"Do you know how much power I'd have to give up to be President?" - Lex Luthor

The CIA, like all intelligence agencies, spends much of its time managing and creating spies. Doing that is its primary job, and though it's also the clandestine operations arm of the U.S. government, the vast majority of employees at the CIA are assigned to analysis or acquisition of information from "human intelligence" sources.

For field officers in particular, creating your first spy is a very significant career milestone. If a CIA officer is unable to accomplish this after being trained for it and spending a few years in a foreign country, they'll probably have to pick a different job.

Let's imagine that newly trained field officer is you. Who would be your ideal informant? Who would you want to flip, if you could flip anybody in the world?

This is an important question. Most of the time you won't be able to just arrange a series of private meetings with people of real stature, like the head of a foreign military, so you can convince them to betray their country. However, it's not unheard of that an officer turns someone of small stature, say an analyst at the ISF, and that person later gets heavily promoted. Perhaps because they got help from a Certain Intelligence Agency.

A counter-terrorism analyst is privy to a lot of secret information throughout the course of their job. But that analyst's commanding officer manages a bunch of counter-terrorism analysts. So, getting your source that manager job means they're going to be even more helpful. Right?

Well, maybe. It certainly sounds like it'd be impressive on a Wikipedia article or a spy resume. But there are a few problems in practice with this strategy, some specific to intelligence and some more general:

Spies often still have an odd sense of patriotism. If they become promoted really heavily, they sometimes start to feel embarrassed on behalf of their country or at least like they no longer need to talk to you, and demand to call the whole relationship off.
An elevated rank tends to carry more scrutiny. Your spy might now be subject to more intense surveillance by their host country, like a permanent security detail, that may complicate your ability to communicate privately or provide them with "gifts" they can actually use.
Most importantly for this conversation, your agent's boss might nominally command the people pr

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Mechanics of Tradecraft

Mechanics of Tradecraft