Yes. Intelligence agencies have used blackmail, threats of exposure and compromising information to coerce people. The historical record leaves little serious doubt about that. The more difficult question is what this tells us about agencies such as the CIA today.
Declassified CIA literature recognizes compromise and coercion as established concepts in human-intelligence recruitment. A senior CIA official has publicly listed “fear of compromise” among the motivations that can lead someone to spy. Soviet intelligence famously used sexual compromise and threatened exposure against targets. And in perhaps the clearest American domestic example, the FBI used secretly recorded information about Martin Luther King Jr.’s private life in an anonymous threatening package intended to pressure and discredit him.
But several conclusions do not follow from those facts.
There is little basis for saying blackmail is the CIA’s routine or preferred method of recruiting agents. CIA professional literature says almost the opposite: people coerced into espionage tend to be resentful, unreliable and dangerous to their handlers. One CIA-published discussion says coercive recruitment is actively discouraged in CIA training.
Nor does the history of intelligence abuses prove a particular modern allegation. Evidence that an agency can do something is not evidence that it did do it in a particular case.
What the historical record does destroy is the opposite absolutism: the claim that an intelligence agency could not possibly blackmail, intimidate or otherwise mistreat someone because its regulations prohibit such conduct.
Government agencies are institutions made of human beings. Rules constrain them. Oversight matters. But history contains documented cases of intelligence personnel exceeding authorizations, concealing activities from overseers, keeping unusually sparse records and engaging in conduct later found improper or illegal.
The defensible answer is therefore neither “intelligence agencies never blackmail people” nor “they blackmail everyone.”
It is that blackmail is real intelligence tradecraft, generally an unattractive form of agent recruitment, demonstrably used by some intelligence and security services, and possible even where formal policy prohibits it.
Blackmail, compromise and coercion are not the same thing
Spy terminology can make this subject unnecessarily confusing.
An intelligence service may discover that a target is having an affair, committing a crime, hiding money, concealing a sexual orientation in an environment where disclosure could be dangerous, violating professional rules or keeping some other damaging secret.
That is compromising information.
A service might collect the information and never threaten the person with it. It might use the information merely to understand the target’s vulnerabilities. It might leak it to discredit the target. It could confront the target hoping to persuade him to cooperate. Or it could explicitly threaten exposure unless he provides information.
Only the last scenario is what most people ordinarily mean by blackmail.
Similarly, a “honey trap” is not automatically blackmail. An intelligence service could engineer or exploit a sexual relationship to obtain information, establish access, cultivate emotional dependency or create compromising evidence. It becomes blackmail when that compromise is turned into coercive leverage: cooperate, or something bad happens to you because we disclose what we know.
That distinction matters because otherwise almost every discussion of sexual intelligence operations becomes falsely inflated into a proven blackmail case.
CIA’s own literature recognizes compromise and coercion
There is unusually revealing evidence inside the CIA’s own professional literature.
A 2013 article in the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence examined the classic intelligence acronym MICE: money, ideology, compromise/coercion and ego.
The article explains that compromise and coercion were major Cold War counterintelligence concerns. People with security clearances were warned that illegal or stigmatized conduct could leave them vulnerable to blackmail. It also notes that CIA officers were familiar with American law-enforcement agencies obtaining cooperation from informants by leveraging criminal exposure.
Then comes the important qualification.
The article says people coerced into espionage rarely make ideal agents and that coercive recruitment is actively discouraged in CIA training. An unwilling source may be angry, do only the minimum necessary, deceive the case officer, double-cross the service or even become violent.
This is not an official CIA policy directive. Studies in Intelligence carries a disclaimer that authors’ views do not necessarily constitute the Agency’s official position.
But that limitation cuts both ways.
The article is weak evidence for the proposition that “CIA policy is to blackmail people.”
It is strong evidence that compromise and coercion are genuine concepts within the intelligence profession, understood by CIA practitioners and discussed seriously enough to appear in the Agency’s professional literature.
An older CIA recruitment paper goes further
A particularly interesting example appeared in Studies in Intelligence in 1964.
