Intro to Agent Recruitment-The Swallow's Nest Clandestine Human Intelligence asset recruiting is the recruitment of human agents who work for a foreign government, or other targets of intelligence interest. The term spy refers to human agents that are recruited by intelligence officers of a foreign intelligence agency. The popular use of the term in the media is at variance with its use in a professional context. Spies are not intelligence officers. Spies are recruited by intelligence officers to betray their country and to engage in espionage in favor of a foreign power. Intelligence officers who interact with spies are generally referred to as case officers. U.S. intelligence services, for example, are concerned when their own personnel could be subject to sexual blackmail. This applied to any homosexual relationship until the mid-1990s, and also applied to heterosexual relationships with most foreign nationals. In some cases, especially when the national was a citizen of a friendly nation, the relationship needed to be reported. Failure to do so, even with a friendly nation, could result in dismissal. One former CIA officer said that while sexual entrapment wasn't generally a good tool to recruit a foreign official, it was sometimes employed successfully to solve short-term problems. Seduction is a classic technique; "swallow" was the KGB tradecraft term for people trained to seduce intelligence targets. During the Cold War, the KGB (and allied services, including the East German Stasi under Markus Wolf, and the Cuban Intelligence Directorate (or DGI)) frequently sought to entrap CIA officers. The KGB believed that Americans were sex-obsessed materialists, and that U.S. spies could easily be entrapped by sexual lures. The best-known incident, however, was of Clayton Lonetree, a Marine guard supervisor at the Moscow embassy, who was seduced by a "swallow" who was a translator at the Embassy of the United States in Moscow. Once the seduction took place, she put him in touch with a KGB handler. The espionage continued after his transfer to Vienna, although he eventually turned himself in. The Soviets used sex not only for direct recruitment, but as a contingency where an American officer might need to be compromised in the future. The CIA itself made limited use of sexual recruitment against foreign intelligence services. "Coercive recruitment generally didn't work. We found that offers of money and freedom worked better". If the Agency found a Soviet intelligence officer had a girlfriend, they would try to recruit the girlfriend as an access agent. Once the CIA personnel had access to the Soviet officer, they might attempt to double him. THE SWALLOW'S NEST--SIDI SLIMANE tells the story of an enlisted man at Sidi Slimane, Morocco, who fights a silent but destructive war against the encroachments of the KGB and its efforts to establish an espionage net that would stretch from North Africa to Washington D. C.
About the Author: Richard Dalton served in the USAF from May 1959 to October 1971. He was subsequently retired due to wounds received in Saigon, RVN. The book, THE SWALLOW'S NEST--SIDI SLIMANE, is an account of actual events which have been fictionalized and names changed. As an ex-Intelligence Operations Technician, Dalton had first-hand knowledge of infiltration of KGB operatives within the USAF during the post-Cuban crisis.