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>they will eventually look around at all the security measures and consider the risk to their life and liberty to be too great to justify leaking information fu
by jackpirate 13y ago
>they will eventually look around at all the security measures and consider the risk to their life and liberty to be too great to justify leaking information further.
This never happens in espionage. Once you go down that rabbit hole even a little, the people you're giving information to own you. They have the power to instantly ruin your life. If you stop giving them information, they inform on you. Most spies never wanted to be spies. They got sucked into a crappy situation by making one crappy decision, then they're stuck with it forever.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoSources, please, or Google terms for further reading? I find this terribly interesting.
- jackpirate 13y agoThis is fairly common knowledge in the intelligence communities. You can find lots of detail in declassified training manuals, but the most accessible sources will be memoirs from CIA/KGB operatives. The book Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames by Victor Cherkashin is particularly good. He's quite critical of the Soviet practice of executing spies because once an American CIA agent converted a Soviet worker, the Soviet worker had no choice but to continue giving away secrets. The American agents (supposedly) used the threat of informing on the worker to coerce more and more information away.