truly a bird’s eye view. After each reconnoiter the bird would then rendezvous together with his birdie beloved within the pigeon coup. Before being put inside, however, his camera was removed, lest the inadvertent creation of any pigeon pornography.

You can’t make these items up.

During the Cold War the main advanced airplanes were spy planes, probably the most famous being the U-2. (No, not the Rock band.) Created jointly by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA, the U-2 flew at extremely high altitudes, making the most of its extremely long wings and since it was extremely light. So light, the U-2 was not much stronger than a compact car product of aluminum foil. Whenever a U-2 at the ground got bumped by, say, a mechanic’s tool box, that clumsiness actually dented the plane. And it wasn’t an inexpensive fix. However the end product was a spy plane which did fly very high. So high that one pilot complained, “The worst thing about flying higher than anyone has ever flown before is that you just can’t tell anybody!”

For a time U-2 spy planes overflew even the Soviet Union itself. Those were tense years, however the overflights were kept very secret – by each side. The Americans kept quiet because they were sneaky. The Soviets kept quiet because they kept botching their chances to shoot the darn things down. One U-2 overflew a Soviet test site – prior to the Soviets tested an Atomic Bomb. (Guess what the pilot saw in his rearview mirror?) Ultimately, against another U-2, the Soviets launched missiles even while the aircraft was being chased by Soviet fighter planes. BOOM! BOOM! (Oops. One boom too many.) The U-2′s pilot survived, although he did get captured and was later sent back to America, traded for a captured Soviet undercover agent. As for the luckless Soviet pilot – well, his widow married another pilot. From an analogous squadron.

You can’t make these things up.

The next generation after the U-2 was the SR-71. The SR-71 was a spy plane so sleek and sexy, you may call it a red hot lover. As it loved getting red hot. Cruising at greater than thrice the rate of sound – that’s nearly 2,200 miles per hour, or three dozen miles every second – the SR-71 generated a lot air friction that the airplane glowed red hot and truly grew several inches. To face up to all that heat, the airframe contained the metal titanium – imported from the Soviet Union. The Communists never got the metal back, despite greater than 4,000 attempts.

Trying to shoot down the plane.

But if the SR-71′s speed and shape rendered it hot and sexy, its soaring altitude gave it a soaring attitude. Its pilots flew so high that their chest medals included Astronaut Wings. Really. Their flight suits were later adapted to be used at the Space Shuttle.

Well, Communist fighter pilots can be forgiven for thinking that the SR-71 was some style of alien spaceship. As their fighter planes tried, tried, and tried again to succeed in its cursing altitude – and not succeeded – the lofty SR-71 would sometimes fly in a circle, simply to taunt them. Nice.

If you are a UFO aficionado, get this: the SR-71 was flight-tested on the super-secret Area 51. And it was created by a secret organization called the Skunk Works.

You really can’t make these items up.

So…what do you think that of this post?  Leave me a comment!

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple, Spy Extraordinaire

What is an official seal? An official seal is a symbol of officialdom that a central authority agency affixes to its reports as a colourful symbol of its bureaucratic existence and, therefore, of its excellence.

Once upon a time, considered one of America’s intelligence agencies displayed upon its official seal a tiny mistake. A misspelled word. The word intelligence. Really.

Surely we couldn’t be that stupid!

Spies may haunt our lives, but haunting the spies are-bureaucrats. They spook the spooks from a parallel universe of memos, manuals, regulations and timecards, a puzzle palace of mind-boggling monotony we call procedures. Procedures which no ordinary person can understand, nor ever sanely should, for it’s the bureaucrat who knows best. Knows that nothing is what it seems that to be.

During the Cold War, both the Russian Communists and the Red Chinese raced against us to employ more bureaucrats than we did. They won. And that’s the reason why we won. That needs to have taught us something. Nevertheless, after I became a spy, i used to be fed another meal of acidic acronyms and unsavory terminology. Consider, for example, the next conversation:

“Hello, beautiful lady. I’m a spy.”

“You are? Oh my. How glamorous! Let’s make love!”

Sounds delicious. But for reasons i can’t digest, the word spy will not be an officially approved term. Instead, the officially-approved term of art appears on this revised conversation:

“Hello, beautiful lady. I’m an operative.”

“What? You’re inoperative? What do you need from me? Pity?”

That’s a talk I remember well.

After confessing this story, I’m slightly reluctant to invite you for a comment. But go ahead.