Spies & Spying Personality Profiling: Intelligence Operations Officers

‍‍

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

Intelligence Operations Officers (IOOs) provide essential reinforcement and administration of operations to ensure their success. These operatives are the glue in the operation and are essential members of the team. 

IOOs will research targets using data from open sources; they will support technical operations; they will be part of a team that conducts counter-surveillance. They will also manage the overseas offices and act as personal assistants or manage the administration for others in the office. They have to be multi-skilled and multi-talented.

‍

‍

Spies & Spying: IOOs in fiction and film

In fiction, the classic IOO is Miss Moneypenny who it is interesting to note in the more recent James Bond films has a much more active role.

They are often involved in meeting sources, working with the Technical Officers and the Analysts. They tend to be generalists and knowledgeable. In most services the specialists turn to these operatives to make things happen when and where they are needed and with the necessary resources. Their work is often unseen but ignored only by the foolish.

Spies & Spying: Psychological profile notes

These individuals need to be team players: to be sociable, outgoing, and happy working with others. They need to be conscientious, well-organized, reliable, and hard-working. Again, they need emotional intelligence and to be highly adaptable.

Three essentials for the Intelligence Operations Officer:

‍

‍

It is a characteristic of this group of officers that they do not seek the limelight and there are none with a significant and recent public profile. 

‍

Spies & Spying

In the story below, Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer working for the British, identified Joan (not her real name) as an IOO. 

A trust of spies‍

('Treachery' and 'duplicity' appear to be the accepted collective nouns for a group of spies but we prefer the collective 'trust' - acknowledging purist wordsmiths may raise an eyebrow!) 

Based on the accounts in Oleg Gordievsky’s (1995) and author Ben Macintyre’s (2018) books. 

Location: Russian Embassy and SIS safe flat, London

Date: June 1983

Principal Personnel:

Arkady Guk: KGB Resident

Oleg Gordievsky: KGB member of Residency and British agent

Joan (not her real name): Member of British intelligence

Michael Bettaney: Member of British Security Service who offered his services to the KGB 

Arkady Guk, the KGB resident in London showed Oleg Gordievsky a letter that had been delivered to Guk’s home in Holland Park, London. The letter claimed to be from a serving member of MI5 and was offering to pass crucial intelligence to the KGB. Guk believed the letter was a hoax, that MI5 was trying to trick the KGB with a ‘double agent’ operation.

Gordievsky, an agent working with SIS, doubted this and worried it might threaten his own security. He called for an emergency meeting with his SIS handlers. “I found that Jack was temporarily away, and in his absence, it was Joan who met me. By then I had total confidence in her, and was delighted to see her, but at the same time I felt that this meeting was a huge responsibility for a general service officer not used to conducting complicated debriefings… I told her the outline of what had happened, and she came out with a classically calm British reaction. ‘As far as I know,’ she said, ‘there is no operational game in progress.’”

Gordievsky worried that the letter was genuine and, if so, there was a traitor in MI5 who might know he was an agent and pass his identity to Guk.

Sir John Jones, the Director General of MI5, was briefed. He immediately established a secret unit and appointed the best counterintelligence analysts onto the case. They narrowed down the possible list of suspects which included Bettaney as its prime suspect. Surveillance Teams were deployed to follow Bettaney and Technical Officers were tasked with eavesdropping on his phone.

The police arrested Michael Bettaney, a British intelligence officer who worked in the counter-espionage branch of MI5, in September 1983 for conspiracy to commit treason. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison. He had not in fact passed any information to the KGB and was released on license in 1998. He died in 2018.

Who’s who?

Masterspy: Guk was the head of the KGB in London – the Resident in KGB parlance.

Agent Handler: Oleg Gordievsky worked in the KGB; but his full loyalty was as an agent of SIS, in effect a penetration agent.

Intelligence Operations officer: ‘Joan’ (not her real name) worked in the Soviet section of SIS.

Agent Handler: Jack was Gordievsky’s handler working for SIS.

Spymaster: Sir John Jones was the Director General of the British Security Service.

Others mentioned generically are the Counterintelligence Analysts, the Surveillance Operatives, and Technical Operation Officers.

Michael Bettaney was a Senior Analyst working in MI5. He offered his services as an agent to the KGB. He was motivated in part by money and because he resented the way he had been treated by his employers in particular after his arrest for drunkenness and assaulting a police officer. 

Psychological note:

Gordievsky’s liking and respect of ’Joan’ contributed to the trust he had in the British agencies.

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

‍SPYCHOLOGY

‍Your personalized SPYCHOLOGY profile is based on a series of challenges available exclusively at SPYSCAPE HQ and included free in the price of admission. While the complete SPYCHOLOGY experience is only available at our HQ in New York City you can try the personality element online.

‍