Technical research ships were used by the United States Navy during the 1960s to gather intelligence by monitoring, recording and analyzing wireless electronic communications of nations in various par
USS Liberty spy ship
USNS Private Jose F. Valdez
A spy ship or reconnaissance vessel is a dedicated ship intended to gather intelligence, usually by means of sophisticated electronic eavesdropping. In a wider sense, any ship intended to gather infor
Technical research ship
…AGTR – Auxiliary, General, Technical Research – but it was more or less an open secret that this was a euphemism and they were commonly referred to as "spy ships". These ships carried a crew of U.S. Navy personnel whose specialty was intercepting wireless electronic communications and gathering intelligence from…
Oker, an Oste-class ELINT and reconnaissance ship, of the German Navy
SSV-33 Ural, the largest spy ship ever constructed, used by the USSR to observe and track US ballistic and orbital launches.
While USNS Vanguard was not strictly a spy ship, being used for space tracking, there is some overlap between her capabilities and those of a spy ship.