Story of an Undercover CIA Officer who Penetrated Al Qaeda

Johnny Stockwell • August 21, 2024 11:26 AM

As insiders would note, the CIA refers to employees with this role as “officers” and not “agents.” The Rolling Stone article correctly uses this term. Agents are CIA assets that are recruited in the field by officers.

Oddly the FBI does not obey this convention.

Lurking Reader • August 21, 2024 4:06 PM

Just curious, what stood out to you (Bruce, or any other readers) about this article?

My TLDR for this article would be: “going deep undercover has a psychological toll that the CIA hasn’t addressed adequately.”

For me, that was a long read that didn’t say anything I hadn’t thought of before. Is there something more I’m missing that makes this piece newsworthy?

Clive Robinson • August 22, 2024 12:36 AM

@ Johnny Stockwell,

“As insiders would note, the CIA refers to employees with this role as “officers” and not “agents.” The Rolling Stone article correctly uses this term.”

It’s not just the CIA the far older UK SiS also uses that convention. In fact if you read the original James Bond books you will find Ian Fleming correctly used it (he had been an “Officer” during WWII).

The same applies to all NATO members[1] and also appears to be true of many other nations that have “field officers” working in other nations in various roles as well.

Which brings us to,

“Oddly the FBI does not obey this convention.”

Nor do most other US Federal Agencies.

The reason is to do with US legislation, which goes back quite a long way. Look up “Government Service” jobs via the “Office of Personnel Management”(OPM) for criminal investigators catagorised as GS-1810 and GS-1811

If you look at,

https://www.specialagents.org/what-is-a-1811-special-agent

You will see they alude to the officer/agent foreign / Domestic distinction with,

“Relatedly, the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) refers to its domestically assigned 1811’s as special agents, however foreign posted criminal investigators are called Regional Security Officers.”

So when working for a federal agency inside the US you are a “Federal Agent” and if working outside the US with “Official Cover” a “Regional Security Officer” or similar.

[1] Have a look in “NATO AAP-6 : Glossary of terms and definitions”

Winter • August 22, 2024 3:29 AM

@Lurking

My TLDR for this article would be: “going deep undercover has a psychological toll that the CIA hasn’t addressed adequately.”

I understand the CIA has a bad reputation with regard to the health and safety of it’s “officers”, “Agents”, and “informants”.[1] So this seems to tell the story of the “Officers”.

For me, that was a long read that didn’t say anything I hadn’t thought of before.

Then this article is not for you but for people like me who did not have this knowledge. I for one welcome the original post.

[1] ‘https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/cia-informants-killed-captured.html
‘https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/has-the-cia-done-more-harm-than-good

Devin • August 22, 2024 4:56 PM

@Johnny Stockwell

The CIA may use those terms; but in intelligence more broadly “agent” is the generic term. If we were making a Venn diagram, “agent” covers everyone doing intelligence work for an “agency,” whether that’s the CIA, the ONI, NSA, MI5, SIS, DGN, KGB, etc. Within that, the CIA refers to some of its agents as “officers.” That is its prerogative, but it does not overwrite the more general definition. Hell, the CIA itself continues to use “agent” in the general sense at least sometimes: I’ve never seen Aldrich Ames referred to as a “double officer,” for instance. For him to be a “double agent,” he must have been an agent in the first place.

(And it’s not particularly odd that the FBI declined to change their long-established naming convention merely because the CIA came along decades later and decided to use the word differently.)

By analogy, consider whether it is, in fact, incorrect to refer to someone doing programming work for Initrode as “a programmer at Initrode” simply because the job title Initrode prefers is “software engineer” or “coding superstar” or something.

Erdem Memisyazici • August 22, 2024 11:22 PM

@Lurking Reader

What stood out to me was given more recently official institutions like the military branches have begun to recognize mental disabilities as actual diseases. So for example if you put someone in charge of doing nothing but remote bombing nearby villages in an office even though they are not there the prolonged exposure to such high levels of stress causes some serious neurological damage.

Some people, such as those with early childhood trauma are able to better hide the signs of extreme stress. CIA may have thought this to be an ability sought after to qualify a person for a specific mission in the article I just read.

Personally I say it’s a dangerous proposition because it is likely to lead to self harm for the person involved and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Lagunas did kill himself.

That being said CIA is rarely known for being nice but not never. Enhanced interrogation… not the best idea, whole lot of bad intel from that yet stopping human trafficking is a good deed. As I understand it the agency is moving from HUMINT to a more SIGINT processing unit, even on people. Otherwise we wouldn’t read this article where the agency stopped to think, “we maybe should not never stop pushing an agent until they raise their hand and say enough.”

It is more likely in my mind that the CIA will use such intimite signals intelligence classifications of mental states to set up remote villages where they cultivate people with those required skills. Whatever gets the job done even if that means having a few carefully traumatized children on a future payroll. That kind of stuff would be classified I am sure but you can get staff you can send to a mission and even they don’t want to know they work for you.

ResearcherZero • August 28, 2024 5:40 AM

Department A

Within the KGB was a department that specialised in planting false stories and forged documents. Run from right to the top of the KGB, with a multimillion-dollar budget.

The AIDs story is especially notable because the KGB orchestrated the entire thing.

Operation InfeKtion: How Russia Perfected the Art of War

‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo

Aktivnye meropriyatiya (active measures)

The Papers of Vasiliy Mitrokhin (declassified KGB files)
https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/repositories/9/resources/1716

ResearcherZero • August 28, 2024 6:26 AM

@Devin, @Erdem Memisyazici, @ALL

There is a good book on this stuff and it is not too dry and boring like many others.
It contains a well detailed history of how propaganda was planted into the ‘bloodstream’.
It sights the methods used and draws on a lot of well researched and factual evidence.

There are a number of interesting accounts included of how far, and for how long, the KGB penetrated various orginisations, government departments and media publications.

‘https://markhollingsworth.co.uk/agents_of_influence/