A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) (5 page)

Vetting

Vetting is the process of testing and evaluating a target prior to recruitment as an agent. During the vetting process, information is obtained that is important to authenticating the target. Vetting includes testing the target without him realizing he is being tested. Such testing might include testing his honesty, truthfulness, etc. Assessment and vetting go hand-in-hand in the recruitment cycle. Authentication is a vital part of the recruitment process as well as post-recruitment administration of the agent. Simply put, authentication is the act of investigating a potential or recruited agent to determine whether he is or is not under hostile control of a foreign intelligence or security service directed against the CIA. The authentication process also attempts to determine whether or not the agent is in some way deceiving the CIA in his reporting and operational activities for whatever personal or political reasons. The process also determines the claimed access the agent has to information of intelligence interest to the CIA. Intelligence and operational information provided by agents who have been “authenticated” is given a higher credibility than information from agents who have not yet been authenticated. The several points necessary to the authentication process include proving the agent is who he claims to be, that he has access to the information he reports, that he reports the information accurately and truthfully, and that the agent is not under hostile control (i.e., a double agent).

Development

Development is the mating period of the recruitment cycle. During the development stage, the target is primed in order to reinforce motivations and vulnerabilities that the case officer has determined may be useful to recruitment and handling of the target. We have mentioned motivations and vulnerabilities several times here. Just what are these concepts? As simply as I can put it motivations are psychological and sociological factors of the target responding to a perceived benefit or fulfillment of a need. Motivations can be used to justify his acceptance of recruitment (either witting or unwitting) to cooperate with the CIA as an agent. An agent’s motivation may change over his years of cooperation, thus the case officer must continually assess him for change.

Vulnerabilities are positive or negative aspects in the agent’s personal character that the case officer may use to make him more inclined to accept recruitment and maintain a relationship with the CIA. Vulnerabilities may be used to provide some degree of influence or control over his actions before and after he is recruited as an agent. There are character traits perceived as negative, such as greed, vanity, ego, and jealousy that are useful. Then there are character traits perceived as positive, such as loyalty, friendliness, duty, honor, and sense of responsibility that are also useful. Then there are also dysfunctional character traits that can also be used such as obsession and compulsion just to name a few.

Recruitment

Recruitment is the process of the CIA entering into a special relationship with a target where he agrees to become a covert agent and willingly provide intelligence and operational information in return for something connected to his motivation. In other words, recruitment is where the case officer makes the “Pitch” to become an agent. The asset may be recruited on a witting or an unwitting basis. A witting asset knows he is reporting to either the CIA or some other intelligence agency of the US. An unwitting asset does not know he is reporting to US intelligence and may believe he is working as a consultant to a private company.

Agent Authentication

As a case officer, it is your obligation to master the art of agent authentication. Agent authentication is a never-ending process that begins when you first express an operational interest in a target as a potential future agent and continues throughout the life of the operation. The authentication process seeks to prove or disprove many things that you either suspect or that the target claims about himself such as his position and claimed access to information of interest to the CIA.

The authentication process seeks to prove or disprove that the agent is who he claims to be, that he has access to the information he reports, that he reports the information accurately and truthfully, and that the agent is not under hostile control of another intelligence service. Failure on any one of these criteria means the agent cannot become fully authenticated. This does not mean, however, that the agent cannot be utilized in a Foreign Intelligence reporting capacity. So long as the CIA knows the deficiencies of the agent, he may still be useful in some capacity.

Throughout the CIA’s history, agent authentication has been treated as anything from an inconvenience to an absolute necessity depending on the CIA’s evolution through various crises and conflicts. There were never any formal criteria for authenticating an operation until the early 1970s when Saigon Station uncovered a massive number of fabricated liaison operations involving the Special Branch of the Vietnamese National Police.

The Special Branch received funding from their local CIA counterparts for “penetration operations” of the local Viet Cong infrastructure. Unfortunately, many Special Branch case officers were prone to make up or fabricate penetration operations in order to receive funds from the CIA that they would often use for personal gain rather than use to develop real penetrations of the local Viet Cong. When the CIA began to uncover a large number of these fabricated operations, Saigon Station began to place emphasis and training of its case officers on authenticating these liaison operations. Thus began the formal process of agent authentication.

Intelligence provided by liaison services—those foreign intelligence agencies which cooperate with the CIA in an exchange of intelligence—has traditionally been regarded with great suspicion by the CIA, and if history is, indeed, the great teacher then this suspicion is justified. Thus, the authentication process is a must for liaison operations. The information provided by an authenticated liaison operation is treated with a much higher regard than an unauthenticated operation. One wonders what happened to the authentication process for those agents who provided intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Obviously someone dropped the ball?

But how about non-liaison agent operations: those agents that the CIA develops, recruits, and runs? Should they be authenticated? The answer is a definite YES. In fact, by definition liaison operations are often compartmented from direct CIA access. The CIA often only has limited access, if any at all, to the agents of a liaison service. Therefore, it is difficult to authenticate a liaison service operation. It should be a much easier process to authenticate an agent over which the CIA has direct access and thus some margin of control.

