Vladimir Kastorny. On how to recognize an active agent

February 16, 2012 · KGB, Vestibule, Security Services

“What nonsense are you talking? What agents?” — this (or something like it) might be said by some anonymous person who is barely understandable to you, who has supposedly dropped in here by chance, and then tries somewhere to voice their “indignation” about everything they’ve seen here. Yet if you are not an interested party, you should hardly take anyone’s word for it. As they say — don’t give in to emotions and try to think with your own head. And if you do think with your own head (or at least try to use your brain a little), it will become quite obvious that every most average citizen is subjected to undercover influences — if not at every step, then in very, very many cases. How does this manifest? Oh, in the most varied ways.

Let’s begin with the fact that in every person’s life situations sometimes arise when they start to be suspected of committing some crime (if only because of the mere fact that they were or happened to be in certain places at certain times), and if so, by this very fact they turn themselves, without realizing it, into an object of operational investigations. On the other hand, one or another person can become an object of operational and undercover investigations in situations where someone among his relatives, friends, or acquaintances is exposed for some criminal actions — with the aim of uncovering possible criminal ties — or in cases where he turns out to be a witness to something very important, which, for various reasons, representatives of operational and investigative structures find it highly desirable to present not in strict accordance with what happened, but in the light most favorable to themselves. In addition to the above, any person can easily turn into an object of operational and undercover investigations in situations where he starts being considered as a candidate for appointment to some responsible positions and posts or as a possible executor of responsible assignments, or conversely — where he begins to behave in an overtly oppositional or antisocial manner (i.e., starts being perceived as potentially dangerous).

Everything just described applies to very noticeable events that stand out from the ordinary. But far more often each of us becomes an object of undercover investigations for far more banal and commonplace reasons. For instance, this happens every time when moving to a new job or place of service (or upon de facto joining one or another association or fairly large circle of people). In situations of this kind, every newcomer is probed by agents already operating there (or by non-staff representatives of the MVD, FSB, or certain other agencies). Such probing is usually carried out to determine the potential usefulness (in the broadest senses of the word) of each newly arrived worker and to ascertain his suitability for subsequent use “in the dark” (i.e., without revealing to him that in certain situations he will be used in the interests of the special services) for the purpose of exerting specific influence on third parties under development. Once the degree of usefulness and suitability for use in predetermined roles has been determined, the new workers are taken into circulation, or in other words, by exerting undercover influence on them, they are induced to obediently carry out unspoken instructions and all manner of requests coming from the agents themselves. If new workers display an obvious unwillingness to dance to the tune of specific agents and become blind tools in others’ hands, they are then processed with the aim of bringing them to an obedient state and submission to the will of the active agents through other methods of undercover influence (for more details, see the section «Agents Are Not Born — Agents Are Made«).

In addition to agents of the police or other special services, specific workforces and social circles always contain agents of the administrations of particular institutions and their security services. The activity of the former is aimed at studying the strong and weak personality traits of specific workers in order to put them in a position where they find themselves forced or willing to deliver the highest possible labor (or other) output for the lowest possible material reward. The activity of the latter is directed at countering the emergence of all kinds of external and internal threats to their corporations or associations and at timely identifying persons who facilitate or could facilitate their emergence. In addition to all that has been said, a source of specific undercover influences on representatives of all strata of the population is the sphere of modern trade and the provision of all kinds of services (aimed at ensuring the highest possible sales levels — no matter by what means, including the most sophisticated and devious). Moreover, in the overwhelming majority of cases, sources of undercover influence are various people who, having no connection whatsoever to the special services, in certain situations begin to show a tendency to express something unreliable or not entirely consistent with reality, with the aim of misleading others and obtaining from them something necessary or highly desirable for themselves for free or at little cost.