In “The Recruitment of Soviet Officials,” CIA officer Andrew J. Twiddy discussed approaches for recruiting Soviet targets. Among the scenarios was a young KGB officer whose personal vulnerabilities could be discovered and exploited. The discussion eventually suggests seeking compromising information that could be used against him.
There is an important evidentiary limitation: the article says its case sketches include both hypothetical and real examples without clearly telling the reader which category every individual scenario falls into. It also appeared in a professional journal rather than an operational directive.
So this document does not prove that a named Soviet officer was blackmailed by the CIA in a specific operation.
It does establish something narrower but still important: CIA professional literature explicitly contemplated obtaining compromising information as leverage against a recruitment target.
That is incompatible with the claim that such a concept would somehow be unimaginable inside American intelligence.
A CIA deputy director publicly acknowledged “fear of compromise”
The concept was not confined to obscure Cold War literature.
In a 2015 public speech at Cornell University, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen explained how case officers develop and recruit human sources. He described possible motivations including money, ideological affinity, hostility toward a target’s home country, ego, excitement—and “fear of compromise.”
Cohen also emphasized the longer and more important process behind successful recruitment: identifying someone with access, meeting the person, establishing a relationship and earning trust.
That context matters.
The speech is evidence that vulnerability to compromise remains part of how CIA leadership publicly describes human motivation. It is not evidence that CIA case officers routinely manufacture compromising situations and threaten their targets.
The two propositions should not be confused.
Why wouldn’t the CIA simply blackmail more people?
Because it often makes for bad espionage.
Imagine two spies.
One secretly provides information because he hates his government, believes in the United States, wants money, resents his superiors or enjoys the clandestine life.
The other provides information because his handler can destroy his marriage, career or freedom.
The first person has a reason to preserve the relationship.
The second has a reason to escape it.
A coerced source may deliberately provide low-value intelligence, hide important information, attempt to expose the operation, seek protection from his own security service or turn himself into a double agent.
CIA professional literature makes essentially this point: coercion creates angry and resentful agents, which is precisely what an intelligence officer does not want while meeting secretly in a hostile country.
Britain’s MI5 currently takes an even stronger public position. Its official description of human-source operations directly asks whether MI5 uses blackmail or forces people to provide information. Its answer is no: agents are volunteers, coercion would be unlawful, and knowing a source had been forced to cooperate would undermine confidence in the information the person supplied.
That statement should not be dismissed merely because it comes from MI5. It describes a genuine operational problem with coerced sources.
But neither should an agency’s statement of policy be transformed into proof that no employee could ever violate that policy.
Those are separate questions.
Intelligence agencies unquestionably have used blackmail: the John Vassall case
For a remarkably clean example of traditional espionage blackmail, consider British civil servant John Vassall.
Vassall worked at the British Embassy in Moscow in the 1950s. Soviet intelligence compromised him in a sexual operation at a time when homosexual activity could expose him to severe legal, professional and social consequences in Britain. The KGB used that vulnerability to blackmail him into providing classified information.
Vassall subsequently passed secrets to the Soviets for years before being exposed in 1962 and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Britain’s National Archives describes the case directly as a KGB honey trap followed by blackmail.
This is the classic mechanism that popular culture associates with intelligence blackmail:
compromise → proof → threatened exposure → compelled cooperation.
There is nothing hypothetical about intelligence services having used that technique.
The more legitimate debate concerns how often particular services use it and under what circumstances.
The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr.: an American government example that is difficult to explain away
The United States has an extraordinarily well-documented example of blackmail-like government coercion, although it involves the FBI rather than the CIA.
During its campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI extensively surveilled King and collected intensely personal information about him.
A package was then anonymously mailed to King containing a surveillance recording and a threatening letter. A later House investigation concluded that the tape was apparently included to substantiate threats to expose damaging personal information.
The letter told King that he was about to be exposed and that there was only “one way out.” The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the final paragraph clearly implied suicide as the suggested course of action.
