Spies & Spying Personality Profiling: Agent Handlers

From The Psychology of Spies and Spying by Adrian Furnham and John Taylor.

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Case Officers, Asset or Source Handlers meet, cultivate, recruit, and manage agents who provide intelligence of interest and relevance to that service and government.

Agent Handlers also might provide access to other sources and facilities to support intelligence operations. In many ways, Handlers are what people think about when asked to describe spies and what they do.

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Spies & Spying Personality Profiling: Agent Handlers

The most important assets (agents) are those who provide secret intelligence. They betray their employer’s trust. The Handler must, therefore, manage the relationship with great care so the source’s employers do not discover what the source is doing. It is perhaps the greatest skill that a Handler has: agent recruitment and handling. 

Handlers need to establish a high degree of trust with their agents. The Handler also needs strong powers of charm and persuasion. At the same time, the Handler must ensure that potentially hostile people or technical devices do not observe their meetings.

This latter process is known as tradecraft or street craft and involves the use of clandestine communication systems such as a brush contact or dead letter box. Source Handlers also must become experts in identifying hostile surveillance.

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Spies & Spying: Psychological profile notes for Agent Handlers‍

The key attributes are first and foremost interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. The Handler needs to understand the motives and fears of the agent while hiding their identity and motives. They need to listen with the insight and empathy of a clinician and yet have the skills of a great actor.

They need also to be curious, open-minded, and be prepared to 'go with the flow'. But they need to be highly resilient and able to work patiently and calmly under great threat and pressure. They certainly need to keep their heads about them while all those around are losing theirs. And, yes, they may also need to drive fast cars, pour and consume many cocktails, and charm members of the opposite sex.

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Spies & Spying: Agent Handler essentials

The three essentials for the Handler are:

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Spies & Spying: Real-life officers

Autobiographies have been written by Valerie Plame Wilson and H.K. Roy (both CIA). George Blake, Aldrich Ames, and Oleg Gordievsky were also Agent Handlers in their own national service as well as agents of a hostile service.

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Spies & Spying: Fictional officers

Fiction is remarkably light on Agent Handlers. Charles Thoroughgood in the Alan Judd series of novels is a Handler but there are few others.

James Bond, although often portrayed as an operational spy, is more of a Special Forces officer. He does sometimes move into Agent Handling as in his contact with Tatiana Romanova in Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love (1957).

Similarly, George Smiley rarely becomes involved in Agent Handling; he comes closest to it when interviewing Grigoriev in John le Carré’s Smiley’s People (1979). Jack Ryan does a good job of managing the defector Captain Ramius in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October.

‍Excerpt courtesy of The Psychology of Spies and Spying by Adrian Furnham and John Taylor.

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