Blog Post

AEIdeas

In mid-May, the New York Times reported that “the Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.” How this happened is apparently still a mystery, but some believe there was a mole within the agency, others that CIA agents had gotten sloppy in their tradecraft on the ground in China, and still others that the CIA system for communicating with its foreign agents had been hacked into by the Chinese.

Regardless of the source of this failure, it’s eerily reminiscent of a similar catastrophe in the mid-80s and early 90s when the CIA’s operations in Russia also blew up, with multiple losses of key Soviet assets. In time, of course, we learned the losses could be tied to two moles within American intelligence: the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen. Around the same time, a defector from Cuba’s intelligence service revealed that several dozen Cuban officials that the CIA and FBI thought were spying for us were in fact double agents, feeding the US misleading and useless intelligence. In similar fashion, a ranking member of the House intelligence committee noted that almost all, if not all, of the supposedly recruited East German spies were “doubles” as well. Then, in the mid-90s, it was reported that more than four dozen Iranian assets reporting to the CIA were “rolled up.” And, more recently in 2011, more than a dozen CIA-recruited assets in Iran and within Hezbollah were rounded up and, most likely, executed.

Now, recruiting, communicating with, and handling foreign spies is a difficult business. The targeted countries are called “hard targets” for a reason—in particular because their own security services are large and constantly vigilant to protect their own despotism. On the other hand, the record on the US side appears far less than the best, leading one to wonder if there isn’t something more systematic in these failures than just the fact that US intelligence occasionally loses human assets.

At the same time, here on the home front, we have Ali Watkins of Politico reporting that the FBI is scrambling to deal with an “escalating” problem of Russian spying in the United States. As she notes, “after neglecting the Russian threat for a decade, the U.S. was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s election operation. Now, officials are scrambling to figure out how to contain a sophisticated intelligence network that’s festered and strengthened at home after years’ worth of inattention.” Not too surprisingly, the issues received little attention in the past because Russian espionage efforts had not been a priority for the Obama administration. “There was a general feeling that this was not getting the attention it deserved,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Yet resource constraints complicate any effort to give Russian espionage the attention it might deserve. Keeping track of any intelligence officer requires physical and electronic surveillance—and a considerable number of bodies to do each if the coverage is to be effective. As one counterintelligence officer is quoted as saying, “They’ve just got so many bodies.” Toss in the Bureau’s resource-intensive efforts to stay ahead of the terrorism threat domestically and keep up with the expanding Chinese intelligence efforts in the United States and you have a counterintelligence effort here that is essentially fighting a three-front war with a largely one-war CI force structure.

As former National Counterintelligence Executive Michelle van Cleave explained in recent testimony, “increasingly,” hostile intelligence operations can be run outside:

the former safe havens of their diplomatic establishments.” More than ever, “the number of formal and informal ports of entry to the country, the ease with which people can travel internally and the relatively benign operational environment of the U.S. are tailor made for embedded clandestine collection activities. Thousands of foreign owned commercial establishments within the United States, the routine interactions of trade and transnational business and finance, and the exchange of hundreds of thousands of students and academicians, all potentially extend the reach of Chinese intelligence into the core structures of our Nation’s security.

This is all in addition to the intelligence losses caused by the traitor Edward Snowden’s “leaks” and, more recently, the WikiLeaks publication of CIA cyber-collection capabilities.

Of course, one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know. So it’s possible that the US intelligence community is more on top of things than such (new and old) news might suggest. Let’s just hope that this is the case and not just a hope.