CLASS 1: SPYING 101

Photo by Sergiu Nista on Unsplash

Welcome to my Foreign Influence Operations course! This first class is free to everyone. Every class after this will be for paid subscribers only. Want to know more about the course? See the INTRO here and the ABOUT page here. To upgrade to a paid subscription, click here.

CLASS 1: SPYING 101

ASSIGNMENT: None.

LECTURE:

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, trying to steal the NOC list by hanging from the ceiling of a temperature- and humidity-controlled room accessed only with retinal biometrics in Mission: Impossible.

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, slipping in and out of countries using multiple passports and currencies previously stashed in strategic locations in an effort to take down a covert CIA assassination program and figure out who he really is in The Bourne Identity.

Charlize Theron as Lorraine Broughton, uncovering a mole in Cold War Berlin, kicking ass in thigh-high leather boots to a killer soundtrack in Atomic Blonde.

All these movies—and this should surprise no one—are practically documentaries.

I joke, of course. Very few films or books accurately capture the complexities and nuances of the world of intelligence. Hollywood tends to ignore the tremendously important role played by analysts, likely because someone constantly reading and writing does not make for stunning visuals on the big screen. Meanwhile, intelligence operators, if they do everything right, slip seamlessly into their surroundings, unnoticeable. Not great, cinematically speaking. But in the real world of spying, if the gun comes out or something goes boom, chances are your operation has gone horribly wrong.

In real life (IRL for anyone under 50 in the audience), developing, recruiting, and running an asset is a much more delicate process. In this class, we’ll talk about what intelligence is and how it works. While we will discuss some generalities across the US Intelligence Community (IC), the focus will be on CIA and human intelligence (since that is what I know best!), including a look at how recruitment works and why assets agree to be assets at all.

What is intelligence?

Put simply, intelligence is information. For our purposes, intelligence is information gathered by the government in order to help guide policy decisions and actions. The act of gathering this type of intelligence in a clandestine manner is called espionage.

Within the IC, we often hear about “Strategic Intelligence” and “Actionable Intelligence.”

Strategic intelligence aims to help policy makers with long-term policy decisions. For example, information that adds to policy makers’ understanding of how advanced North Korea’s nuclear program is would be considered strategic intelligence.

Actionable intelligence helps policy-makers take immediate action. For example, intelligence that says Wanted Terrorist X will be in this specific location at this specific time on this specific date.

The US Intelligence Community is composed of 17 organizations and overseen by an 18th, the Director of National Intelligence. We won’t dig into which organizations do what, but if you want to know more, visit the DNI website here.

Or, for a more entertaining explanation, may I humbly recommend my series: The Intelligence Community: Smart People Looking at Computers.

As I mentioned above, we will be focusing on CIA.

How does intelligence work?

As you can see on the DNI site, there are six basic sources of intelligence:

SIGINT: Short for Signals Intelligence. For example (but certainly not limited to), capturing someone’s phone call.

IMINT: Imagery Intelligence, representations of objects reproduced electronically or by optical means on film, electronic display devices, or other media.

MASINT: Measurement and Signature Intelligence, which measures any signature characteristic of a physical thing. I will let DNI explain: “If the ‘target’ vibrates, makes a sound, leaves a trace, or gets hot or cold, it could have an exploitable signature. MASINT measures the way things are and how they actually perform. Due to the highly technical and scientific means used to develop MASINT signatures, it became known as the ‘INT’ of science.” So, imagine a missile going off and leaving a vibration and heat pattern. That’s MASINT. For more, click here.

OSINT: Open-Source Intelligence, information that is available openly to the public.

GEOINT: Geospatial Intelligence. Think of the people staring at satellite photos and measuring shadows to know what time of day it is and what movement is going on on the ground.

HUMINT: Human Intelligence, my favorite. This is intelligence derived from human sources.

Now, let’s dig a little more into CIA’s role in the Intelligence Community.

CIA has three main functions:

·      Collect foreign intelligence

·      Produce objective, all-source analysis

·      Conduct covert action (as directed by the president)

Collect foreign intelligence

CIA’s focus is on human intelligence, or HUMINT. This is generally what people think of when they think of spying. This involves intelligence officers going out in the field and recruiting sources (called assets) and getting those assets to give them information they shouldn’t be giving. We will look into this more below.

Produce objective, all-source analysis

This is carried out by analysts, the smartest people on Earth. They look at intelligence gathered through all the different INTs we discussed above and write finished analytical products for IC “customers,” such as the National Security Council and the president (who is considered the ultimate customer).