Some might form the impression that all kinds of individuals who operate as non-state agents—or who, on their own initiative, quite actively employ methods inherent to them—are incapable of posing threats to other citizens as serious and dangerous as those that agents of certain state departments and security structures can create. The reason would be that the former do not usually possess a significant volume of classified knowledge (in the overwhelming majority of cases having only something partially or one-sidedly assimilated) and are not distinguished by a high level of psychological training (in other words, the ability to apply all of their knowledge in cold blood under real-life conditions). From a purely theoretical (and partly practical) standpoint, everything appears exactly this way—but with the exception of one rather substantial point. The overwhelming majority of those individuals who begin to demonstrate any noticeable success in the ability to manage people according to their own discretion (especially in cases where they do not provide their charges with something genuinely desirable and necessary, keeping them near only with promises and expressions of various threats) do not achieve such success without reason; to a large extent it is because, simultaneously, they are (or were at some point in the past) acting agents of specific state intelligence services. By focusing their primary efforts on achieving their own private or narrow-group interests, such a category of acting or former agents essentially turns into double agents—they begin to widely employ well-assimilated methods of agent-based influence not so much to ensure the achievement of state interests, but rather for the sake of their own personal advancement (or the collective advancement of a narrow circle of people closely connected to them) and for the suppression of their ill-wishers and competitors. In other words, such agents discover in themselves the psychological capacity and practical readiness to resort to the widespread use of the dirtiest and most unscrupulous methods. To resort to them not in exceptional cases and not with the sanction of specially authorized representatives of the state, but for any reason and at their own discretion—out of a striving to resolve any problems that arise for them by the least costly means and in the shortest possible time. For this very reason, such a category of agents—who prefer to engage concurrently in their own private business or generally to withdraw from regular involvement in the operational development processes conducted by the representatives of the intelligence services overseeing them—poses (both to society as a whole and to each of its individual representatives) a far greater danger than fully functioning (or controlled) agents do.

On the other hand, paying attention to particular moments in the behavior of individuals who reveal in themselves a tendency toward the self-directed use of the most primitive agent-based methods of influencing others can serve as a key to understanding the behavioral psychology of other categories of more capable and professionally adept agents and to identifying their most expressive distinguishing traits. For this very reason (and in the sense being discussed here), one should under no circumstances disregard even banal schemers and those fond of providing themselves with everything they need at others’ expense—after all, they are, in essence, agents behaving in a rather primitive manner, and therefore they are entirely suitable for use for educational purposes and as visual aids.

So, what, in its very essence, does any agent-based influence represent? In a literal sense, it entails achieving a set goal not directly, but through the use of various mediations (in the form of spoken words and displayed emotional moments) and intermediaries (in the form of specific people who carry out the requests or tacit instructions of persons interested in this). The most primitive example of agent-based influence is the banal deception of one person by another. But since instances of outright deception are fraught for deceivers with the possibility of quite undesirable consequences, in many cases it turns out to be far more sensible and advantageous for them, in order to achieve what they want, to use not outright lies but suggestive hints, expressions, and words that contain an element of understatement or have a double meaning. To put it in simpler and more understandable terms, any agent-based influence is, in its essence, a veiled deception—one that looks very plausible and is constructed with the expectation that, having obtained something desired from the person under development, the manipulator will not give him anything in return (or will give it only in part) that was essentially promised, under the pretext that the deceived person misunderstood the actual deceiver or did not carry out everything strictly in accordance with what was proposed or asked of him.

Having dealt with the theoretical background of any intelligence-driven influence and having clarified that their most important component is the indirectly motivating elements contained within them, let us move on to strictly real-life practice. In the process of communicating with various people, we often notice (or fail to notice) in their behavior and words certain suspicious moments that in principle may be either veiled attempts to influence us in a way that is desirable to them, or an element of something entirely random or arising under the influence of momentary moods. To avoid tormenting ourselves with doubts about all such occasions, the author of this material suggests that everyone who wishes to take into their arsenal two fairly simple but very reliable methods for determining which suspicious moments in the behavior of any of your interlocutors are actually attempts to exert certain pressure on you or to nudge you imperceptibly toward something very desirable for them, and which pose no real threat and are a product of your imagination.

The essence of the first method is as follows. If a particular suspicious moment that has appeared in the manifestations of your interlocutor or opponent manifests itself once, that still means nothing.

Life is full of all sorts of misunderstandings and coincidences that, in many cases, even the most sophisticated mind is incapable of imagining. In 99 cases out of 100, one-time manifestations of anything suspicious turn out to be exactly that. For this very reason, you should not torment yourself with vain doubts and raise the alarm ahead of time — just in case, take note of the one-time suspicious moments, but under no circumstances clutter your brain with thoughts on that subject.

If such an incompletely voiced or unclearly expressed moment arises in your interlocutor’s or opponent’s utterances a second time, then even if it does not seem suspicious, you should still pay the closest attention to it, so that through a thorough analysis of all available and known factors you may arrive at a conclusion about whether its occurrence is accidental or not (and also determine the probable aims pursued by the person interested in you in those cases where this is actually taking place). If such an incompletely voiced or unclearly expressed moment arises for a third time, that unequivocally indicates that it did not arise by chance and that your interlocutor or opponent — through resorting to something veiled and highly crafty — is trying to mislead you regarding something specific and ultimately to obtain from you something very desirable for himself.

