“Because most secret agents don’t tell every harlot from here to Hanoi they ARE secret agents!”
“Then why be one?”
-Archer
If movies and television are to be believed, most “spying” consists of a multinational network of people who presumably everyone knows is a member of an intelligence service holding all sorts of mixers and cocktails parties and waiting to see what slips out of their mouth after a few martinis or scotches.
According to this wiki article, the school depicted in the film Red Sparrow was actually based on the Soviet “State School 4” where they trained female operatives to be “swallows” (because the Soviets are not familiar with the concept of “phrasing”.
I wonder how that works in practice? The films are always very exciting and action packed, but I imagine the reality is a lot of bored sexy spies spending a lot of time milling around fancy hotel bars listening to a lot of mid-level nobodies.
Like seriously. If you are a trained CIA agent stationed in Budapest or wherever, you aren’t going to assume the sexy Russian girl with the vague nondescript job you “happened” to meet isn’t some sort of agent?
I’ve read that people who are handsome or beautiful are not considered suitable for intelligence work, because they would be likelier to be recognized/noticed. Plain-looking is ideal.
I should clarify this. The people collecting the data generally have other jobs that give them access to the information being stolen, or they are collecting the “open source” data mentioned earlier that’s only barely spying seeing as it’s not even illegal. Most intelligence assets are mundane people with little loyalty to their government who want some extra money and are in a position where foreign powers want the information they have access to. Anyone that works for an intelligence agency that might be considered a “spy” will generally be either an intelligence analyst and/or a handler of the assets that provide the data. Sending someone directly under the employment of the gathering nation to illegally obtain data directly is not nearly as common, at least in my understanding. Are there people who work for foreign powers that have the outward appearance of someone with a completely different job whose real job is to clandestinely gather data? There certainly are some. But I’m fairly sure they’re vastly outnumbered by citizens or permanent residents who spy on their own local governments and pass it along to foreign agents.
So how do these turncoats get discovered by the foreign agents looking for their Intel? Does the interested foreign government pull random people aside and say, “Hey, wanna be a spy?” How does a spy get the ball rolling?
The process is called “pitching” - i.e., making a sales pitch. Occasionally, one side will just pitch “blind” - i.e, approaching a Russian officer, in Russia, and see if he’s amenable to passing on some juicy info to America in return for money - although this is rare because it’s not likely to succeed and the associated drawbacks are high.
More often, what happens is that one side will take careful notice of someone who may be vulnerable and willing to accept and agree to a pitch - i.e., someone who is disgruntled and angry at his own nation (using the Taiwan example, the reason the disgruntled Chinese officer was willing to spy for Taiwan was because he had been previously falsely accused of wrongdoing by his own folks in China and unfairly denied a promotion, which then put him in the mood to betray China as revenge) - or someone who badly needs money (for instance, is known to be up to his neck in debt, medical bills, etc. and would be willing to betray his country in return for half a million bucks. Aldrich Ames, for instance, had a wife who loved to spend and splurge, and Russian money was the only way he could finance her lavish habits.) Or maybe someone has a fetish for Asian women and would really like to bed a sexy young Chinese woman, which makes him vulnerable to the age-old honeypot trap. Once such vulnerabilities are known, the agency may then send someone to give that person a recruiting sales pitch. Another pitching technique is blackmail, if someone has kompromat - i.e., “we know you’re secretly gay, and you live in a Middle Eastern nation that jails or executes homosexuals. So you better spy for us or we’ll let everyone know about your gayness.”
At any given moment, intelligence agencies are probably taking careful note of any individuals on the enemy side who have vulnerabilities of any sort and would be pitchable.
In some cases, the turncoat himself voluntarily seeks out the other side - Robert Hanssen, for instance, approached the Soviet GRU of his own accord, in the 1970s, to offer himself up as a spy to work for them. But such turncoats may come under suspicion because they may be believed to be a dangle - someone who claims he’s defecting but in fact isn’t.
Kind of: check out how Israeli agents found Iraqi defectors to steal a top of the line Soviet jet and take it to Israel. The first two attempts were failures, and agents were caught.
Assuming for the moment that I am a sexy Russian spy, I’d not be wasting my time with CIA operatives. After all, what do they actually know other than their part of the bigger game we are both playing?
I’d be honing straight in on middle-ranked execs of defence contractor companies who’ve we’ve already established are unhappy at home and just passed over for promotion, nerdy computer genii who were probably still virgins who were working for government agencies and political staffers who think they are God’s gift chick magnets.
This type of information gathering played a big part in the above mentioned TV series “The Americans.” The “husband” and “wife” had been trained in seduction techniques.
It occurred to me as I was writing my earlier post that I should ask whether there is any aspect of this kind of work that is, in fact, against the law. I know about open source intelligence in the private sector (I work in the investment industry, which is quite cutthroat), but I’m less familiar with its application in country-to-country espionage. The collection of non-classified, public-sourced information is, of course, and must be, completely legal. However — are there any laws anywhere that try to prohibit the illicit use of that information? Say, the assembly and analysis of fragmentary non-classified facts in order to indirectly discover the classified details in the gaps by process of induction, combined with secret transmission of such conclusions to adversarial parties overseas, all for nefarious purposes. I can see an aggressive, paranoid government trying to put illegality into the underlying intention rather than the surface-level actions, but I don’t know if it’s been done.
It’s obvious that the use of some public information is illegal. If I type “how to build a thermonuclear bomb” into a search engine, that’s OK (not that I get exact blueprints) but if I use that information to help me build one and blow up a port, that’s not OK.
If you want a real example, one Trevor Paglen investigated and photographed secret CIA black sites and uncovered the identities of some of the people involved in “extraordinary rendition”. All legal.
So I’ve been on a spy reading kick of late (non-fiction mainly). Ben Macintyre does really great WW2 and cold war intelligence history. Just finished his latest book on Kim Philby. Really great read and covers a lot of the details you discuss:
Its more on “SIGINT” rather than “HUMINT” but I’m currently reading this book on the NSA, it goes into a lot of the details you describe however. One of the points it makes is even the fact the existence of the regular spying procedures the soviets used in the US in the 1930s and 1940s (the kind of things, like losing tails, dead drops, etc. that nowadays are so well known as to be movie tropes) was a huge shock to the US establishment.
When I was a kid, I had a book on spycraft that described one highly-successful spy whose strategy was to go to secure places and just ask for a tour. Some of that, of course, was the public-knowledge stuff, but the tour guides probably also showed him some things that they shouldn’t have.
Well, yes, clearly, any overt act like that would be prohibited, completely aside from the information collection one used to facilitate the act. My question is solely about the gathering, collation, and dissemination of ostensibly public information, if one’s covert intent is ultimately nefarious.