Snitches
An exposé article by Vladimir Kastorny from https://www.tipolog.netne.net/spy_kmb/spy_kto_stukatsh.htm about stool pigeons or Judases with which the special services flooded the churches during the USSR and continue to flood them today.
—————————————
The paths of men are inscrutable, but with all the existing diversity, most of them follow well‑known and long‑existing channels.
(From the introductory part of “A Guide to Action for Those Who Like to Fish in Troubled Waters”)
As for the author of these lines, he received his very first proposal to become a stool pigeon when he was a seventh‑grade student in secondary school — from his class teacher, who one day took him aside and suggested that during the school holidays he keep an eye on a classmate who was on the police register. Without undertaking to delve into the reasons that prompted such proposals to him, and even more so without judging anyone or drawing any serious conclusions from what has just been said, the author wishes to point out this rather remarkable fact of his biography as if in passing — solely as a lead‑in to the topic and to stir the interest of all those intrigued and curious.
But if we set jokes aside and try to turn to something more serious, then we must begin a discussion of how people become informants and agents with what operatives from various special services say on this matter. And every time they say roughly the same thing: different people come to their formation as informants and agents by a multitude of very different paths. What can be said in this case? Only that such words are nothing other than a vivid example of expressing half‑truth and, respectively, half‑lie. Where does their truth lie? At least in the fact that in reality different people become somebody’s informants and agents in the most varied ways and by the most varied paths. And where is the lie? In the fact that as they enumerate the various paths that lead people to becoming agents, operatives deliberately stack the deck and mix those that are predominant and typical with those that are by their very nature very rare and exotic. By behaving in this way, they actually lump flies and cutlets together into one pile — with the aim of instilling in broad strata of society the idea that both are essentially of approximately equal significance. Put differently, operatives from various special services try to embellish a real state of affairs that does not suit them at all — to put an equal sign between everything that occurs according to long‑established rules and that which in fact constitutes an exception to them and develops in spite of them. In the manner described above, operatives try to convince broad strata of society that they themselves are quite likeable and benevolently disposed toward all people. Yet the chief reason for the distortion of reality in this case is that in the overwhelming majority of instances acquiring agent cadres proves impossible without the use of the most refined and, in their essence, criminal methods of influence on persons previously singled out and suited for them. Like politicians (and to a far greater degree than they), operatives in real life find themselves placed in conditions in which, for the sake of professional success and career advancement in the course of carrying out their official duties, they must turn themselves into utter cynics and vengeful scoundrels (alas, such are the costs of their generally necessary and useful profession).
If we move from general words to specifics, the first thing to point out is the fact that in their overwhelming mass, informants and agent cadres of various kinds are selected by professional and non‑professional operatives (like production managers, informal leaders, and public ringleaders) from among persons deliberately driven by them into all sorts of dead‑end situations and desperate straits***.
As a vivid example of something of this kind, one can cite the relationships that arise between operational police officers and individuals who, after serving their sentences in places of deprivation of liberty, have returned to their places of residence. Throughout a whole series of subsequent years, such individuals are endlessly harassed in connection with crimes that cannot be solved immediately and that bear a certain resemblance in manner and style to the criminal acts they once committed. In itself, this kind of operational activity is perfectly normal and is built on reasoning by analogy. Put more simply, its essence lies in the well-founded assumption that a person who has committed a crime once may develop a tendency to repeat it in any difficult and trying situations for him. And not to repeat it just anyhow, but in his former manner, stemming from his natural inclinations and the practical skills and experience acquired in a completely specific field. For this very reason, the primary attention paid to and the implementation of various kinds of verification measures with regard to the said category of persons in any complex and tangled situations surrounding unresolved crimes is a fully justified and sensible practice. But, as they say, everything has its flip side (or its less than attractive side). The unseemly side in this case is not the very fact of universally following this practice, but the form in which it is carried out day after day. And that form is nothing other than a display of rudeness, brazenness, mockery, and constant jeering toward persons thus suspected. The sense of such behavior on the part of police operatives consists in constantly instilling in the persons under their “care” the thought that they are criminals who belong in prison and that, if not this time, then some next time, they will inevitably end up there all the same.
And in the overwhelming majority of cases, the police officers prove to be right. They are right not because they are examples of great prophets and far-sighted sages, nor because most of their “charges” are hardened villains and utterly incorrigible people. The grounds for such confidence prove to be extremely simple and are built on the awareness of the fact that human patience is not limitless and, under conditions of constant powerful psychological pressure — in the form of endless humiliations and public reproofs — is capable of leading to the arousal of inappropriate reactions and to the emergence of an acute desire to take revenge or in some other way to cause trouble for their unrestrained offenders in police uniform. From there it is only one step to committing new crimes, which for the police operatives are quite predictable and easily calculated by reason of their spontaneous nature (or, in other words, the lack of forethought on the part of the persons who committed them while in a state of intense agitation).
Constantly putting pressure on their “charges” in the manner described above, police operatives from time to time change the tone of their speeches — “good-naturedly” hinting to them that if they were to prove more compliant and agree to inform the internal affairs bodies regularly about everything that happens in the criminal circles around them, then the attitude toward them would become much more benevolent and tolerant. Being endlessly subjected to such refined pressure, many former prisoners cannot endure it or succumb to the temptation to take the path suggested to them — they become police informants and agents due to a perceived hopelessness of their situation. It is precisely such persons who, in police circles, are called “those who have embarked on the path of correction,” while those of them who actually decide to break with their criminal past, not wishing at the same time to become stool pigeons and informers, the operatives proceed to press with redoubled and tripled force — as if they were their bitterest enemies. For all the apparent paradoxicality of this point, there is nothing surprising in it. The whole point is that persons who continue to move in criminal circles while expressing their unwillingness to take the path of cooperation with police officers, one way or another, remain constantly in the officers’ field of vision — thanks to the presence among them of a sufficiently large number of agents of the internal affairs bodies. But any strong personalities who manifest a striving to become independent of anyone at all and refuse to let into their private life anyone who seems to them completely unnecessary and extraneous prove to be effectively disappearing from the police officers’ field of vision and difficult to predict in their behavior — due to the absence of a possibility for regularly gathering a sufficient amount of information about their everyday conduct. The conclusion from everything said here is the following. A police officer is by no means some inveterate evildoer, but from a purely practical point of view it is much more convenient and easier for him to deal either with a hardened criminal or with an agent broken as a personality, than to engage in complicated and painstaking work with regard to someone not entirely comprehensible and who has effectively walled himself off from his constant presence behind his back by a barrier of something essentially hard to overcome. By virtue of this, the operative finds himself professionally interested in behaving in such a way that any personality who comes into his field of vision finds itself, as soon as possible, placed before the necessity of choosing between becoming either his actual ally or his obvious enemy, and left not the slightest possibility of occupying some intermediate and not entirely clearly expressed position.
