As the Cold War drew to a close, Langley hoped to learn how the Soviets had identified so many CIA agents in the field:
The KGB was a huge bureaucracy within a bureaucracy — the Soviet Union. Any Soviet citizen had an intimate acquaintance with how bureaucracies function. They are fundamentally creatures of habit and, as any cryptanalyst knows, the key to breaking the adversary’s cipher is to find repetitions. The same applies to the parallel universe of human counterintelligence.
The difference between Totrov and his fellow citizens was that whereas others at home and abroad would assume the Soviet Union was somehow unique, he applied his understanding of his own society to a society that on the surface seemed unique, but which, in respect of how government worked, was not in fact that much different: the United States.
[...]
What Totrov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Other indicators of a more trivial nature could be detected in the field by a vigilant foreign counterintelligence operative but not uniformly so: the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.
The invariable indicators took further research, however, based on U.S. government practices long established as a result of the ambivalence with which the State Department treated its cousins in intelligence.
Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.
Funny stuff. Interesting how our spies suffered at the hands of bean counters. Hmm… sort of like our astronauts. Merchant’s gonna cut them corners. Hope you are not standing on one.
Great insight into how the USA does not play to win.
In a similar vein I learned that the US Military, apparently from the start, has never instituted in the selection of officers mechanisms to promote the most competent instead it has relied on the fitness report: please the superior officer who writes up that report. No objective standards, no testing of knowledge, no forgiveness for failure hence institutional timidity and we wonder why our military brass appears to be less than au fait.
So too our foreign service who have rubber-stamped the Iran Deal and blew the “peace” in Iraq after the fall of Saddam.
My god, are/were we seemingly that obvious?
My faith in the government has been destroyed.
Also, if they weren’t sure, they could ask Alger Hiss or one of the thousands of agents like him.
Agents aren’t free of blame either. As was seen in the Abu Omar case & the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, many are so full of themselves and the choreography of their operations that they ignore basic mindfulness that any two bit hood practices without thinking.