Exposing course of theoretical training for entry-level agents
Exposé article by Vladimir Kastorny from https://www.tipolog.netne.net/spy\_kmb/spy\_agents\_norod.htm about the tactics of minor agents with which the secret services flooded churches during the USSR and continue to flood them today.
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You don’t need a knife for a fool. Spin him a yarn … and do with him whatever you want.
(Words from the anthem of modern-day followers of the work of Alice the Fox and Basilio the Cat)
Have you ever been anyone’s agent? Would you like to feel what it’s like to be in their shoes for a little while and understand the train of thought that goes through their head? As they say, nothing could be simpler! To begin with, all you need to do is slightly raise your eyes and read what is written on this page just above the main text. I mean the epigraph. Yes, yes — the very one that shines before you in bright yellow letters! Well, have you read it? If you have, then I congratulate you — because thanks to this manner of my presentation you have just (and I hope for a long time) managed to grasp the essence of the most important agent-spying truth. We can present it in a form more concretised for our situation. In this case it will look roughly like this: If you feel a desire orneed to deceive someone or pull the wool over their eyes, then first of all look among those around you for persons who could turn out to be more stupid (in general or in some predetermined sense) or more naive than you.
After the most important agent-spying truth has been firmly grasped, it is time to move on. To move on in all seriousness — without inappropriate jokes and any kind of fooling around — and, following the foremost agent-spying truth, to grasp truth simply number one (the first not in terms of significance but in its ordinal number). As a rule people mislead and deceive one another not for the sake of a joke or for some training purposes (although such cases are also not uncommon in our lives), but in order to achieve for themselves (or someone else) something very desirable and quite concrete. Therefore if by your deception or misleading you wish to achieve a concrete practical goal, then there is no point in trying to deceive just anyone who might in principle be within your reach. For this reason the first (by its ordinal number) agent-spying truth sounds approximately like this: Before you start looking around in search of someone sufficiently stupid or naive, determine the circle of persons who can be of practical interest to you and only after having determined that begin searching for fools within their more narrow and limited environment.
The ability to quickly recognise relative fools or sufficiently naive persons in various respects among a large number of the most diverse people is not as simple a matter as it may seem at first glance. For this very reason, beginning agents are usually advised to start with observations and exerting trial influences on people who are quite well known to them or who are familiar in many life senses and at the same time fully capable of forgiving them in case of any mishaps arising from a lack of sufficient experience in this matter. Or to practise on people who are very random or pose no serious threat to them — by carrying out towards such people something jocular and fairly innocent in its essence. And then — as they accumulate a certain amount of practical experience — to proceed to attempts at carrying out some trial steps and verification actions towards people who are less familiar and not so favourably disposed towards them.
In order to induce another person tothat personshare something that he has or possesses, any agent trying to exert influence on him needs in some way from his side to give or promise him (or conversely to prevent him from receiving something or to utter such a threat) something without which he cannot manage in his life. For different people, the most diverse and dissimilar objects, things and relationships can turn out to be vitally necessary. But amid all the existing diversity there exist certain universal human needs – such as regularly arising needs for food, sleep, satisfaction of sexual desires, money, items of adornment and clothing, for compassion, expression of understanding and support from those around in difficult life situations – as well as various kinds of apprehensions and fears that arise in people on this basis. Therefore if the main emphasis is placed precisely on identifying such points, then regardless of knowing what one or another person under development represents (i.e. with almost a complete lack of any background data on him), by carrying out before him a successive review of all the points just listed it proves quite possible to determine in what precisely he most of allneeds and** it is precisely in this direction to focus one’s subsequentefforts. (By and large, in all situations that are sufficiently difficult for them, agents in principle behave in the same way and use approximately the same techniques as any of us, only they do so in a more conscious and cynically manifested manner and not in their own personal interests but in the interests of some third party).
However, in actual practice it often happens that all attempts by agents to identify unsatisfied universal human needs in targeted persons, as well as anxieties and fears that might arise in them from the realization that they might lose something they currently possess, prove fruitless. This can occur in situations where the latter experience no special need for anything of the kind, or are accustomed to making do with the bare minimum, or, because they are seasoned in cunning, can conceal all this by an effort of will, or even make a show to outsiders that they have everything in abundance by ostentatiously displaying whatever little they actually have. For this reason, from identifying in their target persons existingfears and unsatisfiedneeds on a universal human levelagents move on to identifying needs (and correspondingly fears) of a more specific nature — ones that are common to all persons of a given sex-age group, nationality, social status, professional activity, and life interests, to which, based on observable external signs and verbally formed impressions about them (or received from someone’s words), the observed persons can with a high degree of probability be assigned. The purposeful use of such rather complex and profound psychological methods often leads to the result that the targets under agent observation who, for various reasons, reveal no unsatisfied universal human needs, prove far less resistant to more sophisticated influences and disclose their existing fears and obvious dissatisfaction in very specific (and sometimes completely unpredictable) senses — thereby revealing (i.e., making quite evident to the agents) one or another of their present weaknesses. The determination of concrete lists of the specific needs and fears that most correspond to representatives of particular social groups is carried out by agents on the basis of experience accumulated in the course of their activities, from clarifying various points with the operatives supervising them (whose practical experience in the overwhelming majority of cases proves far more significant), as well as in the course of instruction at short-term courses specially organized to ensure the systematic retraining of certain categories of agents.
On the other hand, in order to make it easier for the operatives of various special services and their agents to rapidly classify the persons they are developing and identify the presence of specific needs in one or another of them, a definite policy is implemented by the state authorities, which has a targeted focus on particular strata of the population. The essence of such a policy consists in implanting into the consciousness of the broad masses and the majority of their representatives illusory stereotypical ideas about how every self-respecting representative of a given milieu should look, behave in the most typical situations, and react to specific external stimuli (capable of arousing both positive and negative emotions) — for example, a man, a woman, a young man, an adolescent, a girl, a respectable citizen, an intellectual, a tramp, a bandit, a spy, a prostitute, a secretary, a fashion model, an important official, a tough businessman, a small-time trader, a partygoer, a freeloader, a collector, a fan of pop or rock music, and so on and so forth. And concerning the manifestation by specific representatives of particular strata of any discrepancy with anything thus prescribed, they arouse in all others suspicions of their alleged abnormality, inhibitions, ill health, or the presence of some special bodily deformities and dangerous psychological defects — so as to have the opportunity to corral all persons trying to follow their own path and think independently into some generally accepted framework and force them, by their type, to be in everything similar to someone easily recognizable and quite concrete. In turn, any representative of a given social group who tries to look and behave in such a way as to conform to the stereotypes imposed on him becomes visible a mile away in any crowd and easily predictable in his behavior to any sober-minded persons observing him, and first of all to operatives and their agents. The principal instrument for imposing all sorts of illusions and delusions of this kind on broad strata of society is the mass media, as well as everything that in one way or another evokes associations with the words entertainment and mass-media culture. In other words, all these instruments of influencing the public consciousness are by their very essence long since agent-provided or aimed at disseminating measured doses of truth and facts that correspond to actual reality, intermingled with doses of deliberate lies and unreliable but highly desirable rumors.
After clarifying the facts of what the person under development most needs or most fears (or both together), the agent proceeds to the third step — the determination of the concrete tactics for carrying out his further actions. The essence of such actions consists in making possible an exchange of something rather insignificant or almost unreal that the agent has at his disposal for something very significant and quite concrete that the target person possesses. By hook or by crook, trying to buy (or, to put it more precisely, to swindle) a kilogram of diamonds for 3 rubles from someone who has them and is potentially capable of selling them — this is how one can define the sense of pulling off any swindles of this kind.
In turn, there exist two main methods of exerting motivating influences on various people, which are usually used by agents for the purpose of nudging or coercing the individuals they are developing into carrying out various exchanges, deals, borrowings and selfless assistance, the undoubted benefit from which would be secured for the first, while for the second it would prove highly dubious. The first in terms of antiquity of its origin is the method that involves the use of emotional influences. By the nature of its origin, such a method corresponds to the feminine principle and, for this very reason, it is women who most often achieve the heights of true mastery in its use, which, however, does not mean that men, and especially male agents, use it much less frequently than representatives of the fair sex. (In agent work, there is a purely pragmatic approach in this regard — in each specific case, what is most suitable from the point of view of ensuring the possibility of achieving the set goals is used). The essence of this type of influence consists in arousing in the developed individuals sufficiently deep sensual attachments to something or someone quite specific or, conversely, unfounded fears about something seeming or insignificant, but in reality serving merely as a convenient pretext for starting to carry out something long conceived.The purpose of such actions in operational and agent practicelies in bringing persons tested in this way out of a state of mental equilibrium andin provoking in them inadequate or, in other words, unrestrained responses(both very positive and extremely negative in nature) - with the aim of inducing themto manifest somethinghighly unreasonable and completely uncharacteristic for them under ordinary conditions.
As a very crude but highly illustrative example for this case, one could mention small-time drug dealers, who begin treating certain teenagers to their potions in order to induce drug addiction and turn them into their constant and wholly dependent clients. Another manifestation of this kind, far more common in real life (and not at all associated by most people with the actual practice of agent influence), is the behavior of many very sweet and charming women, who throughout life have the habit of seeking out very wealthy husbands and lovers. Upon spotting someone quite suitable, such women, with an appearance of something tremulous and disinterested, surround the men who have taken the bait with endless displays of their love and sexual passion. After these men have grown accustomed to such an unusual and highly pleasant rhythm of life and begin to perceive their supposedly adoring mistresses as someone inseparable from themselves, the latter, sensing the arrival of such moments, unexpectedly change their tactics—suddenly becoming very capricious, sorrowful, or behaving in a very preoccupied manner. As reasons for these changes in their behavior, such women point out to their lovers the fact that they lack something very desirable, supposedly long possessed by everyone else, as well as various difficulties and problems that have suddenly arisen in their lives and require fairly significant financial investment. Striving for further continuation of passionate love, men often take this bait and undertake to pay for specific purchases and individual bills of their women.
In turn, such women, having acted out brief fits of insane happiness over the generosity once shown to them, after some time again and again appear before their lovers excited, sorrowful, or preoccupied for some much more serious reasons, requiring them to shell out ever larger sums. Behaving in the manner just described, such mistresses strive to get their men to agree, without looking, to take on the payment of any of their expenses and purchases—in other words, to pay an enormous price for the illusion of truly extraordinary love from women who skillfully use them. When the men they are using begin to voice dissatisfaction and reproach about the need to somehow curtail all the spending, such mistresses start playing the part of anxious and suffering individuals and reproach their naive lovers for supposedly having stopped loving them and for this very reason (and no other) refusing to satisfy such “trifles.” If, in the course of acting out such passions, the supposedly sorrowful women realize that their lovers are completely ruined or no longer intend to cater to their mad whims, such mistresses, with a decisive step and loudly slamming the door (while glancing back—secretly hoping that at the very last moment someone will stop them and beg them to stay), go off in search of someone new. However, if the men who madly love them, out of fear of losing such supposedly extraordinary wives or mistresses, agree unconditionally to fulfill any of their demands, it often turns out that these men are forced to spend all their time earning and hunting for money to satisfy their women’s whims, and for this very reason become completely unable to give them sufficient attention. In the end, this leads to such women, knowing no lack of means, beginning to feel a lack of male attention. In other words, they take lovers for heartfelt conversation and the satisfaction of sexual passions, while keeping their husbands as fools and utter idiots—using them not only as their providers, but also as actual providers for their lovers and payers for the amorous pleasures of someone who endlessly betrays them.