Someone might ask — what relation does all the above have to the life of the overwhelming majority of law-abiding (or, more precisely, never criminally prosecuted) citizens? The most direct relation. The habitat of the socially disadvantaged strata of the population and its inhabitants themselves are, for the police and special services, nothing other than a training ground for practicing the basics of conducting operational work by novices and young representatives of their professions, and a testing ground for the preliminary approbation and detailed elaboration of all newly created innovations which are then introduced and used in the process of conducting operational work with regard to representatives of the more protected and self-assured strata of the population. And together with the basics and innovations thus assimilated, the operational officers of various special services “assimilate” a disdainful attitude toward the rights not only of hardened criminals but also of quite ordinary and law-abiding citizens who, for the most various accidental reasons beyond their control, have the habit of sometimes coming into the operatives’ field of vision. In practice, this leads to the fact that the methods described above of coercing into confidential collaboration (perhaps not in such sharp and clearly visible forms) are widely used by operatives of the police and other special services with regard to entirely normal and in no way particularly remarkable people.
As vivid and commonly encountered examples of manifestations of something of this kind, one can point to the rather frequent instances of operatives appealing to the relatives of prisoners who have a great desire to be released as soon as possible, with proposals to observe the behavior of someone among their well-known surroundings or to find out something from them in exchange for promises to help them in some way in resolving vitally important issues for them (or, on the contrary, to threaten with their ability to create serious obstacles on the path to achieving something they greatly desire). Another no less vivid and life-like example is the maximal obstruction of obtaining rights to Russian citizenship for migrants and forced resettlers (on purely formal and unsubstantiated grounds), combined with the practice of simultaneously making enticing offers to one or another person striving to obtain it. The essence of such offers consists in promises to assist in speeding up the processing of all necessary documents in the event of their expressing reciprocal agreement to inform the operatives regularly about everything that happens and who is thinking what in the resettlement communities (and, it goes without saying, is accompanied by threats to make entry into Russian citizenship impossible in the event of a reciprocal refusal).
In a somewhat more complicated but largely similar manner, scientists and representatives of other professions who happen to be admitted to state secrets are recruited into agent activities. For the purpose of carrying out their periodic checks, operatives from the central apparatus of counterintelligence services are regularly sent to such persons, presenting themselves as representatives of kindred professions dealing with questions of similar subject matter. Acting as initiators of acquaintances and striking up friendly relations, the undercover operatives begin deliberately to draw those being checked into conversations on professional topics on some controversial questions. Those being checked who bite at this bait and start defending their point of view with all their might, for the sake of arguing their words not infrequently begin to cite some secret data as examples. Having achieved what they wanted, such highly intellectual “friends” soon disappear somewhere, and the operatives supervising them turn up from the regional state security administrations and acquaint them with the materials of the checks carried out. Having pointed out to their charges that for the committed breaches of the secrecy regime, at best, unpleasant hearings and a cross on their entire future career await them, and at worst, criminal prosecution, the operatives (after a certain pause) inform such persons that they can treat them with indulgence and save them from all troubles on the condition that they become informers on their colleagues at work.
Quite widely used — for the purpose of drawing into agent activities — is the practice of using various kinds of temptations by operatives. For example, foreigners with access to certain important secrets, after a detailed study of their passions and the psychological characteristics of their characters, may be offered large sums of money before which they cannot hold out. Once having agreed to something of this kind, on subsequent occasions they prove already psychologically ready to work for much smaller sums. In order to spur them on to display such readiness, operatives often engineer situations for such persons in which an acute need for means for unforeseen expenses arises, or simply proceed to blackmail them — threatening to expose them as sources of obtaining secret information. In other situations, instead of money, prostitutes are slipped to lovers of women, lovers of drink are invited to drinking bouts in an atmosphere conducive to confidential communication, and as instruments for subsequent blackmail — filmed bedroom scenes or recordings of conversations abounding in moments of something prohibited from disclosure. As analogous examples of manifestations of something of this kind with regard to citizens of one’s own state, one can mention cases of appeals to one or another of them with requests to incidentally deliver supposedly innocent parcels and packages (actually containing something prohibited) to certain acquaintances of their acquaintances (who in reality are agents of the operatives interested in this) or the brazen stuffing by the operatives themselves into their pockets and bags of items of something stolen, drugs, or weapons.
With the aim of driving into hopeless situations young and green persons who manifest an inclination to do something criminal, and who also demonstrate an inability to think critically and a readiness to be led by someone more experienced, special methods are used. Thus, to persons of this kind, using various suitable occasions and their propensity to readily enter into contacts with totally unfamiliar and barely familiar people, seasoned agents are often introduced, who, under the guise of expressing proposals for carrying out something entertaining or capable of satisfying one or another of their needs, or expressing requests for help “out of friendship,” proceed to involve such youngsters in the regular commission of something unsightly and openly criminal. Thanks to the existence of well-established contacts with the operatives, such agents for the time being ensure their newly-baked helpers the possibility of committing criminal acts with impunity. Such impunity and the ideas deliberately instilled by their agent ringleaders lead to the emergence in the heads of the involved youngsters of thoughts about their own specialness and exceptionality — of belonging to organizations of such persons to whom everything is permitted in life. On the other hand, such thoughts and the strongly changing character of their behavior turn into, for the youths who have become overly conceited, the breakup of personal relationships with all their former friends and acquaintances and an effective closing-off within circles of their own kind. In turn, the agent ringleaders of such circles proceed to establish within them their despotic orders — to betray to the operatives all those comrades and underlings who attempt to demonstrate their independence and prove fully capable of competing with them, and to exact in an extremely harsh manner from all the rest for every mistake or transgression committed. Knowing that such persons will not dare to complain about them anywhere, because as a result of such steps the facts of their complicity in previously committed crimes would come to light, for which they face long terms of deprivation of freedom, the agent ringleaders in many cases proceed to retarget the activities of the gangs of their underlings toward the exertion of crude pressure, the staging of provocations, and the organization of “accidents” with regard to someone becoming displeasing to their masters from among the operational officers (or to the certain political circles standing behind them). In the overwhelming majority of cases, this proves to be nothing other than the organization by operatives of concrete special services of the physical elimination of one or another representative of the criminal or political world beyond their control (whom they very much desire, but are unable to remove from the scene and bring to responsibility by more or less legal-looking means) through the hands of such criminals who become in many respects dependent on them, but at the same time prove incapable of realizing this fact and are used by them blindly. This is convenient for the operatives in that the rank-and-file perpetrators, not being initiated into the full picture of the matter, in situations of any hiccups arising and their being brought to responsibility for crimes committed by them against someone of their own kind (or sufficiently resembling themselves), even if anyone had a great desire to do so, would prove incapable of naming the main organizers of the high-profile affairs and would allow them to remain unpunished under any configuration that might arise.
