Instructions for organizing and conducting internal (agent) surveillance of the Tsarist secret police
The tsarist authorities persecuted Protestant sectarians to some extent. The Soviet authorities, for their part, set out to annihilate faith in God, the Word of God (which was banned from publication and distribution), and the church. Upon coming to power, the communists organized the Cheka–GPU–NKVD–KGB, not from scratch — its foundation was the tsarist special service, the tsarist okhrana. Many Bolshevik revolutionaries were agents of the okhrana, for instance Joseph Stalin, which earned him many indulgences. The methods of the tsar’s special service were more aristocratic.
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§1 The primary duty of the person in charge of political investigation is first of all to recruit and maintain internal secret agents — the only fully reliable means of ensuring informedness. All the efforts of the person conducting the investigation must be directed toward recruiting and maintaining the internal agent network. External surveillance is merely an auxiliary, and moreover a very expensive, means of developing agent information and of shielding the conspiratorial character of the agent source.
§2 For successful work in the field of political investigation and the management of internal agents, persons in charge of investigation must know the programmes of revolutionary parties, be familiar with the history of the revolutionary movement, its current state at any given moment, and follow revolutionary literature.
§3 Persons in charge of agents must direct the agents and not blindly follow the latter’s instructions. Usually, an outstanding agent — an intellectual occupying a prominent position in the party — strives to subordinate the person maintaining contact with him to his own authority and exerts pressure on the system of investigation. While it may be permissible, for the sake of preserving the relationship, to leave him with the conviction that such significance on his part exists, in reality, any unaccountable enthusiasm for agents leads to negative results. The person in charge of the agents must draw up a plan of investigation for himself and strive to extract from the agents all the data necessary for its implementation. Therefore, never showing one’s cards to an agent, one should give him assignments arising from the investigation plan. In doing so, particular attention should be paid to clarifying or fixing in the agent’s memory such facts as could subsequently be used as court evidence and confirmed by proofs lying outside of any contact with the agent. These tasks of the investigation (in general outline) may be indicated to the agent, so that he, too, might become accustomed to gathering data suitable for judicial investigation and to covering for the agency.
§4 Persons in charge of investigation must firmly remember that “cooperation” is separated from “provocation” by a very fine line, which is very easy to cross. They must know that the inability to cross this line constitutes the art of conducting a successful political investigation. This is achieved only by an absolutely honest attitude toward the matter and an understanding of the aims of the investigation, and not by a pursuit of distinctions, the discovery and arrest of individual means of propaganda (printing presses, arms caches, explosives, etc.). Persons in charge of investigation must be imbued with the consciousness that the best indicator of their successful and fruitful activity will be the complete absence in the locality entrusted to their supervision of any printing presses, bombs, literature caches, agitation, or propaganda. These final results will be achieved if, with serious awareness of revolutionary activity and the ability to use this knowledge systematically and according to plan, they manage to compel the revolutionaries to cease their criminal work in the given locality.
§5 Secret agents must be members of one of the revolutionary organizations (about which they provide information), or at least be in close contact with serious activists of such, since only then will their information be valuable. Persons who are not members of revolutionary organizations and do not associate with them, especially various local “old-timers” sometimes belonging to extreme right-wing parties, are often not only not useful for the purposes of political investigation, but are even harmful, since they cause inexperienced and uninformed persons in charge of investigation to direct the investigation in a false direction and waste efforts and resources completely unproductively. What has been said by no means implies that information from such persons should be neglected — one simply should not place great hopes on the latter and consider such persons “secret agents” or their information “agent intelligence.” In the matter of investigation, no information whatsoever should be neglected, but one must learn to give it a proper assessment and not consider it reliable without verification (verification of the person providing the information and of the information itself).
§6 Secret agents must be permanent and receive a fixed salary (monthly), and not payment for individual reports, since only by having permanent agents can one be kept informed of the activities of revolutionary organizations, and only permanent agents can take an interest in the work of investigation. In an agent who has begun work for material reasons, one should, as far as possible, create and sustain an interest in investigation as a weapon of struggle against the state and public enemy — the revolutionary movement. Particularly valuable in this respect are agents who have assumed this role out of abstract motivations. In the event of successful liquidations resulting from the information and development provided by a permanent agent, he should be encouraged with a monetary reward.
