Lexicon

Mole

A penetration agent placed inside a target intelligence service to report on its activities from within

A mole, in tradecraft usage, is a penetration agent placed inside a target intelligence service or other institution to report on its activities from within. The term is sometimes used loosely to describe any insider penetration; in the strict usage in the published literature on Cold War counter-intelligence, it is reserved for long-duration deep penetrations of adversary services — agents who are placed early in their institutional careers, develop within the target service over decades, and reach institutional positions from which their access to the target's operational substance is substantial.

The classical operational concept around the mole — the deeply-placed long-duration penetration of an adversary's intelligence service — was substantially elaborated in the published Cold War counter-intelligence literature, principally through the work of James Jesus Angleton (CIA Counter-Intelligence Staff Chief 1954–74) and the parallel British counter-intelligence-and-investigative tradition surrounding the Cambridge Five investigation and its institutional aftermath. The published institutional record on Soviet penetration of Western intelligence services across the 1930s–80s — the Cambridge Five (Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross) within British intelligence; the substantial documented French institutional penetration through Georges Pâques and others; the West German penetration through Heinz Felfe within the BND; the post-1985 American penetration through Aldrich Ames within the CIA and through Robert Hanssen within the FBI — established the institutional terrain within which the mole concept operated.

The operational characteristics that distinguish a mole from a more conventional asset are the depth of placement (inside the target service rather than within an adjacent institution), the duration (decades rather than years), and the access (operational substance of the target service's own work rather than the political or military substance of the target service's reporting). The institutional consequence is correspondingly distinctive: a mole inside an adversary service can compromise the operational sources, methods, and assets of the target service across the entire duration of the placement, with the consequence that any operations the target service conducts during that period are presumptively compromised. The post-1994 institutional reconstruction of the Aldrich Ames damage assessment — published in part through the SSCI 1994 Inquiry into the Aldrich Hazen Ames Espionage Case — documented at substantial scale the operational consequences of such a long-duration penetration.

The term's operational vocabulary entered the public domain principally through the 1974 publication of John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which the term is used (in the form Karla's mole) to describe the Soviet penetration of British intelligence the novel's plot reconstructs. The pre-le-Carré usage is documented in the institutional literature but the term's general public currency is substantially attributable to the novel and its 1979 BBC adaptation. The institutional vocabulary inside the services has continued to use the term, and the published post-Cold-War institutional reconstructions (Edward Jay Epstein's work on Angleton, David Wise's work on Hanssen, Pete Earley's work on Ames) have substantially relied on the term as the established institutional usage.

See also