The most numerous, however, in the plan under consideration and touching very many Russian citizens, is the practice of conscious non-interference (for the time being) in the processes of their committing numerous violations and abuses (provided they have a sense of measure and do not go too far in their deeds), combined with the simultaneous collection of documented confirmations of each such fact. The time for intervention in the affairs of such persons usually comes when the operatives’ plans for using them as their agent helpers in matters connected with something more serious and representing a significant danger have ripened. The thought usually expressed by operational officers in such cases is the following. In exchange for expressing readiness for confidential collaboration, they are prepared henceforth to look through their fingers at all kinds of violations and abuses on the part of persons capable of being very useful to them. In situations where some kind of disagreement is expressed in response, the operatives quickly make it clear to such persons that if they continue to behave so unreasonably, then in the very near future criminal cases may be opened against them or some compromising facts about them may be made public. If, however, against a person who in certain situations could prove very useful to the operatives, it is not possible to collect any reasonably serious compromising materials, then the latter proceed to engage in verbal speculations around everything not fully justified or insignificant in his actions and witness testimony, or simply to dig into moments of his biography in search of something else they could pick on. In other words — to deliberately exaggerate the degree of danger of one or another of his actions, to intimidate with purely theoretical possibilities of bringing him to criminal liability or of contributing to the excitation of public distrust of him through demonstrative actions against him and the spreading of bad rumors through already existing agent helpers.
If there proves to be nothing to pick on (or if such a model of behavior is recognized as not comporting with the situation that has arisen and not entirely suitable in view of the characteristic features of the personality of the person being processed), the operatives usually proceed to portray themselves as someone very conscientious and troubled about the fate of the whole society and at the same time appeal to his conscientiousness, patriotism, or sense of civic duty. In cases where they obtain everything desired from such a person, the operational officers seek to rid themselves of his close presence as soon as possible, so as not inadvertently to blurt out anything superfluous in his presence and not to demonstrate to him a graphic example of the cynicism of their entire practice (not forgetting to accompany him with words that the Motherland will never forget him and will always be proud of him). In cases where some obvious unwillingness or refusals are expressed in response, the operatives are left with nothing else but to knit their brows — to express their disappointment at such unworthy behavior on their part and promise to pay to them in the future the most intent attention — with the aim of bringing them to strict responsibility at the appearance of even the slightest pretext for this. (To be honest, threats of this kind in the overwhelming majority of cases are empty promises designed for simpletons. They are empty not because the employees of the internal affairs bodies are incapable of carrying out what they have promised. In principle, operatives are capable of this (and on occasion are not averse to playing a dirty trick on someone they dislike), but the whole point is that they always have a large number of far more serious assignments and important matters. In other words, in the vast majority of cases they simply do not have the time and physical strength left for inquiries about something essentially rather insignificant and for taking revenge on all those who once dared to refuse them in something. Threats of this kind on the part of representatives of the state security bodies can have more serious consequences, but only for those persons who strive for indispensable career growth, the attainment of high posts, or the gaining of wide renown in society.)
On the whole and in general, the essence of such a method of recruiting into “confidential” collaboration consists in the fact that, once falling into skillfully placed nets, everyone caught in them for a very long time finds himself compelled, against his own desires and without any benefit to himself, to monitor his colleagues and neighbors and periodically report on any more or less noteworthy moments of their behavior to the operative supervising him or to a person closely connected with him.
The second largest category of persons from whom professional and non-professional operatives draw their agent cadres are people who are beginning to feel a certain guilt or awkwardness about their position and at the same time experiencing unhealthy sensations — such as suspicion, resentment, anger, and envy — toward someone around them, connected by something common or similar in essence. Being partly inclined to start informing on someone they do not quite like or who is unfriendly toward them, such persons at the same time find it more preferable for the time being to keep silent about everything they know, harboring quite justified fears that those people, for such behavior, might arrange confrontations within their circle or create obstacles to achieving success, or in retaliation inform on them about something no less serious. To force such ambivalent persons to embark on the path of cooperation with internal affairs or state security organs, operatives in each specific case need to perform just one well-calculated nudge, after which everything usually begins to run smoothly.
But the main perpetrators of the committed unlawful acts, from the nature of the charges brought against them and the facts set out in them, usually find it easy to figure out the approximate circle of persons who could have informed on them. By successively carrying out confrontations with each suspect and conducting various comparisons based on everything thus obtained, the main figures prove to be quite capable of arriving at a well-founded conclusion as to who exactly treated them this way and trying to punish the latter. In turn, those persons who, through the well-calculated actions of operatives, are prompted to display excessive frankness regarding someone they dislike or who is unfriendly toward them, in situations that begin to threaten them with undesirable confrontations in their narrow circles or punishments for their unworthy behavior, are forced to choose. To choose between ending up in the position of an outcast and being persecuted from their familiar environment, and, by purposefully carrying out denunciations against those people who can threaten them or hinder their intentions, once again drawing the attention of law enforcement or supervisory structures to them and thereby for some time remove themselves from the line of fire. Operatives, for the time being looking favorably on such informers and their denunciations, at certain moments begin to tell them that they well understand the motives of such behavior, and in exchange for regularly providing them with opportunities for actual salvation from all kinds of persecution, they desire in return something much greater. This “greater” usually consists in inducing such informers to move from irregular informing against those persons whom they perceive as threatening or hindering in their personal or official affairs, to regular informing and carrying it out against those persons whom the operatives will point out to them.
You to me, and I to you - that is the main principle of “confidential” cooperation of this type.
The third largest category of persons from which operatives recruit agent cadres are people who fall into difficult life situations and dead ends not because someone is trying to drive them there by cunning and the most malicious means, but because they drive themselves there - due to their not entirely serious attitude toward life or the emergence of various accidental causes (such as natural and social cataclysms, loss of health, and the passing of close ones). Conducting operational work aimed at engaging in agent activity persons who are greatly weakened and have lost faith in their ability to independently achieve any life goals is in many ways akin to the activity aimed at recruiting ordinary people into the ranks of religious sects. But with just one small distinguishing feature. If sectarians engage in catching bewildered and lost souls by offering them comforting words and surrounding them with their hypocritical attention, operatives behave in a much more sophisticated and inventive manner — upon seeing someone very suitable for them but still trying to resist the life circumstances piling up on him, they in every way contribute to creating around him oppressive and unbearable conditions that would further increase the degree of his suffering and lead to a sense of complete helplessness in the surrounding world. In other words, operatives, before beginning to use for agent purposes someone weak-willed and quite easily yielding, strive to completely break him, as a personality - so that then, having raised him up, acting as saviors from something utterly inevitable, they can demand of him displays of loyalty and absolutely unquestioning obedience.