§7 Information from occasional persons who demand payment for each individual tip about this or that revolutionary undertaking (“piece-workers”) must, of course, be used in the interests of the cause, especially information concerning planned expropriations, often carried out by persons having no connection whatsoever to revolutionary organizations; but such information must be treated with great caution and thoroughly verified by all means. Such information is often provocative in nature, and sometimes simply “fabricated.” In such cases, one should always strive to use the person providing the individual pieces of information for the purpose of establishing, through his mediation, a systematic agency.
§8 Being members of revolutionary organizations, secret agents must under no circumstances engage in so-called “provocation,” i.e., themselves creating criminal acts and placing under responsibility for what they have done other persons who played secondary roles in the affair. Although, in order to maintain their position in the organizations, agents sometimes have to avoid shirking active work imposed upon them by the associations, in such cases they must request permission for each individual instance from the person directing the agency, and in any case, avoid participating in undertakings that threaten serious danger. At the same time, the person in charge of investigation is obliged to take all measures to completely neutralize the planned crime, i.e., to prevent it while safeguarding the interests of the agent. In each individual case, it must be strictly weighed whether it is really necessary for the agent to accept the assignment imposed on him by the revolutionaries in order to obtain new data for the investigation, or whether it is better to evade its execution under a plausible pretext. It must be remembered here that all the efforts of political investigation must be directed toward identifying the centers of revolutionary organizations and destroying them at the moment they manifest their most intense activity; therefore, one should not “spoil” the work of an investigation just for the sake of discovering some underground printing press or a dead storage cache of weapons, bearing in mind that the seizure of such items acquires particularly important significance only if they serve to expose more or less prominent revolutionary activists and to destroy the organization.
§9 Secret agents should be maintained in every revolutionary organization active in the given locality and, if possible, several within the same organization. The person in charge of investigation must not miss a single case that could offer even a faint hope of acquiring a secret agent. Every person who shows promise should be favorably disposed towards oneself and used for the purposes of the agency, while remembering that the business of acquiring secret agents is a very delicate one and requires much patience and caution. The slightest carelessness or forcing of the issue often provokes a decisive rebuff.
§10 Secret agents are acquired by various means. To acquire them, constant communication and conversation by the person in charge of investigation, or experienced persons subordinate to him, with persons arrested for political crimes is necessary. Having become acquainted with such persons and singled out those whom one can win over to one’s side (weak-willed, insufficiently convinced revolutionaries, those who consider themselves offended in the organization, those inclined to easy profit, etc.), the person in charge of investigation persuades them over to his side and thereby converts them from revolutionaries into persons loyal to the Government. This sort of agent must be recognized as the best. Apart from conversations with persons already brought to inquiry, it is sometimes possible to acquire agents from persons not yet arrested, who are invited for conversations by the person in charge of investigation in the event of receiving indirect information about the possibility of acquiring that type of agent. Independently of this, if the person in charge of agencies has good relations with officers of the Corps of Gendarmes and officials of the Judicial Department conducting cases concerning state crimes, it is possible to receive from them, for conversion into agents, accused persons who are giving sincere testimony; in such cases, it is necessary to take measures to ensure that this testimony is not disclosed. If such testimony was given verbally and cannot have serious significance for the case, it is desirable to enter into an agreement with the interrogator not to enter such testimony into the protocol, in order to create a new agent with greater safety.
§11 In addition, one can make use of those persons who, while convinced of the safety of their personal revolutionary activity, are in need of money and, although not fundamentally changing their convictions, undertake, for the sake of money, simply to sell their comrades.
§12 Agents located in the lower ranks of organizations can be advanced higher through constant joint work with the person in charge of investigation, as well as through the arrests of the stronger workers surrounding him.
§13 A newly recruited agent should always be thoroughly verified, unnoticed by him, through surveillance and an effort should be made to place him under cross-agency.
§14 The person in charge of political investigation must treat with caution visiting informants who travel around Okhrana Departments and Gendarme Administrations with the sole purpose of extracting money. Such persons (in most cases, compromised agents), often quite developed, nonchalant, being informed about the personnel of certain Okhrana Departments or Administrations and familiar with the activities of certain revolutionaries, mislead even experienced persons by giving them statements about impending terrorist acts and other outstanding crimes, and thereby cause the investigation to be directed along a false path. The identity of such an informant and his moral and service qualities should be immediately checked against the alphabetical index and by means of telegraphic communication with the Chief of the relevant Administration or Department, before undertaking anything based on his tip.
