Mole (espionage) - Overview

Overview

A mole may be recruited early in life, and may take decades to get a job in government service and reach a position of access to secret information before he becomes active as a spy. Perhaps the most famous examples of moles are the Cambridge Five, five upper-class British men recruited by the KGB as left-wing students at Cambridge University in the 1930s who later rose to high levels in various parts of the British government. By contrast, most espionage agents, such as CIA Director of Counterintelligence Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen who spied on the US government for the KGB, are either recruited or offer their services as spies after they are in place as members of the target organization.

Because their recruitment occurred in the remote past, moles are difficult for a nation's security services to detect. The possibility that a top politician, corporate executive, government minister, or officer in an intelligence service could be a mole working for a foreign government is the worst nightmare of counterintelligence services. For example, James Angleton, director of conterintelligence for the CIA between 1954 and 1975, was reportedly obsessed with suspicions that the top levels of Western governments were riddled with long-term communist agents, and accused numerous politicians such as Henry Kissinger, Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, and many members of Congress before he was removed in 1975. Fears of such moles in prominent positions in American life led to overreactions such as McCarthyism.

Moles have been featured in numerous espionage films, television shows, and novels.