Handling & the Breaking of Men

The source is a person under a secret. The secret will try to eat the person. Your job is to notice the teeth.

Handling is the unglamorous center of HUMINT: years of meetings, money, arguments, children's tuitions, missed birthdays, and the slow work of keeping a human being functional while they live a double life. If you think this is 'soft' relative to SDRs and ciphers, you have not read the wreckage. Assets drink. They confess to spouses. They take stupid risks to feel like the protagonist. They are doubled. They are burned. The officer who only loves the product will lose both the product and the person — sometimes in that order, sometimes not.

There is a philosophical intimacy here that should be constrained by professionalism and is often not. The asset may love the officer, or the idea of the officer, as the only other inhabitant of the secret. The officer may confuse the asset's dependence with friendship. Both errors kill. The ethical form of handling is closer to medicine than to friendship: confidentiality, non-maleficence, a clear account of whose interests come first when they conflict. In a service, the state's interest comes first. An honest officer says that, at least to himself, before the toasts.

Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames are the other face of the human factor: not the source, the officer. Ames sold names for money and status he could not otherwise obtain; his tradecraft as a traitor was sloppy and sufficient. Hanssen was a study in compartmented piety and contempt. They are this week's reminder that the asset cycle also runs inside the building. CI is not a different species of work. It is the same psychology pointed home.