As a vivid example of recruitment into informing and agent activity using this method, one can point to students at various higher education institutions who show no inclination for persistent mastery of the sciences and are indifferent to the subjects of their future professions. Advancing to senior courses and beginning to understand that nothing is shining for them in their randomly chosen professional fields, but at the same time desiring to arrange their lives well, such students often embark on a stormy and bustling activity. The purpose of such activity usually turns out to be aimed at somehow attracting special attention to themselves and pleasing with their ability to serve some influential and high-ranking person who, having sufficient will, would be fully capable of helping their further employment. But since professionally such graduates turn out to be “quantities” very close to zero, various sufficiently high-ranking and influential individuals who, for some special reasons, pay attention to them, very quickly make them understand that they will agree to keep them with themselves only on condition of receiving reciprocal consent to undertake the execution of something humiliating and unworthy in all senses of the word. Placed in such conditions, when their entire future career growth becomes directly dependent on their ability to satisfy the most depraved whims of their patrons and manage timely to report to them about everything happening around, such persons effectively deprive themselves of opportunities for any growth in a purely professional sense. In simpler terms, such persons are very quickly brought to the final realization that they are nobodies and that if they were dismissed (unlike their professional colleagues), hardly anyone else would agree to take them on equivalent and well-paid positions. On the whole, bitterly regretting their so joyless situation, such informers and agents find themselves placed in conditions where it becomes far more terrible for them to lose it. And since that is so, they have no choice but to patiently endure any humiliations and always strive to please their all-powerful masters in everything, so as not to cause their displeasure in any voluntary or involuntary way and thus not aggravate their situation still further.
As another example, convenient for applying similar methods of operational work, one should name the milieu of representatives of creative professions and the humanities. Due to the absence of clear criteria for determining which achievements in these spheres of activity are more important and significant and which are less, the assessments made of them are to a great extent subjective and dependent on the opinion of the one who actually possesses the right to render final verdicts on the matter. In real life this turns out so that fame and resounding success in these spheres come not so much to truly talented people as to various kinds of sycophants and accidental persons who have managed to attract the attention of the organizers of various one-time actions and mass events (or, more precisely, to please them for a time with something purely external and superficial in its essence). But participation in one-time mass actions and spectacular events quite often leads to bursts of success around individual main participants. While experiencing resounding and completely undeserved success with the general public, such persons simultaneously begin to feel the attention of the mighty of this world, one part of whom consists of operational officers of the special services and their agents, and the other represents certain members of business circles who go hand in hand with them. Both, in such cases, propose to certain unexpectedly spotlighted persons to conclude lucrative contracts. The meaning of such proposals lies in the words that fame is a very fickle and changeable thing – today it exists, tomorrow it is gone. In order to keep it warm and to bask in the rays of one’s success as long as possible, once-spotlighted persons must participate as often as possible in some new projects, and also appear before the broad public at important meetings and public events. But in order to take part somewhere, one must at least receive an invitation. The provision of regular invitations and suitable proposals to spotlighted persons is undertaken precisely by representatives of cultural and artistic business circles and by specially authorized operational officers of the special services. While the sense of the former’s activity lies in imposing on once-spotlighted persons bonded and servile conditions (on the basis of which all their further creative activity must develop) in exchange for providing them a constant opportunity to demonstrate the appearance of success in the eyes of the broad public, the latter make no attempt whatsoever to encroach on their financial interests. The meaning of the operational officers’ activity lies in something else – in obtaining from publicly spotlighted persons, in exchange for providing them opportunities for regular participation in high-profile projects and important public events, written consents to secret cooperation with the special services. The purpose of such cooperation turns out to lie in carrying out regular collection and transmission of information of interest, as well as in imperceptibly exerting targeted influences both on those indicated to them prominent public figures and officials who seek to maintain contact with them, and on the numerous crowds of ordinary people and lovers of all kinds of freebies, who begin to follow on their heels and see them as their idols. In cases when refusals are expressed in response to such proposals, both sets set about keeping the refusers on a starvation diet and, for instructive purposes, displaying them as wretched laughingstocks and failures who failed to take advantage of the opportunity once granted to them.
In turn, in relations with those of the once-spotlighted persons who accept the binding conditions or servile proposals coming from operatives or the representatives of business circles who are recruiting them, rigid frameworks are created in order to prevent any wilfulness and independence on their part. Any departure beyond such frameworks is suppressed in the most decisive manner by establishing for such violators an even more strictly regulated schedule of life, by imposing any additional duties, and as an extreme measure, a temporary or lifelong deprivation of the opportunity to participate in everything that has become very habitual for them and an actual consignment to oblivion.
Very similar to the one just described is the practice of recruiting into agent activity persons who have failed to obtain a full higher education, as well as those who, having obtained it, over a number of years demonstrate their professional incompetence or reveal in themselves insecurity and inferiority complexes in connection with production failures that have occurred to them or facts of having served various punishments for once-admitted violations. Quite many operational officers and their agent assistants from among leaders of various levels are precisely occupied with looking out among such categories of people those who suffer greatly because from some moment in time they suddenly found themselves deprived of the possibility of full-fledged communication with people of an intellectual level equal to their own because of the absence of documents confirming the actual level of their professional qualification, or are slaves of their own prejudices about never allowing themselves to sink to the level of taking up such types of activity that, in their opinion, are the exclusive lot of persons with a low level of intellectual development and outright failures. Agreeing to take the former into their circle as various kinds of assistants and consultants, ostensibly for their having certain knowledge in one or another practical field, and continuing to keep the latter near themselves in managerial positions of the very lowest rank under the guise of showing them special compassion, such operational officers and their agent assistants, appearing in the guise of executive workers of sufficiently high level, at some moments in time unexpectedly start declaring to both that they had shown their participation and agreed to keep them with themselves not at all out of the pity they felt for them or because of their having certain practical knowledge. In other words, such persons who feel insecure and suffer emotionally are presented by the operatives with the fact that from this time forward their chief purpose will consist in conducting continuous surveillance of preliminarily determined and people around them indicated to them. Moreover, for the purpose of ridding them of idle illusions, the operational officers directly tell such agents that the level of the actual value they represent and the expediency of extending contracts with them for further cooperation will in each case be determined on the basis of examining the results of their current activity and will be subject to regular re-evaluations in one direction or another. If you do not wish to be thrown onto the garbage heap, you must work to the point of exhaustion all the time – such turns out to be the lot in life of many people whose formation as informers and agents takes place on the soil of their existing inner complexes and the prejudices they experience.
