Spy story

A spy story and why British politicians need to respect MI5 officers

Agents are the aorta of human intelligence operations.

Intelligence officers recruit individuals, referred to as agents, to spy for their particular service. Agents are targeted for recruitment based on their ability and willingness to use access or relationships to provide valuable information on matters of concern.

Later, I'll explore what a new report by Britain's Parliament tells us about British intelligence agents. First, however, here's a basic hypothetical example of how an agent might be recruited.

The MI6 (Britain's foreign-focus intelligence service) station in Vienna learns that a mid-ranking SVR (Russia's civilian foreign intelligence service) officer, "Lavrentiy", will be traveling from Moscow to attend an IAEA summit in the Austrian capital. MI6 knows Lavrentiy has a drinking problem and might be disillusioned: he's been passed over for promotion three times.

Recognizing that Russian spies might be monitoring Lavrentiy and MI6's Vienna station during the trip, MI6 headquarters send a mid-ranking MI6 officer, Max, from New Delhi to Vienna. Max knows that Lavrentiy will probably tell him to get lost, but also that this opportunity can't be passed up.