how to train a spy

You’ve recruited your would-be spies, and now you must train them.

   If they’re destined for the arduous role of Russian illegals, then the training will last six years, or so I’m told, and on top of that the newly trained couple — usually a couple, together in a real or simulated marriage — may have to spend a couple of years in an intermediate country, Canada, perhaps, polishing newly acquired language and cultural skills, before moving to their final destination, the target country, the United States.

   Anyone who’s watched that brilliant television thriller series about Soviet illegals, Americans, will have some idea of the enormous commitment, risks and loyalty such a role requires over a working life. Of course, fiction involves more spills and thrills than the real thing, but even so the ambiguity, the split identities and divided loyalties, the paranoia, the immense emotional pressure of living perpetually under cover in hostile territory seemed to me pretty convincing.

   Recently I read in The Guardian how Russian military intelligence — still known in post-Soviet Russia by the acronym GRU — sends its trainees to some of Russia’s top technical and scientific universities to be schooled in the black arts of offensive cyber warfare. No doubt this is mirrored by equally rigorous and comptitive training provided by the U.S. National Security Agency and CIA.

   Closer to home, around a dozen or so young people from a variety of backgrounds are selected in the UK for the Intelligence Officers’ New Entry Course or IONEC at Fort Monckton, near Gosport on England’s southern coast. It lasts six months. Not every trainee makes the grade. A newly qualified IO usually starts with a junior desk job in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) known in the media as MI6, either in the UK or abroad.

    The Service is tiny in comparison with the Russian, American and Chinese services. With perhaps 3,000 staff in all, including around 350 intelligence officers, is specialises in gathering human intel. In other words, it seeks intentions rather than capabilities.

    Positioning an asset close to the target, and gaining access is key.

   In The Big Breach, a controversial autobiography by former SIS officer Richard Tomlinson which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went out of her way to try to suppress at considerable cost to the taxpayer, the author recalls the start of his career as a spy: ‘Approximately half of the course was spent in the classroom, learning the administration of the service, the theory of how to cultivate, recruit and debrief agents, listening to case histories and receiving presentations from the different sections of the service. The remainder was spent in exercises…’

    The exercises were physically and mentally exhausting, and for some trainees, great fun.

    Cunning, improvisation, acting a role but above all, careful planning and preparation are considered keys to successful tradecraft — tradecraft being the skills needed to communicate with an agent without arousing suspicion on the part of the opposition’s counter-intelligence. So surveillance, anti-surveillance, counter-surveillance, brush contacts, the preparation and clearing of dead-letter boxes, are practised repeatedly in various environments.

    As well as learning the use of the latest digital gadgets that allow an officer to securely contact an agent at arm’s length. It wouldn’t be unusual for a case officer not to meet the agent at all in person, possibly for years. It would all be done remotely.

   At the end of the IONEC, the trainees are graded by the training officers in the first of what will become annual staff appraisals for SIS career officers. A ‘Box 3’ signals a satisfactory performance and is the most frequently awarded grade. The ‘Box 1’ is outstanding, ‘Box 2’ above average, ‘Box 4’ substandard and ‘Box 5’ a seriously deficient performance, promising a swift exit from the service.

    Tomlinson, a former soldier who had served with the Special Air Service Regiment, scored a highly unusual ’Box 1’ on his IONEC, a first.

    It must be said that Tomlinson appears to have turned out to be an excellent intelligence officer with an unusually useful set of skills. He was technically proficient, talented in mathematics, and physically highly capable. Yet, after four years in SIS, his career was abruptly terminated. The reasons are still not clear. He seems to have offended a senior officer in human resources, someone who set out to destroy Tomlinson’s chances. In trying to fight his unfair dismissal, he was arrested under the Official Secrets Act and jailed in a maximum security prison. Even after he was released, he was hounded by the British authorities and smeared in the media. The authorities used their connections with allied services to have him followed, arrested and deported from European countries, as well as barred from entering the United States. The government threatened legal action to stop publication of his book. I can see why; if people like me had learned from his story just how vindictive the service could be to its own loyal and capable officers, and how willing it was to violate a citizen’s human rights, they’d probably have given it a wide berth.

    I certainly would have.

    It’s not only officer trainees who are sent to Fort Monckton, but agents, too. The place is large enough to run several courses for different varieties of spook simultaneously, but it must take skilful management and time-keeping to ensure they don’t bump into each other at inappropriate moments.

    I was one of these agents.

    The best of the IONEC ’s six months was squeezed into weeks in my case. It was intensive. Report writing and agent handling took up most of my time and energy. Covert photography and making videos were also important skills that had to be practised. I followed people through city streets, and they then tailed me in and out of department stores. For therapy between classroom sessions, I blasted away with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol at paper targets, and learned the basics of unarmed combat on a blood-stained boxing mat.

    Best of all were the SIS officers dressed up as locals of some unidentified country and speaking poor English with what they imagined was the appropriate accent. Both they and I had to resist the temptation to collapse in laughter. While being secretly recorded behind a one-way mirror, I had to befriend them, win their trust and and recruit them, encouraging them to talk freely (in one case I had to encourage an especially loquacious individual to stop talking altogether) and uncover some undisclosed nuggets of useful intelligence in the process.

    Only once did things go awry. I was spotted filming people doing something I shouldn’t have witnessed…excuses were quickly made and apologies offered.

    After all, I was only doing what I was trained to do: spying.

John Fullerton