You’ve been hired by the CIA and trained as an operations officer. You’ve been stationed in our embassy in Damascus and your job is to recruit Syrians that are willing to betray their country and give you secrets about their efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. What do you do?
First, you take on a cover as some kind of mundane grunt working for the Department of Agriculture or something. During the day you discuss crops and pesticides and irrigation with ministers of the Syrian government and businesspeople involved in farming. But, by night you look for Syrian defense officials that are disgruntled, or are crooked, or are homosexuals, or are having extramarital affairs, or have a child that needs expensive surgery, or are otherwise vulnerable to blackmail or enticements.
Once a prospect has been identified, your training in agent recruitment kicks in and you implement your training. You make their acquaintance under some pretext. You befriend them. You get them to make small betrayals at first, and then you trap them into making ever greater disclosures under the threat of revealing their prior perfidy.
If you get caught, you have diplomatic immunity and you can just go back to Langley and work as a desk jockey or something.
Now, imagine that you have been hired by the CIA and trained as an operations officer, but you haven’t been assigned to an embassy and you haven’t been given a cover job with the Department of Agriculture. Instead of being given official cover, the CIA has created a fictitious law firm that will issue you bi-monthly checks. The CIA wants you to go to Damascus and find out what you can about the Syrian government’s efforts to procure weapons of mass destruction. They will arrange for you to be hired by a company that makes nuclear triggers. Then they will have you get passed over for a promotion. You’ll develop a drinking problem. Your girlfriend will leave you. You’ll accumulate staggering gambling debts. You’ll start frequenting brothels. Then, all of a sudden, desperate for money, you’ll show up in Damascus looking to peddle some nuclear triggers.
The Syrians will be suspicious. They’ll try to figure out what kind of fucked up motive you might have to sell them sensitive nuclear equipment. They’ll see how your life has fallen apart. They’ll see the immoral life you’ve been leading. They’ll see how you hate your boss. They’ll see how badly you need money. And then someone will come forward and contact you about buying those nuclear triggers. Once you have their name…if you are lucky enough to discover their true identity…you can begin a true intelligence operation to unravel their whole program for procuring parts and blueprints for a nuclear program.
If they ever figure out that you are a CIA officer, they’ll kill you in a minute.
And then they will kill anyone that they suspect was working with you.
That is how the nasty business of espionage works.
orange.
Sounds like world’s worst job. I hope it pays well!!!
Booman: Are you working on a script for a remake of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?
But seriously, I don’t think that American intelligence works like that. I read somewhere that one reason US human intel is so bad is that Americans don’t like being posted to third world countries where they don’t have access to all the expected amenities. This is why the CIA has never been able to penetrate al Qaeda, even though a Californian drop-out could join it without much of a problem.
believe what you want. Le Carre told the truth.
Le Carré wrote about British intelligence, not American intelligence.
More to the point, I think it’s pretty clear by now that the Brits are much better at running an empire than we are. The immediate post-World War II period was an exception, with people like George Kennan setting policy.
There has been a change in the elites that end up running US foreign policy. After the War, it was Princeton-educated investment bankers based in New York. Today, it is people who tend to come from places like Texas. The former but not the latter have any sense of what the world outside of the U.S. is like.
Face it: our government today is run by hicks. With hicks in charge, how can you carry on serious spying?
Hey, our president hadn’t even been to Europe before he became president. Any wonder?
That total moron Dick Armey once said “I’ve been to Europe once. That’s all I need.”
Fucking moronic peasants. Sinclair Lewis had their number.
Are you watching Ms. Wilson’s testimony? Does she seem like she is a hick?
Does she seem like someone that would shy away from a foreign posting because she wants amenities?
She was a HIGHLY trained and EXPERIENCED operations officer in one of our most sensitive postings.
No, I’m not watching the testimony. I don’t have a TV.
I don’t doubt that she is very able and dedicated, and I was not thinking of her when I wrote my posts. (That’s because you didn’t mention her either in this diary.)
The point I was trying to make is that I think you were exaggerating how effective an American spy can be under the present domestic political and social climate. Just consider Sibel Edmonds case. It appears that in the FBI, if you know foreign languages and are more concerned about this country than your own career, you get fired. Successful people in the Pentagon are career-driven too, as opposed to interested in how to make the U.S. good at fighting real wars; that explains why our army hasn’t put any effort into figuring out how to pursue fourth generation warfare, and hence, the debacle in Iraq.
Why should we think that the CIA is an exception? If Wilson was an effective spy, and my guess is that she was, she was probably an exception. But Cheney took care of that.
Very good points. I guess we both kind of agree that whether we have good spies or not is a moot point, given that the White House is run by idiots who don’t listen to the CIA and meddle in its operations.
As for penetrating al Qaeda, I would just add the following. The US did not have that much difficulty penetrating Soviet intelligence. Why? I would say that that was because it was obvious to an objective observer that the American system was superior to the Soviet system. Therefore, you had Soviets defecting out of purely moral, as opposed to pecuniary, reasons.
The situation today with the US with respect to the Islamic world is different. It is obvious to any objective observer that the US has no interest in attending to the grievances of any Islamic people.
That is the problem. As you point out, it would be hard to get an American to infiltrate al Qaeda. But it shouldn’t be that hard to recruit an Afghani or Pakistani who could do that. But no intelligent Afghani or Pakistani would ever consider being a mole for the CIA, for very good reasons.
I’m sure it would by 90% redacted, but isn’t there a report Congress can request on how many other lives were put in danger by that idiot Novak’s column? When he outed Brewster-Jennings in the second column, he not only blinded the CIA to Iran’s nuclear activities but risked the lives of many.
Slightly OT, but I wouldn’t mind some expert opinion on that tape played at the Libby trial of Armitage dishing to Woodward about Plame. I understand the nefarious motives of Cheney and those he dispatched to blow Plame’s cover, but I don’t understand why Armitage was so gleeful in doing the same with Woodward. I suppose Woodward having evolved into the semi-insider that he’s become could be trusted, and, in fact, it was Woodward’s own sitting on the story that went a long way in allowing Bush to gain a second term. Armitage’s attitude, however, seems way too casual, especially in the post-9/11 world that the entire GOP raison d’etre depends on now that they’ve ceded domestic issues to the Dems. I think it has to do with the time period of the leaking. Wasn’t this not long after the “Mission Accomplished” crowing of Bush? These guys probably thought they’d achieved the cakewalk that Adelman predicted and nothing would ever again stand in their way. If conventional wisdom could believe that even “nice guys” like Armitage are at bottom political hacks who don’t take their jobs seriously, I can see the GOP losing their defense and foreign policy cred for a long time to come.
that I think all those right wing shills are simply lying.
But it is also so obvious I don’t see why the sheeple can’t figure it out.
Even the old spy movies got the basics.