The committee did not find that the FBI participated in King’s assassination. It did conclude, however, that the Bureau had conducted an active campaign to discredit King and that its COINTELPRO activities against him grossly abused and exceeded its legal authority.
This case should be described accurately.
The FBI was not primarily blackmailing King into becoming an espionage source. The objective was intimidation, discrediting and neutralization.
But the underlying method is unmistakably relevant to the question: a U.S. security agency collected compromising personal information through surveillance and then used threatened exposure as pressure against its target.
That happened.
Therefore, “a U.S. government security agency would never threaten someone using embarrassing secret information” is historically false.
What the FBI example does—and does not—prove about the CIA
It does not prove that the CIA behaves identically to the FBI.
They are different agencies with different missions, authorities and histories.
The CIA is primarily a foreign-intelligence service. Federal law specifically states that its director may collect intelligence through human sources but that the CIA has no police, subpoena or law-enforcement powers or internal-security functions.
The King case therefore should not be presented as a “CIA blackmail case.”
Its value is different.
It establishes that severe misuse of surveillance-derived personal information is not merely something American officials accuse hostile intelligence services of doing. American institutions themselves have crossed that line.
“But the CIA isn’t allowed to do that”
This is where arguments about intelligence activity often go wrong.
A prohibition tells us something important: what an organization and its employees are supposed to do.
It does not establish what every employee has actually done.
That distinction would be trivial in almost any other context. Murder is illegal; murders still occur. Companies prohibit fraud; employees still commit fraud. Police departments have use-of-force rules; officers sometimes violate them.
Intelligence agencies deserve neither a special presumption of guilt nor a magical presumption of perfect compliance.
And in the CIA’s case, the historical record contains unusually strong evidence that rules and reality have sometimes diverged.
The CIA itself acknowledges that some “Family Jewels” activities were illegal
In 1973, CIA Director James Schlesinger ordered Agency components to report activities that might have exceeded CIA authority.
The resulting collection became known as the “Family Jewels.”
The CIA’s own modern historical account describes the material as a list of controversial and, “in some cases, illegal activities undertaken by the Agency.” Revelations surrounding those activities contributed to the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee and the Pike Committee investigations of U.S. intelligence.
The underlying controversies included domestic surveillance and other activities outside acceptable CIA boundaries.
This does not mean the CIA has no rules.
It proves the opposite: conduct can violate the rules precisely because rules exist to be violated.
MKULTRA shows why “off the books” needs a more precise definition
MKULTRA provides an even more instructive example, although MKULTRA itself should not be misrepresented as proof of CIA blackmail.
The program involved CIA research into drugs and behavioral manipulation, including testing involving unwitting human subjects.
During later congressional investigation, senators encountered an additional problem: reconstructing exactly who had authorized specific activities was extraordinarily difficult.
The CIA’s own 1963 inspector-general review had noted that, for especially sensitive covert testing, the practice was to maintain no records of the planning and approval of individual test programs. Most MKULTRA files were later destroyed in 1973, although additional financial records survived and were subsequently discovered.
The 1977 Senate investigation emphasized that the documentary weakness was therefore not caused solely by later destruction. Sparse documentation had been part of how portions of the program were managed in the first place.
That is concrete evidence for a phenomenon that is sometimes described too loosely as “off the books.”
But the phrase hides several very different situations.
“Off the books” can mean at least four different things
A secret intelligence activity is not necessarily unauthorized.
First, an operation can be classified and highly secret while still being properly authorized. Secrecy is a normal feature of espionage. A public paper trail would defeat the purpose.
Second, an operation can be compartmented. Only a relatively small number of officials may know the details. That does not automatically make the operation illegal or rogue.
Third, an operation may involve unusually sparse records, contractors, intermediaries or foreign liaison services. Those arrangements can make later accountability harder and can create distance between senior officials and conduct in the field.
Fourth, personnel can actually exceed their authority. They can use an unauthorized technique, ignore a restriction, conceal misconduct or continue behavior that supervisors should stop.
Only the fourth category is inherently a violation.
