Station under diplomatic cover

Nations vary as to how well hidden they choose to have all, part or none of their intelligence personnel under the guise of diplomatic immunity. Frequently, at least one individual is known to the host country, so there can be a deniable channel of communications. If the nations are allies, many of the intelligence personnel may be known and actively cooperating.

Certain diplomatic titles were often assumed to be cover jobs. With the United Kingdom, "passport control officer" was, much of the time, an intelligence position.^[1] Today, it may be confusing that some passport control officers actually control passports. With other countries, "cultural attaché" was often a cover job, although, again, it might be legitimate. An intelligence officer covered as a cultural attaché might still do some cultural things.

• Chief of station or rezident. There may also be multiple chiefs if "country B" has both military and civilian human intelligence. Fairly recently, the US consolidated military and civilian into the National Clandestine Service. Russia still probably separates GRU military and SVR civilian, and the KGB, the USSR-era predecessor of the SVR, ran both illegal and legal residencies.
• Operations officer, also called case officer: interacts with local assets or leaders of local agent subnetwork. Israel's Mossad refers to these as katsas.
• Collection management officer (aka reports officer, intelligence officer): does preliminary report categorization and organization. May be the administrative chief.

• Communications and encryption personnel
• Drivers and guards

• Operational targeting officer: not always used. May be more focused on access agents and recruiting, handing off recruited agents to case officers. Might make the decision to use non-HUMINT collection, such as SIGINT based in the embassy.

• Technical collection specialists (e.g., the US Special Collection Service, a joint NSA-CIA operation)

Stations under official but nondiplomatic cover

An intermediate approach has the officers clearly working for their country but without diplomatic immunity and with a cover role that does not immediately suggest intelligence affiliation. For example, the Soviet GRU covered some intelligence officers under the TASS news agency, or as part of a trade or technical mission, or even as diplomats. The last might seem surprising but this was under a GRU assumption that military attaches would always be assumed to be intelligence officers, but that members of the civilian part of an embassy might actually be diplomats rather than intelligence officers.^[2]

It was easier, of course, for the socialist USSR to assign people to state agencies. Western sensitivities tend to be much greater about using, for example, journalistic cover. The US has been emphatic in prohibiting any relationship between intelligence and the Peace Corps.

US military intelligence doctrine forbids a HUMINT specialist to pose as:

• A doctor, medic, or any other type of medical personnel.
• Any member of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or its affiliates. Such a ruse is a violation of treaty obligations.
• A chaplain or clergyman.
• A journalist.
• A member of the civilian government, such as a Member of Parliament.^[3]

An example of civilian cover for an American officer involved a German refugee, with the pseudonym "Stephan Haller", who had widely ranging interests and special skills in mathematics and physics, as well as native language skill. His overt role, in 1949, was directing a program that paid subsidies to German scientists, part of a larger program of denying German talent to the Soviets. Initially, he was based in Pforzheim, (West) Germany.^[4]

During two years in Pforzheim, with a well-established cover, he collected political and scientific intelligence from the scientists and also Germans that he knew in political circles before emigrating. In 1951, he moved to Berlin, directing overall "operations against scientific targets in the East Zone of Germany", while still managing the subsidy program. His new work included encouraging defection of key craftsmen working for the Soviets. He was considered a master craftsman,

He did not grow careless or conceited with success. Here remained a meticulous craftsman. Before he debriefed a source, he mastered the subject to be discussed. His agents were made comfortable not only by his cigars and beer but also by the easy flow of communication. And he did not end until he had every last scrap of useful information. He never failed, moreover, to remain alert for operational leads--potential agents, counterintelligence indicators, propaganda possibilities. When Haller was finished, there were no more questions to be asked. And though he groaned over the chore of putting it on paper, his reporting became thorough-and more than thorough, illuminating-for he rarely failed to make interpretive comments. ^{[quotation?] [citation?]}

Stations under non-official cover

According to Victor Suvorov, the Soviet reaction to losing networks operated from diplomatic missions – after the countries in which those embassies were located were overrun in the Second World War – was to emphasize "illegal" (i.e., what the US calls non-official cover) stations (i.e., residencies) for HUMINT networks. The illegal residencies were preferred to be in safe locations, perhaps of allies such as the United States, Great Britain and Canada.