For the purpose of becoming acquainted with yet another variant of the examined method of recruitment to secret cooperation, the author proposes to all those interested in this problem to turn to the problems of emigration and emigrants. In the life of various states, situations often arise in which their authorities find it advantageous or expedient to ensure an outflow of certain strata of their citizens while simultaneously preventing the outflow of all the rest. For these purposes, powerful bureaucratic obstacles are often created, for the successful overcoming of which in the majority of cases it turns out necessary to expend an enormous amount of means, time, and nerves. Picking out among the potential emigrants those most emotionally unrestrained and passionately wishing to leave, the operatives conducting careful surveillance over them finally give secret instructions that exit permits be issued only to part of the members of individual families, while another part of them receive a refusal on some formal grounds and contrived reasons. For close relatives such situations are like a knife in the heart. In order to avoid them and to somehow settle everything, many of those receiving individual exit permits start groveling at the feet of emigration officials and begging for the processing of exit documents for those relatives of theirs who have received a refusal. If such entreaties begin to seem sufficiently sincere and convincing to the operatives, they propose to the weak-nerved and hysterical petitioners to conclude a kind of deal – in exchange for providing their relatives the opportunity to depart abroad without hindrance, to sign a document on voluntary consent to cooperate with the special services of their state.
Shortly after any such signatory, along with all close relatives, finds himself in another country and manages to settle down there a little, representatives of the foreign intelligence service appear to them under some pretext and begin to blackmail them with the documents available. Declaring their ability to make public at any moment the facts of the once-expressed consents to cooperate with the intelligence services of the state whose citizens they recently ceased to be, and thereby to arouse distrust and persecution toward them (and all members of their families) on the part of the authorities of the states of their current residence, such guests from “the past” very easily and quickly turn many former citizens of their states into spineless and entirely dependent creatures, which turn out to be quite suitable for subsequent shameless use with some nefarious intentions and for the dirtiest purposes.
Another no less vivid, but more “nobly” looking example, which is capable of providing broad scope for carrying out numerous recruitments and involvements into secret cooperation, is also based on a practice that periodically arises in international relations and is connected with the breakups of large states. In situations of this kind, in many of the seceding outskirts of former empires, movements begin to grow that are aimed at driving out of their places representatives of non-indigenous nationalities, who are perceived there as infidels, occupiers, and potential traitors. The authorities of the largest fragments of former empires, in their striving to restore something of the past in situations of this kind, often start hatching dirty political intrigues, the essence of which consists in the following. Under the guise of loud statements about granting their compatriots who found themselves outside their historical homeland full political rights, they endlessly begin clamorously to make demagogic declarations and to undertake attempts at crude interference in the internal politics of such small states. Perfectly understanding that such forms of conducting foreign policy will most likely turn into an exacerbation of interstate relations and lead to the creation of even worse conditions for the compatriots living there, their politicians and special services are precisely counting on this. Heating the situation around the foreign communities of their compatriots in the states very close to themselves to the limit, the representatives of the special services of the largest fragments of former empires start turning their attention to those of them whose situation is the most difficult and complex (and first of all to the families of former military personnel – because of their having an inculcated habit of unconditionally carrying out any orders of their historical homelands, as well as an orientation to fight for their rights in the most decisive and well-organized manner). Under the guise of rendering all-round assistance to such families, the special services start organizing the transportation of their elderly and minor children to the historical homeland. Having freed the most capable and active members of such families from actual burdens and provided their minor children with a full-fledged future, the representatives of the special services, in return for this, begin to demand from them the complete concentration of their efforts on intensifying the struggle for the expansion of political rights and on involving in their activity as many as possible of those of their compatriots whose all family members continue to remain together with them.
Making the activists of the foreign organizations of their compatriots thus created understand that the living conditions of their evacuated elderly and the future of their minor children will entirely and completely depend on what successes they achieve in the process of conducting their organizational activity, it becomes possible for the special services of the largest fragments of former empires to achieve that the former begin to devote all their strength and time to their struggle. At the same time, special agents of the above-mentioned special services, looking at such activists, start purposely drawing to those the attention of the rank-and-file members of their organization, calling them living examples of selfless service to their historical homeland and calling on all the rest to follow their example. Among the rank-and-file members of such organizations there always turns out to be a certain number of sufficiently naive and overexcited people who do not understand the true reasons for the manifestation of such “selflessness” and take everything at face value. Starting thoughtlessly to follow the examples indicated to them, such naive people begin regularly to enter into open confrontations with the local authorities and thereby definitively spoil their relations with them. For their part, the authorities of such states, standing on principle, start demonstrating to the persons of foreign origin who behave so disrespectfully toward them their principled stance and complete unwillingness to make any concessions, thereby reducing their situation to a state of total despair. In turn, the special services and politicians of the largest fragments of former empires begin to use such facts as informational pretexts for blowing them up and turning them into high-profile foreign-policy actions aimed at discrediting states that are unfriendly to them and presenting those in the eyes of the world community as the chief culprits of all that happened. By systematically carrying out their activity in the above-described manner, the special services organizing all this on the one hand secure substantial savings of means for their states, and on the other – build very many of their successes, crudely speaking, on fools who are cleverly hoodwinked by them at one or another moment in time.
But that is not all. The minor children of the activists already considered, who are sent to the historical homeland to receive a full-fledged and all-round development, in the majority of cases turn out to be placed in special boarding schools, where in addition to the ordinary, they receive military and intelligence training. After the time of their growing up comes and they are given the opportunity to start families of their own, such young and supposedly completely green-looking persons, in situations when a special need arises, can at any moment be sent back, having first been inculcated with the idea that the Motherland gave them all the very best and now the time has come for selfless service to it. Settling down in new places with the help of their greatly aged relatives and replacing them at their posts, such illegal intelligence officers, with all the respect expressed toward them, in fact find themselves in the position of slaves. The essence of such slavery lies in a clear awareness of a simple and immutable truth, the essence of which can be expressed in the following. Every instance of their having a desire somehow to retire from affairs or – God forbid – to embark on the path of treason threatens them with the onset of irreparable and horrifying consequences for the wives and children left behind by them (a nostalgic love for whom, as well as for their entire homeland, is purposefully aroused by the efforts of the special services that dispatch them there – through the regular forwarding of various little messages and handmade trinkets from their close ones). Such is the true subtext of the former heroism of Soviet intelligence officers, as well as the heroism of those of their future generations, whose attention is now being concentrated on the Baltic direction and who, quite possibly, in a sufficiently near time will unfold their activity widely on the indicated soil.
