[Ads-l] "double agent" = "[single] agent" ?

[Ben Zimmer]

Let's go to the transcript.

http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2018-03-14

"Oleg Penkovsky was a Russian double agent. He was a colonel in the GRU and
Soviet military intelligence. And unbeknownst to the Soviet Union, he was
secretly spying for Britain and the United States."

So far so good.

"...maybe a British or American double agent who was secretly working for
the Russians knew about Penkovsky being this important asset for the
Western allies and maybe some American or British double agent gave this
guy's name to the Kremlin, we don't know."

Seems plausible.

"Fast forward 40 years to 2004, December 2004, and the successor agency to
the KGB arrests another turncoat double agent colonel from the GRU, another
double agent secretly spying for the West while serving in Russian military
intelligence."

That's Skripal, who we've already discussed.

I don't see anything unusual here.


On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 1:21 PM, Chris Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:

> On 3/19/18 6:58 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> > The first paragraph of the original email reads as follows:
> >
> > Two nights ago, the usually articulate and precise Rachel Maddow several
> > times referred to Russians accused or convicted of espionage on behalf of
> > Britain or the US, and expelled or executed, as "double agents."
> >
> > I did not interpret that as necessarily referring to Skirpal.
> >
> >
> [Skripal is the name.] Correct, but the description does fit him, and
> he's the one currently in the news. In the absence of clarification or a
> longer quote with context my guess was this is the news item she might
> likely have been talking about.
>
> On the other hand, it is true that there have been murders or attempted
> murders or unexplained deaths of about a dozen Russians in Britain in
> recent years, some of whom were probably not double agents. So if she
> just referred to the whole group as double agents, it would have been a
> questionable choice of terms. (Some of them possibly weren't spies in
> any sense, I think [though that may just be my naivety about
> international spying], even though most probably were. What's your take
> on using the word double agent for someone who by their position in
> Russia is expected to, and in fact at least pretends to bring
> information back to the Russian authorities, but then stays in the UK,
> gets police protection and is debriefed by the British intelligence
> services?)
>
>

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