From William and Mary News, March 4, 2004: Underpinning the cloaked world of international espionage is a hard-edged code of ethics, Burton Gerber told members of the William and Mary community.
Gerber, a retired senior operations officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, said such ethics are necessary to keep individual agents alive and to ensure that any sacrifice of lives leads to information that has value.
In his speech, sponsored by the International Relations Club and the Reves Center for International Studies, Gerber also considered ethical implications of torture, assassination, working with human-rights violators and the analysis failure involved in the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Gerber spoke from the perspective of an insider working in collections. He insists that tradecraft and integrity are essential if the mission is to succeed. Tradecraft and integrity are also essential on the analytical side – lest the sacrifices of collectors are made in vain.
Jean Maria Arrigo raises another question: what is the role of outsiders in formulating the ethics?
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