How to recruit a spook

Posted by Jim Stroud

April 16, 2006

This report reminds me of the tv show Alias. In the pilot of the Alias tv show, Sydney Bristow (a college student) is approached by spy guys to serve her country. I imagine that this is how potential recruits are targetted by other agencies? (I also imagine that this is a standard practice by our guys.)

I would LOVE it if someone could send me a sample advertisement the Taiwanese used to recruit their spooks. As cited in the snippet below.

Here is the snippet…

Mainland media have accused Taiwanese intelligence services of using chat rooms, e-mails and online advertisements to recruit spies for the island, claiming that dozens of naive mainlanders have been caught in Taiwan’s espionage trap in recent years.

The People’s Daily group’s Global Times newspaper carried a report yesterday saying the island’s intelligence agencies had taken advantage of the internet in the past few years to cultivate spies and collect intelligence on the mainland.

The newspaper said one of the dozens of cases cracked in recent years involved a postgraduate student at a university in Dalian. The student, identified by the alias Zheng Hui, was employed by “an important unit” and had been sent to study at the university to upgrade his skills.

Zheng’s well-informed remarks in military-related chat rooms quickly made him a target for Taiwanese spy agencies and he inadvertently began his career as an intelligence agent when he accepted a request for a stranger to be included on his MSN friends list.

READ: Taiwan using Internet to recruit spies, says report

Recruiting Rants and Commentary