Opinion

CIA, FBI Traitors Should Be Lured Back With Promise of No Jail Time, Expert Says

As long as there are spy services, of course, there will be defectors. The CIA, FBI and Defense Department have spent years studying why good intelligence officers go bad, without, evidently, finding an effective way to stop them from selling out, much less persuade them to surface themselves. Now, David Charney, an Alexandria, Virginia, psychiatrist who has spent hours interviewing traitors who got caught, has come up with a radical tactic: forgiveness—of a sort—if they turn themselves in.

“You have to offer them something that really would make a difference in their lives,” he says of turncoats who come to regret selling secrets to the Russians, Chinese or other adversaries. “And I came up with the one thing that I thought would make a difference: no jail.” The moles would, of course, face confiscation of their ill-gotten gains, heavy fines, a lifetime monitoring of their finances and perhaps relocation with a new identity, under a very strict watch. “All kinds of bad things,” Charney said during a recent lecture to insiders in Washington, D.C., “but no jail.”