Double Agents

A double agent is person who conducts espionage for two, usually antagonistic, countries. Double agents allow intelligence services to gather information by infiltrating enemy organizations under cover. An organization usually recruits double agents from the ranks of a rival intelligence service, and then "turns" them, using them as spies for their own purposes.

The use of double agents in intelligence tradecraft and strategy is one of the oldest practices in the art of espionage. Spies and double agents appear in literature and written histories from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, India, Greece, and Rome. The rise of great civilizations and militaries prompted the need for intelligence gathering through infiltration of enemy organizations.

In the modern era, double agents gained notoriety in a variety of espionage scandals. While some double agents worked in accordance with their ideals, others were paid handsomely with money or political favor for betraying secrets. During the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, exposure of double agents became a key part of counterintelligence operations. Double agents compromised intelligence, military, industrial, and government strongholds in both nations, sometimes with devastating consequences. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of its KGB intelligence agency, access to formerly secret archives and testimony of former agents has exposed several double agents, and the extent of their decades-long espionage operations. In the United States, double agents working for the Soviet Union (and later for Russia), such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were discovered, brought to trial, and sentenced to life in prison.

During the Cold War, and the decade after its end, double agents were popularly associated with intrigue,

and trials of double agents gained extensive media attention. However, within the intelligence community, the use of trained double agents waned. Intelligence services replaced human intelligence operations with an increasing reliance on satellite and electronic surveillance technology. Technological surveillance permits intelligence organizations to conduct operations without assuming the high risks associated with using human intelligence or double agents exclusively.

█ FURTHER READING:

ELECTRONIC:

United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. <http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/hanssen/hanssen.htm#anchor26782> (April 2003).

The Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies. <http://www.cicentre.com/Documents/DOC_Hanssen_1.htm> (April 2003).

SEE ALSO

Ames (Aldrich H.) Espionage Case
CIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency)
Dead Drop Spike
Dead-Letter Box
FBI (United States Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Hanssen (Robert) Espionage Case
KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, USSR Committee of State Security)

double agents are spies who secretly transfer their allegiance to an enemy secret service which uses them to confuse its foes. For example, in February 1942 an early SOE agent in the Netherlands, hunting for a lorry to remove supplies from a parachute drop, met a Dutchman who ran a small transport firm, whom he engaged. The Dutchman told the Abwehr, who supervised not only that parachute drop, but hundreds more, thus entrapping almost all of SOE's effort into the Netherlands for eighteen months (see Englandspiel). Similarly, a Welsh nationalist was recruited as a spy by the Abwehr before the war. When the war broke out in 1939 he went to his local police station; made his first radio report to Germany from Wandsworth gaol; and helped MI5 to capture every one of the agents the Abwehr sent to the UK, all through the war (see XX-committee). An early escape line (see MI9) in north-eastern France was shattered when one of its organizers, an English sergeant, on being arrested, gave away 50 of his colleagues to the Gestapo, with whom he worked until 1944.

A Frenchwoman who helped a Franco–Polish intelligence circuit in France in the winter of 1940–1 (interallié) was arrested and became a double agent overnight. She drove round Paris with one of her captors, an Abwehr sergeant, pointing out members of her circuit whom they passed in the street. See also triple agents.

M. R. D. Foot