Soviet operations were tightly compartmentalized, with strict need-to-know an absolute rule. "Undercover residencies support illegals, but only on instructions from the Centre without having any idea for whom they are working. All operations in support of illegals are worked out in such a way that the officers of the GRU undercover residency do not have one crumb of information which is not necessary. Operations are planned in such a way that there is no possibility of the illegals becoming dependent on the actions of the undercover residency." A lesson learned from the loss of espionage networks was to keep them small, subdividing them, with independent reporting to Center, when more agents were recruited.^[5]

Support services

Some clandestine services may have additional capabilities for operations or support. Key operational agents of influence are apt to be run as singletons, although political considerations may require communication through cutouts. Useful idiots can be run by diplomatic case officers, since there is no particular secrecy about their existence or loyalty. Valuable volunteers, depending on the size of the volunteer group, may work either with case officers, or operations officers brought clandestinely into the area of operations.

Training

Before the agent actually starts to carry out assignment, training in tradecraft may be necessary. For security reasons, this ideally will be done outside the agent's own country, but such may not always be possible. Increasingly less desirable alternatives might be to conduct the training away from the operational area, as in a safe house in a resort, and then a safe house inside the operational area.

Among the first things to be taught are communications tradecraft, beginning with recording the material of interest. Skills here can include the operation of cameras appropriate for espionage, methods of carrying out documents without detection, secret writing.

Once the information is captured, it must be transmitted. The transmission may be impersonal, as with dead drops or car tosses. It may involve carriers. It may be electronic. If there is a need for personal meetings, the agent must know how to request them, and also to alert the network leader or case officer that the agent may be under suspicion.

Teaching countersurveillance techniques to agents is a calculated risk.^[11] While it may be perfectly valid for an agent to abort a drop or other relatively innocent action, even at the cost of destroying valuable collected material, it is much more dangerous to teach the agent to elude active surveillance. The ability to elude professional counterintelligence personnel following the agent, for example, may confirm the counterintelligence organization's suspicion that they are dealing with a real agent.

Still, the agent may need to have an emergency escape procedure if he confirms he is under surveillance, or even if he is interrogated but released.

Continued testing during operations

Case officers should constantly test their agents for changes in motivation or possible counterintelligence compromise. While "name traces cannot be run on every person mentioned by the agent, do not be stingy with them on persons who have familial, emotional, or business ties with him" to detect any linkages to hostile counterintelligence.^[11] Until an agent is well established as reliable, meetings must always be done with care to avoid detection. "The prime emphasis is put on vigilance and checking-has he been planted by the local counterintelligence, are his motives in agreeing to collaborate sincere? The need for personal meetings with such an agent is increased, for they give the opportunity to assess him more completely."^[12]

An experienced US operations officer emphasized that field operations personnel should report status and progress often. Only with such reporting can a headquarters staff remain vigilant, looking globally for penetrations, and also aware of political implications. Reporting and headquarters advice is critical for joint operations (i.e., with the intelligence service of another country). Headquarters, aware of all joint operations with a given service, can give advice from a broader viewpoint without compromising the need for local initiative.^[11]

Operating the agent

Even with the most sensitive agents, occasional personal meetings are important in maintaining psychological control. Nevertheless, some agents, especially trained intelligence officers like Robert Hanssen, will almost never meet, but provide material good enough to prove their bona fides. A Soviet officer commented, whatever an agent's role in the intelligence net, personal contact should be made with him only when it is impossible to manage without it. The number of meetings should be kept as low as possible, especially with sources of valuable information.

Personal meetings may be held to give an agent his next assignment and instructions for carrying it out, to train him in tradecraft or the use of technical or communications equipment, to transmit documents, reports, technical equipment, money, or other items, or to fulfill several of these purposes. In actual practice several purposes are usually served by a meeting. In addition to its particular objectives more general needs can be filled. A meeting held for training purposes may be a means for clarifying biographic data on the agent or his views on various subjects. At every meeting with an agent one should study him and obtain new data on his potential and talents, thereby providing a better basis for judging his sincerity and deciding how much trust to place in him.^[12]

Agents, to varying extents, need reinforcement. Salary is important and also gives a lever of compromise, although pressing it too hard can offend a truly ideologically motivated agent. Some agents benefit from recognition that they can never show, such as a uniform of your service, or decorations from it.