What is it that you, the case officer, can do to authenticate your agent? The process begins in the very early stages of development. One important methodology is independent verification. If your target says he is a budgetary analyst in the ministry of foreign affairs budget office, how can you independently verify this claim?

First, you might want to run a name trace through the CIA’s database to see if the target’s name appears. You might ask the target for his office phone number, and then check it through overt and covert sources. Call the number and ask for the target by name. Task other agents in the ministry to provide names of people in that department as well as other departments to see if the target’s name appears on the list. Do not specifically mention the target by name to any other agent. Proving that the target is who he claims to be is perhaps the easiest of the authentication tasks.

Does the target have access to the information he claims to have and does he report it accurately to you? Now the process starts becoming a bit of a challenge. First, the information he does provide to you must be of interest to CIA analysis and to US policy makers. If it is of no interest, then it doesn’t matter. The CIA will not be interested to pursue a relationship with the target.

That said, however, the case officer in the field still has a duty to make sure that the source of the information, the agent, is an authenticated asset. Information obtained from an “authenticated agent” is given more credence than information from an untested, non-authenticated agent. The authentication process seeks to determine that the agent is who he claims to be, that he has access to the information claimed, that he accurately reports the information, and that he is not under hostile control of another intelligence service. This is an on-going process throughout the lifetime of the operation.

If the information is of interest, then you must verify that it is true and accurate and provided by the agent through his direct access. If the information is verbal, check it through other agents or historical CIA data and continue to recheck it often. It is always best, of course, to have actual documents provided by the agent, original, photocopied, or photographed. Such documents are more readily authenticated unless, of course, the agent is a provocation agent under the control of a hostile security service.

This brings us to the point of hostile control—double agents. That there are no overt signs of hostile control is no longer sufficient to determine the authenticity of an operation. Many types of covert tests can be administered to the agent without his knowing he is being tested. Some simple tests determine the agent’s honesty such as paying him too much to see if he will acknowledge the overpayment. You might ask him for information that you already know the answer to in order to elicit his responses. Give the agent a “trapped” envelope to mail for you to a cutout, and then test to see if the envelope has been covertly opened. There are literally hundreds of such simple tests you can administer to the agent as part of the authentication process. Some you can do on your own and some will require the assistance of technical services personnel at the Station or CIA headquarters.

As you put the agent through the various tests, you must document the results in your contact reports and operational cables in order to create a history of the authentication process that may later be used to validate the agent’s reporting and enhance the agent’s credibility so that the information the agent provides is given a higher credibility.

The CIA also teaches numerous psychological assessment techniques—direct and indirect—that the case officer may employ during the authentication process. These various techniques are so sensitive that there will be no further disclosure in this publication. However, as a case officer trainee you will be made aware of some of these techniques and, in fact, you may volunteer yourself to be the subject of these testing techniques. You will find them quite interesting and you will learn a lot about yourself that you did not know.

I prefer to keep it simple myself and employ basic “honesty” testing, such as “accidentally” overpaying the agent to see if he will give the extra money back. Having the agent “hold” a document for you in a “trapped” envelope and later see if he tried to open it. When meeting the agent, leave the room for a few minutes (go to the bathroom) leaving behind a file in a precise position to see if he looks into the file. Trap a place or item with touch sensitive chemicals and tell the agent about it but tell him to leave it alone, and then later check his hands with fluorescent light to see if he touched it.

Somewhere during the detailed testing and validation cycle—usually toward the end before you write your authentication report—your asset must undergo a polygraph examination. The Box, as it is affectionately called by case officers, is a useful investigative tool but it is by no means a panacea or substitute for other authentication techniques. It best serves your needs if you use it to validate what you already know about your agent. It may also be helpful to clarify any unresolved areas of the operation or areas about which you have some suspicions but no direct evidence to prove your suspicions.

The polygraph is only as good as the reliability of the polygrapher, and they range from great to terrible. Unfortunately, the individual case officer has no say as to which polygrapher he or she may draw to work on his asset. So before you meet with the polygrapher, do your homework on your asset and prepare some questions you want to have asked. The polygrapher will read the case file and prepare some questions he believes should be addressed on the examination, but it is you, the case officer, who has the final say. Make sure that some of the questions asked of the agent are ones where you know beyond any doubt the correct answer. The polygrapher will ask some routine questions to establish baseline positive and negative responses before he gets into the real questions to determine whether or not your agent is being truthful about his access, reporting reliability, hostile control, etc.

Remember: the Box is not a lie detector. It merely measures physiological (emotional) responses to questions. These responses are breathing, respiration, and heart rate. The art of interpreting the meaning of these responses is where you determine if the agent is trying to deceive you. This is where the reliability of the polygrapher is so important.