Don’t Fall in Love

Throughout your career with the CIA you will be told over and over again “Do not fall in love with your agent”. This, of course, is not meant in the literal sense. What this means is for you to keep a safe emotional and psychological buffer between you and the agent. You will be told not to completely trust your agent, not to take all the agent has to say at face value, to develop a respectful sense of doubt about your agent and to always question his motives and intentions.

Now if you are a perfect Case Officer with complete self-control you may be able to do all this with every one of your agents. But few Case Officers are perfect. We are, after all, the product of our own upbringing and environment and CIA training alone cannot change the very nature of a person. Few of us are able to maintain such profound judgment in all cases.

During your career with the CIA there will certainly be some agents with whom you will “fall in love”. Just as some agents may earn your distrust, there will be others who will earn your complete devotion and trust by virtue of the fact that they are risking their lives or at least their freedom by entrusting it to you.

After years of secret meetings with your agents, a bond of mutual dependency will and should develop. How can this sense of trust and mutual dependency not develop? You are dependent on each other for your mutual personal security! You and your agent’s very lives are intimately interwoven. One mistake on your part by a poorly executed brush pass or a sloppy dead drop run or a poorly run Surveillance Detection Route could lead a hostile security service to the very door of the safehouse where you and your agent are huddled in the act of espionage.

As an Official Cover Case Officer you will have diplomatic immunity and all that will happen to you will be expulsion from your host country. As a NOC Case Officer without diplomatic immunity you could be incarcerated for espionage for many years. Your agent, on the other hand, could face life in prison or even the death penalty depending on the country. So to say you should not develop a sense of trust in your agent is absurd! Trust him but also test him, as he will surely be trusting of you. He will have more at risk than you do.

The CIA bureaucracy reinforces in its Case Officers the belief that agents somehow are expendable and this implies that their value as human beings is less than ours as Case Officers of the CIA. But it is precisely this type of arrogance unconsciously and unknowingly practiced by the Case Officer in the handling of their agents that can lead to the downfall of an operation. The CIA’s Inside Officers, in particular, are prone to this problem because they are the closest to the bureaucracy and less able to isolate themselves from the impersonal influences of it.

On the other hand, the NOC Case Officer is more isolated from the bureaucracy, has himself often been the victim of the bureaucracy and is more distrustful of it. Therefore, NOC officers are more likely to find themselves in sympathy with their agents in a common attempt to remain safe in a hostile operating environment where neither have the luxury of protection of the US government. So regardless of your position as inside officer or outside officer, try to treat your agents with the same respect as a human being that you expect for yourself.