Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast, number 1014, Becoming a Spy.
This is English as a Second Language Podcast, episode 1014.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
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This episode is a dialogue between Vaughn and Sidney about becoming a spy.
What are they going to talk about?
Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
Let's get started.
You've been reading that novel for hours.
What is it?
It's a spy novel and it's really good.
It's about a man who is recruited by the CIA to work in counterintelligence doing code-breaking, but he becomes embroiled in the world of espionage.
That sounds exciting.
Yeah, he's sent on a mission to infiltrate a foreign spy organization and to feed them misinformation.
I'd love to be a spy.
You wouldn't really want to live the life of a spy, would you?
You'd have to live a double life, not being able to tell your friends and family that you're an operative.
I wouldn't care if I could go on clandestine missions to thwart and sabotage the enemy.
Working for the CIA would be a dream come true.
You'd have to keep a lot of secrets, not divulging classified information.
Yes, so?
What are you trying to say?
Well, no offense, but I think your cover would be blown after about five minutes.
This episode is about becoming a spy.
A spy, S-P-Y is a person who works for the government of his or her country and tries to get information about other countries.
Sometimes spies actually do things to hurt other countries.
That's part of their job.
Here we're talking about becoming a spy.
We begin with Vaughn, who says to Sidney, You've been reading that novel for hours.
What is it?
Sidney says, It's a spy novel, and it's really good.
A spy novel would be, of course, fictional book about international spies.
These sorts of novels were very popular when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, especially during the time of what we called the Cold War, when there were diplomatic and other tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.
And There are lots of good spy novelists out there.
My favorite is John le Carré, the British author.
But getting back to our story, Sidney says this spy novel is about a man who is recruited by the CIA to work in counterintelligence doing code-breaking.
To recruit, R-E-C-R-U-I-T, means to get someone to join an organization.
We often use this verb when talking about the military.
The United States has a voluntary military force, meaning you're not forced to become a member of the military, as you are in some countries.
In the U.S., therefore, the military has to recruit people.
It has to go out to high schools and colleges and try to get young men and women to sign up to become part of the military.
This novel is about a man who is recruited not by the military, but by the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA is the part of the US government that is responsible basically for spies, for gathering information, secret information, often about countries and about doing other things that the president wants the agency to do in other countries.
Sometimes these are things the other countries don't like.
In fact, most of the time, they're probably things the other countries don't like.
Counterintelligence, C-O-U-N-T-E-R-I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-E-N-C-E, a long word that refers to the efforts in activities that other governments go through to try to prevent someone from getting their information so you have the United States for example and trying to get secret information about, say, another country.
Let's just say Canada.
You know, Canada is a pretty violent country.
We have to be very careful about the Canadians, I think.
I'm kidding, of course.
The Canadians are wonderful people.
But let's imagine that the Americans are spying on the Canadians...
The Canadians don't want the Americans to find out what they're doing, so they do things to hide their secrets.
After all, if they didn't hide that information, it wouldn't be secret.
These efforts to hide information so that other governments don't discover it is called counterintelligence.
In the novel the person, the man, is recruited to work in counterintelligence, doing code breaking.
Code breaking is also called by a more technical name, cryptography.
Basically, it is the art some would say the science of analyzing codes and trying to understand the hidden information in the codes.
Cryptography, or code breaking, was extremely important during World War II, for example, where each country tried to break the secret code of the other country.
The code, C-O-D-E, here means the system that is being used to disguise or to hide information.
The man in Sidney's novel has become embroiled in the world of espionage.
To be embroiled.
E-M-B-R-O-I-L-E-D means to be completely involved in something, especially something that is difficult, a difficult situation.
You can also become embroiled in an argument where two people are fighting with each other verbally or perhaps even physically.
Espionage, E-S-P-I-O-N-A-G-E, refers to the practice of spying.
Vaughn says that sounds exciting.
Sidney says, yeah.
He's sent on a mission to infiltrate a foreign spy organization and to feed them misinformation.
A mission M-I-S-S-I-O-N here means an important assignment, especially one that involves traveling somewhere for a specific purpose.
We often use that word mission to talk about the tasks or assignments that a spy gets and has to carry out or accomplish.
To infiltrate I-N-F-I-L-T-R-A-T-E is to become a member of an organization in order to get information about that organization.
So, for example, if there are a group of terrorists, people who are trying to blow up a building, let's say, the government may try to put someone in that group, get someone to become a member of that group in order to get information about the group and what it is planning on doing.
That would be to infiltrate the terrorist group.
What the person in the novel that Sidney is reading says is infiltrating another spy organization.
So the CIA might be infiltrating the spy organization of Canada, whatever that's called.
While we often think of infiltrating an organization as a A way of getting information from the organization, in the novel that Sidney's reading, the spy's job is not to get information from the other organization, but to feed them or give them misinformation.
