Wippl: Spies Fail in Cultivating Agents
Joe Wippl, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that intelligence agencies often fail to spend adequate time recruiting and cultivating agents.
Wippl made the argument in a June 4 article on Slate entitled “The Spy Who Billed Me.”
From the text of the article:
In his memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, Duane Clarridge, a former CIA officer who led the Latin American and European divisions, walks through the recruitment of a source. Clarridge identifies a possible agent, a man he calls Adamski. Since he’s having trouble meeting up with Adamski, Clarridge starts by taking a mutual acquaintance for lunch and asking for help connecting. Clarridge doesn’t pay this mutual friend—”I knew that any mention of compensation would be offensive to him,” he writes—but he does give him small gifts. While trying to stage “accidental” meetings with Adamski, Clarridge rents a fishing boat, travels to a nearby tourist town, buys a gift (a piece of embroidery) for Adamski’s wife, and helps him procure an abortion drug. Eventually, all these efforts led to Adamski agreeing to become an agent.
Recruiting agents, for Clarridge, was “addicting,” he writes. But not all case officers relish this process. “As a general rule, case officers do not spend enough on cultivating agent candidates or liaison officials,” Joseph Wippl, a former case officer who now teaches at Boston University, says.
You can read the full article here.
Wippl is the Pardee School’s Director of Graduate Studies and a former CIA officer. Learn more about him here.