Robert Baden-Powell's camouflaged spy diagrams

If anyone recalls the name of Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, most likely it's because he was the founder of the Boy Scouts (and co-founder of the Girl Scouts). But he also worked as a spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service, as described and illustrated in his book My Adventures as a Spy (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1915). No longer under copyright, it is available online to download as a pdf.

In one instance, he pretended to be a lepidopterist in what was then Dalmatia (now Croatia). Walking along with a net and sketchbook, he positioned himself on hills overlooking strategic fortresses and appeared to make drawings of butterflies, one of which is shown above. In truth, within those drawings, he was concealing cryptic diagrams (camouflaged or embedded figures) of the structures and their armaments.

He recommended such activities. Indeed, as he states in his book, "…for anyone who's tired of life, the thrilling life of a spy should be the very finest recuperator!"

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

 

Can you find the big gun embedded in this picture?

Above An embedded figure puzzle from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. August 18, 1918.

Steganography, Camouflage and Eviatar Zerubavel

Cover of Hidden in Plain Sight (2015)

Above Cover of the latest camouflage-related book, titled Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance, just out from Oxford University Press. It's the latest achievement by Rutgers sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, who is well-known for his earlier books, such as The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (2006) and (our favorite) The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (1993).

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In Zerubavel's insightful and wide-ranging book, among the subjects introduced is a current encryption technique known as steganography. Now practiced in its digital form, the term was originated in 1499 (so says Wikipedia) by Johannes Trithemius in Steganographia, "a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic." We ourselves first learned about it in 2006 at an international conference at the University of Northern Iowa on Camouflage: Art, Science and Popular Culture, at which digital media scholar Eugene Wallingford (UNI Computer Science Professor) offered a wonderful overview of current uses of digital steganography.

Here is an excerpt from Zerubavel's text about steganography (pp. 35-36)—

There is a particular form of background-matching camouflage known as steganography, in which actual "signals" are purposely designed to be mistaken for mere "noise" and thereby effectively ignored. One can thus send a covert message in such a way that no one apart from oneself and one's intended audience (who are in fact usually alerted to expect it) even suspects its existence. Whereas in cryptography  only the content of the hidden is concealed, in steganography, its very existence is concealed as well.