But the most mass platforms for finding suitable candidates for future agents and informers are not higher education institutions, not closed special boarding schools, and not even the widely advertised parties of any broadly popular persons who enjoy a certain fame. In Russian conditions, such platforms are prison zones, military units, and children’s homes. These, if they can be called such, enormous testing grounds and training polygons, through which huge numbers of the most diverse people regularly pass, by virtue of their significant isolation and closedness from the rest of society, are ideally suited for use for the purpose of subjecting the latter without exception to various testing influences for fortitude and inclination to commit certain actions (or, to put it differently, of working out an understanding of who is what and taking all of this into account). The concrete advantages of carrying out something of this kind consist in the possibility of classifying all the persons who have ever been subjected to testing into categories: into potentially dangerous, not entirely reliable, and truly reliable citizens, with the subsequent entering of the marks assigned to them in the personal files kept on each of them. Proceeding from the sets of documentation on people once studied by them, the representatives of the special services arrive at the acquisition of the ability to easily and quickly discover such persons among all those toward whom, at one time or another and for the most diverse reasons, their attention happens to be drawn. Moreover, all this gives them the ability to quickly pick out among the recognized persons such ones as possess any criminal inclinations and from the outset cannot merit any trust and leniency, and to easily distinguish them from those toward whom, on the basis of conclusions obtained from the previously collected materials of their files, one should relate in a more benevolent and trusting manner. In turn, the possession of such an instrument, which is capable of giving the special services the ability to quickly determine what those or other citizens who have unexpectedly interested them really are and whom they represent, gives them a real possibility to carry out more rational redistribution of their forces and to implement mutually differing or differentiated approaches to various categories of persons.
All the above-described considerations arouse in operational officers unbridled aspirations to open establishment or personal files on as many of their citizens as possible and (first and foremost on those who are only beginning to enter the time of active life), and also to the development and putting into operation of state programs aimed at carrying out measures of an educational and strengthening character and applicable to various categories of such persons – with the aim of bringing them into full correspondence with the demands put forward on the part of society and the existing authorities. Such aspirations usually find their expression in the form of painting before society the most bright and cheerful pictures of the future which, according to the words of such painters, can come true only in the event of the special services being endowed with limitless powers and capabilities to watch the behavior of each and everyone. But even in cases when the special services begin to receive unwavering and firm support from the supreme authority of their states in affairs of this kind, one big BUT very soon arises. This BUT is connected with the necessity of constantly investing enormous sums of money, without the presence of which the full-fledged implementation of such grandiose police programs becomes impossible. For the richest states of the world problems of this kind turn out to be quite solvable and surmountable, but in those states that cannot boast of abundance and sufficiency for the overwhelming majority of their citizens, everything stands completely otherwise. The supreme authorities of such states, discovering that the price of the indicated question turns out to be very and very high, usually pose the question bluntly to their police organs and counterintelligence services – either they completely cease carrying out such costly and unmanageable programs, or they agree to carry them out in separate parts and at the expense of finding hidden reserves within themselves and economizing the available resources (or, in other words, without demanding from their states the allocation of additional means for these purposes from their state budgets). Having weighed all the pros and cons, in the police departments and counterintelligence services of such states they usually come to the conclusion that if they make a good effort and strain themselves, they can kill two birds with one stone – solve the problem that has arisen before them in an independent manner, and at the same time earn good grace and present themselves before their supreme authority in the best light, thus demonstrating to them their unquestionable organizational talents.
Setting themselves such conditions in which it is required to ensure strict economy of means, the specially authorized representatives of the police departments and counterintelligence services first of all proceed to put on starvation diets those huge contingents of persons who are wholly or to a large extent transferred into their de facto disposition – for the purpose of economizing the available means and simultaneously carrying out on them experiments to reveal their true essences. A situation in which many people over the course of a long time are forced to experience cold and hunger constantly is already extreme and conducive to finding out who is worth what. Some in such conditions start loudly expressing indignation and protesting against such unbearable conditions, others withdraw into themselves and squeeze into various cracks, still others – make something in order to exchange or sell, a fourth – engage in fraud and forcibly rob their companions in misfortune. Even from this it is already possible to draw quite definite and clear conclusions about what those or others of the observed personalities truly represent.
As they say, all would be well, but the thing is that many of the persons specially placed in conditions so unusual for them begin to reveal inclinations to escape and subsequently tell all the people around them about facts of the arbitrariness reigning in the places of their recent confinement and stay. Absolutely not wishing to be recognized as the chief culprits for the creation of such unfavorable pictures, the responsible representatives of the police departments and counterintelligence services in such conditions turn out to be especially interested in concealing them from the eyes of the broad public. For this reason they have no choice but to ponder the necessity of installing sturdy window bars and erecting high and well-guarded walls around the institutions and units under their control. But since the materials for the construction of such walls cost no small amount of money, and working hands are required for their erection and current maintenance, all this leads to the fact that in such institutions and units they begin widely to use the labor of prisoners, rank-and-file servicemen, and under-age inmates. Because such measures turn out to be clearly insufficient and incapable of being provided all at once, the operational officers, who for the designated purposes are specially introduced into the management staffs of the examined institutions and units and whose instructions are mandatory for execution and are not subject to any discussion on the part of the rest, begin to conduct their daily work with their main contingents and personnel.
The purpose of conducting such operational work turns out to be aimed at, on the one hand, forever inculcating in all the contingents the thought that one does not argue with the authorities, and on the other – instilling in as many of their representatives as possible a stable aversion (at the level of subconscious fears) toward everything criminal and to develop in them an evident striving, upon seeing before themselves the committing of anything reprehensible and criminal, immediately to report this to the representatives of the authorities.
The essence of conducting such operational work consists in the following number of points. On the one hand, it manifests itself in the form of summonings for introductory conversations face to face and the expression of explicit or veiled proposals to begin working for the operational section or, to put it differently – to observe daily the behavior of one’s companions and to secretly inform on them in exchange for receiving improved conditions of maintenance and a reduction in the level of generally obligatory demands. Another side of it is the winning over to one’s side of the most inveterate hooligans and their ringleaders. Summoning such to themselves for talks or meeting them in a more informal setting, the staff operatives in a veiled form gently indicate to such hooligans whom they should and whom they should not touch and offend. At the same time the operational officers do not forget each time to draw the attention of the ringleaders they have enlisted from the circles they control to the fact that if they listen to them in everything, they will not know any problems – any of their criminal deeds will remain as if unnoticed and easily get away with them. And conversely, to point out that if they try to act contrary to the just-voiced words, then the entire punitive power available to the administrative apparatus will be brought down upon them. In cases when oral agreements are reached, the recent hooligans and bullies turn into active helpers of the operational officers and other representatives of the commanding staff of their units or institutions. From that time onward, such helpers and activists begin everywhere to walk around with an arrogant air and to point out to all the rest that it is they, and not anyone else, who are the de facto masters of their situation. In other words, to perpetrate lawlessness and cruelly mock the arriving novices and recruits so as to reveal and disclose their personality essences as well as possible for the operatives who invisibly observe everything, and for instructive purposes to beat up those persons who commit any blunders, show an inclination to disobedience when faced with something humiliating to themselves, and demonstrate an outright unwillingness to do hard and dirty work.