Agents will be more comfortable if they believe that they will have protection, preferably exfiltration, if compromised. Protecting their families may be even more important. When the agent operates in a country with a particularly brutal counterintelligence service, providing them with a "final friend", or means for suicide, can be comforting even if they never use it.^[13]

Agent communications

This section deals with skills required of individuals, either agents or support personnel. Most skills are concerned with communications.

Clandestine transfer operated by humans

It is a case-by-case decision whether the material exchanged should have safeguards against accessing it in other than a precise manner. One straightforward protection method is to have the material on exposed photographic film, in a container that does not suggest that it contains film and might be, innocently, opened in a lighted room. Self-destruct devices also are possibilities, but they confirm that the transfer involved sensitive material.

Brush pass and other physical exchange with couriers

Under the general term "brush pass" is a wide range of techniques in which one clandestine operative passes a physical item to another operative.^[14] "Brush" implies that the two people "brush" past one another, typically in a public place and preferably a crowd, where random people interfere with any visual surveillance. In a properly executed brush pass, the agents do not even stop walking; at most, they may appear to bump into one another.

During the brief contact, a common means of executing the exchange is for both to be carrying otherwise identical objects, such as a newspaper, briefcase, or magazine. The information being exchanged is in one of them. As the two people separate, they still appear to be holding the same object in the same hand.

More challenging versions are reminiscent of passing a baton in a relay race, and would be most commonly done with small objects such as a photographic film cartridge. In this more dangerous method, the transfer is from hand to hand, or from hand into a pocket. While this technique obviously takes better manual dexterity and is more prone to error, it has the countersurveillance advantage that the operatives are not carrying anything after the transfer, and can blend into a crowd even more easily.

A variation of the brush pass is the live letter drop, in which one agent follows a predefined route, on foot, with a prepared report hidden in a pocket. En route, a second agent unknown to the first agent picks his/her pocket and then passes the report on unread, either to a cut-out or to an intelligence officer. This technique presents opportunities both for plausible deniability and for penetration by hostile agents.

Dead drop

A dead drop is a container not easily found, such as a magnetized box attached to a metal rack in an out-of-sight alley. The box could be loosely buried. It should be possible to approach the container to fill or empty it, and not be easily observed from a street or window.

Typically, a clandestine collector will put espionage material, perhaps in encrypted form, into the box, and use some prearranged signal (i.e. signal site) to let a courier know that something needs to be taken out of the box and delivered to the next point on the route to the case officer. Such a route might have several dead drops. In some cases, the dead drop might be equipped with a device to destroy its contents unless it is opened properly.

Representative dead drop device

Signals to tell a courier, or a case officer if there is no intermediate courier, that the dead drop needs service can be as simple as a piece of colored tape on a lamp post or perhaps a set of window shades raised and lowered in a specific pattern. While "wrong number" calls with a predefined apology can be used, they are more vulnerable to surveillance if the phone in question is tapped.

Car tosses

A car toss can take many forms, one of which can be considered a moving dead drop. An agent or courier can put a magnetized box inside a bumper on a parked car.

In some cases, if a car can drive slowly down a street or driveway not easily observed, a courier can toss a message container into an open window, making the transfer method intermediate between a brush pass and a dead drop.

Cars with diplomatic immunity have advantages and disadvantages for tosses. They cannot be searched if the toss is observed, but they also are followed more easily. Diplomatic cars usually have distinctive markings or license plates, and may be equipped with electronic tracking devices. Counterintelligence could wait until the car is out of sight following a toss, then apprehend and interrogate the courier, or simply keep the courier under surveillance to discover another link in the message route.

Termination

For any number of reasons, a human source operation may need to be suspended for an indefinite time, or definitively terminated. This need rarely eliminates the need for protecting the fact of espionage, the support services, and the tradecraft and tools provided.

One of the most difficult challenges is ending an emotional relationship between the case officer and agent, which can exist in both directions. Sometimes, an agent is unstable, and this is a major complication; perhaps even requiring the evacuation of the agent. More stable agents may be happy with termination bonuses, and perhaps a future emigration opportunity, that do not draw attention to their own side's counterintelligence. In some instances, an intelligence agency may issue a "burn notice", indicating to other such agencies that an individual is an unreliable source of information.