As a vivid example built on the deliberate arousal of passions and emotions of a directly opposite kind in order to achieve something desired, one can cite cases that very often arise in relationships between bosses and their subordinates. Having committed some serious miscalculations in their work or proving unable to secure indisputable authority in their team, many bosses find a need to present the main culprit not as themselves, but as someone subordinate to them, or, as a lesson to everyone else, to toss out with a bang someone insufficiently respectful toward them or who has suddenly become undesirable. In such situations, these bosses begin to pay special attention to those subordinates who seem to them weak-willed and inexperienced, or, on the contrary (for the second case), very hot-tempered and unrestrained in their behavior. Having picked the most suitable moments, such bosses summon such subordinates and out of the blue begin to unleash torrents of anger upon them over some formal violations and minor mistakes, while simultaneously observing the response. If the response expresses a certain disagreement with what has just been stated but is presented in a sufficiently benevolent manner with hints of the possibility of something quite inconvenient for the bosses, or, conversely, if categorical disagreement is competently expressed and pointedly polite in its form, the superiors quickly slow the pace of their speech and shift to a normal tone of conversation. If, however, a particular subordinate’s response (regardless of the degree of their actual guilt) expresses fears and apprehensions about something in principle quite possible, or, on the contrary, proves completely inappropriate or (in other words) involves gross violations of workplace discipline, then on the basis of all thus determined, their bosses immediately issue them a strict formal warning and take immediate organizational measures.
It goes without saying that the agent practice of using various emotional influences for the purpose of developing persons of interest is not limited to the individual examples just described here and is far more diverse and broad, but at its foundation lie precisely the elements just sketched here.
The second basic method for exerting stimulating influences, widely used in agent practice, is the active contributory creation in the developed persons of distorted ideas about something really existing – with the aim of misleading them and pushing them toward specific actions or inactions, aimed at securing for themselves something highly desirable and very advantageous. In contrast to the first, which arises almost exclusively on an emotional or sensory basis and represents endless vacillations between various extremes and recklessness, the second method involves carrying out mixtures of certain portions of truth and falsehood and creating on their basis plausible fictions about someone or something quite concrete – by one-sided interpretation of the essence of all presented points and expression of weakly argued proofs regarding everything that is unclear and not sufficiently well known to everyone. In other words, unlike the first, it creates an appearance of having elements of common sense and readiness to engage in discussions on contentious points – i.e., it corresponds more to the rationally organized masculine principle (which, however, does not mean that women, and especially women agents, use it much less often than men).
As a most simple but very illustrative example of using agent influences of this type, one should mention advertising, which seeks to declare with huge letters and screaming text about individual positive aspects of the services and goods it offers as something unprecedented and quite capable of solving whole complexes of problems, while at the same time in every way keeping silent about their shortcomings (or – in the best case – reporting this in very small print and faded little letters in its farthest corner). Another example of using such influences on someone very naive and inexperienced is the entire practice of network marketing. Smiling and polite young people with presentable appearances, who not so long ago had the habit of endlessly approaching random passers-by or entering office premises with one sole purpose – by any means to talk the people they stopped into buying from them with huge discounts something very stale and not intended for long-term use, are precisely agents (only sales agents) who widely use influences of this type.
In order to become acquainted with more civilian examples of something similar, the author recommends that anyone wishing pretend to be a “newbie” and go to the nearest computer store or electronics shop. If you have a sufficiently solid appearance, then in response to any of your inquiries, the store employees will start offering you something very cool and sophisticated (both in quality and price) from the latest models – describing all its charms, which include the ability to activate many various functions that you will hardly ever need. If your appearance tells the sellers something sufficiently modest, they will try to “palm off” (with the main emphasis on the indicated low prices) something obviously morally outdated and going out of use, which for that very reason finds no demand among knowledgeable buyers. In the event that after this you suddenly show yourself to have certain knowledge in the field of computer technology and electronics, the store employees will change the tone of their conversation – they will start loading you with various highly specialized terms and talk to you as a professional. That is – on the one hand they seemingly show a desire to flatter you, but in reality in a quite conscious manner they try to load you with phraseology and very specific terms that are unclear to you. The meaning of the change in the sellers’ behavior in this case is as follows: if a specific buyer could not be convinced of the idea of the necessity of purchasing something from the newest and greatly inflated in price (or conversely very stale and almost out of use), then one must try to persuade him to buy something slightly less expensive (or not entirely stale, but already half so) – i.e., to sell the buyer not what he actually needs, but what is more profitable for the store. And only if you firmly stand your ground and specifically indicate what exactly you need, will you manage to get from the sellers what you actually wanted from them.
And what relation, you ask, do all these modern salesmen and sales agents have to special services? In general, none. It’s just that agents of modern special services in their daily practice widely use their techniques and methods, though with one clearly noticeable difference. If the former are mainly interested in the money of their potential buyers and clients, the sphere of interests of the latter is not limited to this one aspect, but extends much wider and deeper.
Despite the broad possibilities provided by employing the two above-described methods of exerting motivational influence (as well as a whole series of additional ones — such as issuing overt threats and applying crude physical force), intelligence service agents in their work often encounter situations where the individuals they are developing do not respond to such influence at all, or respond in some highly undesirable way. While in the practice of trade, under similar circumstances, salespeople and commercial agents prefer to turn away from utterly intransigent individuals and immediately redirect their attention to someone who seems to them more amenable, in intelligence work the entire course of further events most often turns out to differ sharply from what has just been described. Such differences are due to the fact that intelligence services very frequently have to deal with specific people who are the possessors, sources, or bearers of something special or very rare, or who represent a real or potential threat to society. To put it differently, representatives of the intelligence services, unlike salespeople and commercial agents, when their initial efforts to develop a person of interest encounter failure, are in most cases deprived of any real chance to redirect their efforts toward someone more yielding and pliable among those around them — that is, they are forced instead of endlessly skipping from one person to another, to persistently pursue the once begun work in relation to those who* at the moment they already have or to whom they have been assigned.
Such persistence in pursuing the work once begun entails a temporary cessation of active measures and placing the individuals thus developed under covert agent surveillance whenever facts come to light indicating that those individuals, having sensed something amiss, begin to observe heightened precautions and no longer react at all (or react in a manner quite different from what the agents and operatives pressuring them had desired). The purpose of conducting covert surveillance lies in identifying those moments when the target person somewhat dulls his vigilance and caution (because he perceives around himself a semblance of a certain lull) — begins to display heightened activity and a state of excitation, due to his return to his normal condition and rhythm of life — or, conversely, starts revealing his weakened and depressed state, resulting from the influence of some purely external and fortuitous causes. Precisely at the moments when outward signs of something of the kind just noted are detected, agents most often receive instructions from the operatives supervising them to activate their actions immediately and to undertake renewed attempts to achieve something highly desirable.
Another fairly frequent reason why operatives demand that their agents step up their activity is the expiry of certain time limits and the consequent need to report on the work done — without particular success — to higher-ups, with the secret hope that perhaps in this way everything can be changed at the very last moment.
Because, by acting in a passive or observational manner, it proves impossible in the overwhelming majority of cases to achieve any significant and demonstrable results, operational work places its primary emphasis on the use of active or effective methods. In actual practice, in order to encourage specific agents to carry out active work successfully and to discourage in them any inclination to actually evade it by shifting to passive stages in their work on particular target persons, the supervising operatives proceed deliberately to create for them unequal conditions. This is expressed in the fact that, from their very first steps, operatives begin in every way to aim all their agents at achieving practical results in their work — by all their words and actions to inculcate in them the idea that if they display activity everywhere and at all times, and through its use ensure the fulfilment of the tasks set for them, they will be given the opportunity to focus wholly and completely on attaining high indicators that will be credited to their account (and the tasks set for them will be assigned the highest priority compared with the tasks set for less active agents). If, on the contrary, they begin to exhibit a tendency to slide into the realm of passivity and are unable to ensure the timely solution of the tasks set for them, they will be constantly torn away from the direct execution of what they have been assigned and used in an auxiliary capacity for solving those tasks that are considered more of a priority — credited to the account of their more successful “colleagues” and not credited to their own account.
It goes without saying that when situations of this kind arise, novice or inexperienced agents begin to grumble and express their dissatisfaction with having to carry out their work in such difficult and challenging conditions. In response, the handlers looking after them usually very quickly find very convincing verbal arguments (in many cases, for full effect, supplemented by a couple of hefty slaps) to quickly shut the mouths of the obstinate ones (an idea of an approximate list of such arguments can be obtained by referring to the section «Who are stool pigeons ?»). After such measures are applied, the agents—defeated in every sense of the word—having first swallowed the tears and saliva they have just shed, quickly begin to return to a correct perception of the reality around them and an understanding of who in this situation is the master of the situation, and who is his involuntary servant. Following this return to reality, a silent question always arises in the eyes of those agents thus humiliated: how can they get out of the hopeless situation that has arisen? As if anticipating such a question, and most often without waiting for it to be spoken aloud, the handlers invariably proceed to tell their unlucky helpers that their situation is in fact not as hopeless as it appears at first glance. The gist of such statements is that in order to make it easier to carry out all the tasks assigned to him, every agent who has even a modicum of self-respect should carry out preliminary groundwork in respect of those suspicious and law-breaking persons who may be of particular interest to law enforcement agencies at some point in the future, and be able to involve in his work — in conducting developments against somebody he has thus tentatively marked for himself — all the other people around him who associate with him for various reasons, by purposefully building his personal relationships with all of them together and each one individually.
In other words, immediately after taking several very clumsy steps in the agent’s field, every novice agent receives from his handler a rigid directive that, in addition to all the work laid out for him, through his own initiative or independently - he must put into agent development all the directlysurrounding people (both those who are beginning to arouse some suspicions and apprehensions, and those who arouse none at all), starting with those who are most frequently in contact with him for various accidental and non-accidental reasons, and then gradually expanding this circle by shifting his attention to persons a little further away from him, as well as to all newcomers who appear near him. The schemas for conducting agent developments are no different from the schemas for conducting operational developments and fully correspond to everything that has been said about this above. But unlike operational developments of those persons in whom the handlers have a special or heightened interest, the agents under their tutelage are recommended to conduct their agent developments of all persons who come into their field of vision not with a view to uncovering anything criminal or representing a potential danger in their actions and deeds, but (since the vast majority of them are perfectly normal people and honest citizens) in order to determine the degree of usefulness that they, in principle, may be to the agents independently developing them. At the same time, the agents themselves are strictly warned that all actions carried out by them in this sphere, unlike operational developments, are not sanctioned from any higher authority, and in the event that any undesirable consequences arise as a result, full responsibility for this will rest entirely with the agents themselves. That is, the agents are thus, as it were, forewarned that, unlike actions aimed at persons suspected of committing certain crimes or put on the wanted list, such actions of theirs carried out with respect to perfectly normal people and honest citizens musttake place in a sparing manner - not lead to them receiving serious physical injuries or deep mental suffering.
However, at the same time, operative workers never forget to make their assistants understand that in special cases involving someone who is currently not violating existing laws but simultaneously represents a potential danger and endlessly causes operative workers extraordinary trouble, they will be very much not against those assistants, in an unofficial capacity, taking initiative aimed at somehow neutralizing—or doing away with (in the most varied senses of that word)—certain of the previously designated undesirable individuals. In other words, in situations of this sort they, as it were, tell their agents that, of course, such actions are illegal, but at the same time, in real practice, special circumstances often arise when, in the interests of their common cause, all that should be disregarded and things should be done as “better.” In order to encourage their helpers to display an attitude of complete impunity toward certain of the persons they are developing agent‑wise (or, in other words — to commit outright lawlessness ), operative workers seek to convince agents that, should any undesirable publicity arise (thanks to their existing official capabilities and connections), they can easily pull them out of any trouble and present everything that occurred as if it had been the result of carelessness on the part of the victims, accidents, hooligan attacks, mutual squabbles, or unexplained circumstances. And it must be said that such words from operative workers most often do not diverge from deeds, but at the same time they endeavor not to miss opportunities that allow them to somehow document concrete facts of the committing of criminal lawlessness (allegedly occurring without their knowledge) on the part of particular agents, in order to obtain additional means for intimidating and blackmailing the latter at some future time — in the event they display outright intransigence or stubborn disobedience.
