Keeping agents isolated might enhance security but, when you're on the sharp end and stuff is "incoming!", what you need is partners, buddies, the other members of your combat team. 

As any street cop can tell you, a group of isolates assigned together will just *not* react as effectively in an emergency as a well honed team. This relates to why cops are assigned the same partners for long periods instead of just grabbing whoever is available in the squad room that morning. It also relates to why the military puts so much emphasis on maintaining unit integrity. And part of why experienced units beat green ones.

And it works for the agents.. When the shit goes down, you *don't* want to be around a bunch of strangers you have no idea how they'll react. Even if you're assured they're all pros, you want to know do they break left or break right. Shoot straight or move quietly. And most important, you have to trust them with your life. A couple of hairy assignments where you're constantly worried about being the FNG and you're liable to tell Alphonse to commit an act illegal in Georgia on himself. And that's bad for security.

Keeping teams together actually enhances security in the long run. Everybody *needs* someone to talk to about the shit that bugs them. The more intense the shit, the more the need. This is why cops hang with cops, grunts with grunts. Its not *just* shared interests, its also that it's *hard* to hang with civilians. They really *don"t* understand.

For most people this is a real physical need (validation of your experience for you psych types). It's a major reason why perps brag to other perps despite the fact even *they* know that the smart thing to do is not "put your business in the street". If Delta Green doesn't allow some outlet for this the agents will soon start talking to others whom the agents think they can trust. Wives, husbands, mentors, their agency partners. It's hard to lie to people we trust, at least to non-psychopaths, and it tends to erode sanity at a high rate. As if our agents didn't have enough trouble remaining sane to begin with. And in the long term this will lead to much greater security problems than a few agents knowing each others names.

That's why cells are recruited in the same geographical area. Or in the same agency where there is plenty of normal reasons for the agents to be in contact. This is why a certain limited and very careful amount of fraternization is allowed, even encouraged. Of course, it's always a trade off. The security advantages of not being known associates versus the need to know your partners.

I suspect *most* Delta Green cells don't openly hang together after work. But occasions for meetings can be manufactured. "Casual" meetings at interagency conferences, "running into each other" at restaurants etc. More ingenious cells may arrange to have a leisure activity in common. Being members of the same chess club, having boat docks next to each other at the marina, their kids being on the same little league team, any good explanation for being casual friends will do. They key is to keep it from being obvious that they're more involved than they are with all the other casual friends that they have. Remember that for any spy maintaining the semblance of a normal day to day life is the most important part of his cover. While we may not play out (or we may) much of an agents day to day life in our simulation exercises, remember that most of an agents time is *not* spent chasing spooks.

Because of it's need for security above all DG recruits *only* personnel with an extremely low need for external validation. Combined with the skill sets involved and the need to recruit only exceptionally stable individuals this would make for a fairly limited pool of candidates for recruitment, but DG is a small group anyway.

Cell membership is based on recruitment. The traditional way is that Bob recruits Chuck and Carly, Chuck recruits Dave and Don, Carly recruits Dick and Donna. Bob has no idea who Dave, Don, Dick or Donna are and vice versa. Don knows Dick, or more often how to leave a message for him, so if Carly invests in real estate there's some way to contact Dick and Donna and Ethel, Englebert, Edward and Egor. Sometimes the leadership at the top has a complete list of who's who so that they can assign jobs by specialties, sometimes even the Supreme Council has no idea who the underlings are.

In DG, it seems that everybody reports directly to Alphonse. In effect, DG *is* A-Cell and all the rest of us are their friendlies. Which might explain why they tend to recruit field operators rather than administrators. This sort of evades the problem of who actually recruits agents. If Alphonse just assigns everybody to a cell, that means every agent knows, in addition to his/her cell mates, at least one agent in an unrelated cell; his/her recruiter. This I suspect would spread damage even faster than near cell communication. Not to mention completely destroying the organization if it gets beheaded, as opposed to a traditional cell structure which can continue to operate even if the leadership cell is captured.

If DG is really just A cell, then it explains why they don't worry that much about security, we're all expendable.