On Courses of Action Proposed

In the two memoranda below, HUMINT component chiefs addressing their immediate superiors request endorsement of particular courses of action proposed by their case officers. The courses of action are to further missions already known at the superordinate division level. In the first memorandum, the head of the First Section of the Political Protection Division of the Harbin Public Security Bureau is given permission to proceed with arrangements for an intimate dinner party to be hosted by a case officer’s agents (one male, aged forty, and one female, aged thirty-three, married and operated by him as a pair) for two targets (a Chinese chemist and his Japanese wife) in order to proactively ‘increase the intimacy of the relationship’ between the two couples and, in this way, to ‘create conditions for operational work in greater depth’. In the second memorandum, a course of action of dubious legality proposed by a different head of the same section is ultimately vetoed by a deputy director of the Harbin Public Security Bureau.