Clandestine HUMINT - Human Sources Who Changed Allegiance

Human Sources Who Changed Allegiance

With the exception of penetration moles, other human sources start out as highly trusted by their services. What causes an individual to betray service A, typically his country of birth? The most common shorthand for changing allegiance is MICE, an acronym for:

• Money: Low salary? Greedy? Needs money for family crisis? In debt?
• Ideology: Hates his system, admires ours?
• Compromise (or coercion): Vulnerable to blackmail? Emotional relationship with an access agent?
• Ego (or excitement): Lonely? Looking for a friend? Passed over for a promotion? Not appreciated by peers and superiors? Seeking praise and recognition? Adventurous? Looking for personal challenge? Wants to be James Bond? Egomaniac? Wants to prove he can get away with it?

Sometimes more than one factor applies, as with Robert Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who was a "write-in" to the KGB. While he received large amounts of money, he apparently felt unappreciated in his own service and spying on it satisfied his ego.

Psychological factors can apply to people changing allegiance for reasons other than coercion or ideology. To go beyond slogans, Project Slammer was an effort of the Intelligence Community Staff, under the Director of Central Intelligence, to come up with characteristics of Project Slammer, an Intelligence Community sponsored study of espionage.

It "examines espionage by interviewing and psychologically assessing actual espionage subjects. Additionally, persons knowledgeable of subjects are contacted to better understand the subjects' private lives and how they are perceived by others while conducting espionage .

According to a press report about Project Slammer and Congressional oversight of counterespionage, one fairly basic function is observing one's own personnel for behavior that either suggests that they could be targets for foreign HUMINT, or may already have been subverted. News reports indicate that in hindsight, red flags were flying but not noticed. In several major penetrations of US services, such as Aldrich Ames, the Walker ring or Robert Hanssen, the individual showed patterns of spending inconsistent with their salary. Some people with changed spending may have a perfectly good reason, such as an inheritance or even winning the lottery, but such patterns should not be ignored.

By 1997, the Project Slammer work was being presented at public meetings of the Security Policy Advisory Board. While a funding cut caused the loss of impetus in the mid-nineties, there are research data used throughout the security community. They emphasize the "essential and multi-faceted motivational patterns underlying espionage. Future Slammer analyses will focus on newly developing issues in espionage such as the role of money, the new dimensions of loyalty and what seems to be a developing trend toward economic espionage."

According to a 2008 Defense Department study, financial incentives and external coercion have played diminishing roles in motivating Americans to spy against the United States, but divided loyalties are increasingly evident in recent espionage cases. The study said, “Two thirds of American spies since 1990 have volunteered. Since 1990, spying has not paid well: 80% of spies received no payment for espionage, and since 2000 it appears no one was paid. ... Offenders since 1990 are more likely to be naturalized citizens, and to have foreign attachments, connections, and ties, and therefore they are more likely to be motivated to spy from divided loyalties.” Despite this trend, the report says that the majority (65%) of American spies are still native born.