At the same time, it is important always to remember that by no means do repeated manifestations of something not entirely understandable or veiled always serve as obvious evidence that one or another of your interlocutors harbors a desire to harm your interests in any way. For instance, it is in principle not excluded that one of them wishes to confess his love to you or needs to tell you something that may greatly upset you or provoke unpredictable reactions. Not knowing how best to do this, such persons who are close to you or who cherish you may resort to innocent tricks or ploys in order to prepare you somehow for the expression of something crucial or, before openly expressing their feelings, to make doubly sure that you are ready to receive their not-yet-uttered words in the most sensitive and attentive manner.

But this is rather an exception than the rule. For this very reason, strive not to let your ears be deceived and not to allow anyone who wishes to pull the wool over your eyes. On the contrary, treat everything with a healthy suspicion and strive to detect in the words or other manifestations of your interlocutors detailed contradictions and inconsistencies with something factual, and only then, on the basis of such observations, draw your final conclusions about the degree of their sincerity or insincerity toward you or other people around you.

Of course, not all persons who regularly resort to the practice of repeatedly expressing something insufficiently clear or veiled are someone’s agents, but at the same time all agents make extensive use of such methods in their intelligence practice. In other words, when the suspicion arises that this or that person is a snitch or a full-fledged agent, one must first of all pay attention to the fact of a noticeable presence or absence, in his everyday behavior, of the moment just indicated. If it is present, then it may well be that your intuition has not failed you; if it is not, then you have most likely been mistaken in your assumptions.

The essence of the second technique boils down to considering the following point. Agents of various special services and individual persons, who often resort to the use of agent methods, in many cases have to deal with such individuals who tend to show suspicion and intransigence in the course of clarifying their relations with other people. In situations when agents and others very much like them begin to need to somehow influence someone vigilant and intransigent, they have no choice but to resort to using more sophisticated methods of exerting such influences. In practice this is usually achieved by the agents engaging a whole array of their good acquaintances and persons who are dependent on them. These acquaintances and dependent persons are approached by the agents with requests that, having selected the most opportune moment, each of them approach the person indicated to them and, in the course of communicating with him, пunder the guise of expressing their own wish or personal opinion, briefly mention something desirable for the agents directing them. In situations where a particular person begins to regularly hear from different sides very similar opinions and hints from a sufficiently large number of individuals (who often turn out to be barely acquainted with one another or complete strangers), in most cases he begins to perceive such words as the unbiased opinion of the overwhelming majority of those around him. Or, to put it in simpler and more understandable language for everyone, to ask himself questions like: Am I a fool? and then succumb to the emotions that pile on after that.

In order to figure out the nature of the influences being exerted on you, and also as to whether you are a fool or not in a particular such case, one should not invent anything complicated. Simply cast aside all your emotions and try to properly look around you. If shortly before that you experienced surges of some feelings or became excessively carried away with something (or someone) specific, then you could easily have overlooked manifestations of something obvious that arouses no doubt whatsoever. Therefore if, having taken a sober look at everything, you find in your previous actions and expressions of your opinions a serious flaw or obvious mistake, then this will directly indicate to you the fact that the hints and opinions expressed to you by many people are not the result of anyone’s intrigues and should be heeded most attentively. If, however, you do not discover for yourself an obvious need or serious requirement to follow in the vein of something constantly hinted at or suggested from different sides, then this fact will indicate that you in all likelihood have become the object of a persistent concentration of someone’s very sophisticated influences.

Influences of this kind are likewise not always malicious and originating from agents. But compared to the first case, the likelihood of something of this sort occurring here is even more rare. The whole point is that individuals who discover in themselves natural abilities in terms of the skill of exerting influence and manipulating the behavior of other people are always viewed by representatives of special services as having in themselves all the makings for becoming successful agents. For this very reason, the majority of such persons are taken into special registration from their youthful years and appropriate work is conducted, aimed at their purposeful and phased involvement in full-fledged agent activity.

