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be used to provide some degree of influence or control over his actions before and after he is recruited as an agent. There are character traits perceived as negative, such as greed, vanity, ego, and jealousy that are useful. Then there are character traits perceived as positive, such as loyalty, friendliness, duty, honor, and sense of responsibility that are also useful. Then there are also dysfunctional character traits that can also be used such as obsession and compulsion just to name a few.
     
    Recruitment
     
    Recruitment is the process of the CIA entering into a special relationship with a target where he agrees to become a covert agent and willingly provide intelligence and operational information in return for something connected to his motivation. In other words, recruitment is where the case officer makes the “Pitch” to become an agent. The asset may be recruited on a witting or an unwitting basis. A witting asset knows he is reporting to either the CIA or some other intelligence agency of the US. An unwitting asset does not know he is reporting to US intelligence and may believe he is working as a consultant to a private company.

Agent Authentication
     
     
    As a case officer, it is your obligation to master the art of agent authentication. Agent authentication is a never-ending process that begins when you first express an operational interest in a target as a potential future agent and continues throughout the life of the operation. The authentication process seeks to prove or disprove many things that you either suspect or that the target claims about himself such as his position and claimed access to information of interest to the CIA.
     
    The authentication process seeks to prove or disprove that the agent is who he claims to be, that he has access to the information he reports, that he reports the information accurately and truthfully, and that the agent is not under hostile control of another intelligence service. Failure on any one of these criteria means the agent cannot become fully authenticated. This does not mean, however, that the agent cannot be utilized in a Foreign Intelligence reporting capacity. So long as the CIA knows the deficiencies of the agent, he may still be useful in some capacity.
     
    Throughout the CIA’s history, agent authentication has been treated as anything from an inconvenience to an absolute necessity depending on the CIA’s evolution through various crises and conflicts. There were never any formal criteria for authenticating an operation until the early 1970s when Saigon Station uncovered a massive number of fabricated liaison operations involving the Special Branch of the Vietnamese National Police.
     
    The Special Branch received funding from their local CIA counterparts for “penetration operations” of the local Viet Cong infrastructure. Unfortunately, many Special Branch case officers were prone to make up or fabricate penetration operations in order to receive funds from the CIA that they would often use for personal gain rather than use to develop real penetrations of the local Viet Cong. When the CIA began to uncover a large number of these fabricated operations, Saigon Station began to place emphasis and training of its case officers on authenticating these liaison operations. Thus began the formal process of agent authentication.
     
    Intelligence provided by liaison services—those foreign intelligence agencies which cooperate with the CIA in an exchange of intelligence—has traditionally been regarded with great suspicion by the CIA, and if history is, indeed, the great teacher then this suspicion is justified. Thus, the authentication process is a must for liaison operations. The information provided by an authenticated liaison operation is treated with a much higher regard than an unauthenticated operation. One wonders what happened to the authentication process for those agents who provided intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.