§15 The most durable, though not always productive, position for an agent is one where he is in the organization in the role of an abettor and intermediary in conspiratorial affairs, i.e., when his activity is limited to the sphere of participation in designs or preparations for a crime, which is factually elusive through formal inquiry and investigation and makes it possible to leave the agent and those close to him at liberty.
§16 Secret agents can under no circumstances be initiated into information provided by other agents. In general, one should treat with special caution the familiarization of an agent with the course of an investigation, as well as with the activities and personnel of the investigative institution. In relations with an agent, one must obtain from him everything necessary and, as far as possible, not reveal anything to him. Otherwise, the person running the agency will quickly find himself in the hands of the agent, many of whom are very inclined to play a double game, and in the event of a break in relations with them, the investigative work and the persons conducting it will always be threatened with extreme danger.
§17 No one except the person in charge of the investigation and the person who can replace him must know any secret agent by sight. The agent’s surname is known only to the person in charge of the investigation; the other ranks of the institution in charge of the investigation who deal with the agent’s information may, in necessary cases, know only the pseudonym or number of the agent. The ranks of external surveillance and the chancellery must not know the secret agent even by his pseudonym. To them, he must be known only as an actual revolutionary activist by his external surveillance pseudonym, if he has entered the sphere of the latter.
§18 Secret agents must under no circumstances know each other, as this may lead to the “compromise” of both and even the murder of one of them.
§19 Information provided by secret agents must be stored with the observance of special caution and in strict secrecy.
§20 Information received from secret agents is obligatorily verified, if the possibility presents itself, by external surveillance.
§21 It is recommended that the person in charge of the agency establish relations with reliable agents that exclude all formality and dryness, bearing in mind that the role of an agent is usually morally very difficult, and that “meetings” are often the only moments in an agent’s life when he can unburden his soul and not feel pangs of conscience. Only on the condition of observing this can one count on having devoted people.
§22 One should never force an agent to obtain information forcefully, as this often causes compromises. After a liquidation, it is necessary to give the agent the opportunity to temporarily cease active contacts with comrades.
§23 When carrying out a liquidation, one should never arrest all the persons surrounding the agent, leaving him alone at liberty; rather, one should leave several persons around him who are closer and less harmful, or give him the opportunity to leave town beforehand on business, or, in an extreme case, arrest him as well, releasing him subsequently, along with those close to him and the least harmful persons, for lack of evidence. One should always enter into an agreement with the agent concerning his impending arrest. The arrest of an agent is permissible only in cases of unavoidable necessity.
§24 The conduct of searches and arrests based on agent information should be carried out with great caution and circumspection, so as not to “compromise” the secret agent; therefore, prior to liquidation, one must carefully consider everything that might affect the integrity of the agency and divert the latter from the possibility of suspicion.
§25 In liquidation reports, one should never place the conspiratorial pseudonyms of agents, nor generally indicate the person who provided the information, but use for this purpose the expression “according to available unspoken information.” Agent information known to only one secret agent or a very narrow circle of persons should not be placed in such reports at all. Liquidation should begin with those places and persons where there may be serious material evidence or “technical equipment,” since the latter, as corpus delicti, makes it possible to charge with participation in a revolutionary association even persons caught without material evidence in their apartments, and makes it possible to cover for the agency. It is best possible to cover for the agency if liquidation is begun with the arrest, established by surveillance, of a meeting of at least some of the most prominent persons subject to liquidation, since such a tactic gives the liquidation the appearance of chance. For seizing printing presses or bomb workshops, it is good to begin with the detention on the street, under a plausible pretext, of someone residing in the targeted apartment, by which the search of the apartment is then explained.
§26 The remuneration of an agent is in direct dependence on the value of the information he provides and the position he occupies in the organization.
§27 Secret agents, if they do not live on party funds, must obligatorily have some kind of legal income, since not having one immediately arouses suspicion in the organization regarding the source of means of subsistence. It should be recommended that the agent arrange employment himself, without the mediation of the person in charge of investigation, since this mediation, even through intermediate persons, sooner or later inevitably leads to the agent’s “compromise.” Given the presence of meager legal income for the secret agent, the most serious attention should be paid to ensuring that he does not give others cause to notice that he is living beyond his means. Particular attention should be paid to the discrepancy between his legal income and his clothing, footwear, etc.
