Mole (espionage) - Reason For Using Moles

Reason For Using Moles

The most common procedure used by intelligence services to recruit agents is to find the location within the foreign government or organization of the information they want (the target), find out which people have access to it, and attempt to recruit one of them as a spy (agent) to obtain the information. However, the people with access to top secret government information, government employees with high security clearances, are carefully monitored by the government's security apparatus for just this sort of espionage approach, so it is difficult for a representative of the foreign intelligence service to meet with them clandestinely to recruit them. Private organizations such as large corporations or terrorist groups have similar security monitors. In addition, the security clearance process weeds out employees who are openly disgruntled, ideologically disaffected, or otherwise have motives for betraying their country, so persons in these positions are likely to reject recruitment as spies. For these reasons, some intelligence services have tried to reverse the above process, and recruit potential agents first, and have them conceal their allegiance, and pursue careers in the target government agency in hopes that they can reach positions of access to desired information.

Because the spy career of a mole is such a long-term one, sometimes occupying a majority of a lifetime, persons who become moles must be highly motivated. One common motivation is ideology (political convictions). During the Cold War a major source of moles in Western countries was so-called "fellow travellers", Western citizens who in their youth in the 1920s to 1940s became disaffected with their own governments and sympathetic to world Communism without actually joining the Communist party.