Timeless tradecraft that transcends the field.
Be patient. Be flexible. And have back-up plans for your back-up plans. The soft skills of spying are undervalued, but so useful in today’s world.
Spying is a political job. There’s no getting around that. The government sets the intelligence priorities, and so as the government changes, so too do the priorities. Yesterday’s enemy could be tomorrow’s friend. And no agency, despite what you read, can comprehensively monitor the entire world.
But the connection between the activities of spy agencies and the priorities of their corresponding governments is never a perfect fit.
Why?
- Covert info collecting operations, whether by human or signal, take a while to set up. It’s a waste of resources to give up too quickly.
- The path to the end goal must be constantly adjusted based on new information, and so compromises are often required.
I experienced this tension all the time when I worked in intelligence. The conflict between what is good now, and what might be beneficial a few years down the road, created friction between our agency and the political leaders.
Patience, flexibility, and back-up planning were required in more ways than one.
Some operations had been slowly built over time, relationships nurtured, trust established, a nugget of intelligence obtained long after the original connection was established. To have pulled resources to chase after a new priority would have resulted in waste and missed opportunity.
I also saw operations fizzle. Patience and flexibility don’t guarantee success. Months, if not years, of effort put into developing an intelligence feed, but the obstacles finally became insurmountable before any payoff could be realized. In cases like these, when all back-up plans were exhausted, the intelligence failure hit hard. But there was always another source to try to exploit.
More and more politicians are influenced by polls. And failure never polls well. We’ve all seen leaders make monumental policy shifts overnight to stay popular.
But spy agencies can’t often pivot that quickly. Too many shifts, too quickly, results in broken relationships, compromised intelligence, and an information vacuum.
In a world where instant gratification is cultivated and expected, espionage can seem archaic. But I believe that the qualities necessary to be a great spy – patience, flexibility, and planning – are traits that are timeless ingredients for success.
***
Read this: Operation Kronstadt by Harry Ferguson. A true story of a British spy in Russia in 1919, this book will teach you a ton about the tradecraft of espionage. I get that it’s old, but the first principles of spying haven’t changed much in 2000 years. Paul Dukes was a concert pianist who infiltrated the Bolshevik government – it doesn’t get much more gripping than that.
Thanks for giving me the gift of your time.
Rhiannon