Staff and Skills in A Clandestine HUMINT Operations Station
This description is based around the foreign intelligence service, of country B, operating in and against country A. It may also include operations against non-state organizations operating in country B, with or without country B support. It may also involve offensive counterintelligence against country D assets operating in country B.
The basic structure here can be pertinent to a domestic service operating against a non-national group within its borders. Depending on the legal structure of the country, there may be significant, or very few, restrictions on domestic HUMINT. The most basic question will be whether criminal prosecution, or stopping operations, is the goal. Typically, criminal prosecution will be the primary goal against drug and slavery groups, with breaking up their operations the secondary goal. These priorities, however, are apt to reverse in dealing with terrorist groups.
If there are separate organizations with diplomatic and nonofficial cover, there may be two chiefs. Sufficiently large stations may have several independent, compartmented groups.
| Description | Soviet terminology | US terminology |
|---|---|---|
| Officers with diplomatic immunity | Diplomatic cover, emphasizing that GRU assumed that the host nation assumed all military attaches were intelligence officers, but that some diplomats might actually be diplomats | Diplomatic cover |
| Public association with the service's country, but no diplomatic immunity | Civilian cover (e.g., Tass news agency, trade or scientific delegation) | Not often used. Personnel with Peace Corps and certain other backgrounds are barred from intelligence. Some, decreasing, cover as journalists now rarely used |
| No affiliation with host nation government | Illegal (usually with an assumed identity) | Nonofficial cover (NOC). May use real name or not, but often some invented background |
Read more about this topic: Clandestine HUMINT Operational Techniques
Famous quotes containing the words staff, skills, clandestine, operations and/or station:
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)
“In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this interest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)