Help me make a spy!

[Knife]

About Assets;

I'm sure they prefer the easy to manage ones, then again I hardly think there are stable and willing people ready to turn traitor in all situations. The possibility of having to do it the 'hard way' must still be there, even if reserved for emergencies.

I just presume that Intelligence agencies are more likely to retire someone early if they are deemed too unstable or too far out for service. After all, there can be nothing worse than someone doing a vital role cracking under pressure. I guess they'd rather retire someone then risk his going nuts when things get hot or at least stressful.

True, my point being is if they know that, they must also know an once of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The mental health of their employees should be paramount, lets face it, mentally unstable agents out in the field is a bad thing. I would assume Intelligence agencies go through great lengths to moniter an agents mental health so as to stop your end result and pull them out of the field early and put them on a desk.

AFAIK, intel officers don't like working with unwilling agents, because they're hard to manage and there's a constant risk they will run to the authorities when you make a mistake.

I would agree, however it must also still be an option when you're pushed and don't have any willing.

Paid agents are good, as are ideologically motivated ones.

Agreed.

BTW, on tactical support: Russian GRU ran (still runs?) all their officers through some training with GRU Spetznaz units. Just the way they do things, it would seem - this had the side effect that most officers would be able to run security as well as handle more "normal" fieldwork.

When I worked at a Combat Skills School in the USMC, we training support people all the time (anually) for field operations, defensive positions and combat/security patrols as well as convoy security. They had the tools, but only ever practiced it once or so a year, so they were hardly experts. We litterally did it every week, and were very good at it.

You can have cross training, I would assume any 'agent' knows the basics of marksmanship and how to 'pie off' corners in clearing a building, just not as well as the guys who do it every day. My example with Police Detectives and SWAT still stands, the detectives know the basics of clearing a hostile room and I would assume have to qual with their pistols once or twice a year. But the majority of their skill sets are devoted to data crunching and interviewing skills to build cases against people, not the nitty gritty of CQB.

[Keevan_Colton]

So far folk seem to be covering things well enough, generally though there's a lot less use of force by intelligence operatives than some folk seem to be thinking. The key skill is really the ability to analyze and understand a puzzle from limited pieces of information, that's where the biggest similarity with journalism comes. It is essentially investigative journalism for a nation rather than a newspaper. The techniques used are much the same, attempt to talk to people, get independent verification if possible, use cameras and recorders to capture proof of something...and of course, making good use of "open source" intelligence.

The ways of approaching a potential source or asset are similar, you can try and find someone with access to the information you need and who has some vulnerability. This can take the form of ideological doubts, or a personal vice, some kind of secret...in the past it wasn't uncommon for homosexuality to be used for blackmail purposes to get an asset to work for you. This is also often used in the case of "double-agents" who are then made to feed false information back to their previous controllers under threat of personal consequences.

In order to do this you want agents who are good at talking to people, and understanding them.

For "black" operations it's generally a different sort of agent, you dont want to use an intelligence operative to carry out anything that might attract attention. You dont want connections between agents that might let counter intelligence on the other side piece things together. This means there needs to be a trade off between efficiency and secrecy for the sharp end of things. You ideally want as much isolation as possible really, there's the case of the atomic spies to look at for an example. There were two separate assets operating for the soviets at Los Alamos, neither of whom knew of the existence of the other and who were run through separate channels to prevent the compromising of one betraying the other.

The trouble is that none of this makes for particularly good narratives, since really you want to keep characters from interacting as much as possible. That's why the Bond-esque field agent is popular in fiction, to be honest though, the character of Bond was more based off of the kind of operatives that OSS had during the end years of WW2...who were more special forces than espionage agents. They were engaged in fieldwork and liaising with local militia forces in occupied territory.

[PeZook]

Officers need to read people very well, yeah. There's an anecdote one of retired Polish officers told a reporter for the interview mentioned by me earlier ; Basically, he was sitting at a state function dinner next to an ambassador, who was flipping through a notebook. The officer asked him about the phone numbers he had there, and the ambassador bragged they're all secret. Then the officer went:

"Those would really interest me"

And wham! Just like that, he had recruited a high-level agent. The job really is about talk, talk, talk and more talk, with risks taken only when necessary.

