Espionage Files: Time for a New CIA?

By John Sipher of the Cipher Brief

Across the Central Intelligence Agency lobby from the iconic stars memorializing officers killed in the line of duty is a less well-known memorial.  It is an understated relief in honor of those foreign spies who risked and lost their lives to provide secret information to the United States.  It is a reminder that the CIA remains at its core, the nation’s espionage arm.  Apparently, however, CIA Director John Brennan doesn’t see it that way.

In what was otherwise a thoughtful interview with National Public Radio last week, CIA Director John Brennan expressed his personal view that the CIA should be not be viewed as a spy agency.  In the 24 February interview he said, “I don’t support government spying…. We don’t steal secrets…  We uncover, we discover, we reveal, we obtain, we elicit, we solicit.  All of that.”  What?  We don’t steal secrets?  Is he joking?  Brennan has reportedly also made clear to the officers under his charge that he eschews the term espionage, and does not view the CIA as an espionage service.

Fortuitously, former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s new book, “Playing to the Edge” was released on the same day that Brennan made his comments, and he seems more comfortable advocating for CIA’s espionage role.  The title of Hayden’s book is sports metaphor meant to highlight how he viewed his responsibility as the Director of the NSA and CIA.  That is, in an effort to secure the safety of the American people, U.S. officials should use all of their authorities under the law.  They should use the entire playing field, even right up to the boundary.  In the book, Hayden refers to a speech in which he comments that “the American people expect CIA to use ever inch we are given to protect her fellow citizens,” adding his view that espionage is essential to a democracy.  Sadly, Brennan’s remarks on the same day suggest that he does not see his authority in the same way.

While his comments might not resonate outside of the Intelligence Community, make no mistake, it is a long term danger to our security when the head of the nation’s espionage organization says that he doesn’t support spying.  It sends a chill through those who work in the shadows to keep us safe and makes them wonder if their boss has their back.  It also confirms the fears of many CIA employees and alumni that Brennan’s recent efforts to restructure and change CIA culture were a furtive means of weakening the clandestine service.

CIA houses several very different cultures under one roof.  The three main tribes are the analysts, the spies and the techies.  For outsiders, the analysts are in-house academics and experts who brief and write papers for the President and policymakers.  The spies are those officers of the Clandestine Service (now called the Directorate of Operations, or DO) who live overseas and manage human spy networks.  They tend to be the cocky jet pilots of the CIA.  The techies spend the money and manage huge, sophisticated, cutting edge programs.  They are engineers, scientists and visionaries.  Housing these three tribes under one roof has always been both CIA’s strength and weakness.  The training, mission and career progression of the three tribes are very different and don’t always mesh.  When they work together it is magical.

However, in order to maintain that magic, one tribe cannot seek to dominate the others.

Since his arrival in 2012, there has been a fear in the clandestine side of the house that Brennan, a career analyst, was intent on taking the clandestine service down a peg.  There is a view that he has never been comfortable with the DO culture and was looking to neuter them.  Some view the highly publicized restructuring (“modernization”) as means to accomplish this culture change.  The Washington Post even reported that the previous Chief of the Clandestine Service abruptly retired in opposition to the restructuring plan that he believed was a calculated effort to weaken the spy side of the house at the expense of the Intelligence Directorate (the analysts).  Despite the whispers, I didn’t believe that the CIA Director could be so petty.  Now I wonder if I was wrong.

Let me be clear.  Despite what Mr. Brennan says, what my colleagues and I did in the CIA was espionage – stealing secrets.  We didn’t “discover,” we stole.  Our sources were not taxi drivers, social media feeds, or newspapers.  They were people with access to secrets who were well aware that they were risking their lives, and possibly those of their families, to steal information for the U.S.

The CIA steals secrets and will always need to do so.  We don’t do it for fun or because we can.  The clandestine arm of the CIA is the collector of last resort.  The USG should use all means—open, technical, and diplomatic—to gather the information it needs to inform policy.  Collecting information openly is certainly preferable to stealing it.  However, if a critical piece of information is determined in our national interest and nobody else can get it, we have to steal it.  The officers of the clandestine service take their responsibilities seriously and often put themselves in harm’s way to get the job done.  We are not always successful, and sometimes create political scandals, but we succeed more often that the public knows.

