Talk:Mole (espionage)

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what is a mole
 * Did you actually read the article? It explains what a mole is.  Alternatively, maybe you mean a different kind of mole.  Astronaut (talk) 19:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

North of 49
So what about Phlby & Maclean?! And who was the RCMP mole who blew so many CI ops in the '60s? (He was related to the then-Commissioner of the RCMP...)  TREKphiler   any time you're ready, Uhura  04:09, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

where does the name originate from?
where does the name originate from? why is a spy called mole? who did coin that term? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.198.127.153 (talk) 15:35, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Origin of Mole
From Marxists.org:

"Old Mole

Shakespeare uses the “Old Mole” to represent the ghost of Hamlet’s father who keeps speaking from under the stage, despite Hamlet and Horatio shifting their ground seeking a secret place to swear their oath.

The ghost says again: “Swear by his sword” and Hamlet says: “Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ th’ earth so fast? A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends!” (Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5).

Hegel uses the ghost of Hamlet's father, a.k.a. Old Mole, as a metaphor for Spirit in the Philosophy of History. Reviewing the entirety of history up to the present time, he says:

“All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal. What we pass in rapid review when we recall it, stretched itself out in reality to this great length of time. For in this lengthened period, the Notion of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to make progress itself and to develop from spirit. It goes ever on and on, because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the ground so fast?”) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away.” (Philosophy of History. Conclusion).

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx continues the metaphor:

“But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other half. It first completed the parliamentary power in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has achieved this, it completes the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. VII)

Lenin cites this passage in State and Revolution, to show how Marx took the state in historical context, rather than as some historically invariant formation. Rosa Luxemburg also uses the metaphor in Old Mole."

Marx was a great reader of Shakespeare. East bloc spooks would have believed themselves to be fighting for the same long-range historical objectives as Marx. Hence, the origin of this use of mole.

User:Miasnikov — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.193.151.241 (talk • contribs) 14:26, November 26, 2019 (UTC)


 * That is an interesting view. However it is WP:original research.  To include it in the article, would require a statement published in a reliable journal or book that the KGB got the term mole from Shakespeare.  --ChetvornoTALK 19:59, 26 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Specifically, this is Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia's entry for "Old Mole".


 * It's not OR, as it isn't the editor's own work. Instead, it's a question as to whether the source, marxists.org, is a reliable source.


 * From what I can tell, most of its material is copied from other sources and the site itself is neither the source (ultimately) nor does it meet the criteria at WP:IRS. It's hard to say definitively, as the site doesn't give a whole lot of info. Worryingly, it does give info on how to submit entries and corrections.


 * I don't really see that we can use it. - Sum mer PhD v2.0 03:59, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
 * I don't see where in the entry for "Old Mole" it says that Russian intelligence operatives adopted the word "mole" for a spy from Lenin. Am I missing something? --ChetvornoTALK 18:34, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Merge with sleeper agent?
The article begins by saying that moles are also called sleeper agents, but then there's an entire other article on sleeper agents that it links to. It'd make the most sense to merge the two (and leave a redirect).

Mszegedy (talk) 05:02, 5 September 2021 (UTC)