This often involves escalating requests for information. Once an intelligence officer better understands a potential asset’s motivations, it’s time to develop and groom that individual, leading them to the point where they are ready to commit espionage. Spending significant amounts of time chatting with, and listening carefully to, what the potential asset is saying (and also leaving unsaid) informs these judgments best. Many questions come into play, among the most important being: Can this individual both provide needed intelligence and remain willing to provide more? During this phase, the intelligence officer gauges what motivates this candidate-money, ideology, ego or something else-and how best to satisfy this motivation in return for something of value to U.S. Spotting can take place almost anywhere, from the internet to swanky diplomatic receptions, with an emphasis on face-to-face encounters with interesting people.Īfter an intelligence officer spots a potential asset, she must assess that person. Put simply, an intelligence officer looks for an individual who can provide secret information that will prove valuable for political and military decision-makers and for the analysts who provide all-source assessments to those decision-makers. More often, however, the officer targets a specific person (or a type of person) who can fill intelligence gaps, on anything from an adversary’s military research and development to a terrorist group’s attack plans to a foreign leader’s political agenda.
An intelligence officer can come across this person by chance. Spotting refers to finding someone who might make a good asset. Technical solutions can help in some cases, with one or more of the steps in this process, but they cannot reliably replace the human touch in all of them. And each stage works best when intelligence officers can look sources in the eye, earn their trust, calm their anxiety and share their peril. This process-spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting and handling-is known as the recruitment cycle. They must find potential spies, determine what information those targets can provide (and how reliably), develop a relationship of trust, convince them to commit espionage and handle the flow of secret information from those people. To gather intelligence from human sources, intelligence officers have long used a logical and rigorous process. And it must, because COVID-19 presents the most widespread obstacle to human intelligence collection in the agency’s history. This legacy of creativity and technological innovation will serve their successors in today’s CIA well. Pervasive, invisible and potentially lethal, the KGB’s smothering embrace led the CIA’s operations officers to do some of their best work to complete one of their most successful operations. intelligence has a long and distinguished record of working against oddly similar foes in oppressive environments-most notably, the Soviet Union’s KGB on the streets of Moscow. And don’t even try to pull off a brush pass when social distancing demands at least six feet of physical separation.īut all is not lost.
#BEING A SPY AGENT FULL#
Conducting surveillance detection before meeting with a recruited asset or gathering material from an asset’s dead drop full of secret material? Good luck avoiding attention from local law enforcement and counterintelligence when the streets are otherwise empty. Developing a relationship of trust with a potential intelligence asset? Far from a cakewalk when lengthy face-to-face meetings are a nonstarter. Bumping up against disaffected foreign diplomats or disgruntled terrorists? Difficult when virtually all public events have been canceled. Normal techniques don’t work under the unique circumstances created by the virus. In fact, the agency’s intelligence officers now face a more difficult challenge than ever when it comes to their efforts to recruit spies. The novel coronavirus presents significant challenges to the mission and operations of every government agency and department-and the Central Intelligence Agency is no exception.