However, we have gotten somewhat carried away — encouraging the committing of lawlessness within the agent milieu is not the most important aspect of operative workers’ professional activity. The most important thing for operative workers in directing their agents’ activity is targeting them toward proactively conducting agent development of all the persons immediately surrounding them, with a view to ascertaining practical abilities and determining the degree of suitability of the latter for attracting them at some time in the future to possible participation in various operative measures aimed against some third party — someone whom the authorities and secret services regard as socially dangerous or very suspicious in his inner essence. In practice, this usually finds expression in the fact that beginning or slightly successful agents, in their habitual human environments, begin to search out someone new or obviously bored, standing alone, lacking self‑confidence and with the look of a sufficiently authoritative or experienced person, strike up non‑committal conversations — enter into introductory conversations . The purpose of such conversations is to determine the degree of contactability of the preliminarily targeted persons (silent — sociable, guarded — trusting, brusque — timorous, bashful — shameless), as well as to ascertain certain biographical details, areas of interest, and facts of having mutual acquaintances. On the basis of the conclusions drawn, the beginning agent decides on the advisability or inadvisability of attracting the superficially defined person to joint participation in something further without disclosing to the latter the fact of what he really is . In doing so, the agent structures his actions so that the sphere in which he is trying to involve someone would be quite significant and attractive for the majority of representatives of the category of person he is considering, and at the same time he himself would prove fully capable of demonstrating in it to all his companions his superior skills and leadership qualities . Gathering around themselves small groups of people captivated by them, beginning agents, with invisible support from the operative workers supervising them, set about organizing joint successful undertakings and actions (which, in their overwhelming majority, are purely symbolic in nature and do not represent anything substantial) so that the former gain confidence that, by acting under their leadership, they can go far in their endeavors. Thus becoming leaders and a kind of trend‑setter in very narrow circles, agents, in order to acquire still greater power over those persons, start challenging any among them who in any way attempt to dispute their right to leadership. The essence of such challenges lies in drawing them into competitions in those spheres and directions of activity in which the agents can hope for success thanks to their superior abilities, while at the same time immediately dismissing (under various contrived pretexts) all proposals for joint participation in things in which such leaders are not very strong and where there is a high probability that someone more capable in some particular respect could easily surpass them. Behaving in the described manner and, with the assistance of operative workers, arranging failures in the activity of persons trying somehow to seize the initiative from them, such beginning agents frequently become formal and informal leaders in various youth or socially maladapted milieux and set about leading after themselves people who are quite immature and gullible in the directions prompted to them by their handlers from the secret services.
But young people and representatives of the socially maladapted environment are far from the only (and, it must be said, not the most serious and influential) parts of society at which the interested gazes of internal affairs and state security representatives are directed. More mature and sufficiently experienced adults have the tendency to quickly accumulate life experience, become more critical, confident in their own strengths, and completely unwilling to leave their place and participate in anything for nothing—without receiving in return quite real and tangible benefits for themselves. In other words, those methods of recruiting various helpers and volunteers that allow special service representatives to achieve decent results in a youth environment become unproductive and inappropriate in situations where targeted actions are taken to broadly involve someone sufficiently experienced and more confident in all their actions in their activities. For this very reason, after undergoing initial testing in youth environments, those agents who begin to show certain successes in their invisible work are then redirected by the operational workers who supervise them to a more adult audience. To begin with, the operatives recommend that such promising agents pay attention to someone quite specific (someone who interests the operatives in terms of the possibility of obtaining very important information from them and who can significantly influence the course of certain processes or events and the actions of specific individuals) and try to get close to them on the basis of expressing something sufficiently kindred and in line with their interests.
Having taken note of everything the operatives said, such agents set about looking for pretexts to get acquainted with those initially pointed out to them, as well as conducting preliminary inquiries among other people who might have some information about someone they need. But since adults usually do not have the inclination to share everything they learn with just anyone, the agents first of all begin to single out among them those who are not fully mature and insufficiently socially adapted, and offer them a chance to earn some good money from something accidental happening, or invite them for one-time participation in various forms of pleasant pastime (such as board games and asking for all sorts of advice, smoking breaks and chatting during working hours, drinking alcohol and noisy merrymaking, flirting with persons of the opposite sex and socializing with people of similar hobbies) in the company of their long-time acquaintances. Wishing to become regulars of such useful and pleasant companies, the overwhelming majority of people thus attracted begin to show a tendency for confidential communication and expressing their readiness to help with something that is quite within their power to the agents cultivating them and their henchmen. But since such methods of gathering information of interest turn out to be connected with the necessity of sharing something and spending something of their own, agents who have achieved some slight success, being completely unwilling to waste anything in vain, begin to limit the number of regular participants in the noisy companies they gather to those individuals who prove to be sufficiently valuable due to some existing opportunities of an official or personal nature, or who are prepared to regularly make tangible contributions of their efforts and material means to organizing some joint activities.
In their striving to avoid unnecessary expenditures, when such agents see someone dubious (like newcomers appearing) or seemingly of little value (like someone uncommunicative or greedy) in situations where certain such persons might be useful to them in some way, or for the purpose of preliminary study, they widely resort to a somewhat different practice. The essence of this practice consists in the use by agents, for introductory or testing purposes and in the presence of third parties well known to them, of various kinds of ridicule, mockery, and petty attacks on some insignificant pretexts. If the persons being tested begin to demonstrate tightness and a depressive state, the agents acting upon them switch to a condescending and conciliatory tone (thus seeking to instill in the former the idea that if they always strive to maintain good relations with them, then they themselves will never have any particular problems in relationships with other people around them) and in that context as if in passing take an interest in everything that particularly interests them—with an air as if it interests not so much themselves as all the others present nearby. If, on the contrary, those being tested begin to react to the teasing and mockery in a disrespectful or rather aggressive manner, the cultivating agents usually tell them that they do not understand jokes at all, or that their retaliatory jokes are, on the contrary, too mean and abnormal, and then on this basis they set about spreading unpleasant rumors about them among those around. By behaving in this way, the agents strive to instill in all persons of equal or lower status who relate to them too restrainedly and disrespectfully the idea that until those persons manage to establish good relations with them, they themselves will endlessly have all sorts of problems and frictions in relationships with the rest of the people around.
In their practice, various agents often encounter situations where individuals they have cleverly hooked on their line begin to thrash about, show defiance, and attempt to independently shape their own behavior. In such cases, agents frequently begin to speak disparagingly and to focus the attention of those close to them on particular negative qualities of these individuals, thus pushing their henchmen tostart with them quarrels and conflicts overvarious petty issues. If events unfold according to prearranged scenarios, the agents use such pretexts to whip up a great commotion and stir up the majority of those around against someone who has become undesirable, by exaggerating anddeclaringthemguilty of everything. In situations where the undesirable individuals begin to show restraint and caution, the agents start to modify their tactics—under the guise of making peace and showing something friendly, they invite them to join their groups in order to distract them from fulfilling their official duties and to push them to display something indecent and impermissible toward someone in their surroundings. The agents do this in such a way that there will be a large number of witnesses to everything that happens, or so that the fact of such behavior candrawdirect attention of the authorities or the administration of their institutions. All this results in serious troubles for those who have behaved so foolishly, or in constant expressions of threats from the agents in the form of claims that, if they wish, they can at any moment ensure that the former will face a host of problems. Seeing the depression and broken states of the people they have thus worked over, the agents usually begin to show theirhypocritical concern and declare that they are essentially kind people who bear no grudge for past offenses. In addition to such general words, the agents never forget to mention that they are fully capable of shielding such not entirely self-sufficient individuals from the consequences of the troubles that have already arisen, as well as from many of those that might arise at some point in the future, but only in exchange for an expression of submissiveness and readiness to carry out any assignments and requests they are given.
The very process of shielding those who are in some way guilty from the onset of undesirable consequences is ensured in a twofold manner. On the one hand, these are measures carried out by operational officers at the request of their agents and provided through operative resources, cultivated business connections, and personal acquaintances the former possess. On the other hand, it is ensured by measures taken by the agents themselves. Such measures are nothing other than the agents‘ expressions of requests to all people somehow dependent on them who, in principle, have the ability to appeal in some way and influence the persons authorized or morally entitled to make final decisions regarding how further to deal with various violators of existing orders and rules and underminers of moral standards. In practice, it looks approximately like this. From various sides and at various opportune and not entirely opportune moments, individual people approach specific responsible or authoritative persons for a given case and begin to ask them one and the same thing—not to be too severe and to take pity on the offender on the grounds of some alleged extenuating circumstances. After hearing such requests several times a day, the person responsible for making specific decisions, voluntarily or involuntarily, begins to wonder whether he is assessing everything correctly and whether his decisions will lead to growing discontent and expressions of distrust toward him from the majority of those around him. In the final analysis, most often they conclude that it is advisable to develop a selective approach toward different categories of individuals, which in practice results in endless pardons or substantial mitigation of the lot for certain offenders. And so that those who once fell into dependence on particular agents will not forget and will constantly feel a sense of guilt, the latter begin, with enviable regularity, to draw them into various unsavory situations, only to then rescue or cover for them through the organized actions of their most loyal henchmen.
Once they begin to organize attempts to exert desired pressures on various officials by using some third parties, the agents very soon discover that certain of these third parties—by virtue of some sympathy toward them, or because of already established relationships, or existing family and other connections, as well as some particular personal qualities, expressive features, and obvious talents—prove capable in far greater measure than all the rest to exert their influence on individual representatives of society or on rather large segments of it. Marking such individuals as the most valuable acquisitions because they possess these abilities to exert desired influence on others, which far surpass those of many others, the agents who have once acquired them conclude that it is expedient to surround them with special attention and to predominantly use them as agents of theirinfluence on specific representatives of society, or even on its separate social groups (with the latter being completely or relatively unaware of exactly in what capacity and for what purposes they are being used by certain people standing behind them).
The reasons for not informing the agents of influence being used about whose interests they actually serve are numerous, yet at the same time easily reducible to a few points. The first arises from the consideration that agents of influence, as a rule being very mobile and sociable people and at the same time fairly undisciplined due to being spoiled by constant attention from those around them, may easily blab that they are active agents and thus disrupt the course of something already conceived and currently being carried out. Another lies in the thought that agents of influence, in many cases being quite pampered and sensitive creatures, upon learning the whole truth about themselves and the true aims of their use, may become frightened — begin to behave in a very withdrawn or overly restrained manner in their dealings with others, which, willingly or unwillingly, will affect their ability to exert influence upon others as effectively as before. The third reason lies in the awareness that even with the strictest observance of secrecy, the fact that a formal affiliation of specific agents of influence with the active agents of certain special services might be disclosed cannot be ruled out. The disclosure of such an affiliation usually leads to disappointment and loss of trust in the agents of influence on the part of those who are usually the objects against whom such influences are directed. And if so, then in order to avoid any possibility of such disclosures, it is most expedient not to conclude any formal (or documentary) cooperation agreements with agents of influence at all, but to carry out the cooperation under the guise of something very friendly, arising from good intentions and built exclusively on the mutual trust of the parties involved.
At certain moments, having accidentally acquired for themselves someone who subsequently turns out to be usable as an agent of influence, active agents, out of considerations of increasing their capabilities, begin to contemplate the expediency of forging close relations with as many such individuals as possible who can become no less useful to them in every sense of the word. Since the most suitable candidates for use as future agents of influence are most often found among women, the growing children of very influential persons, and adherents of various creative professions, the already described rather dirty methods of making others dependent on them, which are usually employed by active agents against many people around them, prove in most such cases unsuitable and inappropriate (due to the fact that most of the former display a clear striving for something purer and brighter, and have a fairly large number of obvious or potential defenders both among specific individuals and among wide sections of society). By virtue of this reason and the unwillingness to attract attention by manifestations of anything too obvious, active agents are forced, with respect to candidates being groomed for use as agents of influence, to resort to special methods of exerting influence, which presuppose the exercise of impeccable (especially at their initial stages) manifestations of sensitivity and friendliness in outlook. In other respects, this kind of work does not differ much from everything already described here.