§28 During arrest, the agent’s salary must obligatorily be preserved and, if possible, even increased. Compromised agents should be carefully assisted in finding employment (except for service in investigative institutions) and supported materially for the first while.
§29 When parting with a secret agent, one should not exacerbate personal relations with him, but at the same time not put him in such a position that he could in future exploit the person in charge of investigation with unacceptable demands.
§30 Meetings with secret agents must take place in special (“conspiratorial”) apartments. A secret agent who has not yet proven himself should not be shown the “conspiratorial” apartment; it is better to have a special apartment or a hotel room for such a person, or to arrange meetings with such persons in restaurants and similar places.
§31 The conspiratorial apartment must not be located in places where surveillance can be established over it (proximity to a tavern, garden, small grocery shop, cabstand, tram pavilion, public institution, etc.). It must obligatorily have two entrances, if circumstances allow, not be situated in a courtyard, be, as far as possible, close to the chancellery, and in a part of the city where fewer revolutionary activists live.
§32 One should have as many conspiratorial apartments for meetings with agents as possible, and in one and the same apartment, schedule meetings on different days and at different times for agents of different parties, in order to prevent not only the highly harmful consequences, but even the very possibility, of two agents meeting.
§33 To prevent the possibility of two agents meeting, one of whom arrived at the appointed hour and the other on some urgent business, the apartment must be arranged so that those who have come can always be isolated from each other.
§34 The master of the best conspiratorial apartment can be an unconditionally loyal person who served in the Okhrana Department or in a Gendarme institution in a position by which he was little known in the city, living in retirement, without servants, and having no other connection to the investigative institution.
§35 Usually, however, a conspiratorial apartment is set up at the home of persons serving in the Department or Administration who enjoy special trust, who do not occupy conspicuous positions (who are less known), and whom none of the employees known in the city, and especially, no one in uniform, visits.
§36 One should adopt as a rule the locking with a key of the room in which the meeting with the secret agent takes place or in which he is alone. One should never seat an agent opposite a mirror or a window. One should also not have in the room visited by the agent any papers, notes, etc., documents relating to the activities of the Department or Administration. In general, for the purpose of preventing various failures, no precautions, down to the most petty ones inclusive, should be neglected.
§37 The most insignificant information about suspicion of the “compromise” of a conspiratorial apartment must serve as the basis for its immediate change.
§38 For each secret agent, a special notebook (booklet) is opened, into which all information received from him is entered. At the end of the notebook, there must be an alphabetical index, into which all names mentioned by the agent are entered, with a reference to the page of the notebook where information about them is found. The personal identifications of individuals are also entered into this index, with a reference to the original name or revolutionary pseudonym.
§39 From all the alphabetical indexes, cards are written, which are threaded onto an arch (the general archive) or register of all persons who passed through internal and external surveillance. For each person, there may be several cards under various pseudonyms and identifications, but with reference to other cards, for example: “Mortimer” (pseudonym in the organization of Samuil Ryss). Reg. S.R. vol. 1. see Nikolaev Ivan Petrov (illegal passport of Ryss) — see Ryss Samuil Yankelev — real surname of Nikolaev (“Mortimer”) see “Samonya” — (Ryss’s name in the family circle) see “Berlinsky” — (surveillance pseudonym of Ryss), etc. Thus, having a separate card for each of the pseudonyms with a reference to the rest, one can always find the needed person from any one of them. On these cards, apart from pseudonyms, identifications, and a reference to the register of the agency or the number of the agent giving information about the given person, nothing is written.
§40 All information about one person received from various agents is transferred from the booklets onto a special sheet, on which decisively all agent information about the given person is concentrated. All sheets with information about members of one and the same organization are threaded onto a separate register, to which a reference is made on the card located on the arch (e.g., “Reg. S.R. vol. 2”).
§41 Concerning persons who were secret agents and who displayed themselves negatively, a report should without delay be made to the Police Department, as well as to all investigative institutions and Gendarme Administrations.
From the website “Psychology of Special Services”
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