way to disguise a man today so that he will be acceptable in hostile circles for any length of time is to make him over entirely. This involves years of training and a thorough concealing and burying of the past under layers of fictitious personal history which have to be “backstopped.”
If you were really born in Finland but are supposed to have been born in Munich, Germany, then you must have documents showing your connection to that city. You have to be able to act like someone who was born and lived there. Arrangements have to be made in Munich to confirm your origin in case an investigation is ever undertaken. Perhaps Munich or a similar city was chosen because it was bombed and certain records were destroyed. A man so made over is known as an “illegal,” and I shall have more to say about him later. Obviously, an intelligence service will go to all this trouble only when it is intent upon creating deep-set and long-range assets.
If an intelligence service cannot insert its own agent within a highly sensitive target, the alternative is to recruit somebody who is already there. You might find someone who is inside but is not quite at the right spot for access to the information you need. Or you might find someone just beginning a career which will eventually lead to his employment in the target. But the main thing is that he is a qualified and “cleared” insider. He is, as we say, “in place.”
One of my most valuable agents during World War II, of whom I shall have more to say later, was precisely of this kind. When I first established contact with him, he was already employed in the German Foreign Office in a position which gave him access to communications with German diplomatic establishments all over the world. He was exactly at the right place. No single diplomat abroad, of whatever rank, could have got his hands on so much information as did this man, who had access to the all-important Foreign Office files. Even with the most careful planning many years in advance, it would have been a stroke of fortune if we could ever have placed an agent inside this target and maneuvered him into such a position, even if he had been able to behave like the most loyal Nazi. This method of recruiting the agent “in place,” despite its immense difficulties, has the advantage of allowing the intelligence service to focus on the installation it wishes to penetrate, to examine and analyze it for its most important and most vulnerable points, and then to search for the man already employed at that point who might be likely to cooperate. It does not, as in the case of plants, begin with the man, the agent, and hope it can devise a way of inserting him into the target.
In recent years, most of the notorious instances of Soviet penetration of important targets in Western countries were engineered in this way, by the recruitment of someone already employed inside the target.
David Greenglass at Los Alamos during World War II, though only a draftsman, had access to secret details of the internal construction of the atomic bomb. Judith Coplon was employed shortly after the war in a section of the Department of Justice responsible for the registration of foreign agents in the United States. She regularly saw and copied for the Soviets FBI reports which came across her desk on investigations of espionage in the United States. Harry Houghton and John Vassall, although of low rank and engaged chiefly in administrative work, were able to procure sensitive technical documents from the British Admiralty, where they were employed in the late 1950s. Alfred Frenzel, a West German parliamentarian, had access to the NATO documents which were distributed to a West Germany Parliamentary Defense Committee on which he served in the mid-1950s. Irvin Scarbeck was only an administrative officer in our embassy in Warsaw in 1960–61. But after he had been compromised by a Polish girl and blackmailed, he managed to procure for the Polish
If you were really born in Finland but are supposed to have been born in Munich, Germany, then you must have documents showing your connection to that city. You have to be able to act like someone who was born and lived there. Arrangements have to be made in Munich to confirm your origin in case an investigation is ever undertaken. Perhaps Munich or a similar city was chosen because it was bombed and certain records were destroyed. A man so made over is known as an “illegal,” and I shall have more to say about him later. Obviously, an intelligence service will go to all this trouble only when it is intent upon creating deep-set and long-range assets.
If an intelligence service cannot insert its own agent within a highly sensitive target, the alternative is to recruit somebody who is already there. You might find someone who is inside but is not quite at the right spot for access to the information you need. Or you might find someone just beginning a career which will eventually lead to his employment in the target. But the main thing is that he is a qualified and “cleared” insider. He is, as we say, “in place.”
One of my most valuable agents during World War II, of whom I shall have more to say later, was precisely of this kind. When I first established contact with him, he was already employed in the German Foreign Office in a position which gave him access to communications with German diplomatic establishments all over the world. He was exactly at the right place. No single diplomat abroad, of whatever rank, could have got his hands on so much information as did this man, who had access to the all-important Foreign Office files. Even with the most careful planning many years in advance, it would have been a stroke of fortune if we could ever have placed an agent inside this target and maneuvered him into such a position, even if he had been able to behave like the most loyal Nazi. This method of recruiting the agent “in place,” despite its immense difficulties, has the advantage of allowing the intelligence service to focus on the installation it wishes to penetrate, to examine and analyze it for its most important and most vulnerable points, and then to search for the man already employed at that point who might be likely to cooperate. It does not, as in the case of plants, begin with the man, the agent, and hope it can devise a way of inserting him into the target.
In recent years, most of the notorious instances of Soviet penetration of important targets in Western countries were engineered in this way, by the recruitment of someone already employed inside the target.
David Greenglass at Los Alamos during World War II, though only a draftsman, had access to secret details of the internal construction of the atomic bomb. Judith Coplon was employed shortly after the war in a section of the Department of Justice responsible for the registration of foreign agents in the United States. She regularly saw and copied for the Soviets FBI reports which came across her desk on investigations of espionage in the United States. Harry Houghton and John Vassall, although of low rank and engaged chiefly in administrative work, were able to procure sensitive technical documents from the British Admiralty, where they were employed in the late 1950s. Alfred Frenzel, a West German parliamentarian, had access to the NATO documents which were distributed to a West Germany Parliamentary Defense Committee on which he served in the mid-1950s. Irvin Scarbeck was only an administrative officer in our embassy in Warsaw in 1960–61. But after he had been compromised by a Polish girl and blackmailed, he managed to procure for the Polish
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