In the lexicon of espionage, a cooptee is an individual, often an embassy employee, who willingly agrees to collaborate with their country's intelligence agency in an operation, usually for a specific task or mission of lesser importance.[1] Cooptees often have little to no formal intelligence training and sometimes only exchange tasking and information with their handler through a cutout.[2] In some authoritarian countries such as East Germany, cooptees can be ordinary civilians who inform on their neighbors and coworkers to their secret police or domestic intelligence agency.[3] A cooptee's usefulness may be disproportionate, potentially confusing hostile surveillance in assessing the strength of the organization, acting as a decoy to draw away unwelcome attention from the local security apparatus, or surveying sites suitable for dead drops.[4]
Slovakia's National Memory Institute has identified cooptees of the StB, the secret police of the former Czechoslovakia, who have attempted to enter public office.
In France, journalists, businesspeople, aid workers, and others who volunteer as cooptees to assist the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) are called honorable correspondents.
In 1996, the United Kingdom's MI5 recommended that Khalifa Ahmad Balzelya, an employee in the de facto embassy of Libya, be declared persona non grata for acting as a cooptee of the Libyan Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya.[5]
In 2020, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that George Papadopoulos "was not a witting cooptee of the Russian intelligence services."[6]
A 2017 U.S. FBI report states that from 1998 until the September 11 attacks, Omar al-Bayoumi "was paid a monthly stipend as a cooptee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) via then Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan Alsaud."
In a 1973 memo describing HTLINGUAL, a CIA operation which surveilled mail between the United States and the Soviet Union, the agency wrote "Based on KGB and GRU defector information, it is presumed that the visitor is a KGB agent or cooperating with the KGB, i.e., a cooptee."