In addition to the two methods just discussed, there is a whole range of various expressive indicators whose presence can, with a fairly high degree of certainty, point to the fact that a particular observed person is actually an active agent. The most obvious among these should be named as a number of special psychological moments. Thus, all agent activity is based on gathering primary information about specific individuals in the vicinity and events that have already occurred, most often carried out through questioning. Since agents are usually not permitted to conduct their questioning openly, they are forced to carry out all of this in a very covert and sophisticatedly veiled manner. For the simple reason that such practice becomes a frequently repeated element of the daily behavior of active agents, it soon begins to stand out noticeably against the background of typical behavioral patterns of all other people. Usually, this finds expression in the following. Upon seeing someone barely acquainted, long absent, or capable of knowing something of particular interest to him, the agent, immediately after words of greeting, turns to him with inquiries about where he has been, what he did, and then quickly steers the conversation towards something very specific. If the person in response starts to joke back or answers in a very monosyllabic way, the agent usually proceeds to return to the former – claiming that he is asking in a quite serious manner or even expressing displeasure or resentment in his words. In situations where he is asked about the reasons for his such interests, the agent usually expresses something clearly contrived or only just arising in his head, or something fairly vague – such as: need to, for a certain matter, I’ll tell you later, or someone asked me to find out – and again returns to the topic of interest. If the respondent himself starts asking the agent any questions concerning the agent himself, the latter, in order to avoid answering them, with an impatient expression on his face, usually utters some stock phrase – such as: well, let’s not talk about such rather unserious things, or let’s talk about it another time – only to return again and again to the question that interests him. As soon as the agent manages to obtain something exhaustive on this, he immediately loses interest in further continuing the conversation with his interlocutor and, under the pretext of being busy with other matters, quickly departs from him.

Seasoned and sufficiently authoritative agents in certain cases may complicate the above-described scheme of their behavior by involving support groups from among persons dependent on them, who by playing along with the former create on the questioned the impression that the questions asked are of interest to their collective, and that reluctance to answer them directly will be perceived as nothing less than clear disrespect towards all of them together. In other words, such practice is nothing other than the use of an additional tool for exerting pressure on the psyche, which proves sufficiently effective when used against people who are not entirely self-confident.

On the other hand, agents – in order to achieve something highly desirable in matters concerning persons under agent or operational development – are quite often forced to arrange various kinds of meanness and provocations against the latter. But since committing meanness and provocations in many cases is fraught with the onset of highly undesirable consequences, agents prefer not to risk themselves and to carry out such actions and deeds by the hands of others. Because in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other special services they strive to reliably conceal any facts of involvement of their operational services and cooperating agents in everything that extends beyond the bounds of legality, the agents themselves are unofficially instructed to seek out among the surrounding people sufficiently dim-witted or not quite self-confident individuals with manifested criminal inclinations. The task of active agents in such cases is, having found such persons, to entangle them completely – to turn them into weak-willed and dull-witted executors of any of their will, on whom, if something happens, all the blame for what was done by their hands could easily be shifted. Due to the fact that in the overwhelming majority of groups, dim-witted individuals with manifested criminal inclinations are encountered in very insignificant numbers, in real-life conditions active agents most often have no other choice but to address their dirty intentions towards any insufficiently mature and insecurely behaving (most often young) persons.

The behavioral pattern of active agents turns out to be fairly simple. Upon seeing uncertain steps and obvious blunders in any actions by persons who interest them in this way, the agents begin to express their caustic remarks or ridicule first, and they do this with the calculation of making such words audible to everyone around. Having repeated this maneuver several times, when they find that the persons they are working on have been completely broken and are inwardly ready to submit to them, they usually proceed to express something conciliatory and patronizing in their tone, and then turn to them with requests to satisfy some of their petty and fairly innocent requests. Having previously tamed the persons they have confused into uncomplaining compliance with something fairly innocent, the agents—under the guise of admitting them into their circles and company and jokingly expressing demands for the necessity of showing reckless audacity—soon begin to nudge them into committing reprehensible acts, fraught with disciplinary liability and the onset of very unpleasant moments in relations with various people. Having personally nudged the targeted persons into committing obvious follies, the agents, when the unpleasant consequences occur, usually set about extricating them from trouble—using their influence and connections to settle everything amicably.

Once having discredited the good name of one or another of the targeted persons, the agent handling him, after some time, usually offers him to try again to carry out something fairly similar in meaning (so to speak, out of sport and love of thrill-seeking), promising that if anything happens he will try to defend him and not let him be harmed. As a result of the purposeful execution of a whole series of such steps, each agent strives to ensure that in the opinion of the overwhelming majority of people around, every fool he has finally confused should come to be perceived as an outright scoundrel and villain, who does not deserve any trust and with whom no self-respecting person would associate. Having effectively built a wall of universal alienation around some of his charges and forced them to keep company almost exclusively with those like themselves, the agents, as the only ones continuing to treat them well—exploiting the hopelessness of their situation and threatening to stop providing support and help in difficult situations for them—begin to secretly entrust such persons with carrying out the dirtiest and most unsightly deeds, while not letting them in on the matter, and therefore not having to fear being exposed.