Also, for those of us in the business, it is hard to fathom why a CIA Director would even bother to claim that he doesn’t steal secrets.  Our adversaries are not likely to take him at his word.  Further, we don’t really get to define what counts as espionage and what doesn’t.  Other countries decide what constitutes treachery and secrecy in their countries.  As far as I know, every country in the world views espionage as a crime and punishes those who engage in it with prison or death.  I certainly took my responsibility seriously and worked diligently to protect those in my care – always well aware of what would happen to them if caught.  No government in the world would see what we did as “discovering or eliciting” information consistent with their laws.  We scrupulously followed U.S. law, while consistently breaking foreign laws.

Surely, the CIA is much more than just an espionage Agency.  It is a central clearing house for open source information, human intelligence, diplomatic reporting, military reporting, academic expertise, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence, covert action, relations with foreign security services, and a world class analytical shop.  CIA’s magic is that it can do so much under one roof.  It needs to put all data and information in context for policymakers.  That said, its life blood is secret information – information that no other organization can provide.

While Mr. Brennan can claim that the CIA doesn’t engage in espionage, that would come as a surprise to those sources sitting in foreign prisons for allegedly cooperating with the CIA.  Dr. Shakil Afridi is still sitting in a Pakistani jail for reportedly helping the CIA find Osama Bin Ladin.  According to press accounts, he is the Pakistani physician who ran a fake hepatitis vaccine program in Abbottabad to collect DNA and confirm Bin Ladin’s presence.  Over the years, many brave foreigners provided information to the U.S. and paid the ultimate price.  Dozens of Russian spies were killed due to the treachery of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.  Pyotr Popov was reportedly thrown into a fire pit in front of his GRU colleagues in an effort by the KGB to show its officers the price of treachery (see the book “Mole” by William Hood).  And sadly, many more.  Those brave souls would be surprised to hear that CIA doesn’t engage in espionage.

Shortly after its stand-up in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence tried to create lead agencies for all of the various functions of the Intelligence Community – NSA for signals intelligence, FBI for domestic intelligence, DIA for military support, NRO for space based collection, NGA for imagery, and CIA for human intelligence – spying.  If Brennan is not comfortable with the spying side of the house and is intent on re-crafting the CIA into an analytical agency, the time has come to look to our history and re-create a separate espionage service along the lines of the WWII era OSS.  Spying, stealing, suborning, and pilfering is often dirty work, but someone has to do it if CIA won’t.

Read the Original Article at the Cipher Brief

The CIA’s Constant Battle Between Secrecy and Effectiveness

 

In his masterwork, On War, Carl von Clausewitz discussed the inner logic of war. He maintained that it is a logic of maximum violence without pause, violence that ceased only with the utter and permanent subjugation of the adversary. However, he also noted that war is the continuation of policy through other means. These two notions combine to form a paradox: Though war is inherently violent, political purposes are seldom, if ever, served by the senseless violence of absolute war. Therefore, if it is to be useful, war must be restrained by policy and policy leaders from fulfilling its brutal inner logic.

Christopher Moran addresses an analogous issue in his book Company Confessions: Revealing CIA Secrets, which was published late last year in the United Kingdom (though, oddly it will not be out in the United States until August of this year and then under the title Company Confessions: Secrets, Memoirs and the CIA). The book is a vastly entertaining, though ultimately depressing, discussion of the inner logic of intelligence, at least as it is interpreted by the Central Intelligence Agency. Moran, a professor at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, whose previous bookdealt with secrecy in the British government, admits in Company Confessions that “the danger of not having a veil of secrecy for sources and methods should not be underestimated.” Nevertheless, he describes an agency whose devotion to secrecy is so extreme that it comes at the cost of its effectiveness within the American policy and political systems.

If one believes (as I firmly do) that intelligence agencies are necessary to the security and prosperity of a democratic country, then there are two main measures of merit for those agencies. One is whether they are efficient and effective at carrying out their core missions. For the CIA, these missions are collecting human intelligence, doing all-source intelligence analysis and conducting covert actions abroad as directed by the president. The other is whether the agency maintains a level of public and congressional support that allows it to continue to perform those core missions.

Like any government agency, the CIA has had its ups and downs in carrying out its core missions. For the last 45 years or so, however, the agency has, at best, muddled through in maintaining support and even at fending off misconceptions — such as the claim (engineered behind the scenes by the KGB) that the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Moran’s book suggests that the agency itself is to blame for many of these problems. It has been insistent on secrecy, but then when a scandal or crisis occurs it complains that it is misunderstood.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

Cold War Files: CIA Fooled by Massive Double-Agent Failure

The CIA was fooled by scores of double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly loyal to communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.

The large-scale deception included nearly 100 fake CIA recruits in East Germany, Cuba, as well as the Soviet Union (and later Russia) who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. policymakers for decades.

