FALSE FLAG

The recruitment of a source by a case officer who misrepresents his own allegiance. This expedient may be the only way of acquiring cooperation, and it was a favorite strategy of intelligence agencies that would not otherwise expect active assistance from targets. For example, in the early 1950s Israel’s Mossad ran a false-flag office in the Federal Republic of Germany with the assistance of Ze’ev Avni to cultivate Germans employed on missile development projects in Egypt. Similarly, Robert Thompson posed convincingly as a Central Intelligence Agency officer in East Berlin to persuade NATO diplomats to collaborate in what he claimed were highly secret operations.