Glossary: Types of Agents

Access Agent – An agent used primarily as a spotter of targets of interest to the CIA. The access agent will also provide avenues to help assess and vet other development contacts for his Case Officer. The access agent may also help provide physical access to a target such as a room, building, computer, and telephone where the CIA may plant a technical operation. Access agents primarily provide operational information rather than intelligence information.

Double Agent – An agent engaged in clandestine activity for two or more intelligence services.

Mole – An officer of an intelligence service who has been recruited to report to a hostile security/intelligence service. The mole is a penetration agent.

Institutional Agent – An agent, usually witting of his CIA contacts, who can be easily handed down from Case Officer to Case Officer over many years of service. Institutional Agents may work for the CIA over a period of 10, 20 or more years and may be passed down through ten to twenty different Case Officers over his years of service to the CIA.

It's Always Your Fault (aka How This Job Is Like Any Other Job)

Sometimes things go wrong as a direct result of instructions given by the bureaucracy but since the Case Officer is at the end of the pipeline, guess who gets to accept responsibility! I had an agent with a green card (U.S. Permanent Residency) but the foreign government agency for which he worked would not let him travel to the U.S. to renew his green card status nor to apply for an extension of time to renew it. In essence they were forcing him to give up his green card. The agent was afraid that his government may suspect him as a spy thus he requested CIA permission to defect to the US. The agency came up with a complicated compromise that satisfied the agent and all was supposed to be in order.

However, some bureaucrat shortly forgot about the promise and the green card expired. The agent received a notice that his green card had expired and assumed this was part of the CIA ploy. He brought me a copy of the expiration notice and I sent it to the Station.

Soon it was determined that - oops - someone dropped the ball. When the bureaucracy finished assessing blame it was determined that it was my responsibility to have initiated the action to remind headquarters that action needed to be taken on the case. Bottom line is that the CIA finally did take appropriate action and the agent maintained his green card. Years later over the protests of the CIA the agent did immigrate to the US and became a US citizen.