Misinformation is information that is given to another group in order to trick them, in order to lie to them, in order to make them think something is true when it really isn't true.
You can talk about misinformation in a lot of different contexts.
In a business organization.
You might, for example, have misinformation that you give to people who are trying to do the same things that your company does and you don't want them to find out what you're doing.
Basically, it's lying, and so it's not a recommended practice.
However, I'm sure it's done.
When we talk about governments and misinformation, we're talking about information that is meant to make another government think something is true, when in fact it is not.
Now there's a related word called disinformation.
D-I-S-I-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N.
Disinformation is when the government thinks gives false information, often to reporters and newspapers, to make them think something is true about their country that really isn't.
Disinformation is sort of a special kind of misinformation.
Sidney says, I'd love to be a spy.
Vaughn says, you wouldn't really want to live the life of a spy, would you?
Notice this is a classic example of a tag question in English.
The first part is negative and the question tag or part at the end is affirmative or positive.
You would not really want to live the life of a spy, would you?
Vaughn's assumption is that Sydney doesn't really want to be a spy.
Vaughn says you'd have to live a double life, not being able to tell your friends and family that you're an operative.
To live a double life is to... have a secret or hidden identity separate from your normal life.
So you might work at a bank during the day, but also you work as a spy on nights and weekends.
You don't tell the people at the bank that you're a spy.
You're living a double life, a secret life, in addition to your normal or regular life.
An operative O-P-E-R-A-T-I-V-E is someone who works in the spy business.
We might say who works in espionage.
Sidney says, I wouldn't care if I could go on clandestine missions to thwart and sabotage the enemy.
Clandestine C-L-A-N-D-E-S-T-I-N-E, which can also be pronounced clandestine, refers to something that is secret, something that is hidden, especially if it is related to something that is wrong or criminal.
Here, the meaning is basically a hidden mission or a secret mission.
Sidney wants to go on missions to thwart and sabotage the enemy.
To thwart T-H-W-A-R-T means to interfere with something so that someone cannot do what he or she was planning to do.
To sabotage is similar.
To sabotage, S-A-B-O-T-A-G-E, usually means to interfere with someone, but in a physical way.
You might, for example, blow up a bridge or do something to the enemy's water supply.
Those are examples of sabotage.
Sidney says working for the CIA would be a dream come true.
We use that expression a dream come true to refer to the perfect situation, an ideal situation for you.
Vaughn says you'd have to keep a lot of secrets, not divulging classified information.
To divulge D-I-V-U-L-G-E means to tell someone something that is secret, to give information to someone that you're not supposed to.
Often
Classified refers to information that the government says is secret.
The government says this is classified information.
You can't tell anyone else about it.
Sidney says, yes, so?
Vaughn then uses an old expression, loose lips sink ships.
Loose lips refers to people who are always talking, who are talking to people and giving them information they shouldn't be giving them.
To sink a ship means to make a boat or a ship go down into the water.
So loose lips, sink ships means that people who give information and are not careful about secret information that they have may hurt the cause of death.
The country may actually cause the enemy to get information that would lead to the destruction of some part of your country's military.
Sidney says, what are you trying to say?
Vaughn says, well, no offense, meaning don't get angry.
I'm not trying to upset you.
But I think your cover would be blown after about five minutes.
The cover of a spy is the false identity that the spy has, so that no one knows that he or she is a spy.
Your cover might be that you're a photographer traveling and taking photographs of things, when in fact you're a spy for your government.
Your cover is that you're a photographer.
To blow someone's cover is to reveal who they really are.
To say this person isn't a photographer, he's a spy.
When that happens, your cover is blown.
Blown, B-L-O-W-N, is the past participle of the verb to blow.
I, for example, would make a very, very bad spy.
I would definitely not be able to keep my mouth shut, to not talk.
The CIA definitely would not want me to work for them.
Now let's listen to the dialogue, this time at a normal speed.
You've been reading that novel for hours.
What is it?
It's a spy novel, and it's really good.
It's about a man who is recruited by the CIA to work in counterintelligence doing code-breaking, but he becomes embroiled in the world of espionage.
That sounds exciting.
Yeah, he's sent on a mission to infiltrate a foreign spy organization and to feed them misinformation.
I'd love to be a spy.
You wouldn't really want to live the life of a spy, would you?
You'd have to live a double life, not being able to tell your friends and family that you're an operative.
I wouldn't care if I could go on clandestine missions to thwart and sabotage the enemy.
Working for the CIA would be a dream come true.
You'd have to keep a lot of secrets, not divulging classified information.
Yes, so?
Loose lips sink ships.
What are you trying to say?
Well, no offense, but I think your cover would be blown after about five minutes.
I'm not divulging classified information by telling you that the script writer for today's script was the wonderful Dr Lucy Say.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thank you for listening.
Come back and listen to us again right here on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
Copyright 2014 by the Center for Educational Development
