A Guide for the Aspiring Spy (The Anonymous Spy Series) by Anonymous Spy Page A

true cover at social, commercial, and scientific forums all the time.
     
    After the initial cold contact, the case officer usually prepares an operational cable on the person if he believes there may be further interest in the contact as a “target.” The cable will usually request name traces from headquarters to see if the target has been previously contacted or has otherwise previously come to the attention to the agency.
     
    There are times when the Company may determine that the contact should be further assessed by a second officer but does not want any association to be given to the initial contacting officer, who may have made the initial contact in true name. Thus an unattributable spin-off or turnover is made to a second Case Officer perhaps in alias. This then becomes a Cold Contact for the second case officer who has an agenda in contacting the “target.”
     
    There are a wide range of options available to making cold contacts and sustaining the contact as a development contact with a view toward future recruitment. Contact with the target could be continuous or intermittent, over a period of months or years. On each occasion of contact, the case officer should prepare operational cables that will go into the target’s 201 file, which maintains a historical record on the target.
     
    During my career, I made about a dozen cold-pitch recruitment attempts in alias, but unfortunately only one of these turned into a bona fide agent. The recruitment attempt was made in commercial alias to “hire” the target as a “confidential commercial consultant” for my devised facility cover. After some time, another case officer turned the asset into a witting asset, meaning he then knew he was reporting to the CIA. Another cold-pitch target that turned down commercial recruitment later was contacted by an official cover officer and recruited as a witting agent. I guess as cold pitches go, two out of about twelve isn’t bad. Several other cold-pitch commercial recruitments were accepted by the target but since they later did not provide information of intelligence interest, they were amicably terminated without ever knowing they had been reporting to the CIA.
     
    Of course, the more you know about the target the more likely will be the success of a cold contact. You may be so fortunate to have information about the target from public sources or from other agents or friendly contacts. If, however, you have zero information on the target, you may have to make social and professional assumptions about the target and make your initial approach somewhat generic as you elicit information about him or her to able to develop a tailored approach.
     
    Role-playing is an important tool for the CIA case officer. Operating under cover and in alias, the CIA officer is given the freedom to completely change his persona, to alter his personality to fit the situation at hand. This is an arena where acting skills are so important. The case officer in alias can break away from the confines of his true character to become someone completely different. Operating in alias and perhaps light disguise, the case officer might find himself doing things that he would never do ordinarily. I am a fairly traditional person with fairly high moral standards, a sense of fair play, and I like to think I am fairly intelligent with a quick grasp of any subject matter that comes up in discussion. I found role-playing to be fun.
     
    On one occasion, however, while developing a contact in alias and a light disguise, I found myself compelled to play the role of an idiot to feed the ego of a contact who felt that all Americans were dumb and that it was his job to educate us. In fact, he felt that everyone, even his own countrymen, were well beneath his intellectual level, and he was probably right.
     
    The agent was an expert in the field of sub-micron lithography, one of only a few such experts in his country at the time. It seemed the dumber I acted