Spotting refers to finding someone who might make a good asset. Technical solutions can help in some cases, with one or more of the steps in this process, but they cannot reliably replace the human touch in all of them. And each stage works best when intelligence officers can look sources in the eye, earn their trust, calm their anxiety and share their peril. This process-spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting and handling-is known as the recruitment cycle. They must find potential spies, determine what information those targets can provide (and how reliably), develop a relationship of trust, convince them to commit espionage and handle the flow of secret information from those people. To gather intelligence from human sources, intelligence officers have long used a logical and rigorous process. And it must, because COVID-19 presents the most widespread obstacle to human intelligence collection in the agency’s history. This legacy of creativity and technological innovation will serve their successors in today’s CIA well. Pervasive, invisible and potentially lethal, the KGB’s smothering embrace led the CIA’s operations officers to do some of their best work to complete one of their most successful operations. intelligence has a long and distinguished record of working against oddly similar foes in oppressive environments-most notably, the Soviet Union’s KGB on the streets of Moscow. And don’t even try to pull off a brush pass when social distancing demands at least six feet of physical separation.īut all is not lost.
Conducting surveillance detection before meeting with a recruited asset or gathering material from an asset’s dead drop full of secret material? Good luck avoiding attention from local law enforcement and counterintelligence when the streets are otherwise empty. Developing a relationship of trust with a potential intelligence asset? Far from a cakewalk when lengthy face-to-face meetings are a nonstarter. Bumping up against disaffected foreign diplomats or disgruntled terrorists? Difficult when virtually all public events have been canceled. Normal techniques don’t work under the unique circumstances created by the virus. In fact, the agency’s intelligence officers now face a more difficult challenge than ever when it comes to their efforts to recruit spies. The novel coronavirus presents significant challenges to the mission and operations of every government agency and department-and the Central Intelligence Agency is no exception.