For example, James Angleton, director of counterintelligence for the CIA between 19, was reportedly obsessed with suspicions that the top levels of Western governments were riddled with long-term communist agents and accused numerous politicians such as former U.S.

The possibility that a top politician, corporate executive, government minister, or officer in an intelligence service could be a mole working for a foreign government is the worst nightmare of counterintelligence services. By contrast, most espionage agents, such as CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who spied on the US government for the KGB, were either recruited or offered their services as spies after they were in place as members of the target organization.īecause their recruitment occurred in the remote past, moles are difficult for a nation's security services to detect. Perhaps the most famous examples of moles were the Cambridge Five, five upper-class British men recruited by the KGB as communist students at Cambridge University in the 1930s who later rose to high levels in various parts of the British government. While the term mole had been applied to spies in the book Historie of the Reign of King Henry VII written in 1626 by Sir Francis Bacon, Le Carré has said he did not get the term from that source.Ī mole may be recruited early in life, and take decades to get a job in government service and reach a position of access to secret information before becoming active as a spy. Le Carré, a former British intelligence officer, has said that the term mole was actually used by the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, and that a corresponding term used by Western intelligence services was sleeper agent. The term was introduced to the public by British spy novelist John le Carré in his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and has since entered general usage, but its origin is unclear, as well as to what extent it was used by intelligence services before it became popularized. In police work, a mole is an undercover law-enforcement agent who joins an organization in order to collect incriminating evidence about its operations and to eventually charge its members. However, it is popularly used to mean any long-term clandestine spy or informant within an organization (government or private). In espionage jargon, a mole (also called a 'penetration agent', 'deep cover agent', 'illegal' or ' sleeper agent') is a long-term spy (espionage agent) who is recruited before having access to secret intelligence, subsequently managing to get into the target organization. ( December 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Statements consisting only of original research should be removed.

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1940s fbi counter espionage agents