HOW ARE AGENTS RECRUITED TODAY?

Stage 1: Identification

This is done in two ways: self-recruitment or talent spotting. A self-recruit makes contact with an intelligence officer, offering to betray classified information, often for money. It is fairly common today (even more so during the Cold War), but there is the danger of ‘the dangle’ (a potential recruit who tests an intelligence officer by pretending to have information then turns them into the target).

A talent spotter identifies potential recruits on the basis of information they may be able to supply (for example, a nuclear technology scientist in Tehran). Most intelligence agencies focus their efforts on one person, although in China the Ministry of State Security in Beijing uses the ‘thousand grains of sand’ principle, pitching to many people at once.

Stage 2: Cultivation

Next the recruiter identifies the political views of a potential recruit (flagging those deemed extreme or inappropriate) and their level of access to information (including their organisation’s future plans, past operations, finances, the structure of the organisation and the chain of command).

If the incentive is money, the intelligence officer may also give them a glimpse of their future life. This method, still used today, was frequently employed in Northern Ireland. A couple from Belfast would be informed that they had won a prize, for example a holiday in Spain. They were then taken out of their socially deprived neighbourhood to a hotel full of intelligence officers posing as British holidaymakers, who they would get to know and socialise with before they were pitched to and recruited.

Stage 3: The 'bump'

Finally, the recruiter meets their target in a choreographed scenario – for example, a dinner party thrown by an ‘access agent’. Or, if the target is a physicist based overseas, the agency might arrange a scientific conference and offer the potential recruit an honorarium fee to attend.

At the event, the recruiters may present themselves under a false flag. For example, a British intelligence officer may pretend to be an Israeli or American intelligence officer, or whichever nationality the target is most likely to sympathise with.

The groundwork for this ‘bump’ is sometimes laid several years in advance.

— Nigel West, European editor, The World Intelligence Review, is the author of several books about spies, including Churchill's Spy Files (The History Press, £25)