T. H. E. Hill | |
---|---|
Born | 1948 (age 75–76) |
Pen name | Thomas Heinrich Edward Hill, a.k.a. T. H. E. Hill |
Occupation | Intelligence officer, author |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Indiana University, DLIWC, USARI |
Period | Cold War |
Genre | Spy fiction |
Notable works | Voices Under Berlin The Day Before the Berlin Wall |
Notable awards | Hollywood Book Festival 2008 Voices Under Berlin |
Website | |
www |
Thomas Heinrich Edward Hill, or T. H. E. Hill (born 1948), is a pseudonymous American novelist who writes mostly in the genre of spy fiction. [1] [2] His first novel was published when he was 60 years old, after a career that was spent in military intelligence.
Hill has three degrees from the West Coast branch of the Defense Language Institute. He is also an alumnus of The U.S. Army Russian Institute.
He served at United States Army Security Agency Field Station Berlin in the mid-1970s. [3] His pen name is a reference to the Field Station Berlin operations site, which was referred to as "The Hill" by those who worked there. [4] ("The Hill" was in fact a common appellation for SIGINT sites at other locations.) [5]
Hill retired in 1993, following 26 years of combined uniformed and civilian service, 16 of it overseas. [6]
Hill's first novel was Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary, published in 2008. It is a fictionalized story of the Berlin Spy Tunnel (Operation Gold, covername: PBJOINTLY). This was a COMINT, as opposed to a HUMINT operation, which makes the novel different from most spy fiction. Voices Under Berlin was an award winner at the Hollywood Book Festival in 2008. Since then it has garnered an additional five awards. Most recently, it was included in the Indie 500 Booklist for 2011.
Hill's second novel, The Day Before the Berlin Wall, is an alternate history of the lead-up to the construction of the Berlin Wall, based on a legend that was still being told in the mid-1970s, by U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Berlin. According to the legend, the U.S. had advance intelligence of the plans to build the wall. This information included the fact that the East-German engineer troops who were going to build it had been told to halt construction if the Americans were to take aggressive action to stop them. This novel has so far won two awards, the most recent being the Stars & Flags Book Award for Historical Fiction. [7]
Hill was awarded the TANS “Recommended Reading” award for published authors in the 2012 Old Spooks and Spies Short-Story Contest for his story "Lieutenant Bar". [8]
Hill's third novel, Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin, was published in 2013, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first permanent buildings on Teufelsberg, the operational home of Field Station Berlin. The novel is set in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The main characters are an American who used to be stationed in Berlin and his old "long-haired dictionary,” who is not thrilled to see him again. The novel is a juxtaposition of Berlin in the 1970s with Berlin in the 2010s, spiced up with stories of American intelligence escapades. The novel explores the difficulties of post-reunification reconciliation, both within Germany and between Germany and the United States. [9]
In addition to being an author, T. H. E. Hill is a graphic artist. He specializes in military themes. Hill has designed four sheets of commemorative Cinderella stamps:
Hill's stamps are a part of the collections of The Allied Museum in Berlin, The Wende Museum in California, and the Artistamp Museum in Florida.
Hill is also the creator of "The Great Army SIGINT Seal". [14]
ECHELON, originally a secret government code name, is a surveillance program operated by the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, also known as the Five Eyes.
Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether communications between people or from electronic signals not directly used in communication. Signals intelligence is a subset of intelligence collection management. As classified and sensitive information is usually encrypted, signals intelligence in turn involves the use of cryptanalysis to decipher the messages. Traffic analysis—the study of who is signaling whom and in what quantity—is also used to integrate information again.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British agent, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. It serves as a sequel to le Carré's previous novels Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, which also featured the fictitious British intelligence organization, "The Circus", and its agents George Smiley and Peter Guillam.
Royal Air Force Menwith Hill is a Royal Air Force station near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, which provides communications and intelligence support services to the United Kingdom and the United States. The site contains an extensive satellite ground station and is a communications intercept and missile warning site. It has been described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world.