If one or another agent comes to the conclusion that a specific individual among those he has preliminarily targeted is quite suitable for use as an agent of influence and for that reason fully deserves to receive increased attention, he begins to use and artificially create various pretexts for forging closer and friendlier relations. Since, due to the existence of objective differences in characters and perceptions of life, specific agents are by no means always able to quickly get close to the persons they are intensively developing, in order to fill the discovered lack of information both about such persons themselves and about the subjects of their
As a result of carrying out such cunning maneuvers, agents, in addition to securing an influx of additional information about the persons they are developing as agents, in many cases also achieve an additional positive effect, the essence of which can be expressed as follows. The individuals under development, upon learning about rumors circulating about them, start to believe that the interest shown in them by a relative stranger is supposedly based on recognition of something special about them. Based on conclusions thus drawn, they begin to look with much greater favor or indulgence upon the agents developing them, thereby making it easier for the latter to accomplish their goals. In situations where the collected information proves insufficient, or in cases where the development concerns persons of particular significance, the agents turn for help to their operatives, who, as far as possible, arrange access to personal files and archival data on whoever interests them. In addition, in special cases, agents may be given trips to specialized repositories and libraries, as well as meetings with experts and leading specialists in various fields, so as to enable them to quickly become well-read and knowledgeable in the areas of professional activity and hobbies of the persons they are developing – in order thereby to demonstrate their similarity in convictions and views, and to clearly display their ability to be engaging conversationalists.
Another advantage that agents derive from approaching persons who are beginning to inspire a certain trust in them with discreet requests is that in this way they can easily arrange tests for the latter to determine which of them truly trusts them and values their relationship, and which is actually either a cunning schemer or an unresisting chatterbox. The practical implementation of such tests is as follows. To a number of test subjects, in turn, similar information is communicated, which however differs in some significant details. Since such information inevitably spreads as gossip in a short time, it is quite easy and simple to determine, from the presence or absence of certain pre-communicated details, on whom one can rely and on whom one cannot when truly difficult situations arise and delicate predicaments are created. (When such situations occur, agents who have prepared in advance know well how to proceed – in such cases they address their discreet requests only to those persons who will not blab, firmly knowing that all other gossipers will immediately pick up everything thus passed on to them and will chatter about it like parrots.)
Moreover, competent agents strive not to let anything pass their ears and to study all gossip that arises around them without their involvement – i.e., occurring quite naturally. Without going into various details, they glean from such gossip facts of approaching and diverging relationships between specific people, and then proceed to use such moments to facilitate the possibilities of achieving everything they need.
In situations where more or less tamed agents of influence begin to display recalcitrance toward the operating agents who use them, the latter attempt to exert influence of a different kind. Unable in most such cases to use outright dirty methods, the operating agents focus primarily on ceasing to facilitate the emergence of any rumors about the persons they use in this capacity (especially in contexts that are pleasant for them). The result most often turns out like this: obstinate agents of influence, having grown accustomed to constantly being in the spotlight, at certain moments begin to feel neglected and forgotten by everyone else and, for this reason, experience resentments toward many of those around them. In turn, the operating agents, having waited some time in order to let the unruly agents of influence quarrel with everyone possible and feel forgotten, at certain moments come to them with the air of the only ones capable of understanding their refined natures. The purpose of such maneuvering lies in the operating agents’ desire to establish themselves in the eyes of their agents of influence as the only truly faithful and devoted friends, or, to put it more precisely, to become their chief advisers in all matters vitally important to them. After the operating agents manage to establish themselves in this capacity, in order to securely take their agents of influence into their tenacious grip, the former undertake a whole series of additional measures. The essence of these measures consists in initiating the agents of influence into something depraved or intoxicating, which is presented by the former with a conspiratorial air and special attributes as a specimen of some ancient cultures and curious occult views (or something accessible to comprehension only by unusually elevated and initiated persons). In other words, by serving up under an unusual wrapper something far from the best and long known to everyone, the operating agents accustom the agents of influence they have tamed to the regular consumption of alcohol and narcotics, and also introduce them to refined forms of debauchery and sophisticated brain fogging their brains. Turning in effect into irreplaceable pimps and secret suppliers of everything forbidden for their agents of influence, the operating agents easily turn the former into blind instruments of their will (or, at worst, into a generous source of funding — for ensuring regular deliveries of outright hackwork and all sorts of rubbish, presented to high-society wastrels and broad-minded artistic natures under the label of something highly rare and exclusive).
In those rather rare cases when the agents of influence being developed are of exceptional value (for example, in terms of their ability to influence the minds of broad strata of the population) and outright initiation into vicious pastimes or activities is deemed inexpedient by the intelligence services, the operating agents cultivating them set about acting in an entirely different manner. The essence of carrying out developments of this kind of action consists in organizing — under the guise of expressing a very friendly disposition — regular inflows of sponsorship assistance (supposedly from anonymous supporters of their views and admirers of their talents) and providing all manner of organizational support for the growth of the public popularity of such agents of influence. In situations where, in response to such generous displays of friendliness, the agents of influence being used reciprocate and, during their public appearances in society, behave and present themselves before the broad masses of people or individual prominent figures in the way they are asked to, then everything with the further inflow of sponsorship assistance and organizational support remains in perfect order. But as soon as such agents of influence, having grown accustomed to the fact that everything in their lives is resolved at the wave of their finger and having persuaded themselves that this is all the result of public recognition of the exclusivity of their talents, the operatives and operating agents working with them quickly bring them back down to earth. Such a result is usually achieved by unexpected cessations of the displays of unprecedented generosity, without which the former popularity and influence of such agents of influence begin quickly to fall below rock bottom. Finding themselves in such an unusual and uncomfortable atmosphere, the agents of influence in the overwhelming majority of cases begin tearfully begging the operatives and operating agents working with them to alter the situation in a way favorable to them. The operatives and operating agents, after expressions of deep reflection on their faces, usually inform the agents of influence being developed that they are fully capable of ensuring a return to everything as before, but not for nothing, and on the condition that they behave more predictably and carry out everything that certain completely incomprehensible providers of sponsorship assistance (who are in reality merely the executors and expressers of the interests of the intelligence services behind them) ask them to manifest or express in various situations.
In situations where some of the agents begin to demonstrate an ability to quickly establish relationships and gain the trust of individuals who can then be used as suppliers of valuable information and agents of influence over someone high-ranking or numerous, interested operational workers set about doing everything possible to support such productive efforts of their individual agent assistants, creating opportunities for them to advance rapidly in their careers within state institutions and other places of work, thereby providing them with opportunities to communicate and have frequent contacts with a wider circle of people. First and foremost, this is expressed in the practice of issuing by internal affairs and state security agencies the most positive references for those persons who are their agents and expressing to the administrations of requesting institutions their doubts about the law-abidingness and political reliability of those persons who turn out to be competitors of their agents in competing for the same job positions. Or in expressing to representatives of personnel departments of institutions and establishments of any form of ownership (whose list of direct duties includes an item on ensuring timely informing of internal affairs and state security agencies about all personnel changes taking place there)verbal doubts about the advisability of promoting someone outside the special services and at the same time remarks about their wishes to see on those positions someone far more suitable to them.
But mere unsubstantiated statements about the desirability or undesirability of certain persons are in most cases insufficient—in response to such words, the special services often demand that corresponding arguments be provided. While ensuring favorable references for agents is quite simple—it is achieved by highlighting positive aspects and overlooking or not drawing particular attention to the rough spots in their biographies—the task of backing up negative references about their competitors turns out to be much more complicated. In such situations, representatives of the special services begin to feel an acute need for documentary evidence that would testify to manifestations of anything criminal or not entirely reliable on the part of someone not entirely to their liking. And so that in the future they will not have to burden themselves with urgent searches for compromising material on persons who become undesirable to them in direct connection with specific developments in the course of affairs, operational workers of the special services begin to engage in this well beforehand or in advance—directing the efforts of their agents toward carrying out the advance collection of compromising materials on all (without exception) any more or less energetic and active citizens who in any way come within their sight.
In situations where the compromising materials provided by the special services on undesirable (from their point of view) persons turn out to look insufficiently convincing and the balance of opinion regarding the most suitable candidates for appointment to any vacant positions begins to tip against the agents they are pushing, operatives often resort to using the compromising material they had previously collected on those persons who, in such cases, are authorized to make final decisions or are able to influence their outcomes in some way. Put differently, operational workers in difficult situations for themselves show a tendency to use blackmail and various psychological pressures on those officials who represent the interests of agencies, state institutions, and private corporations external to them, and who have at least once been caught by them committing something impermissible or forbidden (or who, for some reason, fear that certain inspections might be sent), in order thereby to obtain from them decisions that would be beneficial for them and for the special services they represent. And since the realities of Russian life are arranged in such a way that even without malicious intent it is impossible to take a single step without violating something, in practice this means that operatives of Russian special services have very broad opportunities in terms of one-time or irregular use as their agents of officials at various levels and forms of ownership.
Having touched upon the topic concerning the possibilities of one-time or irregular use by operational officers of special services of certain citizens as their voluntarily coerced helpers, the author considers it necessary to delve deeper into it and point out the fact of widespread use in operational practice of substandard agents – in the language of the special services usually called informants or tipsters, and colloquially referred to as stool pigeons. In the overwhelming majority of cases, such agents become individuals prone to committing any violating or criminal acts, or close relatives of such individuals, besides them – petty troublemakers and enviers of others’ successes, as well as flawed and complex-ridden little people who, at every opportunity, show an unwavering desire to please someone much more influential or powerful than themselves. Although in their desire to derive some benefits for themselves, such categories of persons in situations of something threatening them (or perceived by them as such) do show certain inclinations to enter into cooperation with representatives of law enforcement agencies on specific grounds and at first glance seem quite suitable candidates for further use as full-fledged agents, in the vast majority of cases this turns out not to be so. Most such persons are unmistakably identified and classified by operatives as of limited suitability for use as agents. The reasons for deeming such persons of limited suitability usually lie in their lack of sufficient life activity and constant focus on success, in their inability to control their emotions sufficiently, in slow-wittedness or, on the contrary, excessive talkativeness and mendacity of their natures. The label of limited suitability, stuck on such categories of persons who agree to cooperate with representatives of law enforcement agencies, in practice means that operational officers of the special services find it most expedient to use them on a one-time and irregular basis – only in cases of some involvement of theirs in specific instances that begin to particularly interest the operatives themselves and about which they find themselves unable to find more worthy witnesses (and in all other situations they seek to drive them away like importunate flies).
But in life, situations often arise when such not quite full-fledged agents, for some random or not entirely random reasons, manage to get close to or attach themselves to someone of particular interest to the operatives, to whom they have no other approaches, or to occupy some official positions that allow them to influence events taking place around certain persons of special interest to them. When such situations arise, operatives often come to the conclusion about the advisability of more frequent and regular use of their substandard agents – during those periods of time while the latter maintain close ties with someone of particular interest to them or continue to occupy specific influential positions, and after such periods end, to return everything to the previous order of using the latter. Agreements on the working conditions of such agents are, as a rule, concluded orally (without obtaining documentary confirmations and granting legal guarantees regarding anything promised or due for full-fledged agents according to the Law of the Russian Federation On Operational-Search Activity«) and concern something strictly specific, and they themselves are not provided any training in the skills of conducting agent activities – with the calculation that they could not begin to use the acquired knowledge to the detriment of the existing authorities, and in the event of any troubles or misunderstandings arising from the actions of such persons, not bear any responsibility for them.
But in all cases when, through the efforts of the special services, certain positions in state institutions or institutions of other forms of ownership become reserved for their agents, the administrations of such institutions and establishments begin to endure numerous inconveniences from the involvement in their activities of persons artificially imposed upon them. One such inconvenience is that, having been allowed to participate in the management of institutions and establishments that are external to the special services, such agents of theirs gain de facto access to their official secrets and behind-the-scenes aspects of their activities, which by no means always proceed in accordance with established rules and laws. That is, by admitting de facto proteges of the special services to participate in the management of their institutions and establishments, their administrations know in advance (or assume with a high degree of certainty) that they are letting a fox into the henhouse and thereby make themselves even more dependent on the pressures and arbitrariness of the representatives of specific special services. But the most important inconvenience from such crony appointees lies not even in this, but in the fact that, being almost entirely obliged for their appointments to the operational personnel of the special services that in fact promoted them, such individuals, in their activities, first of all begin to think about observing the interests of the agencies standing behind them, rather than those under which they are formally listed and on whose behalf they carry out their activities in the posts entrusted to them. In essence, promotees from the special services turn into a kind of foreign bodies artificially implanted into the organisms of particular agencies. In an effort to combat the manifestations of such tendencies, such appointees set about selecting deputies and assistants who would be a match for themselves and, as their career advancement is ensured, seize more and more space within the walls of their institutions and establishments in order to ensure their de facto transition under the complete control of the special services supervising them.
