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Spy
January 2021
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Types of spies


Double Agent
A double-secret agent is an employee in counterintelligence, also known as a dual-secret agent for one country, whose main objective is to spy on another country's target organization and which is now spying on its organization to be the target organization of its own country.

A double agent can be practiced by target agency spies who penetrate the controlling organization or result in former loyal control agencies turning to their target (switching sides). The threat of execution is the most common way to turn a captured officer into a duplicate agent (working for a foreign intelligence service) or a duplicate into a duplicate. It is different from a defector, which is not considered an agent as intelligence agents are in place, and there are no defectors. Still, others believe that defectors are an agent before they have defected.

Sleeper Agent
A spy in the target country or company is a sleeper agent, which does not serve an immediate mission, but serves as an asset if triggered. The "sleeper agent," even though not activated, is still an asset and still plays an active part in sedition, conspiracy, or surveillance because it agrees to act when activated.

Sleeper agents, especially in spy fiction and science fiction, are a standard plot device. This regular fiction usage is correlated explicitly with and is a product of repeated incidents of "sleeper agents" engaged in surveillance, spying, sedition, treason, and murder.

In espionage, a sleeper agent has penetrated and "gone to sleep" in the target country for several years, at times. The agent doesn't connect or get details beyond what is available in public sources with the sponsor or any current agent. The agent can also be called a "deep cover" agent. The agent acquires jobs and identities which are hopefully useful in the future and seeks to fit in as an ordinary person in daily life. Counter-espionage organizations in the target nation are in practice unable to closely track all those that could be hired a while earlier.

The best sleeper agents are, in some ways, those who do not need to be paid by the sponsor because they can raise enough to support themselves, thereby avoiding future traceable from international payments. In such situations, the sleeping agent may succeed in being what is often called an "agent of influence."

Resident Spy
A resident spy in the spy world is an operative working for long periods in a foreign country. An operational base within a foreign country that a resident spy may attach to is known in English as a "station" and Russian as a rezidentura. The United States considered a "station leader," the head spy, known in Russian as a "resident."

There are two forms in the former Soviet Union and Russian nomenclature: the legal resident and the illegal resident spy. In the U.S., there is the same distinction between official coverage and non-official cover. The same is right in the former Soviet Union and Russian vocabulary.

In a foreign country, a legal resident spy works under official cover (such as the Embassy of his country). He is an official consular staff member, for example, a financial, cultural, or military attaché. Diplomatic immunity from prosecution is granted and, if accused of espionage, cannot be arrested by the host nation. The host country may expel such an individual and require them, as a person non-grata, to return home.

Mole
The spy jargon of a mole (also known as a "penetration agent," a deep-cover agent, or a "sleeper agent") is a long time spy recruited to a target agency before it gets secret intelligence. However, the word "clandestine spy" or "informant" inside a government, a private organization.

It may take decades, and then a mole may be hired early in life to work for government services and enter a sensitive intelligence role before it becomes a spy. The most well-known examples of moles, perhaps, were the Cambridge Five. The five British upper-class men recruited by The KGB to serve as Communist University students, later on, in Cambridge University, who were raised to high levels in different sectors of the British government
 
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From the TV series "The Spy"
Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen
Netflix
 
From the movie "Red Sparrow"
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence
Prime video