Designing a modern 'agency' Safe House

[Tessen]

Hard to find on the net but. So does anyone know much about Safe Houses used by secret agencies.

These are my theories if anyone can add please dive in.

I take it, it should be situated near a major transport network , but not too near potentially nosy neighbours.


Multiple types of buildings used: apartments , industrial estates etc

It would either be vacant or have a skeleton staff who would be engaged in other things i.e observing signal traffic etc

Unobtrusive CCTV , early warning alarms etc.

The PCs and servers would all be fitted with thermite charges in case they were rumbled.

Plenty of vehicles available if they had to leave quickly.

Inside of house: land lines , sat phone, radios an armoury , medical facilities

Is this stuff in Gurps Covert Ops?

[jason taylor]

One I found that I was surprised at was that WW2 doctrine said that urban ones could actually be better than rural. The idea was that city terrain was thick, and even if an enemy radio spotter triangulated your transmissions you have time enough (assuming you have friendly watchers) to pack up your equipment and escape in the labyrinth. Whereas in rural terrain the enemy can isolate where you probably are as there are fewer possibilities. I suspect that does not apply to genuine wilderness and certainly not to ground controlled by friendly partisans.

[Tessen]

Yeah that makes sense , you could always disguise the long antenna wire as a washing line or string it up in a tree.

[Tessen]

I was just thinking , if your got word that your safe house had been compromised and that the enemy was on its way. You had literally minutes to escape you'd need some type of device to completely destroy the operational activity of the 'house' and its contents ,using thermite or something but if it was located in an apartment building then you could potentially cause a major fire , emergency etc. That's a lot of collateral damage.

[David Johnston2]

Do you want a real safe house or a cinematic safehouse? Because a real safe house would be boring. It would need a place to hide things. A crawlspace, a floorboard, an attic. Just a place to stash a few incriminating things out of sight. It would be minimalistic, with no decoration and the bare minimum of furniture. It would have a secure parking space or be close to a subway. It would be urban. Suburbia has too many people noticing your comings and goings and the country is right out. It would not have any fancy surveillance systems. It would have a back exist.

[Agemegos]

You seem to be describing an operational station rather than a safe house. Is that intentional? A safe house is just a prepared hiding place: no armoury, no radio transceiver, no computers, no secrets, no permanent staff.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Tessen

I was just thinking , if your got word that your safe house had been compromised and that the enemy was on its way. You had literally minutes to escape you'd need some type of device to completely destroy the operational activity of the 'house' and its contents ,using thermite or something but if it was located in an apartment building then you could potentially cause a major fire , emergency etc. That's a lot of collateral damage.

It's also a huge mess that the authorities who are after you will have to deal with, likely making your escape easier. Partisan stories tend to have a lot of "morally gray" stuff in them. If you don't want that, you could have something setup so once you activate the thermite there's a time-delay release on some high-quality fire suppressant gear, largely restricting the damage to your unit only. There may also be less-dangerous options of disposing of evidence, such as a powerful electrical pulse to fry electronics, but that may be less reliable. In the book The F0rb1dd3n Network (which took pains to restrict itself to existing exploits and technologies), one of the paranoid main characters has all his computers rigged up to a switch (using a Staples "Easy Button" of all things) that, when pressed, sends enough electricity through them to fry pretty much everything. A nation-state level attacker may be able to pull some incriminating data from the remains, but it will take time, and may be impossible if your harddrives are setup to be encrypted.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

You seem to be describing an operational station rather than a safe house. Is that intentional? A safe house is just a prepared hiding place: no armoury, no radio transceiver, no computers, no secrets, no permanent staff.

A suitcase radio is a clumsy thing by comparison to a cell phone but is perfectly compatible with any decent building or even just an apartment. I saw on a docu one fellow who claimed to use one in a loft while Germans were partying in the floor beneath.

[Tessen]

Sounds interesting. So could somebody describe an operating station , or give me some links please.

And a cinematic safe house would be nice.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Tessen

Sounds interesting. So could somebody describe an operating station , or give me some links please.

And a cinematic safe house would be nice.

I'm not sure what is meant by operating station. There is really little an elaborate set-up can do that a safehouse cannot and being able to move is a premium. The closest thing I can think of is a smuggler base. The OSS for instance maintained in Greece several underground harbors for paramilitarized fishing boats (it was a project similar to the Shetland Bus though I think it was based in Turkey which was neutral territory).

Similarly the SOE maintained secret airstrips, not least because operatives would be expected to come back for debrief and you can't parachute upward.