Edition: U.S. / Global

The Way We Live Now: 12-03-00: On Language; Netspionage

By William Safire
Published: December 3, 2000

E-fraud solicitor is how Steven Philippsohn, a lawyer in London, describes his line of work. In a recent article in Communications World, he used a word that fills a void (once pronounced in Brooklyn as ''a woid that fills a verd''): ''Netspionage is already affecting computer contractors.''

Netspionage is a blendword. (That is usually written as blend word, but in my view, its meaning of ''mingling'' all but forces the two words together.) It uses the net of Internet as a prefix, following Netiquette (for ''Internet etiquette''), Netsploitation movies (which exploit fears of the Internet) and Netspertise (which I don't have).

You'll see plenty of other blendwords created with the net prefix. Forget cyber, from Norbert Weiner's cybernetics: that was the last decade's hot combining form. It's now almost as outdated in the neologism dodge as the suffixes arama and aholic.

Because inter begins so many words, it is not a popular new combining form. Internesia means ''inability to remember where on the Web you saw a particular bit of information,'' and I presume a lesson plan to overcome this mental lapse is called an intercourse.

But let us return to the subject of Netspionage. What new words are the real spooks speaking out there in the cold? A cleaning out of the usual dead drops takes us beyond the computer world and elint (electronic intelligence) into humint -- a blendword formed by human and intelligence.

Here's one I heard rather than read: skiff, as in the sentence ''Is there a skiff where we can talk?'' At first, I thought it was a small boat, the word skiff derived from the Germanic schif, akin to ship. But it has nothing to do with naval information; thanks to Thomas Powers, author of ''Heisenberg's War,'' I am informed that it is the sound of an acronym -- SCIF -- secret compartmented intelligence facility.

''Secret compartmented intelligence,'' says Powers, ''is a level of classification for a class of intelligence that's above top secret. A SCIF is a room that has been secured and sealed under very tight regulations, where classified information can be safely discussed, read and handled.''

We used to call that a ''clean room.'' At Spaso House, our embassy in Moscow, I recall meeting other presidential aides in a soundproof, penetration-proof room built inside another, less secure room, whose walls were suspected to have ears. Now such a room within a room is called a SCIF.

Another relatively new term of the clandestine arts is perception management. David Wise, in his book ''Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas,'' notes that this phrase means ''the manipulation of the perceptions of the target country. But the latest term of art, like its predecessors, boiled down to the same thing -- tricking an adversary into believing false information by persuading it that a source, actually under U.S. control, was selling America's secrets.''

I asked Wise if he had picked up any of the latest spookspeak from Yasenovo, the suburban Moscow headquarters of the K.G.B. (That agency now calls itself the S.V.R., but Americans still refer to it with the name by which it came to be known and feared.) Just as the C.I.A. calls itself ''the Company,'' Wise reports, the K.G.B. now refers to Yasenovo as Kontora, ''the Office.'' Fake passports are called, in Russian, ''shoes'' because the passport forgers are called ''cobblers.'' What we call a dead drop -- often a tree in which secrets are left to be picked up by another agent -- is dubok, or ''little oak.''

Because United States policy frowns on assassinations, the intelligence community needed a phrase to cover the idea of bombing the general area in which an unfriendly dictator or terrorist is likely to be resident. Such attacks are now enshrined in bureaucratese as regime lethal. U.S. News & World Report spotted the usage regarding Saddam Hussein in November 1998, defining it as ''targeting the dictator and the powerful Revolutionary Guard units that keep him in power.''

Ed Epstein, author of ''Dossier: The Secret Life of Armand Hammer,'' reports that mole hunt now has a pejorative connotation, bottomed as it is on witch hunt. In that regard, sickthink, coined on the analogy of doublethink and groupthink, means ''a predisposition to believe one's own agents are controlled by the other side.'' Sickthink is usually accompanied by intimations of paranoia and mutterings about counterspies who grow orchids.

Deer park is defined by Epstein as ''a diplomatic area, like the U.N., in which headhunters recruit agents.'' (I am informed by the novelist Norman Mailer, who titled a 1955 book about a decadent Hollywood ''The Deer Park,'' that he dimly recollects taking that title from a passage in ''The Private Life of Louis XV'' in which Mouffle d'Angerville described le parc aux cerfs as a wooded area near the court of Versailles where ''stags'' -- male courtiers -- would seek out the ''does,'' courtesans selling sexual favors. Spymasters like such literary conceits.)

In examining the new words of espionage, let us not neglect the secrets of an old word about secret dealings. Surreptitious means ''taken by stealth; unauthorized; clandestine.'' It comes from the Latin surreptitius, ''obtained by surreption,'' with the rep from rapere, ''to quickly seize or snatch,'' also the root of rapid and rape.

You never heard the word surreption? Neither did I; the form the word takes is always the adjective, never the noun. But the O.E.D. says the obsolete term means ''suppression of truth or fact for the purpose of obtaining something; fraudulent misrepresentation.'' I'll find a use for it when some politician clams up.

Now about clam up, a 1916 Americanism that describes what a good spy does when caught. But how did a clam, known for its ability to shut itself tightly, clamping its shell, get its name? From the Teutonic klamb, ''to press or squeeze together.'' Before that, and perhaps unrelatedly, we have the Latin clam, ''secretly, in private''; the m changed to n, which led to clandestinus, ''secret, hidden'' -- and to the work of those who practice legal surreption in the clandestine service.