How spies are recruited (a personal view)

It all depends on the recruit.

   Agents, mostly foreign nationals, are generally recruited by an intelligence or security service on a temporary basis because they have access to the target, have the potential to gain access to a valuable target, or because they’re already in possession of intelligence the recruiter seeks.

   They last only as long as they have access to influential people and their secrets, until they refuse to continue and vanish, or until they’re blown, caught or killed.

   The agents’ motives vary, from money to revenge, from ideology to a desire for a better life with resettlement along with a new identity, maybe for the sheer excitement of the role, or because of a growing dislike of their own government and contempt for its political culture.

    Intelligence officers, on the other hand, are usually recruited at university or the armed forces. They might be junior civil servants in other departments seen as having the right qualities. In all cases, the goal is training and developing these young people, most of whom are in their early 20s to mid-thirties, as career intelligence or security officers — provided they pass advanced vetting.

    The intelligence services have ‘talent’ spotters at universities as well as the military, especially in special forces.

    An initial conversation between a tutor and a student might go something like this:

    ‘You’re doing pretty well, Annie, I must say. If you keep it up I’m sure you’ll gain a First. You’re good at languages, too, and I hear you’re also something of an athlete. Have you given much thought about what you’ll do after you graduate?’

   ‘Not really, Professor. I’d like to travel, and explore something of the world.’

   ‘Would you be interested in working in government?’

   ‘Such as?’

   ‘Doing useful work. Serving your country.’

   ‘It sounds old-fashioned. How would I do that?’

   ‘If you’re receptive to the idea, I’ve a friend who I’m certain would like to meet you over a drink or a coffee. I’m sure she’ll have suggestions as to how you might combine your desire to travel with a useful career. May I give you her number?’    

   I’ve met two people who were approached by SIS spotters; both declined.

   I must confess there was no spotter in my case. I recruited myself, but more of that later.

   Nearly half a century ago I was approached by a young officer roughly my age from what I assumed was China’s Gouanbu, or foreign intelligence service. He was too well-spoken, well-dressed and subtle to have been a member of Beijing’s military intelligence. He wanted to know who my defence sources were, and how I came by them. I enjoyed a fine lunch at his expense, but he didn’t get my sources.   

    Organisations such as GCHQ — the UK’s secret government communications headquarters — seek talented mathematicians, cryptographers, technicians, IT specialists, interpreters. Often selected at universities, they’ll be offered careers primarily behind a desk and computer monitors in an office environment. GCHQ pays competitive salaries, especially since staff won a court action in the face of strong government opposition to form their own trade union. Increasingly, GCHQ officers do work abroad.

    The Security Service, the primary counter-intelligence organisation often known as MI5, consists of Britain’s gamekeepers, the hunters of domestic and foreign intelligence operatives. The organisation needs people with languages (Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Russian and Mandarin are always in demand) with the ability to recruit and run agents. They work with few exceptions on the home turf, and they have the reputation, rightly or wrongly, of being instinctively suspicious and right-wing.

    Not my thing at all!

    The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) known in the media as MI6, is a small organisation of roughly 3,000 staff, with around fifty-five stations abroad, some stations comprising only one other two intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover. They specialise in collecting humint, or human intelligence. Unlike military intelligence, which assesses a potential enemy’s capabilities, SIS seeks insight into the all-important intentions of a potential foe.

   President Putin’s current mindset, for example.

   SIS recruits are packed off for six months training, a dozen or two at a time. When they complete the course, if they complete it, they’re graded 1-5, from outstanding to fail. They too face strict vetting. Those who pass are regarded as fully qualified intelligence officers. They typically spend three years abroad, followed by three years back in the UK, then three years abroad. After two or three foreign postings under diplomatic cover, they’re assumed to have been ‘blown’, whether they have been or not, and from that point on, in any posting overseas, the officer concerned is ‘declared’ to the host country as being an officer in British intelligence.

   It is not unusual for an SIS officer to never recruit a foreign agent in his or her entire career, especially if stationed in ‘denied territory’, such as Russia and China, both of which subject foreigners to intense, unrelenting and close surveillance.

   Being a ‘declared’ SIS officer isn’t as bad as it sounds. Word will get around diplomatic circles in that particular capital, and with luck the officer will attract walk-ins — unsolicited offers of service. They could be provocations, of course, attempts to exploit how the British treat and vet potential defectors and agents in place.     

    SIS officers will always try to recruit agents in place if they can, or agents it can position in the right place and keep them there as long as possible. Whereas SIS officers enjoy protection under diplomatic cover, agents have none. They’re particularly vulnerable. Those working under ‘natural cover’, such as academics and business executives, for example, must rely on their professional reputation and the genuine business or book deals they manage to strike to provide them with credible cover.

    Traditionally, it was all a matter class and family. In Britain there used to be naval families, army families, and so on. Recruitment into intelligence was often a family matter, and families, like the spies they bred, were often linked by marriage.

    It mattered what boarding or grammar school one went to, what university, what regiment, and what gentleman’s clubs someone joined (usually the father’s).

   We know the cost of this intelligence in-breeding, and the Soviets worked the class system brilliantly to their advantage. The result: the notorious Cambridge Five — Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross — which did untold damage to SIS.

    There were others, such as George Blake, an SIS officer who became a Soviet double agent, alleged to have betrayed hundreds of agents during the Cold War. Captured in Korea, he became a committed communist and was sentenced to 42 years in prison in 1961 before escaping five years later to the Soviet Union, where he lived until his death. 

    Today, it’s less a matter of class and accent, and more a matter of an individual’s intelligence, self-confidence, a strong skill at improvisation and a willingness to seize the initiative. Women suffered for too long from institutional misogyny, at first able to work only as secretaries, then as ‘assistants’ who were all too often smarter and operationally more able than their male bosses. It’s a little different now; both SIS and the Security Service have been headed in recent years by female director-generals.

    I imagine European intelligence services aren’t much different.

    The problem for SIS and the Security Service today is recruitment.

    Few bright, educated young people see the UK as being a champion of democracy, of human rights and basic freedoms. The scandal of undercover cops is an example. Young people find their own government bedding down with extremists at home and abroad, and bent upon stifling freedom of expression as well as the right to express dissent on the streets. Holding up a cardboard sign in public can result in a 14-year prison term under draconian so-called terrorism laws, while government seems to be aiding and abetting genocide abroad. The mainstream media are owned and dominated by five billionaires who play little if any UK tax.

    The British state has become — to the younger generations, at least — not only corrupt, but increasingly authoritarian.

    Who would want to risk spying for Britain today?

    I sure as hell wouldn’t.

John Fullerton

May 2026