Talk:Recruitment of spies

cleanup needed

There are far too many quotations here, used in an inappropriate, pulpy fashion, and cited in a very confusing, haphazard manner. Example:

The traditional openness of the scientific community can be exploited to obtain information from an individual with access to commercially, scientifically, or militarily valuable material. "There is another important source, peculiar to scientific intelligence. This is the body of experts in particular fields of science available in one's own country for consultation. The phenomena of nature are independent of political boundaries, and the experts are in the position of agents spying on these phenomena in so far as they throw light on the feasibility of a suspected enemy development."

Most of these quotes should be paraphrased, with a standard ref link following the bulk of the paraphrase. Most of these quotes also either fail to be closed properly, or make up an extraordinary amount of the article (the entire last section, everything after

the GRU certainly has recorded the act of payment, and can use it for subsequent blackmail: "The only thing he has not taken into consideration is the wolf— like greed of the GRU. He hopes to dispose of the products of his firm, supposing that this will be sufficient. He is deeply mistaken. Having bought the first model or set of documents, certainly at a staggering price, the GRU will later on lower the prices and finally dictate them.

would technically be a quote. The overall "flow" of the article reads like a how-to, as well. --Badger Drink (talk) 23:03, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

It's obvious you don't like the article. Do you have any constructive suggestions or contributions, or merely complaints? Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 23:36, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

It's obvious? Funny, I don't see myself saying I don't like the article. Thanks for letting me know what I actually said. My "constructive criticism" seems to be your "complaints". My suggestions would be:

Most of these quotes should be paraphrased, with a standard ref link following the bulk of the paraphrase.

. Hope this helps. --Badger Drink (talk) 05:48, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I had gotten distracted from some earlier work on it. Nevertheless, the article is a project of the Military History Project's Intelligence Task Force. Constructive comments in either place are welcome, as are contributions to the article. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 01:14, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Much of the section on honeypots is extracted verbatim from Silverman's article "Sex and the CIA". The article is listed in the references, but apart from being plagiarised, the text doesn't read very well - there are references to "me" that in fact refer to Silverman. 83.250.134.13 (talk) 20:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Plagiarism? The material was sourced to Silverman. There have been complaints of too much quoting, which I have tried to correct. It's possible that the explicit footnote may have accidentally been deleted.

As far as the "me", would you help by telling me where that is used? I just did a text search on " me " in my browser, and did not get any hits.

Would you care to offer alternative text here, or edit the material you find reads so badly? There was no attempt to plagiarize, and, as you mention, it was referenced. Wikipedia is a collaborative project, and the best work comes when there is cooperation, rather than criticism alone. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 21:07, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

The problem here lies in the subject matter being terribly specific, case in point being that the title is ludicrously technical, the lede is patronizing, and the text is so much attempting to be an intelligence officer's handbook that it would require someone keenly familiar with both the recruitment of spies and Wikipedia's layout to make this into a bearable article, someone whose existence is dubitable after six years of no significant change. Alternatively, someone with the time should create Recruitment of spies and rely heavily on this as a source. 8ty3hree (talk) 07:55, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

The article has a narrow focus - seems to be Cold War onwards. While spying, and making spies, is as old as the hills. Might be better to burn this article to the ground and start again. Better a passable stub than a rubbish start.GraemeLeggett (talk) 09:03, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I'll take a swing at this. I found large blocks of the text were lifted verbatim from Suvorov's Inside Soviet Military Intelligence. While an excellent book, using the text this way is a clear copyvio. Many of the complaints about the tone of the article deal with plagiarized material; Suvorov wrote the book with a popular, non-technical audience in mind and the tone is both great there and inappropriate here. Sadly, it appears that these copyvios have been in this article for nearly a decade!

To GraemeLeggett, I'd normally disagree with you on the grounds that the information is excellent even if it needs considerable re-working. However, the copyvios have to go immediately and it will be nearly impossible for me to catch them all. As it is, I only caught them because I just read Suvorov and recognize his prose.

Let me give it some thought tonight and I'll come up with a new structure. I'm very comfortable basing the article on Suvorov. It's good material and more importantly Suvorov eschews the traditional nonfiction spy book emphasis on history in favor of organizational structure, policies and procedures, and tradecraft that are considered too boring for popular works. Or too valuable to divulge.

Along with that, Allen Dulles's The Craft of Intelligence and the books by Mitrokhin would be invaluable to get a sense of the CIA and KGB, respectively. In addition to Mitrokhin, probably the definitive source on this, co-author Christopher Andrew also wrote a book w/ Oleg Gordievsky. Suvorov's perspective is limited to the GRU. Something on the Israeli Mossad, Chinese MSS, and British SIS would also be useful. The John Barron work is far too good to limit to just the one citation it gets. 24.99.61.188 (talk) 01:12, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

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