Loading AI tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||
|
What people outside of the intelligence community don't understand is that there are a wide variety of jobs within the intelligence community in which service members, government employees, and contractors are sent overseas while officially holding non-intelligence occupations. Whether their true role is to run and recruit sources as a human intelligence collector in uniform or as a case officer at an embassy, or act as a consultant to a scientific project in an agency, or pour over reports and put intelligence products together is irrelevant. Whether their jobs involve meeting with agents or doing analysis behind a desk is also irrelevant (it should be noted that interrogators spend long hours flying desks themselves when they are done talking to sources; it's more journalism than James Bond). "Covert agent" is not limited to a particular occupation within the intelligence community and also applies to analysts who may be sent undercover overseas to do all-source work on classified networks. Either way, having association with the intelligence community in any capacity makes them susceptible to recruitment by host nation security services which is why their identities and/or occupations may be covert. A long list of former analysts working for the government have been recruited as spies throughout U.S. history, not only FBI agents or CIA case officers. This is why the public tendency to make a distinction between analysts and collectors (with one being seen as purely "desk work" and the other not being seen as "desk work" when they both, in fact, involve desk work) is silly and demonstrates a lack of understanding about what they do for the community. Furthermore, nobody who is formally employed by an intelligence agency is a "spy" and those claiming otherwise are probably trying to sound dramatic to those who don't know any better. The word "spy" is synonymous with traitor and true intelligence professionals avoid such terms like the plague. -Former IO — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.107.143.3 (talk) 22:19, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
This article does not provide even a basic definition of its topic. There is no way to determine whether Valerie Plame or Michael Scheuer were "covert agents" or merely analysts whose connection to the CIA was confidential. This is significant, because of the "outing" controversy.
Beyond this, we'd like to know more in general about what covert agents do. Are they "spies" is in the Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy novels?—Preceding unsigned comment added by Ed Poor (talk • contribs)
Thanks for the quick response, Commodore. That straightened out a few things. --Uncle Ed 20:06, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.