A mole is an agent or provocateur secretly embedded within an organization, and whose purpose is to serve the interests of an outside entity. Because moles can be immensely destructive to the interests of their hosts, it is essential that they be identified and neutralized. We will discuss here some very basic techniques that can be used to search for and isolate moles with speed and efficiency.
The presence of hostile agents within one’s camp is problem of very old date. The Roman military theorist Vegetius, who flourished in the late fourth or early fifth century A.D., provides the following advice on how to deal with embedded spies:
When an enemy spy is clandestinely roving in one’s camp, all the men should be ordered back to their tents during the day, and the agent will immediately be caught.
[De Re Militaris III.26: Cum explorator hostium latenter oberrat in castris, omnes ad tentoria sua per diem redire iubeantur, et statim deprehenditur explorator.]
In other words, the mole will be the one remaining person with no place find refuge. Exposed and vulnerable, he is easily apprehended. What Vegetius is speaking of here, in the simplest terms, is the idea of denying the mole his protective cover. Moles depend for their survival on deep concealment; and if we can deny them this layer of security, we leave him exposed to plain view. Vegetius’s advice here may work well when the spy is not a member of the organization, but more often than not, the agent will be someone who is already a trusted insider. Nevertheless the same basic principle applies: we must deny the mole his cover, and find some way to strip away his protective camouflage. But how precisely may this be accomplished? It turns out that examples drawn from movies can provide us some clear guidance. I have found that examples drawn from anecdotes are better remembered than are dry theoretical recitations of method.
In the 2006 film The Departed, the Boston police’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) and the Frank Costello criminal organization both have moles secreted within each other’s organizations. Each group knows it has been infiltrated. In one conversation, the character Billy Costigan (Leo DiCaprio) speaks to Sgt. Sean Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and begs him to take active measures to identify Frank Costello’s mole in the SIU. Billy is the SIU’s undercover agent in Costello’s organization. He knows there is a “rat” in the SIU, but Dignam shows little imagination in finding ways to identify the traitor. Billy tells Dignam:
Disinform! Let it slip to SIU that you’re getting a sealed wiretap warrant for Costello’s apartment. Don’t tell anyone in our department, but tell SIU. Flush it and see if it comes out of the pipe on my end. That’s first. Narrow it down!
What does this mean? Billy is talking about deliberately inserting false information in a suspected information channel (i.e., the SIU), and then watching to see whether this false information reappears on Billy’s side. If Costello’s men learn about the “wiretap,” then it will be clear that someone in SIU tipped them off. It may not be possible to identify the specific mole with this technique, but at least the search can be narrowed to one area. This technique is called a canary trap (a term coined by author Tom Clancy in his 1987 novel Patriot Games), and it describes the use of disinformation to narrow down a mole hunt without alerting too many people. This method is also called a barium meal test, a term imported from the world of medicine. For doctors, a barium meal test is a procedure in which a patient drinks a solution of barium sulfate. This chemical can be clearly read on X-ray scans, and permits doctors to examine the path taken by food and drink through the patient’s digestive tract.
Another version of the barium meal test involves giving slightly different “versions” of the same sensitive information to different people. Each version contains discreet identifying markers or badges; and when the information later emerges where it should not be, the revealed badges immediately betray their origin. The barium meal test is not perfect; often it gives only probabilities instead of certainties. But narrowing things down is what investigative work is, and there is no substitute for patience, creativity, and persistence. Eventually, the truth will emerge.
A more elaborate kind of false information test was described in the 1996 film Mission: Impossible. In the movie’s opening sequence, we are presented with what appears to be a “controlled bait” operation. A decoy document (the “NOC list”) is dangled for a suspect to steal; the team is supposed to observe the theft, obtain proof of it, then follow the thief to its prospective buyer. In a way, we could describe it as a “single bait” barium meal test. Later, of course, we find out that this complex set-up was simply a pretext for something deeper: a mole hunt. Higher authorities suspected that the team had been infiltrated by a mole, and staged the entire operation to see who would survive it. The idea was that whoever came out of the ordeal alive was the mole.
Other methods of unearthing moles rely more on surveillance and observation. Pieced together with other bits of information, they can form an essential part of the revealed picture. These observational techniques are typically financial analyses, the monitoring of behavior and spending patterns, recruitment of double agents who can provide information on moles, and so-called “provocation” operations. A provocation operation is one in which an attractive “opportunity” is presented for a mole to exploit; when the mole moves to take advantage of it, he is apprehended.
All of these tests and techniques reduce down, in one way or another, to the one principle described by Vegetius in the quote at the beginning of this essay: strip away the traitor or spy’s concealment, and expose him to the light of day. A mole that is not concealed underground is helpless, and ripe for apprehension. These techniques have a great deal of practical utility, and can be deployed in a variety of environments. And sometimes luck plays the decisive role. In the classic 1953 film Stalag 17, for example, the embedded agent was only discovered through a chance of individual observation. But everything counts, and a win is a win.
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Take a look at the new, annotated translation of the Stratagems of the Roman military theorist Frontinus.
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