The tendency to carry out by others’ hands everything that could result in some kind of liability for it frequently turns into an unconsciously repeated habit among agents and manifests itself instinctively in many petty moments of their daily behavior. Thus, many active and former agents have a tendency to take or receive anything belonging to others solely from someone else’s hands (usually accompanying such actions with requests to some other persons to take, hand over, or bring closer some necessary objects or things that do not belong to them). They act in this way based on the calculation that when any displeasure or accusations begin to be expressed towards them, they will always be able to point out that they did not take anything on their own initiative, and that some objects and things not belonging to them were personally given by the one who was foolish enough to render them such a service (i.e., in effect, shift all the blame onto him).

In a situation when agents find themselves forced to carry out something that threatens them with some kind of liability or seems inconvenient to them for some other reason together with someone else, they strive under any pretext to shift all the main and most responsible tasks onto those others, while they themselves prefer to stand by doing nothing or acting in a supporting role.

In order to be able to attract attention and interest many of the people around them, agents need to always and in everything look like skillful, successful, and very prosperous people. The operational workers of the militia and other special services, who invisibly stand behind such agents and need a regular flow of information from them, become directly interested in ensuring the safety and success of such helpers. To put it in simpler terms, operatives always strive to provide their more or less successful and promising agents with active assistance in pulling them out of any life’s scrapes, providing reliable cover for their criminal activities, and facilitating their rapid success and career advancement in the places where they carry out their main occupations. But since many of the people around them get curious about the secrets of invulnerability and success invariably demonstrated by such agents, the latter, in order to maintain good relations with them, find themselves compelled to provide some sort of explanation for it.

In principle, there can be only two reasonable explanations for this: either the possession of special talents or the presence of powerful patrons. Yet any claim to possessing special talents sooner or later turns into a request or demand to display them in front of everyone (which is far from always possible to do because the indicated agent does not actually possess those abilities). On the other hand, even if the agent does have certain inklings of some talents, openly declaring their existence inevitably stirs up envy and suspicion in quite a few people around him. In turn, the arousal of suspicious glances often leads to the disclosure of the real reasons for the “luckiness” and “successfulness” of the particular agent and to their actual unmasking. As for openly declaring that they owe all their luck and success to the police or other secret services, that is even more out of the question for agents. For these very reasons, operational officers usually advise their agents to use neither of the two explanations mentioned above but a third one — an invented though sufficiently plausible-sounding explanation. The essence of such an explanation lies in recommending agents, in front of those around them, to declare themselves as quite ordinary people who manage to achieve everything solely thanks to luck, the presence of influential relatives, the ability to catch the right moments and quickly find a common language with everyone. This psychological nuance can also be safely included among the most characteristic features of the behavior of a wide variety of agents.

Besides those just listed, there is a whole series of other — more minor and secondary — psychological points that are typical of the behavior of agents of the most diverse types. In principle, anyone who wishes can obtain a fairly clear idea of them after carefully reading the section «Agents are not born — agents are made» and analyzing its content.

In turn, the author of this site’s materials, in connection with everything just said, would like to touch on a somewhat different subject. The fact that any of the behavioral points described above is detected in the behavior of this or that person can indicate with one hundred percent certainty only that he is insincere in certain of his manifestations; however, this still does not mean that he is necessarily somebody’s informer or a full-fledged agent. The techniques and methods of operational work and agent activity are not something that appeared out of nowhere. In their essence they represent the concentrated experience of many human generations, drawn from various times and peoples and, in some of their parts, used by each of us in our everyday life. For this very reason, tentative conclusions that a given person is someone’s agent can be drawn only on the condition that in his behavior there is consistently observed not an isolated point from those listed but a whole series (or complex) of the described characteristic features. Yet even that in itself cannot provide a high degree of confidence in the correctness of the conclusions reached. In order to deal competently with such subtle matters, apart from possessing dry knowledge, one must have a certain practical experience of doing something of the kind. And in order to be one hundred percent confident in one’s conclusions that a suspected person is someone’s agent, one must possess irrefutable facts, which in any scenario turn out to be more precise and just than any theoretical constructs or logical schemes.

Having clarified by what signs one can identify potential informers and agents among those around us, it is time to move on to the next point. All kinds of informers and agents are not merely carriers of certain threats to those around them; they are capable of ensuring the unrelenting presence of such threats over long periods of time and thereby contributing to the constant depletion of significant physical and mental strength from many persons they work against. To put it differently, active agents have a habit of waging quiet aggression against persons designated to them or targeted by them. So, for those persons who begin to feel confident and capable of resisting massive pressure from informers and agents who become embittered against them, the author proposes adopting a set of specially developed counter-offensive measures. That is precisely what the next section of this site will be devoted to.

Article from the site “Psychology of the Special Services”

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