The profession that came in from the cold: Trust and distrust in espionage

Abstract

Trust and distrust are important elements of the fiduciary relationship in the professions. Whether to trust or to distrust someone is a decision that has real consequences for success or failure of secret operations in undercover policing, in fraud investigation, or in audit. In this article, we focus on the spying profession as an extreme context in which we attempt to answer the question: how do spies navigate the trust/distrust dynamic in their work? The world of spies has often been out of bounds for those studying the professions and given that field studies in this context are extremely difficult, we analyzed biographies and autobiographies of secret agents. Based on our analysis, we identified different functions of trust and distrust: trust can be used as an instrument of manipulation and an option of last resort, while distrust is a protective mechanism aimed at shielding from vulnerability. We argue that a better understanding of trust and distrust dynamic may illuminate some of the behaviours of people in other professions.