Wippl Publishes Journal Article on the Art of Agent Handling
Joseph Wippl, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent journal article on the practice of meeting and cultivating prospective intelligence agents.
Wippl’s article, entitled “The Art of Agent Handling,” was published in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence on August 5, 2019.
From the text of the article:
All Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officers are expected to meet prospective agents; to cultivate these prospects until they are ready to be asked to serve as agents of the United States; to recruit the person as an agent; to handle the agent in order to exploit his/her access to secrets; or to direct the agent to take an action. Handling includes reporting to Agency headquarters in a timely manner the intelligence received and ensuring the agent’s security through training and counterintelligence vetting. While this expectation in the performance of a “complete” case officer is the ideal, the reality is that many case officers do not have the talent to recruit agents while many others are unable to handle agents. That the complete case officer, one who can both recruit and handle, may not be as good a recruiter as the pure recruiter or as good a handler as the pure handler is easily conceivable.
Wippl is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. He spent a 30 year career as an operations officer in the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Wippl has served overseas as an operations officer and operations manager in Bonn, West Germany; Guatemala City; Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City; Vienna, Austria; and Berlin, Germany.