The discerning minds of the operatives, who recorded such facts, quickly came to the conclusions that for all its obvious unsightliness and viciousness (leading to the actual division of the human contingents being processed into unequal-right castes and the irreparable mutilation of enormous numbers of human destinies), the practice that had arisen turns out to be fully capable of ensuring the achievement of high formal indicators in their work and moreover is quite successful and convenient in the sense that it opens broad possibilities for quickly clarifying the question of which of the persons thus tested are quite hard to break, and which of them are in principle capable of being a leader, and for breaking whom great efforts are not required, and who is suitable only for use as someone passive. And since it is distinguished by its extreme cheapness and simplicity of reproduction, the operational officers of various law-enforcement departments found it quite expedient for it to be spread widely and everywhere within the territorial limits of their states. As a result of all this, in the outcome we have what we have – lawlessness proceeding according to this scheme has become the norm of life for Russian children’s homes, colonies for minors, and partly for the Russian army. Why partly? Because the army has a specific character, connected first of all with its special purpose, and secondly – with the relatively short terms of service for conscripts and the incomplete isolation of its military units from the surrounding society. In other words, the army command, unlike the State Security operatives who patronize it, for the purpose of ensuring high combat capability for its units, was always interested in subjecting rank-and-file servicemen not to exorbitant physical and psychological loads (for the purpose of obtaining true representations of their personality essences), but to sufficiently moderate and even ones – for the purpose of providing all those drafted into the army milieu with an even and identical military hardening. As a result of a lengthy clarification of mutual relations (which was especially acute in the middle and end of the 1930s and had a very sad effect on the fates of very many military commanders) between the Ministry of Defense and the State Security department on this issue, a certain compromise was reached, later receiving such a name as dedovshchina (hazing). Its essence consists in the fact that in the overwhelming majority of military units, the role of tortured weaklings and dirty chukhans is played by “young” or newly arrived soldiers, and the roles of idly loitering and meting out reprisals activists are carried out by old-timers who have already managed to pass the main test of fortitude during the first year of service. As a result of the secret introduction of such an arrangement into the practice of army life, it turned out to be possible sufficiently easily and simply to bring it into a semblance of a certain equilibrium. On the one hand, to inculcate in young soldiers the thought that they must endure mockery and insults on the part of old-timers and patiently keep silent about everything on the grounds that they themselves in a sufficiently short time will get the opportunity to mock the young from new call-ups to their heart’s content – after they pass into the category of “old men.” And to point out to the old-timers something exactly opposite – that, remembering how hard it was for them at the beginning of service, they should not be too cruel and heartless toward the junior ones. Despite all the sufficient disadvantage of this situation for the curators from the State Security, which arose from the almost universal establishment of such army ways, they also learned to extract their benefits from it. First of all, this consists in the appearance for them of a real possibility to identify without exception in all old-timers the degree of inclination to carry out mockery and cruelty toward someone weaker or lower, as well as – to study the concrete characters of their manifestations and to determine the most effective irritants for any of their far-reaching and long-term goals.
As for places of deprivation of liberty intended for holding adult criminals, the introduction into their life of the practice of lawlessness in the form in which it exists in children’s homes and zones for minors also turned out to be impossible, but for completely different reasons. The essence of the whole thing is that the criminals who get into adult zones, in their overwhelming majority, are no longer children, but people sufficiently experienced and well aware of their interests (more precisely, they absolutely do not wish to content themselves with something small and purely symbolic). This also applies to those representatives of the criminal world who, upon getting into places of deprivation of liberty, by virtue of the presence of some special reasons, immediately express the desire to actively cooperate with the administrations of their institutions. Having been sentenced to sufficiently lengthy or very long terms and closely communicating with operational officers, with time they begin to assimilate from them the simplest and most highly effective methods of exerting psychological influences and to use them in their own way – for the purpose of exerting pressure on concrete representatives of the administration of their institutions. To put it in simpler terms, many-experienced activists set about threatening certain of their controllers and warders that they will denounce or inform the heads of the administrations of their (or higher-standing) institutions about any sufficiently serious violations on their part, or consciously to draw the most easily compliant and greedy of them into their criminal activity, in order then by means of blackmail to force them to dance to their tune everywhere and in everything.
Since the appetites of various people usually grow together with the increase of their possibilities, the most experienced and authoritative (in their circles) activists before long begin to display a striving to subjugate the entire administration under themselves and to secure for themselves the actual fullness of power in their zones. For these purposes, they usually enter into secret collusion among themselves. The meaning of such collusions consists in recognizing the necessity to surround each representative of the administration of their institution with as large a number of their activists of a lower level as possible – for the purpose of ensuring the possibility of collecting compromising material on absolutely everyone of them. But new activists and informers are not mushrooms in the forest – they do not arise as if from under the ground and do not appear out of nowhere. In the overwhelming majority of cases they are raised from among quite ordinary prisoners – thanks to the carrying out of purposeful and painstaking efforts coming from the activists already on hand at the given moment. But the whole thing is that in situations of this kind the most important thing is not to let a favorable moment slip, so there simply remains no time for such activists to carry out anything long and lengthy. For the purpose of ensuring the rapid growth in the number of their assets, the already-on-hand activists, taking advantage of their being uncontrolled, set about definitively untying their hands and staging real lawlessness toward those prisoners who express an outright unwillingness to join their ranks and who advise everyone else not to join there. Because those prisoners who, for whatever reasons of their own, categorically do not wish to embark on the path of cooperation with the administration, in situations of this kind find themselves driven into a helpless position, they have no choice but to rally tightly among themselves and, behaving in the most desperate manner, to give the gangs of the pressing activists a harsh rebuff and to pass over into retaliatory counter-offensives. The activists, in their overwhelming majority being, though impudent, yet sufficiently cowardly creatures, turn out to be completely incapable of showing the same selflessness. In situations when something very critical and threatening to them arises, they prefer to take to their heels and to swiftly leave the confines of the housing zones – to go off under the protection of their administration.
