A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) (6 page)

The CIA bureaucracy has a tendency to judge the polygraph results as pass or fail. A pass means you can authenticate your agent. A fail means that your agent may be a fabricator or perhaps worse, a double agent. Do not view the failure of an agent to pass the Box as a personal failure on your part. In fact, view it as a win because you may have just prevented a double agent from penetrating the ranks of the CIA or prevented a fabricator from providing false information that may have been used by policy makers to establish policy.

Motivation and Vulnerability: The Heart of Agent Recruitment

Throughout your career with the CIA, you will be continually asked by your superiors, “What makes your agent tick?” Just what does this mean? The answer lies in understanding motivation and vulnerability. When you really grasp this relationship between motivation and vulnerability in an agent, you then “know what makes him tick.”

Young case officers often find it difficult to differentiate between motivation and vulnerability. As simply stated as possible, motivation is a function of an agent’s psychology and sociology while vulnerability is a function of the agent’s character. The relationship between the two may at times seem contradictory. However, when the case officer scrutinizes his operation in detail, he will find a high degree of congruence between the two necessary to understand to become a more effective agent recruiter and to more successfully handle his asset.

Put in simple terms, the use of motivation and vulnerability as development, recruitment, and agent handling tools is based on the premise that we all make choices based on the assumption of our own benefit or for the benefit of someone in whom we have a personal interest. “What’s in it for me?” “What’s in it for someone in whom I have an interest?” Answering these questions responds to both the motivations and vulnerabilities of the agent. Motivation is good for the short-term objective to get the asset to become an agent for the CIA. The character traits that comprise the agent’s vulnerabilities, however, are good for the long-term objective to keep the agent working for years. Motivations may change but character is forever.

What are motivations? They are aspects of the psychological makeup and socialization of a person that we can use to make him more inclined to accept the proposition to work for the CIA. There are different categories of motivations: short-term motives, long-term motives, spoken (public) motives, unspoken (private) motives, motives for self-benefit and self-gratification, and motives for the benefit and gratification of other people in whom we have a personal interest. Motivations can be focused as objectives in a recruitment attempt when the target sees how he may benefit or how others in whom he has an interest may benefit.

What are vulnerabilities? They are aspects of the personal character of a person that we can use to make him more inclined to accept and maintain a secret relationship with the CIA.

How do you use motivation and vulnerability in the recruitment of an agent? First, the case officer must remove his own ego from the equation. Because of the nature of the work of espionage, case officers often have over-active egos that can get in the way of an effective recruitment pitch. They tend to put their own egos at the focus of attention instead of the target they are trying to recruit. It is the target that should be at the center of attention, and the case officer must view everything he says and does from the target’s point of view. The case officer must show that he has respect for the target, that he places value on the views of the target, and gives the target due attention. This is basically building rapport between the case officer and his recruitment target.

Now from the past months or years of assessment, vetting, and development of the target, the case officer already has an understanding of the motivations that drive the target to do the things he does and the vulnerabilities—character traits—that can be used to seal the recruitment. The case officer now reinforces these through the use of emotional arguments and logical arguments. Emotional arguments are words or actions that influence how the target feels about you and your ideas while logical arguments are words and actions that influence the target’s reasoning toward you and your ideas. The case officer uses these techniques to show how the target can achieve his motives as personal goals through cooperation with the case officer as a witting or unwitting CIA agent. The pitch plays to the target’s vulnerabilities to reinforce the likelihood that the target will accept recruitment.

After the peak of the pitch, the case officer watches closely the mood, manner, and body language of the target and may wait momentarily for some reaction. If the target accepts the opportunity, then the case officer goes about the formalities of the relationship and gets the bureaucratic process underway to satisfy CIA headquarters as described in the previous chapter. If the target appears not to have accepted the pitch, the case officer may ask a few questions to determine where resistance to the proposal lies. He may also reinforce negative benefits to the target to show how declining recruitment will prevent the target from fulfilling his goals. This, in theory, is basically how the process works. In reality, anything can happen.

Once the agent is recruited, however, motivation and vulnerability should not be placed aside. Evaluating the agent is an ongoing process. Motivations frequently change and this change may impact on the agent’s cooperation with the case officer. So motivations are continually checked and reinforced and when they do change, the case officer must uncover new motivations to replace outdated ones to ensure continued cooperation of the agent.

Young case officers new to recruiting and handling agents very often totally misunderstand motivation. A common mistake that young, inexperienced case officers make is sensing that their agents are motivated only by money, financial gain. After many years of experience, however, they will learn that none of their agents are motivated by money. Money is not a motivation. In some cases, greed may be a vulnerability in the agent’s character—a character flaw so to speak—and in those cases, money can be used to manipulate this vulnerability. But look deeper to see what is in the agent’s psychological makeup that can be a motivation connected to money and you will then understand the relationship between vulnerability and motivation.

For example, one former case officer felt his agent was motivated by greed because he was always asking for more money. But after looking deeper into the case, the officer learned that the agent had a medically dependent mother who was a drain on his normal financial resources. His employer was unsympathetic to his financial plight and refused him a raise. His wife always complained that he spent too much of the family resources on the care of his mother. Poor guy was not getting any sympathy at work or at home. The agent simply contacted the CIA to offer his services in return for cash.

