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.
