Agent of influence

An agent of influence is a well-placed, trusted contact who actively and consciously serves a foreign interest or foreign intelligence services on some matters while retaining his integrity on others. Agent of influence might also refer to an unwitting contact that is manipulated to take actions that advanced interests on specific issues of common concern.

Foreign intelligence agencies take people who tend to agree with their positions on at least one significant issue, such as opposition to some element of a nation's foreign policy, and then seeks ways to motivate and help that person become a successful advocate on that issue within their own circle of influence.

The ultimate prize of an intelligence agency is to have someone sympathetic to their own goals and ambitions in a position of power, for example British Prime Minister Harold Wilson if it was true, as his own security officials may have believed, that he was a Soviet agent.

John Watkins

In 1980, Ian Adams uncovered evidence that John Watkins died while being questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the United States Central Intelligence Agency in a failed attempt to get him to confess to being an agent of influence. In 1999, Adams wrote a novel Agent of Influence, based on the event. This was made into a 2002 Canadian movie of the same name.

See also

• Mole
• Fellow traveler
• Useful idiot

External links

• Interview with Ralph De Toladano
• Book review by Hook
• Agents of Influence - from Soviet Active Measures in The Post-Cold War Era

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