Treating all secrecy as evidence of criminality is bad analysis.
Treating secrecy and formal authorization systems as proof that unauthorized activity cannot happen is equally bad analysis.
We have a recent, extensively documented CIA example of personnel exceeding authorization
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA detention and interrogation program provides unusually direct evidence.
The committee found that CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that either had not been approved by the Justice Department or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
Most strikingly, the committee found that at least 17 detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques without Headquarters authorization. Other techniques were applied in ways that diverged from their specific authorizations, and some interrogators used techniques they themselves were not authorized to employ.
According to the committee, supervisors sometimes recognized this conduct as inappropriate at the time, yet corrective action was rarely taken.
The same investigation found that at least 26 of 119 known detainees did not meet the applicable detention standard. One man’s detention, the committee found, was used solely as leverage to induce a relative to provide information. The committee also reported sparse or nonexistent records for portions of the detention program.
Again, these findings are not evidence that the CIA was blackmailing espionage recruits.
They answer a different question:
Can personnel inside an extraordinarily sensitive CIA operation do things that exceed the authorization supposedly governing the program?
According to one of the most extensive congressional investigations of CIA activity ever conducted, the answer is unequivocally yes.
That makes “it was against the rules” an inadequate argument by itself.
But secrecy does not make every accusation plausible
There is a tempting mistake on the other side.
Suppose someone alleges that the CIA blackmailed a politician, journalist, scientist or business executive.
A skeptic asks for records.
None appear.
The believer responds: “Of course there are no records. It’s the CIA.”
That is not evidence.
History establishes that some intelligence activities have been poorly documented, highly compartmented or deliberately concealed. It does not establish that the absence of evidence proves an alleged secret operation occurred.
If anything, the historical record teaches the opposite lesson: serious claims require careful reconstruction from independent evidence—documents, contemporaneous accounts, financial records, communications, multiple witnesses, later investigations or other facts that converge on the same explanation.
Secrecy changes what evidence we can reasonably expect.
It does not eliminate the need for evidence.
“Covert” also does not mean “illegal”
Another common misunderstanding is that any hidden CIA operation is a “covert action,” and therefore something inherently outside normal law.
Under U.S. law, covert action has a specific meaning: activity intended to influence political, economic or military conditions abroad while the U.S. government’s role is not publicly acknowledged.
Such actions require presidential authorization through a finding and congressional reporting mechanisms. The statute also says a finding cannot authorize an action that would violate the Constitution or federal law.
But there is a wrinkle particularly relevant here.
The statutory definition specifically excludes activities whose primary purpose is acquiring intelligence, along with traditional counterintelligence activities.
So recruiting and handling a foreign spy is not automatically a statutory “covert action” merely because the operation is secret.
That distinction matters when discussing something like blackmail in HUMINT recruitment. Saying “there would need to be a presidential covert-action finding” may simply be legally incorrect depending on the nature of the activity.
Classified intelligence collection, covert action and unauthorized misconduct are three different categories.
What do the CIA’s current rules say?
The contemporary CIA operates under an extensive legal and oversight framework.
Its public Executive Order 12333 procedures describe requirements involving the Constitution, federal statutes, presidential directives and Attorney General-approved procedures. Activities involving U.S.-person information are subject to additional restrictions, authorization and documentation requirements, and auditing.
The CIA also points to oversight by Congress, its Office of Inspector General and other executive-branch oversight bodies.
Those safeguards should be treated as real rather than dismissed as theater.
The United States built much of the modern intelligence-oversight framework precisely because earlier investigations uncovered serious abuses.
But oversight is a risk-control mechanism, not a law of physics.
The existence of an inspector general does not make misconduct impossible. It creates a mechanism that can deter, uncover and investigate misconduct.
That is a meaningful difference.
Is blackmail by a CIA officer automatically the federal crime called “blackmail”?
Not necessarily.
The everyday meaning of blackmail is much broader than the federal statute carrying that title.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 873, federal “blackmail” involves demanding money or another valuable thing under a threat to report a violation of federal law.
