agent-in-place

An employee of a state institution who, instead of fleeing (defecting), secretly works with a foreign government and stays in their post.

The International Spy Museum glossary points out that such a person thereby serves two employers.¹

An agent-in-place is valuable because they have ongoing access to information. According to an article by B. G. Royden in Studies in Intelligence, Adolf Tolkachev, an avionics systems designer at the NIIR institute in Moscow, spent more than seven years photographing documents on Soviet radars, avionics and cruise missiles and passing them to the CIA; military recipients judged that this had saved the United States up to five years of research and development. The article compares him with Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU, who from 1960 passed the CIA and the British information that proved crucial during the Cuban missile crisis.²

A Polish example: according to the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, an officer of the General Staff in Warsaw, after his first meeting with the Americans in The Hague on 18 August 1972, worked with the CIA under the codename “Jack Strong” and handed over some 40,000 pages of documents on the Polish People’s Republic, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. On the night of 7–8 November 1981 the CIA got him and his family out of Poland (see Jack Strong).³