Lexicon

Control

The institutional ascendancy a case officer establishes over an asset; sometimes a synonym for case officer

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Control, in intelligence-service tradecraft usage, has two related senses. The principal sense refers to the institutional ascendancy a case officer establishes over an asset across the operational relationship — the operational direction the case officer exercises over what the asset reports, when, to whom, and (in the more comprehensive operational frames) what the asset does in their substantive position relative to the target the asset's access provides. A working asset relationship is one under control; an asset that has fallen out of control (through changes in the asset's circumstances, the asset's emergence into independent decision-making, or the asset's contact with another service) is operationally compromised even before any specific operational incident has occurred.

The secondary sense uses the term as a near-synonym for case officer or handler, particularly in the British Secret Intelligence Service institutional vocabulary and the Russian kontroliruyushchii tradition. In John le Carré's novels the Soviet Karla is referred to throughout as the controller of the Soviet operation against British intelligence — the institutional figure who exercises operational direction over the running of the operation rather than the field officer who handles a particular asset in person. The British operational tradition has used "control" interchangeably with "case officer" in this looser sense across substantial periods of its institutional history.

The operational substance of control as the principal sense is the management of the asset's two principal vulnerabilities: the operational vulnerability (the asset's safety, the security of communications, the discipline of the asset's behaviour in the asset's substantive environment) and the institutional vulnerability (the asset's continuing motivation, the asset's continuing access to the substantive material the relationship is intended to produce, the asset's continuing willingness to operate within the relationship's framework). A case officer who has not built control over both vulnerabilities is not running the relationship; the relationship is running the case officer.

The published institutional literature on Cold War HUMINT operations has substantial detail on the discipline of asset control — the periodic reassessment routines, the operational and administrative discipline imposed on the relationship, the institutional standards for evaluating the asset's continuing reliability, the operational procedures around suspected loss of control, and the procedures for terminating relationships in which control has substantively been lost. The classical institutional guidance on the question is the recognition that an asset relationship without control is operationally worse than no relationship at all: an out-of-control asset is potentially a witting or unwitting source of false-flag reporting back to the originating service.

See also