In espionage jargon, a mole also called a "penetration agent", [ 1 ] "deep cover agent", "illegal" or " sleeper agent " is a long-term spy espionage agent who is recruited before having access to secret intelligence, subsequently managing to get into the target organization. A mole may be recruited early in life, and take decades to get a job in government service and reach a position of access to secret information before becoming active as a spy.
Perhaps the most famous examples of moles were the Cambridge Five , five upper-class British men recruited by the KGB as communist students at Cambridge University in the s who later rose to high levels in various parts of the British government. Because their recruitment occurred in the remote past, moles are difficult for a nation's security services to detect.
The possibility that a top politician, corporate executive, government minister, or officer in an intelligence service could be a mole working for a foreign government is the worst nightmare of counterintelligence services. The most common procedure used by intelligence services to recruit agents is to find the location within the foreign government or organization of the information they want the target , find out which people have access to it, and attempt to recruit one of them as a spy espionage agent to obtain the information.
However, the people with access to top secret government information, who are government employees with high security clearances , are carefully monitored by the government's security apparatus for just that sort of espionage approach. Thus, it is difficult for a representative of the foreign intelligence service to meet with them clandestinely to recruit them. Private organizations, such as large corporations or terrorist groups , have similar security monitors.
In addition, the security clearance process weeds out employees who are openly disgruntled, ideologically disaffected, or otherwise having motives for betraying their country, so people in such positions are likely to reject recruitment as spies. Therefore, some intelligence services have tried to reverse the above process by first recruiting potential agents and then having them conceal their allegiance and pursue careers in the target government agency in the hope that they can reach positions of access to desired information.
