Yet in order to recruit and handle these human sources (better known as agents or spies), today’s intelligence officers must compete with the rising threat of street surveillance, a threat that has parallels with the Cold War. 3 Simply put, if the US and its allies are going to cool relations, enact sound policy, and curb the relentless intelligence operations of their adversaries, they are going to need reliable and well positioned human sources. The most important secrets, including the aims and intentions of President Xi and President Putin, are likely contained either in the minds of a select few or in heavily guarded vaults. 2 But as military and intelligence resources are steered accordingly towards Beijing and Moscow, Humint, meaning in this case espionage – the recruitment and handling of spies – must play a primary role. As former Defence Secretary James Mattis claimed, declining relations and rising tensions with these ‘revisionist powers’ have increasingly challenged US hegemony. In 2018, the Trump administration declared Russia and China to be the main security concerns of the United States, not terrorism. Despite the possibilities cyberspace offers espionage – for instance, by reducing the need for face to face meetings between intelligence officers and agents – the paper establishes the limitations of technological answers and argues that Western intelligence officers are entering a new era of Moscow and Beijing Rules in which they are more essential than ever and yet need to operate with absolute caution. This paper assesses the degree of street surveillance in contemporary Russia and China – including the impact of biometrics and online data history on the defensibility of cover and the severity of advanced CCTV networks – and the solutions intelligence agencies might adopt to address these problems. However, despite the superficially more open borders of China and Russia, technological advances have made the threat of street surveillance to the recruitment and handling of agents today as acute as it was in Cold War “denied area” states. The recruitment and handling of spies is essential if the US and its allies are to cool relations carefully, enact sound policy and curb the relentless intelligence operations of their adversaries. Reliable and well positioned human sources are essential for the US and its allies in an era of declining relations and rising tensions with China and Russia.
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