It’s not all James Bond and Jason Bourne. The good guy doesn’t always win in the end. Covert work, more specifically covert human intelligence (HUMINT) operations are the most psychologically and morally demanding forms of spying. OSINT and keyboard collectors don’t feel the grief of an intelligence officer in the field. Case officers recruit, develop, handle, and ostensibly protect their agents (“sources” or “assets”), instructing them in appropriate tradecraft to steal secrets and avoid getting caught. These activities are routinely conducted in denied areas. When these agents operate these hostile environments, the stakes are life or death. Discovery often means that the asset will be tortured, executed, and their families persecuted or likewise killed. As seasons of service pass, it is almost inevitable that some agents will be compromised and lost. The emotional burden on the officer responsible for their survival is profound, marked by grief, guilt, and an enduring sense of moral failure.
The humanitarian bond and psychological investment
The key to success as a case officer is the cultivation of a very personal relationship, deep personal rapport with his or her source. A true friendship rooted in trust, empathy, and shared purpose is imperative. A psychological study on intelligence elicitation revealed that non-coercive strategies coupled with rapport-building yield richer and more accurate information acquisition, underscoring how vital emotional connection is to both efficacy and trust. These very human bonds mean that officers break bread, confide in, and take proactive steps to protect their agents. The resulting interpersonal ties transcend formal professional promises. This emotional investment means that when an agent is caught, disappeared, tortured, killed, or all of the above, the officer experiences not just operational failure, but also a deep personal loss. They bear responsibility for agent safety so when the wheels come off, the intelligence officer invariably suffers from a sense of personal culpability. Survivor guilt among those who ‘live through’ while others perish is well documented in trauma psychology.
Survivor guilt and moral injury
Survivor guilt refers to the distress and self-loathing felt by individuals who outlive someone else when they played a role in the other’s fate. In HUMINT, officers feel they failed agents that they recruited, agents who trusted them implicitly. This places officers at risk for moral injury, a condition in which one’s actions or inactions violate their own moral code. The loss of an agent can trigger intense guilt. “I could’ve done more,” “I should’ve seen the compromise,” or “I didn’t protect them like a parent protects a child.”, are common recurring emotional punishments. A recent article on traumatic loss highlights how survivor guilt can evolve into chronic shame and self-destructive rumination unless addressed . This phenomenon aligns closely with what seasoned intelligence officers share in post-action debriefs, i.e., guilt compounded by the clandestine nature of their relationship with agents where that guilt must remain hidden behind professional composure and confidentiality oaths.
Grief within the cloak of secrecy
Unlike traditional warfighter loss, agent deaths or arrests rarely receive acknowledgment nor are honored publicly. There’s no funeral, no rope-dropping anniversary ceremonies, no celebration of life nor what the source contributed. The clandestine world awards no medals for agents who vanish. Intelligence officers grieve in silence and isolation with few official outlets, little acknowledgment, and often no practical nor legal avenue to care for a source’s family. Psychology literature highlights that complicated grief, grief unspoken and unacknowledged driver to depression, PTSD, and physical illness. In clandestine HUMINT, agents operate for years within strict tradecraft boundaries. Case officers managing or sole agents develop significant moral and emotional ties to them. Losing an agent isn’t just a tactical failure within the intelligence agency’s collection strategies. It is the death of someone known intimately and often their families.
The moral complexities of manipulation and betrayal
HUMINT work inherently involves manipulation, the cultivation and direction of individuals that betray their countries. There is no pretty way to describe it. We teach assets to lie, steal, and live dangerous double lives. Covert operators must deploy emotional leverage, sometimes deception, frequently bribery, “ . . . to ensure loyalty and compliance”. As reported in ‘Intelligence & National Security’, manipulation is part of the deal but when influence crosses into coercion or deception, moral dilemmas arise. When an agent is lost, the officer may and often does ask him or herself, “Did I manipulate them into this disaster? Did I betray my own moral code by pushing them into extreme danger?” Psychological research warns that psychological manipulation “targets unconscious, intuitive, or emotional modes of thought… violating autonomy, freedom and dignity”.
Training v. operational seasoning
Formal HUMINT training emphasizes tradecraft, security, and risk/reward management. Intelligence officers learn strict protocols around recruitment, handling, and termination of agents. Real-world operations in hostile environments introduce chaotic variables. Even the most seasoned officer cannot foresee novel counterintelligence techniques, surveillance technology, or unexpected betrayals by intermediaries or an insider threat. As one analysis notes, seasoned double- or triple-agent running reduces an officer’s control. The very experience that can make an officer a great handler can become a liability, undermining his or her ability to predict perils to the asset and operation, increasing their feelings of personal responsibility when things go wrong.
Organizational culture and aftercare
Intelligence services are bad at normalizing and institutionalizing grief processing for covert HUMINT operators. Agencies debrief performance and analyze operational failures, but do a piss-poor job at addressing the emotional consequences. There is a stigma associated with grief, and moral stress in environments that emphasize resilience and secrecy. In some Western countries, covert-source legislation acknowledges that agents and handlers engage in crimes to maintain cover and accomplish operations. Despite this, emotional and moral support for the officers who manage such morally complex situations remains painfully limited. Without interventions such as peer support groups, secret welfare services, or external counseling, intelligence officers risk burnout, emotional numbing, and PTSD.
The ripple effect on agents’ families
When an agent is compromised, repercussions often extend to their families, FIS (FIEs) frequently use assets’ families for leverage. They are targeted as co-conspirators, persecuted and attacked extrajudicially. Officers can manage systems to smuggle a family to safety or allow them to assume new identities but they are not as successful as we would like to assume. When agents die, officers feel they have failed an entire family. Culturally, agents’ loyalty often arises from protecting their families. Losing an agent can thus symbolize failure to protect a family entirely dependent on smart decisions by that operative and his or her handler.
Ethics and accountability
Scholars like Stephan Lau argue that intelligence agencies need pragmatic frameworks to distinguish legitimate influence from harmful manipulation in HUMINT operations. Such models assist case officers in making decisions grounded in ethical clarity rather than moral ambiguity. Institutionalized ethical guidance and accountability structures can both reduce morally damaging decision-making and help handlers process loss after operations fail. Albeit not a panacea, ethical oversight on recruitment, coercion thresholds, and risk assessment can lessen post-hoc guilt and defend against corrosive shame.
Operating at the intersection of psychology, ethics, and national security, HUMINT case officers experience pressures unique to clandestine work. They recruit and manage individuals willing to risk their lives and those of their families for a foreign intelligence entity’s objectives. The loss of such agents in hostile environments imposes profound emotional and moral wounds. Survivor guilt, grief, and rumination on perceived ethical failures are the inevitable result. Individual case officer well-being and institutional resilience is possible. By building ethical guidance, grief acknowledgment processes, peer support structures, and mental health interventions tailored to clandestine realities, HUMINT organizations can care for their own and honor the sacrifices of their assets. In so doing, they protect not just robust operational effectiveness, but the humanity of the professional officers who serve in the shadows.
References
Goodman Delahunty, J., O’Brien, K., & Gumbert-Jourjon, T. (2014). Reframing intelligence interviews: Rapport and elicitation. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 11(2), 178–192.
Lau, S. (2022). The Good, the Bad, and the Tradecraft: HUMINT and the Ethics of Psychological Manipulation. Intelligence and National Security, 37(6), 895–913.
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UK Parliament. (2019–2021). Briefing Paper: Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act.
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