Conduct covert action

Covert action is a secret action undertaken to influence the course of political events, while hiding the hand of the government undertaking the action. In the United States, covert action requires a presidential finding, meaning the president has to approve the action, which will also be briefed to the House and Senate Intelligence Oversight Committees.

Some declassified examples of CIA covert action are:

·      CIA’s orchestration of the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and replaced him with the Shah.

·      Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

·      Support to the mujahadin in Afghanistan in their war against the USSR in the 1980s.

One operational note about covert action to keep in mind as we move forward in this course: Covert action cannot create conditions on the ground. It can only exploit conditions that already exist. For example, the mujahadin in Afghanistan were fighting the Soviet Union before the CIA got involved. That reality on the ground already existed. What the CIA realized was that, by providing the mujahadin with Stinger missiles, it could help amplify the mujahadin’s capabilities and thus bring about an outcome the US considered favorable.

Focus on HUMINT

How does an intelligence officer recruit an asset? How do you get someone to do something they shouldn’t do?

Generally, there are four motivations/vulnerabilities an intelligence officer will assess when looking to recruit someone as an asset. We refer to this as MICE.

·      Money

·      Ideology

·      Coercion (sometimes called Compromise)

·      Ego

Generally speaking, money is not great to use as leverage, since someone else may come along and offer more money. Coercion, too, isn’t great, since the person is giving information against their will. Ideally, an asset gives information because they believe in the same values as you. Of course, a little ego stroking helps everyone.

For some people, it doesn’t take much to get them to betray their country. Some people volunteer their services. But most people require a little bit of hand holding as they move through what we call the recruitment cycle.

The Recruitment Cycle consists of five steps:

·      Spot: Spot a target, someone who can provide information of interest.

·      Assess: Assess their ability and willingness to provide information of interest. This includes assessing what motivates them and what vulnerabilities they have (see MICE section above).

·      Develop: Develop the relationship.

·      Recruit: Formally recruit the person to work as an asset.

·      Handle: The process of working with the asset to keep them safe and direct them toward what information to collect.

Here is an excerpt from an article I co-wrote, explaining the process of recruiting an asset (for the full article, click here):

“It’s useful to think of recruitment—the process of getting an asset to work on behalf of an intelligence service—in dating terms. Let’s say a guy spots a girl he’d be interested in dating. The first thing he does is assess if she might be interested in dating him, too. To save himself potential embarrassment, he might send a friend over to the girl first, to see how she feels. If she shows interest, then the guy will officially ask her out. Of course, he doesn’t propose marriage on the first date: There is a period of courtship. It might be slow, it might be fast, but if all goes well and it’s a good match, the marriage proposal is the ultimate step. When it happens, it probably won’t come as a surprise; in fact, in the spy context, it might not have to be stated out loud at all.

“In the world of espionage, the “dating” ritual might look something like this: An intelligence officer, or IO, spots a target of interest, likely based on her access to information or resources of value. To assess that person’s willingness to cooperate, the IO gives the target a task to test her reaction. Usually this will be something easy, but slightly unethical—like, say, asking a political candidate’s team to meet with people who offer (potentially stolen) dirt on the opposing candidate. As protection, the IO might send someone else on his behalf, known as a “cutout,” to set up this type of meeting—this ensures plausible deniability in the event that the meeting goes south. But if the target performs the task as desired, she has shown a willingness to “cross the line,” even if she hasn’t done so yet. (And even if nothing of value is handed over in that initial meeting.)

“From there, the IO has a “hook” to meet with the target again, and then again. Each time, the IO will slowly ask for more, ratcheting up the risk each time—but always offering enough of an incentive to make it worthwhile for the target to accept. As the tasks requested of the target become dicier, the IO will begin taking the relationship underground. By the time the IO asks the target to do something clearly illegal, not only has the relationship become clandestine, but the IO has collected a whole string of compromising actions the target has performed along the way but probably shouldn’t have—and now the IO has leverage over the target.

“In short, the key to recruitment is time and subtlety. An intelligence officer doesn’t make a target compromise himself in one fell swoop. Rather, it happens incrementally with each small act that “crosses the line” giving the intelligence officer a bit more control. Before the target knows it, the IO has made the target into an asset.”

So, now you know the basics of how CIA recruits assets and how it spies on other countries. Guess what? Russia knows all this, too. Next class, we’ll delve into how Russia conducts intelligence operations, with a little comparing and contrasting with what we learned this week.