Other federal and state statutes can cover different forms of extortion and threats. Federal law also separately prohibits extortion committed by federal officers or employees under color of office.
But it would be legally careless to jump from:
“An intelligence officer threatened to expose compromising information unless someone cooperated”
to:
“That officer necessarily committed the federal crime defined by §873.”
Jurisdiction, location, exactly what was threatened, what was demanded, the officer’s authority and other facts would matter.
For this reason, blackmail-like coercion or coercion through threatened exposure is sometimes the more precise description when discussing intelligence tradecraft rather than a criminal conviction.
So how common is intelligence blackmail?
The public record cannot give us a reliable percentage.
That is worth stating plainly.
Successful espionage operations are deliberately secret. Unsuccessful recruitment attempts may remain secret as well. Declassified archives are incomplete, disclosure rules differ among countries and many operational files remain classified for decades.
What the available evidence does tell us is that coercion has long been recognized as an intelligence technique while also having obvious operational disadvantages.
That makes two extreme claims difficult to defend:
“Intelligence services don’t really blackmail people.” False. Documented cases exist.
“Blackmail is how intelligence agencies normally recruit people.” Also unsupported. CIA literature specifically describes coerced agents as undesirable, and modern MI5 publicly rejects coercive recruitment altogether.
The most supportable conclusion is that blackmail is a genuine but context-dependent intelligence tactic whose prevalence varies by service, era, target and operation—and whose actual frequency cannot be responsibly derived from the public record.
“Not usually preferred” is not the same thing as “so rare that it doesn’t matter.”
In a single high-value intelligence operation, an uncommon tactic can matter enormously.
What should make a modern blackmail allegation credible?
History should change how we evaluate such allegations, but not lower the evidentiary standard to zero.
A serious investigation should distinguish several separate questions.
Was compromising information actually possessed? Rumors that an agency “had dirt” are considerably weaker than documents, recordings, witnesses or independently corroborated evidence.
Was there actually a threat or demand? Possessing embarrassing intelligence is not the same as using it as blackmail.
Is there evidence connecting the intelligence service to the pressure? A target’s personal problem does not become an intelligence operation merely because an intelligence service could theoretically exploit it.
Does the chronology fit? Did the alleged target change behavior after a documented approach, threat or compromising event?
Is there independent corroboration? One interested participant’s retrospective account deserves less confidence than documents, contemporaneous witnesses and evidence from parties with different incentives.
None of those requirements amount to naïvely demanding a CIA memorandum entitled “Our Illegal Blackmail Operation.”
Intelligence investigations often depend on cumulative evidence.
But cumulative evidence still has to exist.
The historical record changes what we can reasonably say
The strongest conclusion is not that intelligence agencies are uniquely evil institutions whose statements can never be trusted.
Nor is it that professional government employees faithfully follow every rule simply because an organizational chart says they should.
The documentary record supports a more realistic view.
Intelligence services exist specifically to operate secretly against adversaries. Human intelligence requires understanding people’s motives, weaknesses, loyalties, fears and vulnerabilities. Compromise and coercion are established concepts within that profession. Some intelligence services have unquestionably converted compromising information into blackmail. CIA professional literature has discussed compromising leverage, while CIA practitioners have explained why coerced agents are generally undesirable.
At the same time, intelligence agencies operate under law, policy and oversight. Those constraints are meaningful.
And the CIA’s own history, congressional investigations and declassified records show that those constraints have sometimes been breached.
The correct inference is therefore limited but important:
A rule prohibiting misconduct is evidence that the conduct is unauthorized. It is not evidence that the conduct is impossible.
That principle applies especially strongly to institutions whose work is secret, compartmented and difficult for outsiders to observe.
But the reverse principle matters just as much:
Proof that intelligence agencies have committed secret abuses before is not proof that any particular secret abuse alleged today actually occurred.
Both propositions can be true at once.
Bottom line
Do intelligence agencies blackmail people? Yes. There are documented historical cases, and compromise and coercion are established concepts in intelligence tradecraft.
