Spooks are Kooks
Wondering why spy agency recruiters never reached out.
The early 1990s were interesting times.
I was a newly divorced thirty-something paying a large mortgage on a home I no longer lived in. Although a foreigner, I had been entrusted with a key role in the most covert planning operation Norway had seen since WWII. Our hotel hosted everyone from people who, officially, lived in exile, like Yassir Arafat and Salman Rushdie, to people representing countries on UN sanctions lists. Representatives of South Africa for example.
When Boris Jeltsin visited Oslo, he stayed in our sister hotel, but most of his staff stayed with us. The Russian embassy was tough to negotiate with. One of the most time-consuming tasks our agreement with them included was to lock hundreds of minibars to ensure none of the delegates had access to alcohol. Three years before the visit, I’d been to Moscow. There were no minibars in the Hotel Ukraina in 1993, but every night the phone in my room rang minutes after I returned from the day’s activities. The voice on the other end asked the same question every night:
“You want Russian girl.”
Every night, I hung up without answering. I suspected it was the babushka who sat in the 13th-floor hallway and handed me my key when I stepped out of the elevator and handed her the crumpled pink card with my Cyrillic name and room number on it.
During our pre-Jeltsin visit meetings, the embassy folks conveniently let slip that they knew I had visited their country by asking if I’d enjoyed my trip to their hometown. When the state visit ended, we said we looked forward to seeing each other again when the next delegation came to town.
Not long after that, the security police asked if anyone from the embassy had contacted me or any of the team. I discretely checked with my colleagues. No one had. The front page of the next day’s newspapers announced that three of our “friends” had been deported.
After moving to Denmark, I was part of a group invited to a meeting at Danish security police headquarters. The topic was how to do business safely in the rapidly emerging Eastern European and Russian markets.
One of the experts said:
“All hotel staff in Russia are paid by the FSB.”
When the lectures concluded, I thanked that expert and said he had saved the company I worked for a lot of money.
“How so?”, he asked.
“We operate and are opening lots of hotels there. If the entire staff is already on the FSB payroll, we can save on our personnel costs.”
“We need to talk.”, the Spook said.
He, and one of his colleagues who apparently was mute and didn’t have a name visited me in my office. They asked me questions about where our hotels were, whether I had visited them, and how we hired local staff. He told me all of our staff were agents and reported to the FSB.
The more he told me about Russia, the more he sounded like he got his intelligence from old films. I asked him when he had last visited the country.
“Because of my job, I’ve never been there.”
I asked if we could play a hypothetical game. He indulged me.
“If one of our housekeepers finds suspicious material, for example, blueprints of the parliament buildings, in a foreign person’s guest room, what should they do?”
“They should report to you!”, he said.
“What should I do?”, I asked.
“You should report to the police, or preferably directly to us!”
“I agree.”, I said. “Now supposing a housekeeper in a hotel in Russia sees suspicious material in a foreign person’s hotel room. Who should they report to?”
Intelligence agencies, both governmental and private, operate everywhere, but I’ve often been surprised at how little these people know about hotels. The people who run international cartels specializing in serious and organized crime are far better at exploiting the low-hanging fruit hotel employees represent.
Hotels have access to scary amounts of information, both formally via their guest record histories and informally through their observations of often interesting behaviours people have when they’re away from home.
Having seen all I’ve seen, I’m surprised that no one from an espionage agency ever tried to recruit me. Neither a domestic nor a foreign one in any of the countries where I lived.
Maybe spook recruiters believe you need a cool name, preferably one with the initials J.B. like James Bond or Jason Bourne.
What would have happened if my parents had named me Jasper Booth?
I’m too old to be a spy now, but if there are any billion-dollar blockbuster producers out there looking for stories, give me a shout.
Stay safe, Always Care
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I don't know... Paul. Paul Moxness rolls off the tongue pretty well!