# Is It Desireable to Have Foreign Spies In Your Government? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 5, 2010, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-desireable-to-have-foreign-spies-in-your-government/563061 "2010-12-05T19:51:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2010, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-desireable-to-have-foreign-spies-in-your-government/563061/1 "2010-12-05T19:51:43Z")
Recently, I heard that there was a concern, that a Russian spy (mole) had infiltrated the NSA. Isn’t this actually an advantage? It seems to me, that finding that you have a foreign spy is a god thing-you can feed the guy misinformation, and see what happens when he reports this misinformation to HIS government Plus, it is cheaper than trying to get your own agents inside his government I realize that spying is a serious business-but actually, wouldn’t it bet better that all "secrets’ be known between rivals? That way, there would be: -less chance of accidental war -planning any agression would be instanly know-you could defuse thinsg right away Seems to me that having a “mole” (and controlling him well) would be a good situation… ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2010, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-desireable-to-have-foreign-spies-in-your-government/563061/2 "2010-12-05T19:57:35Z")
Desirable or not, its probably inevitable, the only question is how high up they get. And although the amount of information that actually IS worthy of being classified as secret is a tiny, miniscule (millionths, maybe) fraction of what is classified by our government (I’m sure the vast majority of official secrets exist largely to hide official bungling and stupidity from the citizenry) there are probably a few things (locations of US atomic subs, troops, weapons silos, etc.) that we do have a legitimate need to keep secret. ---
**Author:** ![hansel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@hansel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hansel)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2010, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-desireable-to-have-foreign-spies-in-your-government/563061/3 "2010-12-05T20:32:24Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Recently, I heard that there was a concern, that a Russian spy (mole) had infiltrated the NSA. > Isn’t this actually an advantage? Ask the CIA and the FBI how advantageous it was to have [Aldrich Ames](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames) and [Robert Hanssen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen) continuously employed. Ames is _known_ to have caused three CIA assets to be executed. The trick is knowing who the mole is and turning him. If you don’t know who the mole is, you can’t control the flow of information back to the enemy. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-desireable-to-have-foreign-spies-in-your-government/563061/4 "2010-12-06T17:41:11Z")
I don’t think we benefited much from the entire filing cabinets of sensitive military tech the Soviets were able to gank from us during the Cold War. Especially since it was much harder for us to do the same by the very nature of the USSR.