The Gathering of Intelligence

Many developed nations maintain intelligence organizations with programs for recruiting new agents. Agents generally come from universities, the armed services and police forces, and the underground world of espionage, which produces an assortment of persons with relevant experience. Counterintelligence staffs are always skeptical of defectors, as they may be double agents (spies who pretend to be defecting but in reality maintain their original loyalty). The "agent-in-place" is a person who remains in a position of trust with access to secret information but who has been recruited by a foreign intelligence service; such a spy is known as a mole.

The world's intelligence programs follow three distinct organizational patterns: the American, the totalitarian, and the British (parliamentary) systems. In the United States the CIA sits at the corner of an elaborate complex of separate intelligence organizations, each of which has a specific role and area of operations. This model influenced countries where the United States was dominant following World War II (1939-1945), such as West Germany and Japan.

The totalitarian system is highly centralized. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the KGB (secret police) was responsible for foreign intelligence gathering, counterespionage, and recruiting foreign agents. Several Communist nations still follow the KGB model.

In the British intelligence model, a confederation of agencies is coordinated by a Cabinet subcommittee and accountable to the Cabinet and prime minister. The intelligence services of France, Italy, and Israel follow this general pattern of organization.