secret contact

A secret contact was a secret collaborator of the Czechoslovak intelligence service who, due to his social status and personal qualities, had the objective and subjective opportunity to perform intelligence tasks and was unwilling to openly work for the intelligence service, and in particular to exceed his usual bounds. His cooperation with Czechoslovak authorities and institutions was conscious, based on an ideological, patriotic or material basis, or personal relations with a worker of the Czechoslovak office to whom he deliberately communicated classified information from his environment. The connection with the secret contact was usually personal, without the technical elements of intelligence work. Unlike an agent, it could be known within a certain circle of people that the secret contact came into contact with a Czechoslovak citizen. Therefore, such contact had to be explained with an appropriate backstory. The secret contact had to be transferable to a new intelligence officer so that cooperation could continue. The secret contact could become an agent were he to overcome the former personal reasons or other factors that prevented him from cooperating directly with the intelligence service. The condition was that no declassification of intelligence content occurred before foreign counterintelligence authorities in the course of the cooperation, that the secret contact accepted and fulfilled intelligence tasks and adhered fully to intelligence service discipline.

Also see: categories of secret collaborators