Why Do Ordinary People Commit Espionage?

It takes a particular kind of person to go from average citizen to amateur spy. Learn what history and psychology have taught us in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/why-do-ordinary-people-commit-acts-of-espionage.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Hey brain Stuff Lauren bog obam here. In mid July,
Maria Boutina, a twenty nine year old assistant to the
Russian Central Bank and to longtime Vladimir Putin ally Alexander Torsien,
was arrested in Washington, d C. On a charge of

(00:22):
conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government.
Per the affidavit, Boutina was allegedly involved in an operation
led by officials within the Russian government to infiltrate the
Republican Party, including members of the Trump campaign and the
National Rifle Association, for the purposes of aligning right wing
political interests with similar interests in Russia. Boutina's actions dovetailed

(00:46):
with continued efforts by Russian operatives to commit cyber espionage
to influence US elections. According to the affidavit, two American
citizens provided Boutina intelligence and guidance on her efforts in
the United States. M I five, the Intelligence Agency of
the United Kingdom, defines espionage as the process of obtaining

(01:08):
information that is not normally publicly available using human resources
agents or technical means like hacking into computer systems. It
may also involve seeking to influence decision makers and opinion
formers to benefit the interests of a foreign power. As
Boutina and countless other spies throughout history have discovered, espionage

(01:29):
is a dangerous game, one that can lead to imprisonment
or even death. What motivates people to commit acts of
espionage is as important as the ramifications of their actions,
and naturally simple ideology serves as a motivator to commit espionage,
but it's not the singular cause. According to a spring

(01:50):
article in the Intelligencer Journal of u S Intelligence Studies,
ideology is quote adopted by an individual to the degree
that it reflects the individuals ego. In that sense, an
ideology is like another motivation money, and that it serves
as a vehicle for the individual to express a personal
value or belief, and ideology has chosen in order to

(02:11):
confirm conscious or unconscious beliefs the individual has already internalized.
In the case of espionage, a particular ideology may serve
as either the actual motivation for a spy to breach
the trust placed in them, or simply as a means
of rationalizing that behavior. Three concurrent elements need to exist

(02:31):
within an individual to make them prone to acts of espionage,
a personality dysfunction, personal crisis, and opportunity. According to Dr
ur Slow Wilder, a clinical psychologist with the Central Intelligence Agency,
for personality elements are essential to the entry into espionage, psychopathy, narcissism, immaturity,

(02:53):
and grandiosity, she stated in an interview at the International
Spy Museum in Washington, d C. A psychopathic person is
a person whose approach to reality is ruthless and cold.
They have no conscience or they have very limited capacity
to feel guilt, so their whole approach to life is predatory.

(03:13):
Their excitement seeking. They love to con people. It's a game.
This is all they can do to connect with other
human beings. So that kind of person will commit espionage,
either flat out for self interest or because it's fun,
or both, she explained. The next is narcissism. A narcissistic
person is fundamentally egocentric. They can only experience the world

(03:35):
with themselves at the center. They are very much needy
for and will provoke circumstances that will permit them to
be at the center of attention. They believe that what
they need, want, and desire is truth. They will get
greedy for attention. That kind of person will commit espionage
as a grab for fame. Someone like that will commit
espionage because it makes them feel big and important. Re

(04:00):
Arting immaturity, Wilder said that an individual prone to commit
acts of espionage in comparison to a professional intelligence agent,
either for or against their nation, is quote an adult
who can only function as an adolescent. These people live
their lives in a blend of fact and fantasy. They
do have a conscience, they can feel deep guilt afterwards,

(04:21):
but fantasy is much more real to them than it
is to adults who are grounded in reality. So to them,
committing espionage is a bit of a game, a fantasy,
and online they have this illusion that if they do
it online, if they just turn off the machine, it
goes away. They have a fantasy about the implications of
their actions, and although on some level they might grasp

(04:43):
the reality of it, it's not real to them. The
grandiosity applies to all three. Furthermore, an individual must be
up against some form of personal crisis that produces distress.
According to a paper released by the CIA titled y Spy,
a survey of agency employees, quote identified emotional instability related

(05:05):
to ambition, anger leading to a need for revenge, feelings
of being unrecognized and unrewarded, and loneliness as the top
vulnerabilities on the road to espionage. They ranked such problem
behaviors as drug abuse and delicit sex as second, and
various mental crises or stresses brought on by debt, work
issues or psychological factors such as depression as third. Regarding

(05:29):
opportunity access matters, an individual must have access to sensitive
information of some caliber that could be of use to
a foreign power. All three combined, the personality, the crises,
and the access serve as fertile soil for acts of espionage,
but it is important to make the distinction between ordinary

(05:50):
people who commit espionage and individuals who join intelligence services.
For the article of this episode is based on how
Stuff Work. Spoke with Dr David L. Charney, a psychiatrist
with the National Office of Intelligence Reconciliation known as NOIR,
a nonprofit dedicated to educating the intelligence community on the

(06:11):
management of insider threats. He said, people who joined the
intel community spent years preparing themselves, school, applying screening, and
there's a huge amount of drive and ambition, identification, pride,
He explained that this would include people with access to
sensitive information who flipped, such as Edward Snowdon or Reality

(06:32):
winner quote. They're not coming into be spies, they join
for loftier reasons. The question is what makes a person
go bad. That's when you have to get more psychological.
According to Charney, at the core of espionage can be
an intolerable sense of personal failure and not necessarily a
shifting ideology. He said, going back to the ideological spies

(06:57):
of the nineteen thirties and forties, we run a cross
people all the time who you know have personal demons
that are driving them, but they wrapped their demons into
the current issue of the day to give it a
higher minded packaging. Anytime you try to understand, you have
to dig a little deeper. Today's episode is based on

(07:20):
the article why do ordinary people commit acts of espionage?
On how Stuffworks dot com written by Jared w Alexander.
Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership
with how stuff Works dot Com and is produced by
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