Intelligence operatives and journalists both seek the truth but in very different ways.
The SPYSCAPE Festival’s Spies & Storytellers event invited former CIA spy and chief of station Daniel Hoffman, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, and New York Times journalist Liza Mundy to share their methods of recruiting sources and gathering information.
Here’s the inside track on how the pros operate.
Spies and journalists: Recruiting sources
“Our mission is to recruit spies and steal secrets. So you’re looking for somebody who has access to protected information. Think about Vladimir Putin’s senior advisor or a member of al-Qaeda who knows about a terrorist attack that’s being planned in the United States,” Danial Hoffman, a three-time CIA chief of station and FOX commentator, told the SPYSCAPE Festival, Spies & Storytellers event on October 6, 2022.
“Those are the people you want to get to and you want to make contact with them in a secret, clandestine way because if their colleagues were to find out that the CIA was in touch with them, their life would be at risk for sure,” Hoffman added.
Journalists, on the other hand, are gathering information from human sources but rarely - if ever - endangering the source’s life in the event they are exposed as the person who leaked the information.
“Ultimately, Dan [Hoffman] is gathering information that may end up killing somebody if there’s a drone strike - and by the way, if his source is discovered, that source could be dead,” said Peter Bergen, a journalist, CNN national security analyst, and best-selling author.“There are high stakes for sources in journalism but it is unlikely they are going to be executed. “
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Intelligence operatives and journalists both seek the truth but in very different ways.
The SPYSCAPE Festival’s Spies & Storytellers event invited former CIA spy and chief of station Daniel Hoffman, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, and New York Times journalist Liza Mundy to share their methods of recruiting sources and gathering information.
Here’s the inside track on how the pros operate.
Spies and journalists: Recruiting sources
“Our mission is to recruit spies and steal secrets. So you’re looking for somebody who has access to protected information. Think about Vladimir Putin’s senior advisor or a member of al-Qaeda who knows about a terrorist attack that’s being planned in the United States,” Danial Hoffman, a three-time CIA chief of station and FOX commentator, told the SPYSCAPE Festival, Spies & Storytellers event on October 6, 2022.
“Those are the people you want to get to and you want to make contact with them in a secret, clandestine way because if their colleagues were to find out that the CIA was in touch with them, their life would be at risk for sure,” Hoffman added.
Journalists, on the other hand, are gathering information from human sources but rarely - if ever - endangering the source’s life in the event they are exposed as the person who leaked the information.
“Ultimately, Dan [Hoffman] is gathering information that may end up killing somebody if there’s a drone strike - and by the way, if his source is discovered, that source could be dead,” said Peter Bergen, a journalist, CNN national security analyst, and best-selling author.“There are high stakes for sources in journalism but it is unlikely they are going to be executed. “
Journalists and CIA 'spies' - who are officially known as intelligence officers - both rely on human sources for information and dig deep, but the professions have strikingly different methods of handling sources.
“We too are trying to uncover the truth. We too are approaching people to interview with the hope that they will give us information, tell us their life stories, and help us get at the truth in a public way,” Liza Mundy, New York Times journalist and author of Code Girls told the SPYSCAPE Festival. “The difference is that we travel 'cognito'. We identify ourselves.”
“I was with the Washington Post for 20 years,” Mundy added. “I would always identify myself as a Washington Post reporter. Never clandestine. Never undercover. Never lying about my identity. Always up front.”
Peter Bergen with Osama bin Laden, 1997
CNN journalist Peter Bergen, who interviewed Osama bin Laden as part of CNN’s team in an exclusive 1997 interview in Afghanistan, said it is important for sources of information to be able to distinguish between journalists and spies.
“When we went to go and interview Osama bin Laden, they were very paranoid that we were members of the intelligence community, and I had to really persuade them,” Bergen said. “They were also very unsophisticated about the media. They had never really dealt with members of the media. So it is a problem if they (journalism and spying) are conflated. They are two very different things.”
Spies and journalism: Protecting sources
Protecting sources is crucial for journalists and intelligence operatives but things can get murky in the spying game.
“What we learn at CIA is that protecting your source is paramount. That’s the most important thing. You never put your source at risk, right?” Dan Hoffman told the SPYSCAPE Festival.
“The two most common words I ever heard at CIA training were, ‘It depends,’ Hoffman added. “There is no certainty. Ever. So no, we wouldn’t want to risk this guy’s life. But we’ve got to go target the al-Qaeda network. Let’s put our guy at risk.”
Spies and journalists: Breaking the law
Spies may not think twice about breaking the law in a foreign country where they operate clandestinely. Not so for journalists.
“There’s a fundamental difference between what the intelligence community does and what journalists do. The intelligence community is stealing secrets. The intelligence community breaks laws in other countries - I mean, that’s part of their job,” Peter Bergen told the SPYSCAPE Festival.
“They don’t break laws here (in the US) because they are not allowed to spy domestically. They are encouraged to break the law in other countries. They encourage people to be traitors to their countries, essentially - or their group, if it is a terrorist group,” Bergen added. “So we are the information-gathering arm of the American public and hopefully the global public. We operate very, very publicly.”
Spies & journalists: The end-goal
At the end of the day, journalists and spies both have their eyes on the prize when it comes to handling sources.
“I think the similarity is that you want this person to trust you. You want this person to trust that you will do the right thing with their information. That you’ll be there for them the whole time because often their name will be published along with this information,” Mundy said.
For journalists, the key is getting information or documents in the public domain. For spies, the end goal is keeping the intelligence secret until they are ready to act.
“We’re trying to keep it secret but at the end of the day, someone has to do something with our information,” Hoffman said. “It might be to launch a raid on bin Laden - which you know a whole lot about in Abbottabad - and so we’re always looking for what we are going to do with information that we worked hard to steal and protect.”
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