“During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian.

“The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure,” he stated in a journal article published last week.

The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies “wreaked havoc” on the agency, Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.

Fischer stated that the failure to prevent the double agent deception was dismissed by the CIA as insignificant, and that congressional oversight committees also did not press the agency to reform its vetting processes.

Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the agency in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging he was mistreated for criticizing the agency for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant.

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence—the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”

The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

Double agents are foreign nationals recruited by a spy service that are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to feed false disinformation for intelligence and policy purposes and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents.

Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.

The CIA’s first major double agent failure occurred in Cuba and was revealed by Cuban intelligence officer Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the CIA in 1987.

Aspillaga revealed that some four-dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period secretly had been working for the communist government in Havana and supplying disinformation to the CIA.

Later that year, Cuban state television confirmed the compromise in a documentary revealing the existence of 27 phony CIA agents, along with their secret CIA communications and photographic gear.

The intelligence failure was covered up by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, according to Fischer, who quoted former CIA officer Brian Latell.

In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi.

According to two East German Stasi officers, Klaus Eichner and Andreas Dobbert, operating against CIA without inside sources was difficult.

“Naturally we tried but did not succeed in placing agents in the CIA,” they stated in their 2009 book. “Nevertheless, there was not a single CIA operation on [East German] territory that we were not able to detect using [double agents] and counterespionage operations.”

Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb, and blind.”

The late East German spymaster Markus Wolf also wrote in his memoir that by the late 1980s “we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.”

“On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans,” Wolf said.

Wolf had been able to identify a CIA officer working in West Germany who was recruiting East Germans and then dispatched double agents to the officer.

Fischer says former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the failure, including Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, who said the double agent fiasco spanned over 20 years.

Former CIA Director Robert Gates also said the agency was “duped by double agents in Cuba and East Germany.

Fischer states that the East German failure was “wall-to-wall,” from the lack of advance warning in 1961 of plans to build the Berlin Wall, to 1989, when cable television provided CIA with the first word that the wall was coming down.

From 1961 to 1989, all CIA intelligence on East Germany was “no more and no less than what Wolf wanted it to know,” he said.

The last major double agent failure took place in the Soviet Union and after its 1991 collapse in Russia.

It was revealed after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames for spying for Moscow since the 1980s.

Ames helped the KGB expose all Soviet and East European intelligence operations, allowing Moscow to pass “feed material”—a combination of accurate information and false data—through controlled double-agents.

The KGB operation involving Ames began in 1986 and continued through 1993, when he was handled by the post-Soviet SVR intelligence service.

During that period, the KGB sent a false defector to the CIA, Aleksandr Zhomov, who fooled the agency into believing he could supply information on how the KGB had unmasked and arrested almost all CIA recruited agents during the mid-1980s.

Zhomov, who was paid an estimated $1 million by the CIA, made the fake offer in 1987 and according to Fischer, was dispatched by Moscow in a bid to protect Ames from being discovered as the source of the earlier leak.

In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from “bogus” and “tainted” sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow.

The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey.

The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.

Fischer said the CIA defended its recruitment of bogus agents by asserting that even while controlled the doubles provided some good intelligence.

A major problem for Soviet operations was the failure of agency officers to successfully conduct direct recruitments of agents to work for the agency. Instead, the CIA was reliant on “walk-ins,” or volunteers, a practice that increased the vulnerability to foreign double agent operations.

Fischer blamed the bureaucratic culture and careerism at CIA for the failure to prevent the double agent disaster.

“The case of the KGB-SVR double agents from 1986 to 1994 is egregious,” he said, “not the least because it revealed that deceptive practices transcended the Cold War.”

The CIA continued to handle agents the CIA knew were fraudulent and allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to “cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents,” Fischer concluded.

“Yet none of these revelations resulted in a serious inquiry into the troubles that doubles cause,” he said. “To paraphrase Lord Acton, secret power corrupts secretly.”

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff member, said he was familiar with some of the details on CIA double agents during his intelligence career but said some information in the article was new.

“Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption—moral, intellectual, and political—of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it,” said Codevilla, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and professor emeritus of International Relations at Boston University.

Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, said Fischer and other former intelligence officials have revealed that large-scale communist intelligence service operations to undermine the CIA show “the story of Soviet-era espionage operations that we’ve understood to this point is probably deeply flawed.”

“What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong,” said deGraffenreid. “And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others.”

David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst and retired Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member, said Fischer correctly notes that “intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.”

Read the Original Article at Free Beacon