Because following such practices in many cases proves to be harmful to the authorities and contains the potential threat that one of the law enforcement agencies at some point might in this way actually succeed in completely bringing it under its control, representatives of the highest authorities, motivated by considerations of ensuring their own security and the stability of the order they have established, begin to impose certain restrictions on the operational activities of the personnel of specific special services and to create for them such conditions under which they would be compelled to enter into conflicts and constantly settle scores with one another, and consequently to report to the highest authorities any facts of controversial or ambiguously perceived actions committed by agencies competing with them. First of all, this is expressed in the fact that for each of the special services a sphere of its exclusive competence is defined, beyond which it has no right to go in its activity and into which no one else has the right to intrude. At the same time, such spheres are defined in such a way that they overlap with one another in certain areas, and the boundaries separating them are defined in a not entirely clear or very vague manner.
If we outline what has just been said as it applies to the conditions of Russian reality, it would look something like this. The Militia (or internal affairs bodies) has the right to conduct such preliminary work concerning ordinary citizens of Russia in terms of establishing everything related to common crimes, and does not have the right — in relation to ordinary citizens in the sphere of everything directly connected with state security, as well as with regard to foreigners, military personnel, and representatives of the Russian elites (and their close relatives), or in other words, nomenklatura officials at the central and regional level. The FSB has the right to conduct its preliminary work in relation to ordinary citizens of Russia and military personnel, but only in situations related to state security, and also in everything concerning foreigners and representatives of elites at the regional level, and does not have the right — in relation to ordinary citizens and military personnel in the sphere of everything that does not fall within its competence and in relation to representatives of the highest authorities. Military tribunals and their investigative bodies have the right to conduct their work in relation to military personnel or closely connected civilians and have no right with regard to all others. The FSO has the right to conduct its preliminary work in relation to representatives of the highest authorities (and members of their families), as well as all other persons who for some reason come into direct relations and contacts with the former, and has no right in relation to all other persons and with regard to situations not directly connected with the activities and personal lives of the highest representatives of the authorities.
On the whole, from an examination of all the above, it becomes clear that operative work and agent activity are, in essence, a waste-free production, in which everything that has once been taken into circulation finds a use. However, that is not the heart of the matter. Having paid much attention to studying the detailed specifics of agent developments conducted independently by acting agents against ordinary and perfectly normal people, we have somehow moved away from understanding that, though these developments are often carried out by fairly (or very) dirty methods, their main thrust is directed not against the main mass of the population, but against those categories of persons who are not distinguished by law-abidingness or a respectful attitude toward the existing authority, and toward whom the authority itself proves to be far less inclined to show any humanity or scrupulousness in matters of observing their legal rights. It goes without saying that from a purely formal standpoint, things are arranged in such a way that everything looks exactly the opposite. Factual confirmation of the correctness of such assertions on the part of the author of these lines is the high recidivism (or repetition of criminal acts by persons who have previously served sentences for committing something similar) of Russian crime, which speaks for itself about the level of the educational-preventive measures used. What are these educational-preventive measures, widely used by the Russian special services in application to specifically Russian conditions? The main emphasis in the use of such measures is placed not at all on explaining the possibility of highly undesirable consequences for all those who have not yet finally embarked on the criminal path but show certain inclinations, nor on creating around them and all those who have already become criminals such conditions under which their return to a normal life would be realistically possible (for the reasons of the complete disinterest of Russian law enforcement agencies in achieving anything of the sort, see the section Who Are Snitches ?« ).
The main emphasis in educational-preventive measures toward someone very suspicious and highly inconvenient from the point of view of representatives of various special services is placed on constantly including them in the process of agent and operative measures (under formal pretexts of expressing assumptions about their involvement in various unsolved crimes), or, in simpler terms — on endlessly harassing them back and forth and throwing them off psychological balance. The goal of the officers who behave in such a rather unsophisticated manner and of the agents they direct in such cases is usually aimed at, by hook or by crook, forcing the persons they intensively process to embark on a path of direct cooperation with representatives of law enforcement agencies or their agents, or if these persons demonstrate stubborn unwillingness in response, to try to provoke them or push them to commit unprepared or hastily organized crimes. In the latter case, the logic of such behavior by the officers and their agents proves to be extremely simple in essence. Instead of passively waiting until potential criminals manage to conceive something special and prepare for its execution in the most thorough manner, it is far more convenient and simpler to drive each of them to a state of nervous breakdown as quickly as possible, in order to push them to carry out something thoughtless and fairly primitive in its nature, which could then be quickly solved — as they say, in hot pursuit. From this, the operatives manage to derive a double benefit. On the one hand, in this way they ensure for themselves substantial improvements in the reporting on the clearance of crimes, and on the other — they gain the opportunity, with incredible ease, to put behind bars for many years someone who greatly displeases and disturbs them, someone who, under calmer and more favorable conditions for themselves, would in principle be quite capable of preparing to commit crimes conceived in a more thorough manner, the investigations of which usually turn out to be impossible without enormous expenditures of effort and time and are far from always crowned with success. In simpler and more understandable language for all, educational-preventive work with the contingents of potential criminals in Russian law enforcement agencies is in fact is long since replaced by concern for ensuring high formal performance indicators — in terms of achieving the “necessary” percentage of crime clearance — - and is actually sacrificed to them.
In principle, no agent is obliged to report to his operative about whom he is conducting his operational developments against and with what success. But by the force of circumstances turning against him, he always finds himself directly interested in doing so. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that if he proves stubborn, the operative can load any of his agents with the most thankless and dirty work, making them wish they were never born. The second is the agents’ clear awareness of the fact that their operatives, in the vast majority of cases, try to assign tasks concerning the operational developments of individuals who, for particular reasons, have begun to attract heightened interest from the law enforcement organs – not to just anyone, but to those agents who already have preliminary groundwork on those persons. Because of these two reasons, active agents have to report regularly to their operatives not only about the work they are obliged to carry out, but also about the work that is formally optional and recommended to be done independently in any form (the only difference between such reports and the former is that they take place exclusively orally and without the operative using a categorical tone in response – something along the lines of friendly edifying conversations). In other words, by listening to oral reports from their agents about their successes in the field of operational developments, operatives form an idea of the practical value of specific agents for the future and make rough assignments of them to particular lines of activity and to likely candidates for inclusion in operational cultivation. Moreover, during such conversations operatives give their agents friendly recommendations about which of the people around them (who, according to information beginning to come in from other sources, are starting to arouse serious suspicions) they should pay special attention to in the course of their further developments. When instructions arrive to begin operational developments against persons who have already been developed in advance thanks to the initiative of specific agents, the operatives often throw such assignments precisely to them. Acting in this way, operatives in many cases make life easier both for many of their agents and for themselves (as those directly supervising their agents’ work) – that is, they thereby create for themselves the prerequisites for, without any hasty effort on their part, coping in a timely manner with many of the tasks set before them and to ensure high indicators of their work (which are calculated roughly in the same way as for their agents) in order to create real opportunities for their own career advancement.
At the same time, with the arrangements they create, should any undesirable misunderstandings arise in the course of preliminary operational developments, the operatives are able to wash their hands of everything easily – to declare that they gave no instructions on that matter to their agents, but merely expressed recommendations of a general nature, which were not mandatory for strict fulfilment and contained no specific details. In other words, operatives have the ability at any moment to make particular agents guilty for others’ (i.e., mistakes committed not by the agents, but by themselves) mistakes. By this means, operatives secure the opportunity to exert additional pressure on their agents and actually compel them to constantly show respectfulness and the most deferential attitude towards such curators, who for their part are free to treat the former however they please at any given moment. However, looking to the future, there is no sense for operatives to sacrifice their more or less promising agents (who do not lie about on the road, but are cultivated through enormous effort and a considerable expenditure of time) for any sufficiently foolish or accidental reasons. Based on these considerations, in such cases operatives most often strive to arrange matters so that the ones found guilty and punished are not the agents who are actually at fault, but someone among their willing and extremely short‑sighted accomplices who acted together with them out of a desire to show friendly support to someone who in reality has deceived them (or, to put it another way, out of their own stupidity – not understanding at all the essence of what they are thereby getting themselves into).
In direct connection with what has just been said, operatives teach their agents one simple but mandatory truth. The essence of this truth is as follows. The agent himself should never undertake the direct execution of concrete actions that might lead to undesirable consequences (and the onset of criminal liability for them) and should delegate their execution to someone outside or dependent on him, so that if something goes wrong, he always has grounds for claiming his non‑involvement and the opportunity to point to a concrete executor on whom he can easily shift all the blame for what has happened and taken an undesirable turn.
If we consider the question of what the so-called “educational-preventive work” carried out against potentially dangerous and undesirable persons by subjecting them to agent-based surveillance actually entails, the following picture can be outlined. By using their henchmen and securing (through the direct efforts of the operatives covering them) a certain support from the administrations of their institutions, agents operating there begin spreading specific rumors and, by various means, quickly silencing anyone who hinders them in this, all calculated to create, in the shortest possible time, a zone of alienation and suspicion around the potentially dangerous or undesirable persons — those who arrive from somewhere into new surroundings and begin working there or merely frequenting the place — among the majority of the long-time residents and veteran workers who are barely acquainted with them. Having ensured all this, the agents, closely monitoring everything, begin to observe how the individuals being processed in this manner will behave henceforth. For the latter, in situations of this sort, only two behavioral options remain. The first consists of provoking in the processed individuals, as a responsive reaction, an overt animosity and anger toward everyone regarding them with suspicion in their new surroundings. The constant expression of overt animosity and anger by preliminarily roused and unsettled individuals repeatedly results in them endlessly provoking conflicts with those people whom they are forced into contact with more often than others.
Because, as a result of investigating the causes of such conflicts and determining the degree of guilt for each side involved, everything invariably turns out to be rigged against the undesirable newcomers, ultimately nothing else remains for them but to leave such intolerant social milieus and collectives with a scandal or, in an effort to prove their innocence or to exact revenge upon all their offenders, to resort to their fists or lean toward committing something knowingly criminal. However, the committing of any criminal acts repeatedly results in such individuals ending up behind bars, which plays into the hands of police operatives and other special services — after all, the fewer potentially dangerous individuals remain free, the lower the probability of any unexpected and well-calculated actions on their part, and thus the lower the probability of any troubles or worries for the operatives in their line of duty. If there’s no person, there’s no problem: such is the reasoning logic of operatives in situations of this sort. As for scandalous departures from specific collectives and milieus and journeys in search of a “better life” for the individuals deliberately harassed by agents, these usually change nothing and do not lead to the creation of anything fundamentally new. The reasons for this prove to be exceedingly simple. Law enforcement operatives, closely interacting with one another in their work and having their confidential informants and agents everywhere, quickly learn of any attempts by the people they invisibly persecute to integrate into other collectives or social milieus and again easily create a zone of alienation and suspicion around them. By forcing such individuals to endlessly run in circles and leap from place to place, operatives and their agents create for them the reputation of “job-hoppers” and unsociable people next to whom no self-respecting person would want to work or closely associate — meaning, in essence, they turn them into a kind of outcast, who everywhere and always prove to be undesirable and alien, and who experience numerous discomforts because of this.
The most persistent representatives of this category, constantly sensing something amiss happening around them without a clear understanding of the reasons behind it, begin to experience enormous strain on their inner resources and often reach a state of nervous derangement. Taking their suspicions as far as the thought that all their misfortunes flow exclusively from being incessantly pursued by representatives of either the secret services or mysterious forces they cannot understand, and at the same time lacking any factual confirmation of such assumptions, quite a number of such individuals start to speak about this aloud. In response, operational officers and their agents make efforts to cultivate among everyone around the opinion that such statements are utterly groundless and frankly ridiculous, and that those making them behave this way solely because they are mentally ill and have completely lost their minds. The fact that the outcome of the set of actions described, when applied to various potentially dangerous and undesirable persons, often results in the onset of severe mental illness in many of them, does not disturb the operatives or their agents in the slightest. On the contrary, they find this state of affairs entirely satisfactory and convenient—after all, monitoring and observing the actions of a mentally deficient and limited person proves far simpler and easier than watching someone who is of sound mind and capable of well-calculated actions and cunning combinations. Put even more bluntly, responsibility for any oversight (or untimely preventive measures) concerning the actions of persons who pose a certain danger but are mentally ill no longer falls on the internal affairs bodies or state security—in such cases the question of oversight passes into the medical sphere, for which they are no longer responsible but the Ministry of Health is. For this very reason, operative personnel follow a logic that can be expressed in the following words: The more fools appear in society, the simpler and easier it becomes to carry out work among the rest of the people.