In turn, the operatives of concrete institutions of the penal enforcement system, in their striving to find an effective means for bringing the groups of activists that have gotten out of measure to their senses, in situations of this kind begin to pay special attention to the communities of criminals opposing them and to facilitate the strengthening of the authority and might of the latter. In real practice this above all expresses itself in the administration of such institutions in effect turning a blind eye to instances of the carrying in from the separated work zones into the common housing zones of sharpened metal rods and pieces of reinforcement bars, which can then be used as weapons. After enough of such weaponry accumulates inside the housing zones that, in the opinion of the administration, it proves to be quite sufficient for organizing a decisive rebuff to the actions of the pressing activists, and learning from the activists themselves about the time when their next intimidating actions toward all those unwilling to join their ranks are to begin, the operatives give instructions to undertake special measures. The essence of such measures consists in two points. The first of them is the pulling up around such zones of forces of the special subunits of the Ministry of Justice and the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs – in case the disturbances arising inside them should somehow begin to break out and come outside. And the second is ensuring the possibility of an unexpected blocking of the exits from the housing zones for the excessively multiplied activists at the moments most threatening to them. Actually giving over a significant part of the activists for reprisal and tearing apart by the rebelling zones, the representatives of the administration of such institutions, after the onset of certain lulls in the passions that have flared up, over the public address system demand that the main body of prisoners stop the outrages and disperse to their barracks, threatening otherwise to introduce the special subunits inside the zones, which will quickly restore order by using, instead of persuasion, entirely different measures (about the special features and detailed particulars of the application of such measures, see [this link](https://tipolog.atspace.com/ps_zagradit.htm#%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%20%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%B1%D0%B5%20%D1%81%20%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%BC%D0%B8%20%D0%B1%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B4%D0%BA%D
And finally, the time has come to deal with the fourth and smallest (for Russian conditions) category of persons, from whom operative workers continue to draw their agent cadres. This is none other than initiative persons who themselves come to the organs of internal affairs or state security, or when meeting with their representatives in some other setting, express frank desires to inform them of something that has become known to them and may be of interest to their departments, and also proceed to declare their readiness at any moment to continue the cooperation they have begun.
As another type of individuals who themselves begin to show a desire to become agents of the special services, we can mention people who derive enormous pleasure from the process of participating in such or similar activity (by turning it for themselves into a kind of exciting game that can be played throughout life) and experience an incomparable thrill. Or those of them who, having acquired excellent preliminary training and regularlyachieving high results in their work in spheres of activity that are inherently very similar to the work of special service agents, receive very tempting (from a material point of view and the existence of real opportunities for rapid career growth) offers of recruitment as an agent, which ordinary people almost never refuse because they realize that this happens only once in a lifetime and they will never have other chances to become truly successful.
Perfectly aware of the special value of this type of agent, for whom their agent activity becomes a way of life without which they simply cannot conceive their further existence, the special services have always exerted and continue to exert considerable efforts in terms of facilitating the creation in society of conditions that would favor the cultivation in the characters of many (above all young) people of qualities that are very valuable — from their point of view. For example, the internal affairs and state security agencies of many countries around the world have for a long time actively promoted the publication of books and the making of films about investigators and detectives (or in other words, the detective genre), which in a playful form teach people to be vigilant and suspicious toward everything presented to them as alien or foreign to their society, elementary surveillance skills, the ability to think logically and find reasoned confirmation for their conjectures, and — most importantly — always report everything thus noticed and discovered to someone older or more experienced (in the person of authorized representatives of authority). As another such example, but this time aimed not at individual but collective upbringing and reinforcement of such qualities (practiced in the course of specially organized games) among many members of the rising generations, one can name the Scout (Pioneer) organizations, which have also never been and never remain without attention from the special services that favor them.
As living examples of those spheres of activity which are to a large extent akin to the special services and which provide them with a regular influx of elite agent cadres from among their own ranks, one can name various intermediary firms (such as those engaged in conducting apartment exchanges, buying raw materials from small producers for wholesale resale to consumers, selling products manufactured by someone else in various towns and regions). Quite a number of their representatives — usually those who serve as examples of mid-level managers who have achieved a certain success in life thanks to their constant activity — in addition to working for the interests of their firms also work part-time as paid agents of the special services. A distinctive feature of such agents is that, through the extensive use of advertising methods, they regularly manage to gather and form around themselves groups of newcomers. By singling out the most capable and energetic ones from among them, such agents draw the attention of special service representatives to them. If, after studying the biographies of such newcomers, the special service representatives have no fundamental objections to their possible recruitment for agent activity at some point in the future, the agent-managers begin to work with them in their usual spheres of activity, but using special methodologies reflecting the interests of the special services. After the preparatory periods are completed, special selection commissions composed of special service representatives review all the indicators achieved by specific candidates for agents. If the achieved indicators are deemed sufficient, the agent-managers receive a per-piece payment from the special services for each of the students who have passed such a selection process in absentia, and at the same time they give the special service representatives a written undertaking not to disclose the names of such their trainees and not to try to seek meetings with them in the future. After that, taking advantage of some convenient pretext, the agent-managers, as it were, remove themselves from their students who have passed the special selection — individually hand them over to other persons, presented to them as their colleagues, but who in reality are operational workers of the special services. When arranging meetings with the unsuspecting trainees under the cover of other institutions, the operatives, during the course of these meetings, identify themselves as what they really are and propose that the former give their consent to enter into agent cooperation on terms that usually turn out to be very close to the limits of their life dreams.
Summing up everything said here about the specific ways of inducing all kinds of informers and agents to enter into cooperation, one can say only one thing. For all the unsightliness of their position, the overwhelming majority of them are deeply unhappy persons, worthy of the sincere pity of all around them. The same, alas, cannot be said about the operational workers of all kinds of special services, by whose tireless efforts, daily and hourly, the destinies of a great many quite normal and honest people are broken.
But enough about that. Having figured out where and how various agents are recruited, it is high time to delve into the essence of the techniques and methods by which they accomplish the tasks set before them. Simple human logic suggests that such methods must be fairly simple and primitive – at least for the reason that ordinary informers and agents are not particularly burdened with knowledge, and if they are taught, it is done hastily or in the course of some operation. Yet since the results of agent activities in many cases turn out to be quite successful, another conclusion follows. For all their primitiveness and simplicity, the hastily learned techniques and methods of influencing others must be truly brilliant in essence, given that they produce such a high effect. And immediately after this a question arises. If everything is so straightforward, why can’t all other people get to the bottom of these techniques and methods? But here the matter is not at all as it seems – all ordinary people regularly employ similar techniques and methods of influencing others in their daily lives. It’s just that in the vast majority of cases (due to insufficient awareness) they don’t realize it. Almost everything used by various agents is a concentrate of the most commonplace human practice, drawn from different times and nations. The advantage of a hastily trained agent over the people around him is that the operatives explain to him, in a very simple and accessible way, what exactly such a concentrate represents and what the core ideas behind it are. The next section of this site is devoted to explaining this very point for all those who have never been anyone’s agents but who nevertheless feel an irresistible desire to grasp the basics of their activity and daily work.
No similar articles