How many Cuban spies are lurking inside Washington? (Part II)

Unmasking spies is difficult and time-consuming work … and there’s much of it left to be done in our nation’s capital

How exactly do you uncover a mole?

If you follow the lead of spy novels and Hollywood movies, turncoats get unmasked when they make a major mistake or otherwise give the counterspies a helpful hint about their betrayal. This does happen in real life. It’s particularly common among the less intelligent and aware would-be moles, who screw up the recruitment process and never get to sell secrets to the other side.

Many are the cases where someone possessing secrets who wishes to pass them to a hostile intelligence service (HoIS), for fun and/or profit, screws up then winds up on the radar of the local security service, usually thanks to poor communications security. Here the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a well-honed habit of getting inept turncoats to take their spy-bait.

Here’s a helpful hint to anyone “in access” as they say inside the Beltway who’s pondering selling secrets:

Don’t.

Again: Don’t.

If you must, when you initially reach out to the other side to inform them that you possess secrets and wish to sell them – that approach is frequently made by calling or emailing their embassy or consulate – understand that there’s a good chance the FBI knows about it too. Any competent HoIS suspects this and they’re customarily cautious about such unsolicited approaches, fearing they could be an FBI attempt to entrap them, what spies call a “dangle.” Because it might be.

The FBI is less risk-averse when they discover that an American possessing secrets is attempting to sell them to HoIS. Therefore, there’s a decent chance that the “HoIS” representative who calls you back after your initial outreach to their “diplomats” to set up a first clandestine meeting in order to discuss illegal business … isn’t.

To take a textbook example, 38 years ago today exactly this scenario unfolded. On December 12, 1985, Thomas Cavanagh, a middle-aged defense contractor in California who’d hit a rough patch, between divorce and debt, sealed his fate. Cavanagh needed cash, fast, so he reached out to the Soviet embassy in Washington and their San Francisco consulate, which possessed dozens of Soviet spies posing as diplomats, offering to sell them classified U.S. Air Force information regarding stealth technology.