King agreed to supply Foreign Office secrets, which he was led to believe would be used to provide Pieck and a Dutch bank a stock market advantage. Pieck convinced the cipher clerk that, if he wished to support his family, money was required. He was approached by Henri Pieck, a Soviet spy, who pretended to be a businessman and high-society flyer. As such, he proved a ripe target for recruitment by Soviet intelligence. He was estranged from his wife, harbored expensive tastes, had a son and mistress to maintain, and only took home a small salary - and no pension. For instance, in 1935, Captain John Herbert King, a cipher clerk for the British Foreign Office, had a problem. Officials in debt are ripe targets for recruiters. Susceptibility to these factors, he claimed, was a target’s key weakness that could be exploited. In 1988 the KGB defector, Stanislav Levchenko, described an American mnemonic, Mice, which stands for “money”, “ideology”, “coercion/compromise” and “ego”. So why do seemingly ordinary people become spies? This follows recent news that David Smith, a 57-year-old and apparently normal security guard at the British embassy in Berlin, has allegedly been spying for Russia. A new film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, The Courier, tells the story of the salesman, Grenville Wynne, caught up in the murky world of espionage during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |