The Recruiter: Spying in the Twilight of American Intelligence by Douglas London

Author:Douglas London [London, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306847301
Google: 9yglzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2021-11-15T00:24:09.085522+00:00

They Don’t Have to Like Us…but They Do Have to Trust Us

The CIA rarely uses coercion to recruit its agents. I say rarely, because to be fair, coercion can be subtle and to define it can be subjective. In some circumstances, we’re not averse to employing some form of quid pro quo or ultimatum to get our foot in the door. The simple truth is that coercion is not effective. If it were, we’d probably do more of it, as many of our adversary intelligence services practice by default. It’s easier. Just ask the Russians, Iranians, and Pakistanis, who prefer the simplicity of blackmail or threat, most often entrapment from a contrived and illicit sexual encounter they have caught on tape.

Coercion will never achieve the trust, insight, and control that a case requires. Those who succumb to blackmail will do the bare minimum and take the first opportunity to flee, or worse, secure revenge. In those cases, when no alternative exists and the stakes so warrant, we do play the heavy to get our foot in the door. We move swiftly, and we demonstrate genuine concern for the agent as well as prove our reliability as soon as time allows. The default is to bridge the relationship to make it one based on respect. When buying time at the outset through such rare acts of heavy-handedness, the goal is to demonstrate through deeds that our concern, reliability, and value for the agent are genuine, and that they are indeed free to go their separate way, if they so choose.

One of my more memorable cases, I’ll confess, started out just this way. At a post where I was the COS, we discovered almost by accident the presence of a long sought-after al-Qa’ida operative. He was, in reality, a facilitator and not a trigger puller. Understandably, I must conceal the details. “Yousef” had been in-country for a while by the time we took notice of him or had made the connection about his affiliations. He had been on the run for some years, first managing to avoid arrest in his home country, itself a repressive police state that sought to exercise strict political control over the mosques. Yousef’s association with fellow Islamic extremists had brought him to the attention of his nation’s counterintelligence service. Like many, Yousef initially fled to a former Soviet state, where terrorist recruiters had invited him. Here he was vetted, indoctrinated, and trained.

From there, recognizing his particular talents, al-Qa’ida deployed him to Eastern Europe, where he provided logistical support to cells that were conducting conventional and asymmetrical warfare in the Balkans during the conflict. From reading our file on him at the time, one in which details were few and far between, Yousef was either the luckiest or the most hapless of terrorist facilitators. He had managed to escape from several countries in different parts of the world where either a group he was supporting successfully executed a terrorist operation or was discovered in the process.

It wasn’t clear

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