Dangle (''podstava'' in Russian intelligence jargon and ''chèvre'' in French police and intelligence jargon
[''Jargon Policier (Police Française)'', Sébastien Burneau]
available online on Knol
.) is a term used in
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
work to refer to an
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
or officer of one intelligence agency or group who pretends to be interested in defecting or ''turning'' to another intelligence agency or group.
The goal of a dangle is to convince the second or foreign intelligence agency that they have changed loyalties by offering to act as a
double agent
In the field of counterintelligence, a double agent is an employee of a secret intelligence service for one country, whose primary purpose is to spy on a target organization of another country, but who is now spying on their own country's organi ...
. The dangle then feeds information to their original agency and/or gives disinformation to the second or foreign intelligence agency.
The KGB believed that most dangles:
# would not come into a
USSR
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
government building with sensitive papers
# would not directly ask for money right away instead
# most walk ins would come in saying they wanted to be a spy for
ideological
An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones." Formerly applied prim ...
reasons to prove their sincerity.
[ ]Victor Cherkashin
Victor Ivanovich Cherkashin (russian: Ви́ктор Ива́нович Черка́шин) (born 22 February 1932) is a former Soviet foreign counter-intelligence officer of the PGU KGB SSSR. He was the case officer for both Aldrich Ames, a CIA ...
and Gregory Feifer, (2004), Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer - The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dangle (Espionage)
Spies by role