The second behavioral option left for potentially dangerous and undesirable individuals subjected to educational and preventive processing consists ininducing in themguilt complexes. To put it more simply and understandably for all, agents and the operatives behind them, by creating zones of alienation and suspicion around the individuals they are working on from the majority of those around them, try to plant in their heads the thought that consequences of this kind are the result of something purely spontaneous and have arisen because of their own incorrect behavior and the wrong way they have built relationships with everyone around them. In their desire to change and somehow correct their situation, such individuals often begin to display obsequiousness, to fawn, and to follow the lead of those around them who seem authoritative. By behaving in this way, in the overwhelming majority of cases they fall under the influence of the agents operating around them and turn into blind tools in the hands of the latter. Appearing as their benefactors and, at first, giving the skillfully processed individuals certain support, such agents rather easily get them, as a reciprocal step and a show of gratitude, to agree to carry out various assignments.
The assignments with which agents approach persons ensnared in this way generally turn out to be very specific. The essence of this specificity lies in the following points. Very many people are inclined to experience various kinds of fears or, conversely, prove prone to violent expressions of something inappropriate in response to various provocative stimuli. In situations of confrontation with undesirable and inconvenient individuals who start to behave too independently, the operating agents in many cases conclude that it is advisable to subject them to test influences in the form of intimidation or provocations. But since attempts at intimidation and provocationoften result in serious troublefor theperformers of such actions themselves, agents, having absolutely no wish to take risks, diligently start searching among those around them for someone quite suitable to carry out such actions. In all such cases, their primaryattention becomes focused on those among the individuals they have already developedwho have certain inclinations toward brazen or provocative conduct and whom they then proceed to use extensively, mainly in that capacity.
Those among the entrapped persons who reveal criminal inclinations toward something not so brazen and obvious (like bribery or theft) are put to use by the active agents in a somewhat different way. The essence of such use can be expressed as follows. In order to ensure closer cohesion of their groups of henchmen and the persons drawn into them, agents need to secure a constant influx of funds, a significant portion of which then goes toward arranging joint informal events, held under the guise of amusement and pleasant pastime (or, in other words, for representation purposes). For the simple reason that the operatives are unable to cover all the agents’ representation expenses (owing to a chronic lack of funds allocated for these purposes in the budgets of their departments, and a suspicion toward the agents themselves, who not infrequently show a tendency to spend the sums given them not for the intended purpose but for their personal aims), the latter, in the overwhelming majority of cases, are forced to solve such problems on their own. In practice, this looks roughly like this. Learning through their channels that certain officials are engaged in theft or bribe-taking, the active agents at some moment approach them and say roughly the following: If you want to go on quietly stealing (or taking bribes), you have to share with other people. Those thieving officials who in such situations prove uncooperative soon find themselves, through the efforts of dissatisfied agents and the operatives behind them, exposed for violations and criminal acts with all the consequences that flow from that. Other bribe-takers and thieves, learning of such cases, begin to become more compliant and yield to the agents blackmailing them.
But by obtaining from individual—dishonest—officials a fundamental agreement to share, the agents run into problems of another kind. One of them consists in securing the possibility of removing stolen material assets beyond the guarded territories of enterprises and their storage bases. However, actions of this sort are too provocative and highly conspicuous, and in addition, are impossible without obtaining direct instructions from heads of security services or higher-level managers. In situations like this, active agents most often prefer to arrange their affairs so that everything appears as modest as possible and does not attract attention. Seeking out among rank-and-file guards lovers of free meals and all kinds of freebies, the agents quickly get them on the hook and arrange that they will carry out very superficial searches of the persons the agents designate and let them through without any quibbling. After that, the agents turn to the previously entrapped persons with thieving tendencies and task them with starting to carry out a regular removal (or removal in small batches) of stolen goods, not forgetting to point out that everything is arranged with the security guards and they can act without fear.
In other cases, the agents propose to the entrapped thieving officials that they issue large bonuses and fictitious work orders (or orders for such work whose payment is made at very high rates) to the rank-and-file employees and ordinary workers whom the agents will indicate. Then the agents approach one or another of the rank-and-file workers who are dependent on them and tell them that, over and above what is due (on a one-time or regular basis), large sums of money will be credited to them, which they will be obliged to return to their benefactors in cash. In those spheres of activity that are by their nature the most bribe-intensive, agents organize the extraction of material assets in a somewhat different way. They introduce a certain number of their own people into the number of subordinates of the bribe-takers they have ensnared. Together with the chief bribe-takers, placing such people in those specific positions that prove most suitable for extorting bribes, the agents (with the direct connivance of the former) give their henchmen instructions to demand from third parties who apply to them additional documents and permits, and pointlessly chase them in circles among various authorities, while simultaneously hinting that under certain conditions all these problems can easily be overcome. To put it more simply, such rank-and-file performers were urged under any pretext to delay the performance of what is required of them and in this way induce third parties to give bribes for cooperation and for the urgency of the work performed. Precisely because for the rank-and-file performers the risk of running into serious trouble in such situations is very considerable, they are allowed, as an incentive to act, to keep half of the sums obtained, or everything that exceeds the norm of collection established for them for each reporting period.
When such potentially dangerous and undesirable individuals are detected, who demonstrate an ability to evade all kinds of provocations and primitive tricks used against them by agents, the latter resort to using more sophisticated methods. Examples of such methods include verbal prodding and encouragement of such persons (expressed through the mouths of subordinate agents) to participate in acts of theft or bribe-taking, which many around them engage in with apparent ease and impunity, or to express dissatisfaction and carry out protest actions against those officials who persistently refuse to indulge the activities of the agents deployed among them, or to attempt to interfere in the affairs and expose criminal actions of groups organized by other agents, whom the first ones begin to view as competitors in the struggle for actual influence within something separate or local. The goal of such actions usually is to make those potentially dangerous and undesirable persons drawn into such actions guilty of everything—either to put them in prison or to bring upon them such misfortunes that they will later greatly regret.
Regarding those potentially dangerous and undesirable persons who do not show an inclination for anything similar, the acting agents begin to behave somewhat differently—to accustom them to an unhealthy lifestyle. In other words, such persons (using one or another of their discovered weaknesses) the agents attempt to accustom to regular consumption of alcohol or drugs, to involve them in gambling and wild orgies, to introduce to them as lovers some of their own subordinates. All this is done with the cunning calculation of knocking the bewildered persons out of their usual rhythm of life, leaving them without means for further existence, depriving them of health and the constant company of close and well-known people, in order ultimately to throw them onto the garbage heap of life—as someone completely broken and no longer needed by anyone.
Those potentially dangerous and undesirable persons who, due to their extensive experience and moral stability, begin to show obvious resistance to all the influences described above and by their examples adversely affect the surrounding collectives, the agents start processing somewhat differently. The essence of such processing consists in the agents creating suitable conditions for the daily engagement of the processed persons in overtime work or inclusion in limited small groups of employees or workers, for whom, due to various reasons, special conditions for their activities are created and who are housed separately from the main body of those around them. Its goal is to, by providing such processed persons with real opportunities for fairly high earnings, occupy them with work to such an extent that they have no free time left except for eating and sleeping, and also to accustom them to unquestioning submission to whoever, by his connections and authority, ensures their privileged position and a contemptuous attitude toward the interests of all others.
In cases when, after inclusion in narrow privileged environments, such processed persons begin to declare their unwillingness to turn into very limited beings and show ingratitude toward the informal leaders of their work groups (who are usually either the agents themselves or the most trusted of their subordinates), the agents change expressions of mercy to expressions of anger. Such anger usually finds expression in the form of throwing out such persons who prove unable to realize all the advantages of the position created for them and transferring them to sections with harsh working conditions and tense work rhythms. If, as a result of being subjected to such sudden severe pressures, especially keenly felt against the background of the previous soft and good-natured attitude toward them, the processed persons do not begin to beg to come back, they are crushed ever harder—until they either are finally broken and ready to agree to any conditions for the sake of obtaining some relief and concessions for themselves, or from the humiliations experienced from many of those around them and the simultaneous awareness of their inability to change the existing order resort to manifestations of extremism (which is a convenient pretext for sentencing such improperly behaving persons to deprivation of freedom or sending them for compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals with subsequent labeling as mentally abnormal).
When the desired results are not apparent, agents and the operatives behind them continue to work the designated persons with redoubled and tripled energy, and persist in their conduct until the latter either abandon their posts—where intolerable conditions of service or work have been created for them—and move on to new ones, or, having endured all hardships, wait for moments when the acting agents, due to changed circumstances and established priorities, find themselves forced to ease their pressure, compelled to concentrate their main efforts on someone who has become more important to them. But such relaxations or cessations of intensive agent influence on persons once targeted are, as a rule, a temporary phenomenon that re-emerges in other places or intensifies again after certain periods of time. All subsequent applications of agent influence are essentially repeated iterations of everything described above, undertaken in the hope that the next attempts will prove more successful than the previous ones—whether due to the inevitable cracking of the targeted persons’ characters, or because the agents newly working them turn out to be more adroit and perceptive than their predecessors. Prolonged lulls in all this can arise only in those fairly rare cases when persistently targeted potentially dangerous persons, as they go through life, manage to find for themselves some secluded nooks and crannies (by renouncing their former way of life and retreating into something of their own, or by finding powerful patrons or defenders capable and always ready to provide effective legal or other protection)—nooks from which, on the one hand, it proves very difficult to pry them loose, and on the other, there is no point, because operatives and their agents conclude that it is inexpedient to incur regular, significant efforts to achieve something improbable or insignificant, and thus to gain real power over someone who has long ceased to be in the least dangerous to them, or who has plainly proved to be beyond their powers.
After having more or less sorted out the techniques and methods used in their work by acting agents against potentially dangerous and undesirable persons, the time has come to delve into the specifics of the operations carried out against the agents themselves—operations conducted by the operational officers of specific security services who stand over them. From reading everything written here, you have probably already realized that literally every pore of our society is permeated by agent influence directed by specific agents. But at the same time, society is structured in such a way that some communities and groupings endlessly spring up while others die off. In their desire to keep every emerging community under their close scrutiny and to find a use for agents who, due to circumstances, suddenly find themselves unable to engage in their usual activities, the operatives controlling them are from time to time compelled to carry out transfers of releasedagents to other areas of work. On the other hand, because there are various spheres of life in society that differ greatly from one another in many of their manifestations, there are different lines of agent activity, developed with this specificity in mind. Because some agents, within what was originally assigned to them, begin to demonstrate their obvious inability to cope with the tasks set before them, while others, on the contrary, reveal abilities that tell the operatives it is expedient to use them in something more significant and promising. In direct connection with what has just been said, the operatives make it a practice to divide their agents into various categories and then periodically reassess the value of each of them—based on the results of their work over the preceding period. Based on the results of such assessments, and also taking into account the state of health and age-related changes in the behavioral patterns of specific agents, the operational personnel come to conclusions about whether it is advisable or inadvisable to leave certain agents in their former positions, and they set aboutreshuffling the agent cadres at their disposal, proceeding from the tasks of the current day and emerginggeneral needs.
