ABSTRACT
Catching spies is challenging work; as West notes, ‘few spies are caught as a result of the “vigilance of colleagues” or routine security screening’. The degree of suspicion involved in catching spies can have a significant psychological impact on those charged with carrying it out. Existing employees of an intelligence agency who betray its secrets to a rival, known as ‘agents in place’, are perhaps the most valuable sources of information for counterintelligence (CI) purposes. Disillusioned with communism, by the time of his arrival in London Penkovsky had already made contact with British intelligence, and a covert meeting was quickly arranged. Complicating matters further, CI work can also involve deception. It is possible for an intelligence agency to arrange a false defection, whereby the defector arrives with false information which is accepted as true, resulting in chaos and confusion. CI work may be considered to represent intelligence not only at its most introspective, but also at its most devious.
