Top American counterintelligence officials sent a memo that warned every CIA station around the world about a troubling number of intelligence assets who had been killed, disappeared, or captured in recent years. The memo actually gave a specific number of agents — a highly unusual inclusion but one that demonstrates the seriousness of the situation.
The CIA is an agency in transition with the focus of intelligence moving from rooting out terrorism in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan to concentrating on our enemies in Russia and China. But the loss of agents is particularly troubling because there doesn’t seem to be a major intelligence leak. The problem is with the agents themselves.
Acknowledging that recruiting spies is a high-risk business, the cable raised issues that have plagued the agency in recent years, including poor tradecraft; being too trusting of sources; underestimating foreign intelligence agencies, and moving too quickly to recruit informants while not paying enough attention to potential counterintelligence risks — a problem the cable called placing “mission over security.”
The large number of compromised informants in recent years also demonstrated the growing prowess of other countries in employing innovations like biometric scans, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and hacking tools to track the movements of C.I.A. officers in order to discover their sources.
With all our satellites, sophisticated listening devices, and “Gee-Whiz” technology, our best intel is still gathered the old-fashioned way. Human intelligence or “HUMINT” is the best way to give meaning to the raw data that streams into Langley’s supercomputers. That idea was challenged in the late 1970s by Jimmy Carter’s choice to lead the CIA, Adm. Stansfield Turner.
Turner was an unmitigated disaster for the CIA. Admittedly, he took over in 1977 right after the Church Committee discovered CIA abuses and law-breaking. But Turner went to work dismantling the clandestine service, believing that “National Technical Means” like satellites and signals intelligence could do the job of people.
He was proved spectacularly wrong. Turner fired 800 clandestine service officers and reorganized and downgraded the entire CIA operations bureau. It took more than a decade for the agency to recover.
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The criticism that the spies have been practicing “poor tradecraft” and the problem of placing “mission over security” is a leadership problem.
The warning, according to those who have read it, was primarily aimed at front line agency officers, the people involved most directly in the recruiting and vetting of sources. The cable reminded C.I.A. case officers to focus not just on recruiting sources, but also on security issues including vetting informants and evading adversarial intelligence services.
Among the reasons for the cable, according to people familiar with the document, was to prod C.I.A. case officers to think about steps they can take on their own to do a better job managing informants.
Former officials said that there has to be more focus on security and counterintelligence, among both senior leaders and frontline personnel, especially when it comes to recruiting informants, which C.I.A. officers call agents.
Losing assets in China and Russia is to be expected. We have very few long-term assets in either country due to paranoid scrutiny by the Communist governments — the most paranoid ideology in world history. But losing assets due to incompetence or laziness shouldn’t be acceptable, and it’s hoped the CIA will address the problems immediately.
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