There is no national level CI effort left. Immediate corrective action must be taken. This cannot be left to the agencies with their known political bias and questionable agents seeded during John Brennan’s term as CIA Director

Our Counter-Intelligence System Is Broken



There is no question that the United States is the number one target of every potential enemy hostile intelligence service in the world. Yet, as recently exposed, there is no national-level effort to counter this threat. Our free and open society is a spy’s paradise, and actually facilitates our enemies’ penetration. Michael Waller of the Center For Security Policy stated this about our lead counter-intelligence organization: “with few exceptions, the FBI has very little to show that it has the strategy and leadership to cut off much more than low-hanging fruit.” A perfect example of this is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents who are safely tucked away in Russia and will never be brought to trial.

Handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation The FBI is the United States’ lead counterintelligence (CI) organization. The CIA also has a key role but is not focused on domestic CI issues, but rather on our hostile enemies. The National Security Agency (NSA) also has an important role to play, focusing on our potential enemies. However, it was recently learned that while NSA is not supposed to be spying on Americans, they recently deleted two-thirds of a “trillion” intercepts on American citizens using the lame excuse of “technical irregularities.” It is not a stretch to imagine that among those trillion intercepts are Hillary Clinton’s emails from her unsecured server, which not only contained Top Secret but “special access” material that should have set off alarm bells at Fort Meade. However, due to political bias, it was ignored. The same situation most likely occurred with the discovery of several hundred thousand of Hillary’s emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Weiner was the husband of Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. Due to the tenacity of House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Devin Nunes, astounding revelations have been uncovered and verified in the report by Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The text messages between the FBI’s leading CI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, showing that he was willing to use his official CI position to stop candidate Trump from becoming President, is more than a dereliction of duty, it borders on criminal activity. China had gained access to Hillary Clinton’s unsecured server According to recent testimony by Lisa Page before the House Judiciary Committee, it has been reported that she revealed that a foreign entity, China, had gained access to Hillary Clinton’s unsecured server. That information was reportedly presented to the FBI’s leading CI agent, Peter Strzok, but he chose to ignore it! Unbelievable if proven to be accurate! The case of the Awan brothers alleged spy ring on Capitol Hill and their IT work for the 44 Democratic Congressional Representatives is another prime example of a failed CI effort. According to many articles by Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), the House Office of the Inspector General (IG) claimed in 2016 that the Awan family logged into members’ servers that they had no business accessing, in some cases even after they had been fired. The IG report, from September 2016, indicates that they logged into servers of offices they did not work for thousands of times, even after the House was warned that the server was being used for nefarious purposes.

Awan’s Pakistani connections With the Awan’s Pakistani connections, it is not a stretch to connect the information flow to the Pakistani intelligence service and then on to China. This activity should have been fully investigated by the FBI’s CI division. Amazingly, the DOJ/FBI prosecutors could find no such evidence. Clearly, our CI system is broken. The inability of our national CI organization to handle these basic cases brings into sharp focus the success of sophisticated cyber-war penetration by both China and Russia. While Russia is getting all the current CI attention, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently declared that Chinese espionage is the most significant spy threat facing the United States. One former CIA analyst put it bluntly: Beijing agents in this country aim “to turn Americans against their own government interests and their society’s interests.” Russia has the same objectives. China has a state-sponsored program to obtain advanced technologies with both military and commercial applications China has a state-sponsored program to obtain advanced technologies with both military and commercial applications. China uses many points of entry into our open society to achieve their objectives. Beijing is infiltrating our universities by funding language and cultural centers called “Confucius Institutes.” They are being used as a cover for technology theft. China is also using 350,000 Chinese students in the U.S. for intelligence activity. Beijing pursues a program to buy small cutting edge technology companies that remain under the radar. This hemorrhaging of our technology must be stopped. In an article by Bill Gertz, 12 April, 2018, he reports that Michelle Van Cleave, a former national CI executive, stated that after the creation of the office of Director of National Intelligence in 2004, a national counterspy program against foreign spies was restricted under the George W. Bush administration. Unfortunately, it continued under President Obama. Van Cleave stated that a directive issued by then-DNI James Clapper in 2013, and still in force, reduced the national CI program authority by directing all counterspy programs to be run by individual departments and agencies. The net result was the end of “any dedicated strategic CI program while elite pockets of proactive capabilities died of neglect.” In short, there is no national level CI effort left. Immediate corrective action must be taken. This cannot be left to the agencies with their known political bias and questionable agents seeded during John Brennan’s term as CIA Director. Therefore, President Trump should appoint a 9/11-type commission to identify the corrective actions necessary to fix our broken CI organization on an expedited basis.

James A. Lyons, Jr. Admiral, USN (ret) -- Bio and Archives James A. Lyons, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.

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