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How To Spot A Spy In The Family

Professor S. Brown - 9/3/2006

At a time when the understaffed British security services are openly recruiting more intelligence personnel and the war on terror pulls former spies out of retirement and back into the field - surely you'd know if your parent, brother or sister was a spy? In short, no. More and more national resources are spent covering the lies of intelligence personnel. You may think your relative works at the Ministry of Work and Pensions (DWP). You may have met him for lunch there. You may have seen papers hanging around about the retirement age debate. You may even have met his DWP friends and spent a whole two week summer holiday on a barge with them. Yet your relative could be an intelligence officer working on the war on terror and you have no idea at all. When you think your relative is computing pension data he or she may well be listening into a plot which threatens your very existence.

It's common knowledge that spies are allowed to tell those close to them what they do. If you have a desk job at MI6 there's nothing stopping you from telling your mother and father generally about what you do. But apparently even this is a fallacy.

A security source - fifteen years a spy - reveals how his wife thinks he's a statistician for the Office of Statistics, yet he's spent three of the last seven months on site surveillance, monitoring Pakistani terrorists in a London suburb.

There's one group of spies out there, known as the Increment. Said to contain the cream of SAS / SBS soldiers, one cannot be sure of its existence let alone membership. Yet, the security source relates, "to be part of the Increment you have to really want to die for your country. Their allegiance is second to none.

They see the apex of honour as dying for the Queen and Britons, and they will sacrifice their personal lives not just physically but in terms of personal ties including family while they are alive. They have everything to live for - physically strong, often highly intelligent and well-educated - but they return to action time and again like moths to the flame.

So, how do you spot if your relative is a part of the Increment or a hardcore British spy?

Here, the source reveals some brutal scenarios. He claims the family member will demarcate himself (very few women are involved in this group if at all) completely from the family. He will either make the family ostracise him (known techniques are brazenly stealing from family members, vile behaviour to the point of excommunication from family life and plethoras of lies to create enough distance) or he will ostracise himself from his family (living abroad, not returning calls, generally preventing himself from engaging in the activities a family needs to engage in to persist). A favourite security services ploy is portraying the relative as someone in terrible financial debt to the extent that he loses his friends because of unpaid debts, loses family respect as bailiffs show up at the family house and generally becomes someone they want to be less around.

So, what are the other tell-tale signs?

Scars are a good one. If your relative has scars appearing and claims they were from a sporting event or accident this could be a sign of covert operations, which often end up turning violent with either knives or bullets.

When your relative ditches his friends. Not only through the aforementioned debt scenario, but through other dramatic circumstances which top relationships dead.

When much of your relative's career has been spent abroad, especially in another time zone, preventing contact.

And, finally, by you seeing some lies surrounding him (all liars are eventually found out, so the saying goes - when the relative spy is at home with the family he is least at guard and that is when his fabricated life may show some chinks in it).

What these signs show is that being James Bond is only for those with titanium mental toughness. For those with quick intelligence and brilliance in lying. For those who have decided that the best way to help out their fellow countrymen is actually to suffer animosity at the hands of those they care for most - a very tough call, however admirable when you come to really think about it.

As the security source says, "orphans are the best spies as they have least to lose". A sobering thought as more and more families across the United Kingdom lose their relatives to the dark, cold world of espionage, and all the misery which it can bring (whether we know the real reason why or never know it).