[Shroom Man 777]

That's, uh, subtle.

[PeZook]

That's, uh, subtle.

Isn't it? But it's this kind of an occasion you need to seize: the guy obviously enjoys bragging about his position and information he has access to, so why not use this fact? You won't even have to pay him!

[Shroom Man 777]

"I has a secrets!"

"Can I sees?"

"Okays!" ^__________^


That must be a tactic Shroomanian Secret Service folks use in SDN World to RESOUNDING success!

Man, they don't even wink or use clever euphemisms.

[Zixinus]

Does anybody know some good memoirs or stories about this? Famous examples?

PeZook, you mentioned an interview, is it avalaible on the net in English?

[Duckie]

One thing is interesting that I know about linguistics: Speaking foreign languages helps. A lot. Fluentlier is better, because you can pick up prosody, implications, word choice, etc. among people you are listening to and in documents alike. Polyglots are almost assuredly much needed by the intelligence community now that speaking chinese and russian aren't a guarantee you speak the language of the country you need to spy on.

In fact, besides head cook at a shift at mcdonalds, that's about the only thing a bachelor's in linguistics could get you (There's no such thing as a Masters except in very specific colleges, so if you make a linguist character, remember that he or she is either a bachelors' degree or a phd holder*). My college has a foreign language degree wherein you become fluent in 2-3 european languages and 0-1 non-european language in the course of college, plus any electives you take.

If I were a more suspicious person I'd suspect that entire degree program funnels straight into the US Governments' intelligence programs, because it sounds useful.

*Also remember that linguistics is the study of languages, not the speaking of languages- a linguistics graduate can conceivably be fluent in a single language and just understand grammar, syntax, phonology, history, etc. We just learn languages because they're super cool.

[PeZook]

PeZook, you mentioned an interview, is it avalaible on the net in English?

Not really: I have it in paper form somewhere around the house. It's been published in the "Angora" newspaper, 01/2008, pages 32-35.

Here's an online copy, you may be able to get something out of it with a translation program or something:

Article

I'd translate it for you, but I can't spare the time right now.

EDIT: This is an interesting bit on family relations:

Reporter: When is the family introduced to the fact that the father, husband is an intelligence officer?

Officer 1 (civilian intelligence): In practice, most families find out after a few years, when the husband goes to a diplomatic post. The family goes through a sort of training then, it's nothing unusual. There are cases, though, when the family never finds out.

Officer 2 (military intelligence): There are cases when there is no other choice. For example, the entire family is abroad, and the wife counts on a trip to the stores, to make some christmas shopping. But she has to go to a place in the middle of nowhere with her husband for a meeting, even though the weather is horrible and there is no snow. In this case, she has to be told what is going on: otherwise, it might end with family trouble, which the service doesn't want or need. Sometimes, the wives get incredibly angry, and ask the understandable question, "What else didn't you tell me?". In such cases, the service's director sometimes invites the wife for a personal talk.

[Zixinus]

The article is in Polish, right? I have difficulty finding an online translator.

Also, what does constitute "treat" for intelligence agencies? Does crime count? Would the CIA work against gangs over the border?

[Knife]

Also, what does constitute "treat" for intelligence agencies? Does crime count? Would the CIA work against gangs over the border?

I see no reason why an intelligence agency wouldn't work with criminal elements, revolutionary elements, or lowly gangs for foreign assets.

[PeZook]

The article is in Polish, right? I have difficulty finding an online translator.

Here's one: Poltran

I'm not sure how goo it is, though.

[Zixinus]

I see no reason why an intelligence agency wouldn't work with criminal elements, revolutionary elements, or lowly gangs for foreign assets.

I meant "threat" not "treat".

I'm not sure how goo it is, though.

It's terrible. The translation is incredibly broken.