You know, like in spy and crime shows. Idk why my brain isn’t braining, but can someone please what double and triple agents are? Can there be quintuple agents? How does it all work?
In: Other
Let me correct and simplify some of the other responses:
James Bond is not an agent. He’s an *officer*. The British intelligence service MI6 pays his salary, assigns him missions, etc. The various people he gets to help him are *agents*. If those people pretend to help him but are really helping the other side, they’re *double agents*. If Bond figures out that they’re pretending to help him, then convinced them to start pretending to help the other side while actually helping him, that person is now a *triple agent*.
Let’s use a more real-life example. A CIA officer named Bob is working at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, pretending to be an Agricultural Specialist. That’s his cover. Bob finds out that a Russian airplane designer named Ivan hates Borscht and thinks Putin is a jerk. Bob convinces Ivan to hurt Putin by giving him airplane secrets. Ivan is now an agent.
But wait! Bob notices that all the plane secrets he gets turn out to be wrong. He does a little digging and finds out that Ivan actually doesn’t mind Putin, but the Russian FSB is paying him to pretend to hate him so that we’ll use him as an agent. Then they can use him to feed Bob bad information (as well as figuring out that Bob is a CIA officer, if he didn’t already know). Ivan is actually a *double agent*.
Bob can just stop talking to Ivan, or he can try to get him to switch sides for real. He offers Ivan something that gets him to switch his loyalty for real, but keep pretending to be a double agent. Now he’s telling Bob who is FSB contacts are, and feeding bad info back to the FSB. Ivan is now a *triple agent*.
You can’t really go past this. If Ivan runs back to the FSB and tells them everything, he’s still just a double agent.
Latest Answers