It took some time working with him to really understand his motivation and vulnerabilities and the relationship between them. He was a compassionate person with a highly developed sense of responsibility toward his mother and his obligation to care for her during the last years of her life. He was also a loyal family man who wanted to provide the best life he could for his wife and children. His motivation was clear: to meet his obligations as a husband, father, and son to provide financial security for all. His vulnerability was also clear: a sense of responsibility and duty that he could not forsake.

What happens when circumstances of the motivation change? Motivations are not static. They are ever evolving. In the case of the above agent, when his mother passed away, he no longer needed the additional income provided by the Company to achieve his obligations as a husband and father. His income from normal employment was sufficient. The case officer then faced the possibility that the agent would cease the clandestine relationship with the Company.

Knowing this day may come, the case officer began to plant the seeds of a replacement motivation long before the agent’s mother passed away. Knowing the agent to be a father concerned for the education and welfare of his children, the case officer’s objective was to convince the agent to send his children to the US for advanced education. This would obviously require considerable financial resources and perhaps some covert assistance from the Company. Finally, when the agent’s mother died, this replacement motivation had been firmly established and the agent continued his clandestine relationship with the CIA. Eventually, two of his children did go to the US for advanced degrees and became US citizens.

Communication Tools

To be a successful case officer, you must develop your interrogative skills—the ability to ask questions in a logical manner that easily elicits information from the target. Your success as a CIA case officer will depend on your ability to communicate effectively through the use of the basic interrogatives—who, what, when, where, why, and how. These basic interrogatives are the heart of elicitations, debriefings, and interrogations—all separate and different tools that the case officer uses to obtain intelligence and operational information.

Elicitation

By far, the tool you will use most often is elicitation. Elicitations are used to obtain information from a yet-to-be recruited developmental asset or a target of interest. The target of elicitation does not know of the intelligence connection of the case officer and thus does not comprehend the true nature of the questions being posed by the case officer. Elicitations normally take place in a relaxed social setting—such as cocktail parties, dinners, golf games, card games, etc. —where the target feels a high level of comfort to respond to the seemingly innocuous questions being casually posed by the case officer.

The best use of elicitation is to obtain personal information about the target. Such personal details elicited over a period of time provide good insight into “what makes the target tick,” i.e., their motivation and vulnerability. However, in some cases elicitation may be used to obtain intelligence information that the case officer may draft into intelligence disseminations or at least ops-intel cables.

Elicitations are usually a give-and-take process where each party responds to the other. While the case officer is developing information on the target that responds to motivation and vulnerability requirements as well as to determine the targets access to information of interest to the CIA, the case officer is responding to questions by the target that tend to enhance a personal relationship of friendship between the two. Elicitations in social settings usually take place during one- to two-hour sessions over a period of months.

It is always helpful in elicitations to have some prior knowledge of the target before going for the contact, but often this doesn’t happen as in the case of cold contacts. So you must make some basic assumptions based on the age, sex, occupation, ethnicity, social customs, etc., and start from ground zero. By far, the cold contact offers to the NOC officer the most challenge in terms of elicitation. For example as a NOC officer in a technical field of expertise, I used to frequent technical conferences, symposia, educational forums, etc., to “troll” for targets of interest. It is good initially just to listen to groups in conversation to pick out your initial target, then develop an occasion to isolate him or her one-on-one, at which time you may have only two or three minutes to impress on the target that you are someone of interest to them as well. Here use some basic tried and true “assumptions” based on the above or some other criteria combined with the views you may have heard the target express while listening to the group conversation. I found it useful to introduce a bit of humor to help keep the interaction relaxed. After some interaction at the technical level, which is the reason we are at the technical conference, I then would turn to eliciting personal information about the target to develop a personal basis for future contact.

Double-teaming is also a useful approach to targeting a cold target. In such cases, two NOC officers not known by the target to be associated isolate the target on two-on-one conversation. One NOC takes the lead while the other acts as reinforcement on the goals of the first NOC. Remember, elicitation only has value so long as the target does not realize what the true goals of the NOC officer are. The NOC must take care not to raise any suspicion in the target. So questioning must proceed in an order perceived by the target as a natural progression of the conversation.

Assets who have been under development for a period of time are easier elicitation targets than cold contacts. You already have good rapport with the developmental contact and he orshe has become accustomed to your interest in them, though they are not aware of the real goals of your contact. You can be more aggressive in your elicitation questions in such cases. I once had a target with whom I maintained an elicitation rapport for five years who never had any idea of my intelligence affiliation. He was a prolific producer of intelligence information in his field. He and I had a genuine fondness and respect for each other throughout our association. The Company never felt a need to “recruit” him since he was providing information freely and his motivations and vulnerabilities did not appear to be sufficiently deep to make him want to accept recruitment as an agent. So rather than trying to recruit him and possibly having him turn down the attempt and refuse further contact, we just continued the elicitation contact.