So those agents who start to exhibit blatant lack of talent and stupidity, a clear inability for agent work (which happens extremely rarely and generally indicates the operational staff’s own professional incompetence), are simply written off as unfit for agent work. Those among them who show complete mediocrity and extreme indifference are for that very reason deemed unpromising. As opportunities arise, they are removed from their initial lines of work and redirected, taking into account their existing professions and qualifications (as educators, teachers, vocational training instructors, cooks, facility managers, etc.), to carry on their further work in children’s homes, juvenile colonies, and low-prestige vocational-technical schools. In other words, to places where the permanent populations are largely deprived of the most basic things — do not possess much life experience or any knowledge — and for that very reason are highly pliable even at the most inept and primitive level of development efforts. Those agents who, despite all their mediocrity and clumsiness, begin to show a certain diligence, are usually directed to work (in a variety of capacities) in general-education schools, vocational-technical schools, and secondary specialized educational institutions. To the same places, as well as to universities, experienced and highly seasoned agents are often sent. This is done because they are considered of limited suitability for further use due to reaching pre-retirement age, sustaining injuries, and suffering serious illnesses (especially those who served in military or law enforcement agencies and were widely used in such specific social environments as agents of special departments and internal security services), and in order to give them the opportunity — as a reward for past services — to pursue their familiar line of work under conditions that do not require great dedication.
Among underperforming agents, operatives pay particular attention to those who reveal a drive to compensate for their apparent deficiencies by displays of something cruel and criminal in essence. Their efforts are usually redirected toward drawing into their circles young people who have clear inclinations toward criminal activity but have not yet merged into the criminal milieu. Operatives give special attention to this line of agent activity based not only on preventive but also on purely practical considerations. The essence of such considerations lies in the fact that, in the course of developing specific individuals, many agents often have to deal with demonstrations by those individuals of open displays of something malevolent or criminal (conditioned both by the personality traits of their characters and by their connections among government officials). Realizing that representatives of such categories of persons under development are not inclined to file formal, documented complaints with law enforcement agencies about harassment by those around them — if only because subsequent investigations would inevitably bring to light certain facts of their own criminal behavior — agents conclude that it is expedient to exert pressure on them by committing acts of crude physical violence, stealing their property, robbery, and outright extortion. But the regular perpetration of such brazen and overt criminal acts requires the availability of suitably prepared individuals who, on the one hand, would be inclined to keep silent, and on the other, ready to commit their crimes in exchange for being provided with something sufficiently insignificant and minimal. In other words, agents need to have at their disposal such criminals who exemplify inexperience and naivety in life. And since finding such individuals anywhere outside proves impossible, they reach the conclusion that it is expedient to cultivate rank-and-file executors of any of their criminal schemes, who would not suspect the true purpose for which they are being used and would consider themselves real (i.e., independently acting) criminals.
However, carrying out such criminal actions turns out to be associated with a certain risk of exposure, both for the ordinary perpetrators and for the direct organizers of their actions. Not wishing to risk their most valuable agents over trifles, many operatives come to the conclusion that it is expedient to use as intermediaries and direct organizers of specific criminal acts those of their agents who seem to them to have little promise, but who are distinguished by displays of unbridled malice. Freeing such unpromising and “malicious” agents (in other words, lawless agents) from carrying out complex and long-term assignments, operatives set about reorienting them toward carrying out something one-time and auxiliary. In other words, they are tasked with behaving among those around them in the image and likeness of criminal authorities and thereby attracting the attention of that part of the youth that begins to show a desire to learn criminal skills under the guidance of someone highly experienced in this matter. After the initial cores of criminal groups organized in this way have been prepared, the operatives, without letting their leaders — in the person of their defective agents — in on the whole affair, start setting specific tasks for them. Such tasks consist of instructions to these agents regarding persons, places, and times for carrying out everything required of them, along with simultaneously conveying to them the demand that they independently convey all this to the future rank-and-file perpetrators, in the person of their not entirely reasonable henchmen, under the pretense that such plans are the result of their own independent designs.
At the same time as all of the above, operatives are engaged in providing cover for the planned criminal actions — by arranging matters in such a way that, in the event of alarm signals from those around them about the perpetration of the said criminal deeds, the militia reacts to them with a significant delay. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this proves quite sufficient for all the perpetrators of the criminal actions to manage to escape in time and be able to remain unpunished. By accustoming such persons to impunity, mutual unity, and distancing themselves from the rest of those around them, the agents leading them turn them into blind tools for carrying out their intentions and instill in them one inviolable rule. Its essence is as follows — if they fall into the hands of the militia, they must keep silent about everything and take upon themselves the entire blame for what has been done jointly. By tuning their charges in this way, the agents leading them thus strive to secure for themselves and the overwhelming majority of them the possibility of avoiding the onset of responsibility for the criminal acts committed, no matter how circumstances turn out. (In all those cases where individual members of such groups, having been accidentally detained by militia officers and not wishing to take the entire blame upon themselves, start giving up other accomplices, the operatives quickly learn of this. By regularly beating such persons during interrogations and creating unbearable conditions of confinement in the cells of pre-trial detention centers, the operatives find it quite easy to get them to retract everything previously stated and to turn the course of the development of the cases under investigation into the channel most suitable for themselves.)
Those agents who, on the one hand, possess the ability to easily establish relations with the most varied people, and on the other — owing to a propensity for irresponsibility and licentiousness in their behavior — prove incapable of rallying stable groups around themselves, are often employed as agents provocateurs.
Provocateurs are agents, usually recruited by representatives of the special services for brief or episodic participation in one or another operation. Such operations can be carried out both against individual persons and against fairly large groups of the population. As a rule, they are aimed at pushing such persons to display something untimely and ill-considered in situations when the special services become aware of protest actions being prepared by them, or of prolonged undesirable targeted actions. The purpose of operations conducted with the involvement of provocateurs is to disrupt or interrupt the course of everything undesirable before the moments when they would develop in full force, and the point is to discredit such movements — by presenting their main (or some of their) participants as ordinary criminals, rather than fighters for any of their rights. Everything thus conceived is usually achieved by arranging something provocative or appealing in front of the main participants in such processes and encouraging them to jointly participate in the initiated — unreasonable or outright criminal — public acts. As soon as the incited actions begin to take a serious turn, the provocateurs quickly remove themselves from the events they provoked and, before the arrival of law enforcement representatives, dissolve into the crowds of indifferent onlookers so as to allow them to carry out arrests and place all the blame on the most short-sighted and zealous participants in what happened.
Those agents who, on the one hand, display certain aptitudes for carrying out such activities, but on the other hand, quite often commit serious mistakes and omissions due to inattentiveness (which is usually a direct consequence of demonstrating one-sided interests in particular areas of their professions or is related to an excessive passion for amateur activities or recreational sports), are usually directed to work in universities and research institutions or are infiltrated into amateur creative collectives and sports sections with the goal of subsequently turning them into leaders of small groups of people who are passionate about something and very trusting of them.
For all its apparent lack of seriousness, this line of agent activity is customarily regarded in the secret services as one of the most important. This is because any amateur activities have always been and continue to be treated with the greatest suspicion (as something in many respects akin to the criminal). It goes without saying that such suspicions do not arise among representatives of the secret services without reason or out of thin air. The essence of the whole problem can be expressed as follows. Although the overwhelming majority of enthusiasts devote a significant part of their time to pursuits that are, in principle, quite harmless and, in most cases, completely useless in terms of deriving any practical benefit from them, at the same time, some individuals among them sometimes manage to make unexpected discoveries, develop unprecedented abilities, or come to realize possibilities for the unconventional application of something long known, which turn out to be quite suitable for use for antisocial and criminal purposes. Such discoveries and personal achievements often arouse in creative individuals an overt desire to somehow test everything or verify in practice the correctness of their preliminary conclusions (which, when such ideas are actually implemented, often results in disastrous and irreparable consequences both for the authorities themselves and for many ordinary people). Agents of this orientation are precisely engaged in monitoring the discoveries and achievements of their fellow enthusiasts and in controlling the moods that arise in creative collectives by ensuring their regular redirection into more appropriate channels and by reporting to operational workers everything that they consider truly important and highly significant.
Those agents who show an inclination for expressing something rather monotonous are primarily used for infiltration into workers’ collectives and the environment of ordinary employees. Those who begin to display confusion and susceptibility to ideas suggested to them by higher-ranking individuals are arranged transfers to work in state institutions. Those who are able to establish business relations with representatives of entrepreneurial circles are used as businessmen operating according to “black” or “gray” schemes — with the aim of gaining the trust of representatives of illegal or semi-legal business and catching them red-handed. Those who discover in themselves the ability to present themselves as defenders of public interests are pushed toward leadership positions in trade unions and other public organizations — for the purpose of exerting on all their members and individual representatives underlying influences that most fully correspond to the interests of the current authorities. Those who demonstrate the ability to quickly single out and seize from the general mass something that appears most suitable and convenient for a given situation are in many cases redirected into the sphere of journalism or culture. Those who can attract the attention of those around them, as well as those capable of unfailing politeness and of endearing themselves to someone they have marked out in advance, are most often directed to positions involving administrative work with foreigners, as well as with well-known and prominent representatives of their own society.
By and large, in this matter there are many various gradations, which could be enumerated for a very long time. But one of them stands apart from all the others. This is agents belonging to the category of moles or quiet ones. For use in this capacity, beginner agents are selected who, in the course of their operational cultivation, prove to be inclined to concentrate on individual persons and show an inability to cultivate several different people simultaneously. Despite their apparent lack of promise, mole agents turn out to be very convenient for ensuring invisible control over the behavior and way of thinking of certain very influential and widely known personalities who, by virtue of their high position or their standing and authority in society, are potentially capable of undermining the existing power and are therefore regarded by its organs as competitors and persons potentially dangerous to society.
Because such individuals, by virtue of their high position, are capable of removing any agent assigned to them at any moment and, in most cases—by using their connections—can put pressure on responsible intelligence officials so that they will long lose the desire to repeat anything similar in the future, extensive preparatory work is carried out with future mole agents. In order to give such agents an appearance that would make them indistinguishable from ordinary people and completely unlike typical agents, they are given a directive to cease maintaining stable contacts with all people who previously knew them and to lead a reclusive lifestyle. As a next step, they are infiltrated into the circles of their designated targets (or very influential persons) under the guise of someone very necessary to them, yet at the same time sufficiently insignificant and unpretentious (in order to thus provide the moles with a real opportunity to conduct relentless detailed surveillance of the behavior of whoever is designated to them and to gain their complete trust). Usually moles appear as housekeepers, nurses, secretaries, permanent lovers, gardeners, personal bodyguards, drivers, pet sitters. Almost never communicating with anyone else and constantly being near their hosts, such agents, through their readiness to be useful and their developing ability to catch their masters’ unspoken thoughts, in many cases begin to conquer the latter to the very depths of their souls. Making a habit of communicating completely openly with such pleasant and likable persons, the targets being cultivated often engage in exchanging thoughts on socially significant matters. In doing so, they hope to obtain from their close assistants a real sense of what many ordinary people think about it, and at the same time they are confident that everything they voice will not become known to any alien ears because of the almost complete lack of opportunities for those constantly near them to communicate with anyone outside.
In turn, mole agents, in the course of conducting heart-to-heart conversations, quickly determine the essence of their content, and then promptly relay everything to their handlers through special couriers, who periodically appear at the hosts’ premises under the pretext of fulfilling their service or other duties. In addition to transmitting the acquired information, the moles receive from the couriers other information, composed by the handlers and essentially false or heavily distorted. The purpose of using such information is to convey it to high-ranking and authoritative individuals under the guise of what many ordinary people think on a particular matter. Because such individuals in the vast majority of cases are deprived of the opportunity to regularly communicate with ordinary people, they usually take what is reported to them at face value and on this basis often arrive at erroneous decisions of a nature that is most convenient for the intelligence services and the highest authorities. In situations where high-ranking or highly authoritative figures begin to contemplate the possibility of carrying out something dangerous or highly undesirable from the authorities’ point of view and they cannot be stopped, decisions on their political or physicaltheirelimination are often made. Handlers who have mole agents at their disposal often engage them for these purposes in such cases and in most instances ensure the successful achievement of all that was planned.
Another, much more numerous type of mole agents is widely used for the purposes of covert surveillance and carrying out various kinds of influence and provocations against individual groups and persons in places of deprivation of liberty, as well as those leading an isolated and secluded lifestyle.
