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Obviously someone dropped the ball?
     
    But how about non-liaison agent operations: those agents that the CIA develops, recruits, and runs? Should they be authenticated? The answer is a definite YES. In fact, by definition liaison operations are often compartmented from direct CIA access. The CIA often only has limited access, if any at all, to the agents of a liaison service. Therefore, it is difficult to authenticate a liaison service operation. It should be a much easier process to authenticate an agent over which the CIA has direct access and thus some margin of control.
     
    What is it that you, the case officer, can do to authenticate your agent? The process begins in the very early stages of development. One important methodology is independent verification. If your target says he is a budgetary analyst in the ministry of foreign affairs budget office, how can you independently verify this claim?
     
    First, you might want to run a name trace through the CIA’s database to see if the target’s name appears. You might ask the target for his office phone number, and then check it through overt and covert sources. Call the number and ask for the target by name. Task other agents in the ministry to provide names of people in that department as well as other departments to see if the target’s name appears on the list. Do not specifically mention the target by name to any other agent. Proving that the target is who he claims to be is perhaps the easiest of the authentication tasks.
     
    Does the target have access to the information he claims to have and does he report it accurately to you? Now the process starts becoming a bit of a challenge. First, the information he does provide to you must be of interest to CIA analysis and to US policy makers. If it is of no interest, then it doesn’t matter. The CIA will not be interested to pursue a relationship with the target.
     
    That said, however, the case officer in the field still has a duty to make sure that the source of the information, the agent, is an authenticated asset. Information obtained from an “authenticated agent” is given more credence than information from an untested, non-authenticated agent. The authentication process seeks to determine that the agent is who he claims to be, that he has access to the information claimed, that he accurately reports the information, and that he is not under hostile control of another intelligence service. This is an on-going process throughout the lifetime of the operation.
     
    If the information is of interest, then you must verify that it is true and accurate and provided by the agent through his direct access. If the information is verbal, check it through other agents or historical CIA data and continue to recheck it often. It is always best, of course, to have actual documents provided by the agent, original, photocopied, or photographed. Such documents are more readily authenticated unless, of course, the agent is a provocation agent under the control of a hostile security service.
     
    This brings us to the point of hostile control—double agents. That there are no overt signs of hostile control is no longer sufficient to determine the authenticity of an operation. Many types of covert tests can be administered to the agent without his knowing he is being tested. Some simple tests determine the agent’s honesty such as paying him too much to see if he will acknowledge the overpayment. You might ask him for information that you already know the answer to in order to elicit his responses. Give the agent a “trapped” envelope to mail for you to a cutout, and then test to see if the envelope has been covertly opened. There are literally hundreds of such simple tests you can administer to the agent as part of the authentication process. Some you can do on your own and some will require the assistance of technical services personnel at the Station or CIA headquarters.
     
    As you put the agent through the various