Especially in the case of non-national organizations, termination can be very literal, ranging from having a trusted operative kill the problematic agent, or, when culturally appropriate, sending the agent on a suicide mission.

When the clandestine phase is preparation for a DA mission such as the 9/11 attacks, or the assassination attacks, using suicide bombers, by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, termination of the operational cells is rather obvious. If there are support cells in the operational area, they may be vulnerable, but it would be good tradecraft to withdraw them shortly before the attack.

Agents of influence

An agent of influence, being witting or unwitting of the goals of a foreign power B, can influence the policy of Country A to be consistent with the goals of Country B.

In Soviet theory, influencing policy was one aspect of what they termed active measures (aktivnyye meropriyatiya). Active measures have a different connotation than the Western concept of direct action (DA), although Soviet active measures could include wet affairs (mokrie dela) conducted by Department V of the KGB, "wet" referring to the spilling of blood.

Strategic deception

Intelligence organizations occasionally use live, or even dead, persons to deceive the enemy about their intentions. One of the best-known such operations was the British Operation Mincemeat, in which a dead body, bearing carefully misleading documents, was put in British uniform, and floated onto a Spanish beach. In World War II, Spanish security services, while officially neutral, often passed information to the Germans, which, in this case, is exactly what the British wanted done. This operation was under the control of the Twenty Committee, part of the British strategic deception organization, the London Controlling Section. A related British operation in World War I was run by a controversial military officer, Richard Meinertzhagen, who prepared a knapsack containing false military plans, which the Ottoman allies of the Germans were allowed to capture. The plans related to false British strategy for the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, setting up a successful surprise attack in the Battle of Beersheba and the Third Battle of Gaza.

Active measures, however, reflected a national effort to influence other countries to act in concert with Soviet goals. These measures could involve state organizations up to and including the Politburo, much as the World War II British organization for strategic deception, the London Controlling Section, and its US counterpart, Joint Security Control, could get direct support from the head of government. Much of the Soviet responsibilities for active measures was focused in the KGB. Its "First Main Directorate uses active measures such as agents of influence, propaganda, and disinformation to promote Soviet goals."

In the present political context of Western democracies, the sensitivity, and separation, of clandestine and open contacts do not lend themselves to the process of building agents of influence.

"Active measures is not exclusively an intelligence activity, and in this sense it differs from the similar American concept of covert action. There are many differences between active measures and covert action. One is the Soviet ability to mesh overt and covert influence activities through centralized coordination of party, government, and ostensibly private organizations dealing with foreigners. Despite interagency coordination mechanisms, the United States is too pluralistic to achieve full coordination between all the overt and covert means of exercising influence abroad. Other major differences are in scope, intensity, and importance attributed to active measures and covert action, and in immunity from legal and political constraints."

While deception and influence operations could involve the highest levels of Allied governments in World War II, it is worth noting that while the West generally speaks of military deception, strategic deception operates at a higher level. A Soviet, and presumably Russian, term of art, maskirovka or "denial and deception", is much broader than the current Western doctrine of deception being run by lower-level staff groups.

Russian concepts involve the full scope of grand strategy

In the military, responsibility for maskirovka easily can be at the level of a deputy chief of the General Staff, who can call upon all levels of government.

Returning to KGB doctrine, presumably still present in the SVR, "Influence operations integrate Soviet views into foreign leadership groups. Propaganda operations take the form of disinformation articles placed in the foreign press. Disinformation operations are false documents designed to incite enmity toward the United States."

The Second Main Directorate of the KGB, whose responsibilities are now primarily in the Russian FSB, is responsible for the recruitment of agents among foreigners stationed in the Soviet Union. The KGB influences these people unwittingly, as most regard themselves too sophisticated to be manipulated.

"The second deception program is counterintelligence, which aims to neutralize the efforts of foreign intelligence services. It achieves this through the use of non-Soviet double agents and Soviet double agents. Non-Soviet double agents are foreign nationals who have been 'turned'. A Soviet double agent is a Soviet with access to classified information. These officials may be used as false defectors".^[19]

"Influence operations integrate Soviet views into leadership groups. The agent of influence may be a well- placed, 'trusted contact' who consciously serves Soviet interests on some matters while retaining his integrity on others, or an unwitting contact who is manipulated to take actions that advance Soviet interests on specific issues of common concern."