Acquiring information may not involve collecting secret documents, but something as simple as observing the number and types of ships in a port.
Other supplementary functions include people who can "legalise" agents with cover jobs, and specialists that can forge documents or get illicit copies from the actual source.
Background research is conducted on the potential agent to identify any ties to a foreign intelligence agency, select the most promising candidates and approach method.
Surveillance of targets (e.g., military or other establishments, open source or compromised reference documents) sometimes reveals people with potential access to information, but no clear means of approaching them.
According to Suvorov, the Soviet GRU was not always able to collect enough material, principally from open sources, to understand the candidate's motivations and vulnerabilities.
[5] Especially when the case officer is of a different culture than the one whose people he is targeting, the recruitment process begins not necessarily with a person that has the desired information.
Indeed, an access agent may arrange introductions without being completely witting that the purpose of meeting the target is to find people who will participate in espionage.
[6] HUMINT collectors often have analysts in their own organizations with a sophisticated understanding of the people, with specialized knowledge in targeted countries, industries, or other groups.
With due regard to the risks and resources required, SIGINT can tap phone lines or intercept other communications that will give the recruiter more information about the target.
[7] He developed these in the context of being stationed in Europe during the Cold War, with a goal of acquiring HUMINT recruits in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.
The U.S. Army defines three classes of people who may present themselves:[8] A Soviet response, to someone visiting the embassy, was "This is a diplomatic representation and not an espionage centre.
Soviet GRU doctrine was that on general, a walk-in is considered only when they can show some evidence of access to valuable material.
Some services, especially the Russian/Soviet, may not have formal or extensive OSINT, and either the case officer may need to check such things (or set up checkable requests) within the station/residency.
One former CIA officer said that while sexual entrapment was not generally a good tool to recruit a foreign official, it was sometimes employed successfully to solve short-term problems.
[12] During the Cold War, the KGB (and allied services, including the East German Stasi under Markus Wolf, and the Cuban Intelligence Directorate [formerly known as Dirección General de Inteligencia or DGI]) frequently sought to entrap CIA officers.
The Soviets used sex not only for direct recruitment, but as a contingency for a possible future need of kompromat of an American officer.
Katrina Leung is one of the more complex cases, who came to the United States on a Taiwanese passport, became involved with a PRC activist, on whom she was recruited to report to the FBI.
While she was allowed, at first, to continue, on the belief that the information she provided to the United States was more important than that which she was giving to the PRC, she was eventually arrested and charged with a relatively low-level crime.
Eventually, that was dismissed for reasons of prosecutorial misconduct, although a subsequent U.S. government appeal resulted in a plea bargain.
The future agent's ambitions, financial and work problems, hobbies, etc., are continuously assessed by an intelligence team to exacerbate weaknesses.
[5] It is the goal of the case officer, with appropriate support from his organization, to learn vulnerabilities, build trust, and solve problems for the developmental.
A creative task officer may then ask for a technically restricted, but still fairly innocent document, such as an unclassified telephone directory.
The interaction becomes more sensitive, especially when the case officer asks for something technically classified, but with an explanation that lets the potential recruit rationalize that he is not really betraying any trust.
Finally, the relationship will move from clandestine to overt, when the foreign service has significant compromising information on the asset.
[5] "Hostile intelligence services begin the agent recruitment process by scrupulously collecting information on persons who are connected to industry, RDT&E laboratories, government institution staffs, military bases, and design organizations".
These can have the function of countersurveillance, during which additional officers may be watching the meeting, and the travel to it, for evidence of "country A" counterintelligence interest.
It is considered important for the case officer to offer money, perhaps dismissed as covering expenses, but really as a means of compromising the developmental.
The businessman, however, may forget that while he might not report the cash transaction to his own government, the GRU certainly has recorded the act of payment, and can use it for subsequent blackmail.
Suvorov explained that while the most strategic information appears to be associated with major firms, there are several reasons why an approach to a smaller company is the place to begin.
The United States has had a group of CIA and NSA specialists who would emplace technical sensors, ranging from telephone taps to specialized devices for measuring weapons tests, into the target country.