Soviet & Nazi Defectors by Nigel West (.ePUB)
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Soviet & Nazi Defectors: Counter-Intelligence in WW2 and the Cold War by Nigel West
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Overview: Analyzes nine wartime and postwar defections, highlighting motivations, risks, and counter-intelligence significance.
A well-informed defector is the most dangerous counter-intelligence commodity because it takes a spy to catch a spy. Very occasionally, an agent, especially a mole or an intelligence professional, will make a mistake and incriminate themselves, but usually it is a denunciation, a tip, or a vague clue from a defector that will provide the vital information required to expose the source of a leak.
Relying on recently-declassified intelligence files and interviews with defectors, their handlers, their families, and their victims, Nigel West has analysed nine examples of wartime and postwar defections to shed new light on the phenomenon.
Defectors are notoriously difficult to handle, and resettle, because of the range of genuine or invented motives that led them to take such drastic action. Some will provide a noble political motive, seeking to impress their host, while others may be driven by less worthy compulsions – perhaps greed, revenge, career disappointment, envy, anger, or nothing more complicated that a desire to start a life afresh with a different partner.
Defectors are the stock-in-trade for all counter-intelligence specialists who seek the background and context of corridor gossip and water-cooler chat cannot be substituted by any amount of technical surveillance, overhead reconnaissance or hard to-interpret intercepted communications. This is the essence of Human Intelligence, and goes to the heart of loyalty, trust, betrayal and deception – the very DNA of espionage.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History
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