Former CIA counterintelligence chief on Putin: ‘He will not survive Ukraine’ | Opinion
Texas A&M professor James Olson talks about life as a spy, espionage threats and the potential fallout of the war in Ukraine.
You were finishing law school when the CIA approached you about becoming an operative. How is being a spy in the real world different than how it’s portrayed in fiction? We have to use a lot of psychology. We have to be able to read people. We have to be able to identify what it is that we can offer them that might convince them to commit treason because it’s generally treason against their own country when they’re cooperating with us. To risk their lives, because they are putting their lives in our hands when they cooperate with us.
Many of the Russians I worked with very courageously decided that a good way to do that was by cooperating with the CIA. I had tremendous respect for people in that category. They were ideological spies. They weren’t out for themselves. I was the first officer to go down the manhole in Moscow in this cable-tapping operation. And to do that, of course, I had to get free of KGB surveillance, and my wife and I were under constant surveillance the whole time we’re in Moscow.
Many of these Russians I had worked with personally, and so it was a devastating loss for me in human terms. Those murders of our Russian agents for me were like deaths in the family. We have an emotional tie to these people that are working secretly for us. We feel very profoundly our responsibility to protect them. That was the lowest point of my career, when we lost all those Russians.
We as a country are losing the counterintelligence wars. The adversaries are stealing our secrets. They’re stealing our technology. They’re subverting our citizens. They’re interfering in our elections. They’re violating our intellectual property rights. It’s unprecedented, and we’ve got to stop that. We’re not doing enough. China is by far the No. 1 threat.We need more resources. We need more personnel. We need a stronger commitment to counterintelligence.
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