Does the CIA understand and consider compromising leverage? Yes. Its own professional literature and public statements establish that.
Does that prove blackmail is routine CIA practice? No. The available CIA literature portrays coerced agents as operationally problematic and generally undesirable.
Can CIA personnel or programs nevertheless violate rules, exceed authorizations or operate with records too sparse for easy later reconstruction? Yes. Congressional and CIA records establish that unequivocally.
Does any of this prove a specific present-day allegation? No. That still requires evidence particular to the alleged operation.
That is the part often lost in arguments about intelligence agencies.
You do not have to choose between blind institutional trust and believing every conspiracy allegation.
History supports neither.
It supports demanding evidence while refusing to confuse “prohibited” with “impossible.”
References and Further Reading
CIA tradecraft and human-intelligence recruitment
CIA Studies in Intelligence — “An Alternative Framework for Agent Recruitment: From MICE to RASCLS” — CIA professional-journal article discussing compromise/coercion, the weaknesses of MICE as a recruitment model and why coerced agents are generally undesirable. The publication expressly notes that authors’ views do not necessarily represent official CIA positions.
CIA Studies in Intelligence — “The Recruitment of Soviet Officials” — Declassified 1964 CIA professional literature discussing approaches to recruiting Soviet officials, including the possible exploitation of compromising information. Its examples include both real and hypothetical cases and should not be treated as an operational directive.
CIA Deputy Director David Cohen — Remarks on “The CIA of the Future” at Cornell University — Official 2015 speech describing HUMINT development and listing “fear of compromise” among possible recruitment motivations.
Documented blackmail and coercion cases
U.S. National Archives — House Select Committee Findings on FBI Activities Against Martin Luther King Jr. — Primary congressional findings documenting the FBI’s campaign against King, surveillance-derived personal information and the anonymous threatening package.
UK National Archives — John Vassall: Victim, Spy, Traitor, Prisoner — Official British archival account of Vassall’s KGB sexual compromise and subsequent blackmail into espionage.
MI5 — Covert Human Intelligence Sources — Current MI5 explanation of human-source recruitment, including its explicit statement that it does not use blackmail or forced cooperation and its operational reasons for relying on voluntary sources.
CIA misconduct, authorization and oversight
CIA — Bush as Director of Central Intelligence and the “Family Jewels” Era — CIA historical account acknowledging that the Family Jewels documented controversial and, in some cases, illegal Agency activities.
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — Findings and Conclusions on the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program — Primary congressional findings documenting unauthorized interrogation techniques, wrongful detentions, inadequate records, oversight failures and inaccurate representations by the CIA.
U.S. Senate — 1977 Hearing on Project MKULTRA and CIA Behavioral Modification Research — Primary congressional record on MKULTRA, destruction of records, unwitting experimentation and the difficulty of reconstructing authorization for especially sensitive activities.
Current CIA authorities and legal framework
CIA — Updated Executive Order 12333 Procedures and Attorney General Guidelines — CIA’s public description of current authorization, documentation, auditing, privacy and oversight requirements.
U.S. Code — 50 U.S.C. §3036, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency — Statutory CIA authorities, including the limitation that the Agency has no police, subpoena, law-enforcement or internal-security functions.
U.S. Code — 50 U.S.C. §3093, Presidential Approval and Reporting of Covert Actions — Governs presidential findings and congressional reporting for statutory covert actions and distinguishes covert action from traditional intelligence acquisition.
U.S. Code — 18 U.S.C. §873, Blackmail — Federal statute specifically titled “Blackmail,” useful for understanding why the criminal-law definition is narrower than ordinary intelligence usage.
U.S. Code — 18 U.S.C. §872, Extortion by Officers or Employees of the United States — Separate federal provision concerning extortion committed under color of federal office.
Editorial currency note: U.S. statutory and publicly available CIA-policy material was checked in September 2026. Intelligence authorities, executive directives, internal procedures and declassification status can change. Classified operational practices are by definition only partially visible in the public record, so claims about the frequency of present-day coercive recruitment should not be presented as measurable from declassified examples alone.
