What motivates someone to betray their country and work for a foreign intelligence service?
The most common answers are found in the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion (or Compromise), and Ego (or Excitement).
Money is a fickle motivation, and even the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, advised against trying to “buy people.” (Though the unreliable nature of money did not stop the Soviet Union from recruiting a few U.S. agents for tidy sums over the years). Ideology is self-explanatory and provided the motivation for some of the more famous spies of history, including Kim Philby. Coercion/compromise is probably the most prevalent motivation featured in spy films and television shows, yet in reality is unreliable and actively discouraged as a recruitment tool. The risk and punishment for espionage is invariably worse than for whatever an officer can use to coerce an asset. Agents who spy for ego/excitement reasons are in it for the thrill or personal satisfaction they get from the act of espionage itself.
This handy mnemonic seems to cover the range of approaches an intelligence officer could use to identify a potential agent’s psychological vulnerabilities and manipulate them into betraying their country and becoming an intelligence asset. But as Randy Burkett argues, the MICE model is not sufficient for understanding the psychology of agents. Burkett, a CIA representative on the faculty of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, instead proposes a different framework in the March 2013 issue of Studies in Intelligence, a publication by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence.
Enter the RASCLS
Burkett suggests that a better understanding of agent recruitment and handling can be found in the work of Dr. Robert Cialdini, a psychologist best known for his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini identified six key principles of influence: Reciprocity, Authority, Scarcity, Commitment and Consistency, Liking, and Social proof. Instead of MICE, Burkett suggests case officers should be taught RASCLS in his article, ”An Alternative Framework for Agent Recruitment: From MICE to RASCLS” (pdf).
Cialdini’s six principles are well-known to the marketing industry, which uses RASCLS to good effect. Burkett examines each element from an intelligence perspective, finding them to be just as relevant to espionage as they are to business. This framework is meant to be utilized throughout the agent recruitment cycle to effectively build and maintain officer-agent relationships. As Burkett notes, case officers do in fact use the RASCLS principles already, albeit without knowing it.
The problem is that officers are not explicitly taught the RASCLS model, preventing them from fully developing their potential recruitment and agent handling skills during training. He argues that while “natural recruiters” may instinctively understand Cialdini’s principles, proper training and understanding of RASCLS can expand the pool of officers capable of effectively manipulating intelligence assets.
The full article is only 11 pages long and well worth a read.
Links
- Download “An Alternative Framework for Agent Recruitment: From MICE to RASCLS” by Randy Burkett here (PDF).
- Buy Dr. Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion on Amazon.
