Rick Spence: evaluation

Transcript context

…The C is for coercion. That’s where you have to persuade someone to work for you. You have to pressure them. So usually you blackmail them. That could be they have a gambling habit. In the old days, it’s very often they were gay. Get them in a decision where they can be compromised and you can get them to do your bidding. Those people usually have a certain amount of control. Here’s an interesting example of how the Okhrana tended to handle this, and I think it’s still largely used. You’d round up a bunch of revolutionaries on some charge or another distributing revolutionary literature, running any illegal printing press. You bring a guy into the room and you say, okay, you’re going to work for us. Of course, we refuse to do so. They go, well, if you refuse, we’ll keep the rest of your comrades in jail for a while, maybe beat them with a rubber truncheon or so, and then we’re just going to let you go. We’re just going to put you back out on the street. If you don’t work for us, we will spread the rumor through our agents already in your organization that you are. Then what will your comrades do? How long are you going to live? So you see, you have no choice. You’re ours, and you’re going to cooperate with us. The way that that effectiveness will be ensured is that you have multiple agents within the same organization who don’t know who each other are. That’s very important. They’ll all be filing reports. So let’s say you have three agents inside the central committee of the SR party, and there’s a committee meeting, and you’re going to look at the reports they file. They all better agree with each other. If one person doesn’t report what the other two do, then perhaps they’re not entirely doing their job and they can be liquidated at any time. All you do is drop the dime on them. This was done periodically. In fact, in some cases, you would betray your own agents just to completely discombobulate to the organization. This happened in one particular case around 1908, the fellow who was the head of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn’t Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist revolutionaries. Actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren’t even actually Marxists more anarchists, but they went all in for the propaganda, the deed. They really like blowing people up and carried out quite a campaign of terrorism. The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a fellow by name of Yevno Azef. Yevno Azef was, guess what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he’d kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him. uess what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he’d kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money. So the Okhrana itself arranged to have him ride it out. What did that do? Well, what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade was a secret police agent. It’s consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust, and you couldn’t tell who you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on Boris Sevenkov who was a Russian revolutionary and the second in command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azef’s job so bad he could taste it, well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent, and well, he should, because Sevenkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two waiting in the wings to take over, but he was legitimately shocked. He didn’t really suspect that. So it’s a way of manipulating this. Then finally, we come to the E. That I think is the most important, ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive, the sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge five. Now, Philby was a communist, and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause. But he also made this statement, I think it’s in the preface to his autobiography, and he says, one never looks twice at the offer of service in elite force. He’s talking about his recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s, and he was absolutely chuffed by that. The mere fact that they would want him, what he considered to be a first-rate organization would want him, satisfied his ego. If I was to take a guess as to whether it was ideological motivation, whether it was the romance of communism or whether it was the appeal of ego that was the most important in his career of treason, I’d go with ego. I think that figures into a lot. Someone doesn’t get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames career in particular, you’ve got these … his career in the CIA was hit or miss. He didn’t get the postings or promotions that he wanted his evaluation. He never felt that he got credit for doing that. That’s the type of thing that tends to stick in someone’s craw and can lead for egotistical reasons an added incentive to betray. Yeah, that there’s a boost to the ego when you can deceive, sort of not play by the rules of the world and just play with powerful people like they’re your pawns.…

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