The Three Letter Agencies
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The three Letter Agencies can be further contracted to the Three Letter Acronym TLA, which of course may stand for either Three Letter Agencies or Three Letter Acronyms. Some are abbrieviations, most are not acronyms.
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[A "spook agency" is a slang term referring to a government intelligence agency, most commonly used to describe the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), where "spook" is a casual term for a spy or undercover agent working for the agency, signifying their secretive nature. Key points about spook agencies: Meaning- Spook is a slang term for a spy, so a spook agency is an organization that employs spies to gather intelligence covertly. A primary example: The CIA is the most well-known spook agency. Why spook: The term likely comes from the idea of someone appearing out of nowhere or being mysterious, like a ghost ("spook"). Source: Google AI Overview]
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US spook TLAs:
CIA - CentralIntelligenceAgency
FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation
NRO - National Reconnaissance Office
NSA - National Security Agency
DOD - Department of Defense [Formerly the Department of War]
DHS - Department of Homeland Security (US)
DEA - Drug Enforcement Agency
DOE - Department of Energy
CID - Counter Intelligence Defense
Non-US spook TLAs:
BVD - Binnenlandse VeiligheidsDienst (Internal Security Agency; Dutch) [now replaced by the AIVD, see below]
BND - Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service; German)
DSD - Defence Signals Directorate - Australian communications monitoring agency
GPU - Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie (State Political Administration)
KGB - Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopaznosti (Committee for State Security)
Questionable if spook:
NIH - National Institutes of Health
OSF - Open Software Foundation (come on, this isn't even a government agency!)
CDC - Centers for Disease Control
Are there any spook agencies with fewer or more letters in their name?
ASIO - Australian Security Intelligence Organization
MI5/MI6 (5 and 6 are numbers...)
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)--if you believe the militiaistas in the US, this agency (which coordinates disaster relief) is in fact an organization designed to suppress public opposition if and when a coup occurs. (This particular theory was very common during the Clinton administration--strangely, the militia movement in the US has vanished since Bush was elected.)
BATF Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. A separate paramilitary/police agency (within the US Department of Treasury, not the Department of Justice), primarily concerned with weapons smuggling. (At one point, bootlegging was the raison d'etre of this organization). Even more unprofessional than the FBI.
BCIS Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the INS). Not true spooks (especially now that the part of the INS that went about rounding up illegal immigrants is now a separate department), but still a royal pain in the ass to deal with.
In the film version of My Favorite Martian, SETI was portrayed as a spook US government agency, complete with jack-booted machine-gun-waving MenInBlack, and Wallace Shawn as a pre-eminent government scientist. (Inconceiveable!)
Are numbers allowed?
MI5 - British security services http://www.mi5.gov.uk/
MI6 - British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) http://www.mi6.gov.uk/ (the web page is encoded as a DNS lookup failure ;)
A misinformed person (me) asked: "I don't know much Hebrew, but wouldn't MOSSAD be spelled with three letters? (Since vowels are optional)"
Surprisingly (to me, as I know enough hebrew to read it, but basically zero vocabulary), Mossad (usually used as haMossad, or 'the Mossad') is actually four letters. While it is true that 'vowels are optional' in the general case, both the 'oh' and 'oo' vowels are a special case. Each has two forms; one form which, like other vowels, is optional; and another form which is based on the letter vav (pronounced 'v', of course), adorned with a dot. Mossad, then, uses this second form of the 'oh' sound, so it is written (without vowels) mem-vav-samech-dalet. For more on the Mossad, including where I found this out (from their logo), see http://www.fas.org/irp/world/israel/mossad/. For the hebrew alphabet, so you have some idea what I'm talking about, see http://www.jewfaq.org/alephbet.htm. Also... if the Mossad isn't a TLA, does that make them spookier or less spooky than the others? -- AdamBerger (Thank you Adam!)
If you look at an image of the Mossad Logo, it indeed shows 4 letters: You're looking at the second line from the bottom. Remember, Hebrew is read right to left. The first letter is the 'h' of hamossad; after that, you see mvsd.
Source: https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeLetterAgencies