We’ve been watching the brilliant British series Slow Horses, and in the fourth series one of the characters, a retired top-level MI-5 officer, develops dementia.
That got me to wondering what happens IRL with people who have top secret classified information in their heads when they develop dementia. Do national governments run special nursing homes for people like that, staffed by people with high-level clearances?
(Blurred for people who haven’t seen all of season 4: That’s exactly what happens to the character in question. But, of course, that’s fiction.)
It seems an obvious solution, but also one that would be so impractical and expensive as to be infeasible. Less extreme options might include, for only the highest-level people, providing home health care with workers who have to go through a careful background check. IOW, they don’t have clearances themselves, but at least they’re probably not enemy spies.
So is anything like this done, and if not, is the assumption that it would be just as impractical and expensive for an adversary to try to obtain useful and reliable intelligence in that way?
(Don’t bother to reply that you could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me.)
A lot of classified information has a shelf-life of usefulness to the enemy.
Someone retired who had access to that sort of info usually has a guard detail for a period of time until whatever they have in their head is no longer considered critical. This is one reason US Presidents have a secret service detail for a while after leaving office.
Also, a retired person, in the US anyway, isn’t likely to have much info like who actually shot Kennedy or where the moon landings were actually staged. Their informational value would be procedural and how the organisation they are retiring from has its culture structured.
There is a long tradition of security officials drinking themselves into complete mental decline while still employed, so I don’t think they are that worried about them after retirement.
My grandfather (who wasn’t in intelligence but worked in some top secret areas of the British military establishment) had a story about a drinking buddy who never recovered from the cancellation of the suez Canal operation by the politicians, and collapsed into a complete alcoholic breakdown as a result. Though he finished with “well he must have got better, though because they made him field marshall”
Interesting idea, I’d like to see if the Russians ever tried to infiltrate the old people’s homes around the DC area where a lot of the workers for the “three letter acronyms” retire to like Bethesda, Georgetown, etc
And here I thought the post-President guard detail was to protect them from lingering threats of violence up to and including assassination. How does this guard detail work? Do they monitor all the ex-President’s conversations and communications? Investigate their golfing buddies? Must be tough and time-consuming.
Though a lot doesn’t. Like the kind that presidents are given (with the possible exception of certain indicted ex presidents) is high level and isn’t going to be useful years later. The guy who runs say the Moscow section on the other hand is gonna have information that could end lives for as long as the agents he ran are alive, even if the intelligence they passed on has long become history. Like even if it’s only the description of a GRU officer who he ran in Gorky Park in 1988, that’s something the FSB would love to hear even if it means putting agent in a nursing home in Bethesda to wipe oatmeal off his chin.
Clearly the USSS was not guarding classified printed information an ex-POTUS had a few years back, let alone guarding information in an ex-President’s brain. I can’t conceive of how they would be expected to do that sort of job.
Yes, I would think that disgruntled employees with problems like alcoholism woould be a bigger risk. I vaguely recall one of my relatives telling me he had travel restrictions for a certain amount of time after retiring - couldn’t visit certain list of countries. Given what we’ve seen in Russia (and for Canadians, in China) thye probably wouldn’t want to anyway.
Another random.thought: I bet the arrangements for retired KGB agents are a lot less pleasant than their western equivalents, has the CIA considered setting up a slightly nicer than usual reasonably priced retirement home in whatever the Russian equivalent to Bethesda or Chevy chase is
I forgot to mention that one of the things the characters in the book on which this series is based suggests (I don’t think this made it into the show) is that the services might kill senile members to keep them quiet. Certainly cheaper than a nursing home.
Meh that brings it down in my estimation. I’ve not read the book or seen the show, but I’ve been looking forward to it as it seems to be very much in the style of one of my favorite authors, Le Carre. But this seems to take out of the down to earth, realistic, Le Carre world of spies into the over the top Bourne/Bond world of spies. The CIA and MI5 (even probably the KGB) do not go around murdering their own retired agents when they get too old and gone in the head. Thats the kind of thing that happens in a Hollywood action movie not IRL.
American TV series often / always have the government keeping secrets from the public. British stories have the agencies killing people.
Back in the day, when airline passengers saw American secret military research aircraft in test flights, they’d be met on the ground by people who would explain to them that there were secrets, and they should not discuss what they saw. More recently, earthquake researchers have been told not to discuss the signatures of novel sonic booms, and ocean researchers told not to discuss the satellite photography signatures of submarines. My own father got a letter releasing him from secrecy after a 50 year limit.
The point is, the American government has always kept secrets from the public, and everyone knows it.
I’ve always suspected that the fact that fictional British agencies kill people said something about real post-war British agencies.
(Off topic, but fun to know)
My favorite example of scientists being prevented from doing research due to military secrecy is: bird migration.
Five hundred million birds which migrate from Europe to Africa every year fly across Israel. The Israeli air force tracks the birds carefully, and adjusts their military tactics to avoid damaging their planes from bird strikes. For many years (till the 1990’s, I think), the migration data was kept secret from biologists.
