We’re all working from home a lot more these days. Logic has it that home is now where the spy recruiters will look for targets. A 2021 incident in Lod, Israel, a town near Tel Aviv, highlights how home can become a target. The Israeli counterintelligence service, Shin Bet, discovered that a member of the Israeli defense minister’s housekeeping staff was in social media contact with someone ‘associated with Iran.’ The household staff member sent photos of the interior of the house to establish his bona fides. The supposition is that he was to install malware in the house computers.
What can we discern from this case? First, we see that home computers are targets. Maybe you think you never bring your work home. Really? Is that really true? Let’s assume for argument’s sake it is. What can possibly be gained by installing malware on the computer of someone engaged in government or other cleared work for a company? Discussions with colleagues will provide, in time, a line and block chart for a potential adversary. He’ll know who is in, who is out. Who has certain weaknesses? The answer to that alone is something which any spy would delight in knowing, because he can exploit that. Money problems? If a malware device is located on your computer, would they be able to see if your finances are in arrears? Your home-life not the best? Your children causing you untold woes? It appears that the household staff member of the defense minister was financially in dire straits. He claimed he offered his betrayal, supposedly, for the money. (His lawyer says he was ‘playing the recruiter along’, and had no intention of doing anything to his government employer.) Whether that is true or not is not the issue at hand.
How to Identify a Colleague at Risk
Cleared personnel who review their colleagues’ files must know several things about them. Are they under any potential blackmail risk? Does he have an ongoing foreign friendship which cannot be accounted for? Income? Remember that Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA spy, came to the attention of his colleagues for paying large sums for a fine car, and cash for a home in the Washington D.C. area. Money has been the bane of so many people who sought the easy way out, and tried to sell secrets to cover their debts.
Make your workplace a location where your staff feels comfortable talking in confidence to you, or to your personnel security persons. Only honest, non-threatening relationships can hope for a resolution to potential compromises before they happen. If someone has something to get off their chest, make circumstances for them to do so. After all, a spy once convinced a guard at a national embassy that she wanted a tryst with a colleague after hours, and would he be so kind as to look the other way? So doing, they had their tryst, only it was to boost secrets from the safe in the office they used. Could that compromised guard have come to you to confess, or would he have kept his secret?
Who Are Foreign Agents Looking For – Anyone
Never assume that a person is too socially insignificant, too obscure to be unattractive to a spy on the lookout for sources. A construction worker was all that was required to place a monitoring device on communication cables at a government site. The money he received was sufficient to satisfy his needs. The information betrayed by his action was incalculable.
Ensure that all staff members who interact with your programs, whether cleared or not, are vetted. They should all be subject to a broad, regular counterespionage briefing program. If they have particular issues, such as possible compromise situations with relatives or friends abroad, make sure they receive tailored, one-on-one briefings from counterintelligence professionals.