Because such individuals in most cases have considerable life experience, are prone to suspicion and retaliatory vengeance, using agents of the ordinary or classic type against them proves ineffective and fraught with significant losses for the latter. For this very reason, moles are also employed against individuals inclined to vindictiveness and suspicion. In order to gain the trust of someone designated to them, at the instigation of their handlers, such agents begin to behave in a way that is most welcomed and encouraged in particular narrow or closed circles—so as to create on their regular members and habitués the impression that they are to them truly one of their own. Having behaved in some very striking and demonstrative manner and quickly gaining the trust of the persons of interest, such agents proceed to cultivate with them a close friendship and simultaneously inform on their every step and action, and also—on instructions from their handlers—surreptitiously hindering their specific affairs and orchestrating various kinds of dirty tricks.
Having examined the varieties of agents and the existing directions of their activities, it is time to move on to another topic. Namely — the special role of agents in the life of the societies and states around them. By acquiring numerous connections and opportunities to influence a wide range of people, the most successful among active agents become capable of solving, quickly and without much effort, problems that appear very complex or practically unsolvable to others. Discovering that they possess such capabilities, many of those around them begin turning to these authoritative agents — in most cases not even suspecting that they are agents of the security services and sincerely believing that they have achieved such significant recognition in society solely because of their exceptional business acumen — with difficult problems (such as property disputes, settling conflicts with regulatory bodies, avoiding criminal liability for unlawful actions, obtaining information that constitutes a trade secret, securing debt recovery, and eliminating competitors). Undertaking to help solve other people’s problems, such agents act far from selflessly and often turn this kind of activity into a well-organized business that provides them with regular inflows of substantial funds. Using their connections, they begin investing the money they receive into creating illegal and semi-legal production facilities, thus further increasing their incomes. Having accumulated initial capital, the agents who have succeeded in this endeavor start playing for high stakes — moving in on (or pressuring in various ways) those competitors who lack extensive social connections and compelling them to engage in joint activities on unfavorable terms.
But having achieved certain successes in the field of business deeply intertwined with crime, successful agents, along with the further growth of their influence on society, begin to feel the discomfort of the ticklishness and duality of their position. This discomfort and ticklishness stem from the status they once acquired as agents of the security services that use them. Possessing the aforementioned status, along with granting them special opportunities and advantages (without which they would hardly have ever been able to achieve such significant success in life), necessarily entails the agents taking on numerous obligations for ongoing participation in the operational work conducted by the operatives who manage them. In simpler and more understandable terms for everyone, agents — by virtue of the fact that they are agents — are obliged to expend a significant portion of their personal time and energy on carrying out missions that are regularly assigned to them by representatives of the security services. In situations of this kind, they have to tear themselves apart and work on two fronts at once: on the one hand, organizing their actions based on the interests of the security services behind them, and on the other, directing their efforts toward ensuring the success of their private business. In order to somehow free themselves from the burdens of the first front and gain the ability to focus entirely on the second, the most successful agents begin resorting to various subterfuges. The essence of such subterfuges lies in drawing the case officers supervising them into participation in their criminal or semi-criminal business (while simultaneously accumulating compromising material on them) or exerting powerful pressure on them by utilizing cultivated connections in circles of government officials. The purpose of such actions on the part of the most successful agents is directed toward forcing the operatives to abandon the regular use of their most valuable assets and their recruitment to participate in the operatives’ developments, and making them vitally interested in providing them with reliable cover (or “roofs”) from pressure by regulatory bodies and attacks by other criminal groups. It is precisely from here that everything concealed under the definition of organized crime takes its roots.
In turn, those most successful among active agents who manage to gain the trust of individual politicians and influential representatives of power and become very useful and indispensable to them in one way or another, often proceed to use the latter to exert all kinds of pressure on the operatives supervising them — in order to completely discourage the said intelligence service representatives from continuing their active use as agents and to turn themselves into figures independent of them in the business and political arena. But by thus acquiring de facto independence from the intelligence operatives, such agents become dependent on the influential politicians and prominent representatives of power who protect them, who turn out to be not much better than the operatives. Such influential figures usually proceed to make full use of the most valuable agents effectively wrested from the intelligence services for their own interests and to boss them around (threatening such henchmen with a return to the power of the hated operatives, to whom they remain registered as agents, or in other words, with being handed over for actual tearing apart) in cases where they begin to express dissatisfaction with their excessive workload of their new patrons’ affairs and inability to properly concentrate on solving their own problems and matters. For this very reason, the most successful agents, seeking to secure their position, are vitally interested in entering power and obtaining parliamentary immunity (both from their high-ranking patrons and from the annoying operatives who begin blackmailing them and want to continue their active use as their operational agents). Those among them who manage to reach such a high state level and finally attain the desired independence from anyone at all then proceed to act by their accustomed methods — quickly bringing their legislative colleagues under their control and forming them into their own factions. But at the same time, having achieved a position in which the law forbids the continuation of their use as agents, the overwhelming majority of such former agents prove incapable of coping with the burden of the past weighing on them. Having grown accustomed during their time as agents to their lack of independence and constant shelter under the supervision of the operatives who looked after them, former agents find that situation quite convenient. Once in power, such agents, instead of stepping forward as leading figures of authority and taking responsibility for the course of all processes, begin to expend their efforts on always remaining in the number‑two position and being able to casually interfere in any of their initiatives with some critical or laudatory remarks. In other words, they turn into political entrepreneurs who are guided in their actions not by state considerations but invariably support whoever offers them the most favorable terms in the course of backroom political deals. Beginning to flaunt their success, such high‑level agents proceed to infect many other legislative colleagues with their highly disdainful and cynical attitude toward everything going on in the surrounding life and to exert a corrupting influence on all structures of state power.
In turn, representatives of the intelligence services, anxiously observing the growth of such trends and in order to prevent the unjustified strengthening and loss from their control of their most valuable agent cadres, on the one hand proceed to regularly shuttle their successful agents from place to place so as not to give them the opportunity to properly entrench themselves and acquire stable connections, and on the other hand — create a competitive environment for them. (In other words, to infiltrate several agents at once into various collectives and groups so that they constantly squabble among themselves and constantly feel the dependence of their position on the intelligence services supporting them and their specific representatives.) In response to this, many successful agents, soon after the implementation of their transfers to new workplaces proceed to drag along behind them their former henchmen. For this very reason, in those institutions and establishments where intelligence service agents are gaining strength in the leadership, appointments to various positions all too often begin to be made not on the basis of business qualities but out of considerations of ensuring personal loyalty and fidelity of the appointees to those who secure their advancement. Because multiple competing agents are introduced into many collectives at once, the factions they form often create internecine strife and endless squabbling and thereby effectively paralyze the productive activity of their institutions and enterprises. And since in most cases the leaders of various competing factions are agents representing the interests of different intelligence services, this competition all too often begins to spill over into competition between various law enforcement agencies and oversight bodies and lead to the emergence of inconsistency and strife within the government.
Finding themselves placed in such conditions, where advancement to the level of power is artificially hindered, the most active of successful agents begin to come to the idea of the expediency of forming numerous groups of their support from among the most diverse representatives of the surrounding society. In order to rally around themselves large numbers of random people, enterprising agents start to win their sympathies by engaging in verbal speculation around existing social problems and handing out promises to quickly solve them by some radical means in the event of their coming to power, or in other words, to act as founders of political parties (with sonorous names — of the liberal or patriotic type),which instead of seeking any constructive solutions come out with populist slogans.
Those of the very active agents who, having rallied around themselves large groups of random people, discover their inability to enter power independently, often attract the attention of individual representatives of the authorities of their regions, who, due to having special ambitions, feel a desire to subdue the central authority or become independent from it. In many cases this results in nothing other than the conclusion of oral agreements between specific regional leaders and individual very authoritative agents to the effect that the latter will create suitable conditions for the former to gain full power, and the latter, after such gains, will take the former on as their deputies and assistants (or in other words, as political technologists-puppeteers). Having agreed on the terms and received tacit support, such agents proceed to unfold their party activity in another direction. Singling out for themselves that part of the population that constitutes the majority in one region or another, such figures set about declaring themselves their supporters and fighters against encroachments on their interests and vital rights by the central authorities or representatives of the local national (religious) minorities. In other words, under the guise of combating emerging social injustice they undertake to push misanthropic ideas and views about the inferiority of some population groups compared to others.
Due to the fact that such parties frequently begin to behave in an unpredictable and highly undesirable manner, the authorities, in order to ensure the possibility of keeping them under their invisible control, in turn undertake targeted efforts to ensure their internal splits. This is achieved by the very same agent methods applied to the leaders of party minorities. Singling out among such not entirely independent narrow-group leaders, who, feeling their inability to become leaders of the majority of the members of their parties and at the same time possessing enormous leadership ambitions, specially authorized representatives of the authorities in certain cases offer them to conclude tacit mutually beneficial deals. The purpose of carrying out such deals consists in encouraging schismatic activity by individual minorities (by providing them with invisible administrative-informational support) within certain parties that are perceived by the authorities as unfriendly. Organizationally fragmenting the forces unfriendly to it and at the moments it needs artificially imposing internal discussions on them (through agents of influence recruited within them), the authorities prove capable in any situations of quickly seizing the initiative and arranging everything at their own discretion.
But for all its definite successfulness, such unscrupulous practice of encouraging schismatic activity begins to seriously malfunction in those situations when the authorities undertake to use similar methods in the fight against the forces of healthy opposition, which inevitably arise on the wave of expression of public dissatisfaction over the authorities’ inability to cope with the growth of negative trends. Due to the fact that the majority of representatives of such healthy forces turn out to be inclined to fight for ideological commitment to a much greater degree than for the satisfaction of any personal ambitions, it turns out to be much more difficult to come to any agreement with them. Or, to put it another way, it proves much cheaper and easier for the authorities to deal with corrupt politicians and unprincipled opportunists than with decent people and honest representatives of the healthy opposition. The fact that the healthy and intransigent opposition — by reason of its inconvenience — begins to be perceived by the authorities as the greatest evil leads to them directing more and more of their efforts towards discrediting the representatives of the former and looking with condescending emotion at the abuses and decline of morals among the representatives of the unhealthy or corrupt opposition.
All this, at every turn, leads to the fact that all truly honest and principled people become inconvenient and repulsive to the authorities, while venal and perverted individuals turn into their favorites, to whom in exchange for the regular display of unprincipled loyalty, many spheres of state and public life are practically handed over for exploitation. The direct consequence of the establishment of such orders is the decline of trust in the authorities and the latent maturing of discontent among broad layers of society. The unprincipled nature of state power and the intelligence services it creates, which allow for the possibility of the large‑scale use of dirty agent‑provocateur methods and the agents themselves in their struggle against everything alien and hostile to them, constantly generates even more evil and multiplies it both within the power structure itself and beyond its boundaries. Because waging a struggle against this kind of evil (which becomes an integral part of the power) is in many respects tantamount to waging a struggle against the power itself, the power and the intelligence services it creates are forced to act with half‑measures—to combat the consequences rather than the root causes of evil, i.e., to act in a deliberately ineffective manner. Preferring to take the path of least resistance and allowing the possibility of using deceitful and repugnant methods in various difficult situations (ostensibly proceeding from good intentions), it has essentially driven itself into a hopeless situation and become a hostage to evil, becoming ever more entangled in its intricacies. But, however, that is a completely different topic, to which one of the upcoming sections of this site will be devoted.
So, at last you have managed to get through this section and reach its concluding lines. From this moment on, you can be firmly confident that you have acquired theoretical training that is in no way inferior to the theoretical training of a novice agent, and in many respects greatly surpasses it. And to do so entirely on your own and, as they say, without interrupting other affairs, and also without signing any non‑disclosure agreements regarding state secrets. For which, needless to say, you deserve great honor and praise!
But having gained some understanding of the paths and methods by which operatives of various intelligence services recruit informants and agents and, with their help, ensure the fulfillment of the tasks assigned to them, every reasonable person begins to understand that at any moment he can become a victim of their arbitrary actions. For this very reason, willingly or unwillingly, he starts to think about how to avoid falling into all sorts of traps and snares that may be set for him in various life situations and to protect himself from pressures of this kind. It is precisely to the study of possibilities for providing effective resistance to attacks and psychological pressure from representatives of internal affairs bodies and other law‑enforcement intelligence services that the next section of this site is devoted.
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