Earlier this year when Compass Coffee declared bankruptcy, right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer alleged that Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund was angling to buy the DC chain in order to use its wi-fi networks to spy on government-connected customers. No actual evidence of such a scenario existed, and Compass Coffee was ultimately bought in a bankruptcy auction by London-based Caffè Nero. But the rumor did get us thinking about spy activity in DC restaurants. Turns out, there’s a history of it. During the Cold War in 1985, CIA officer turned double agent Aldrich Ames handed over US secrets to the Soviets at Chadwicks (now Mr. Smith’s) in Georgetown. That same year, at nearby Au Pied de Cochon, KGB officer and Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko escaped his CIA handler and defected back to the Soviet Union. (The French bistro had a plaque to commemorate his last meal in the US.) More recently, FBI agents surveilled former senator Bob Menendez with Egyptian officials at the downtown Morton’s steakhouse, leading to charges of bribery, extortion, and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt. “Every week, there’s foreign-intelligence officers meeting with people in restaurants in DC,” says Peter Strzok, a former special agent for the FBI. “If they’re interesting enough to the FBI, there’s a decent chance the FBI might be trying to watch that.” Chris Costa, executive director of the International Spy Museum, says intelligence officers might also frequent certain hangouts around, say, the White House: “If you are a trained intelligence officer, you’re going to the restaurant with the express purpose of developing and cultivating a source that has access to the White House. Also, in some cases, you do intensive research. What looks like somebody bumping into you at a bar could be somebody that already knows who you are and knows that you work for the White House.” Spies could potentially be making your coffee or serving you a glass of wine, too. “The idea of having cover work—something mundane and boring—but having some other special task, that is not unusual at all,” Costa says. Still, a cover requires a lot of work, and Strzok notes that it’s unlikely an intelligence officer would be doing spy work from a restaurant position, just hoping to overhear something interesting. But, he adds, there is a “high” likelihood that some local bartenders have been recruited to provide information—though they may be misled about whom they’re really working for. (A foreign operative could be disguised as, say, a journalist to gain their cooperation.) “Return-on-investment-wise, it’s much better to recruit a couple of bartenders and say, ‘If you hear something interesting, give me a call and I’ll pay you for the information,’ ” Strzok says. As for weaponizing the wi-fi network at a coffee shop? According to Strzok, a cafe near the White House or a US intelligence facility may be a tempting target for a foreign government to monitor, but weeding through the data overload—even with the aid of AI tools—might have limited success. “For every US Army Special Forces guy that sits down, there are 2,000 customers who have nothing to do with the US government,” he says. “And that one person, they might be sloppy, but chances are they’re not going to be plopping down and hopping on the internet and all of a sudden discussing classified or sensitive information.”The post Is Your Bartender a Spy? first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less