Teufelsberg is a non-natural hill in Berlin, Germany, in the Grunewald locality of former West Berlin. It rises about 80 metres (260 ft) above the surrounding Teltow plateau and 120.1 metres (394 ft) above the sea level, in the north of Berlin's Grunewald Forest. It was named after the Teufelssee in its southerly vicinity. The hill is made of debris and rubble, and covers an unfinished Nazi military-technical college. During the Cold War, there was a U.S. listening station on the hill, Field Station Berlin. The site of the former field station is now fenced off and is currently being managed by an organisation which charges 15 euros for public access.
A radio listening station is a facility used for military reconnaissance, especially telecommunications reconnaissance by "intercepting" radio transmitter communications. In contrast to the original eavesdropping on an acoustic speech conversation, radio eavesdropping stations are used to eavesdrop on the information transmitted wirelessly using radio technology. For this purpose, highly sensitive radio receivers and suitable receiving antennas are used.
Hopscotch is a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, in which a CIA field officer walks away from the Agency in order to keep from being retired and placed behind a desk, and invites the Agency to pursue him by writing an exposé and mailing chapters of it piecemeal to all the major intelligence agencies around the world, including the CIA. Hopscotch won the 1976 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
The United States Army Security Agency (ASA) was the United States Army's signals intelligence branch from 1945 to 1976. The Latin motto of the Army Security Agency was Semper Vigilis, which echoes the declaration, often mistakenly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, that "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
The Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) or Etterretningstjenesten is a Norwegian military intelligence agency under the Chief of Defence and the Ministry of Defence.
James W. Hall III is a former United States Army warrant officer and signals intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.
Signals intelligence by alliances, nations and industries comprises signals intelligence (SIGINT) gathering activities by national and non-national entities; these entities are commonly responsible for communications security (COMSEC) as well.
Radiofrequency MASINT is one of the six major disciplines generally accepted to make up the field of Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT), with due regard that the MASINT subdisciplines may overlap, and MASINT, in turn, is complementary to more traditional intelligence collection and analysis disciplines such as SIGINT and IMINT. MASINT encompasses intelligence gathering activities that bring together disparate elements that do not fit within the definitions of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), or Human Intelligence (HUMINT).
Signals intelligence operational platforms are employed by nations to collect signals intelligence, which is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether between people or between machines, or mixtures of the two. As sensitive information is often encrypted, signals intelligence often involves the use of cryptanalysis. However, traffic analysis—the study of who is signalling whom and in what quantity—can often produce valuable information, even when the messages themselves cannot be decrypted.
Before the development of radar and other electronics techniques, signals intelligence (SIGINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT) were essentially synonymous. Sir Francis Walsingham ran a postal interception bureau with some cryptanalytic capability during the reign of Elizabeth I, but the technology was only slightly less advanced than men with shotguns, during World War I, who jammed pigeon post communications and intercepted the messages carried.
The Defense Intelligence Headquarters is a military intelligence and signal intelligence agency of the Japanese government, under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Ministry of Defense. It is currently one of the biggest Japanese intelligence agencies, with its creation and structure modeled after the American Defense Intelligence Agency.
Integrated Overhead SIGINT Architecture, or IOSA, incorrectly reported to be codenamed Intruder, was a spy satellite system to be operated by the United States National Reconnaissance Office, which would have replaced the Mentor and Mercury systems. The satellites were reported to have been under development in 1995. The Intruder system was designed to combine the electronic signals intelligence (ELINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT) roles of signals Intelligence (SIGINT) spacecraft, which had previously been performed by different satellites, the Rhyolite and Vortex series respectively.
After the end of World War II, all the Western allies began a rapid drawdown of military forces, including those of signals intelligence. At the time, the US still had a COMINT organization split between the Army and Navy. A 1946 plan listed Russia, China, and a [redacted] country as high-priority targets.
LOVEINT is the practice of intelligence service employees making use of their extensive monitoring capabilities to spy on their love interest or spouse. The term was coined in resemblance to intelligence terminology such as SIGINT, COMINT or HUMINT.
Mass surveillance in East Germany was a widespread practice throughout the country's history, involving Soviet, East German, and Western agencies.
Hüseyin Yıldırım is a Turkish-American auto mechanic who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for his courier role in the espionage activities of U.S. serviceman James Hall III during the Cold War era. Yıldırım was later pardoned and extradited to his homeland, where he was sentenced to 17 years in prison but served only one day.