More al Qaeda Moles
03.11.2008 - 11:17 AMIn the 1990’s, two Soviet moles, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, penetrated, respectively, the CIA and the FBI. In the wake of their exposure and capture, strict new counterespionage procedures were said to have been put in place to prevent a recurrence of a calamity that destroyed America’s human intelligence in the USSR and its successor states.
But when it came to light last fall, the case of Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant who moved from sensitive positions in the FBI to sensitive positions in the CIA, even as she maintained close ties to Hizballah and even as she arrived in the U.S. on the basis of a fictitious marriage, exposed the fact that internal security remains a critical weak point.
Michael Sulick, the head of CIA human intelligence, has openly expressed worry about the harm that could be wrought by an al Qaeda mole in CIA ranks. The Prouty case is only one piece of evidence that this is not an idle fear.
The Evening Standard reports that “four police officers in Britain’s top force are reportedly under close secret service surveillance after being identified as Al Qaeda spies.” MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, believes their function was to alert al Qaeda of pending anti-terror raids.
Clearly, we are facing a sophisticated adversary. The question is: are we sophisticated ourselves?
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March 11th, 2008 at 12:02 PM
We’re about average. There are two aspects to this: prioritization/funding, and personnel management. There is comprehensive fault in the former, and specific IC fault in the latter.
Personnel security — background investigations, periodic reinvestigations, counterintelligence security (e.g., random polygraphs) — is a field always at the bottom of the priority list for funding. It was shrunk dramatically in the early 1990s, when Al Gore was reinventing government, and has never rebounded to the level needed to deal with the influx of new analysts in the terrorism arena. For this, blame lies with everyone: Congress, the executive, and the IC as a whole. The executive’s investigation services are extremely overworked and backlogged. When presented with budget objectives, no one — not Congress, not anyone else — demands the prioritization of personnel security measures. They are not sexy; they don’t “create jobs” on the scale of other initiatives; and they are overhead, not line operations expenses or “investment.”
(When I retired, my “periodic reinvestigation” was eight years old. The standard is five years between PRs, and I had filled in the update paperwork right on schedule. But the Defense Security Service was so backlogged, it had not even started on my PR when I retired. Long-serving military members, and civilian analysts (as opposed to field operatives), are low priority, since they have already been investigated before, and can be transferred from job to job “in status” — without losing their clearance eligibility.)
Personnel management is where the deficit in security measures has to be made up, and too often it is not. By this I mean simple leadership: knowing your people, and taking the trouble to note strange patterns of behavior they may have. In every spy scandal we have had, someone in leadership had an inkling the spy was acting odd, or had some unusual attributes. From atypical financial activities (i.e., owning too much for someone on a GS salary) to getting sick or being on travel or in some way repeatedly avoiding polygraphs, there is always something to key on. It’s a leadership failure when managers notice these things and fail to act on them, as much as when they don’t notice them. And it happens, virtually every time.
Our urgent and expanding need for people with linguistic skills and cultural understanding of the Middle East and South Asia has caused every part of government to access a lot more Arabs, Pakistanis, etc. The overall effect of this is to reduce the obviousness of any peculiar behavior by a single Lebanese American. The practice of hiring contract employees with the requisite skills, instead of home-growing them (from within agencies), is entirely due to budget constraints and “smart” management thinking enforced by Congress. It’s a lot cheaper to pay a contractor $150K a year to provide an analyst who already speaks the language, and whose employee benefits are all managed by the contractor, than it is to train someone for years before seeing the payoff, while being responsible for all her benefits and her lifetime employment cycle.
All that said, I tend to be hard on the IC over this one. Failure to detect a spy is just about always a failure of leadership, when the whole story is known. Feel free to pile on.
March 11th, 2008 at 12:04 PM
Our intelligence services are hindered by two major factors:
1.) The hesitation to “discriminate” against minorities.
2.) The unwillingness over thirty years ago to prosecute Jane Fonda for treason. If the infamous movie actress is not a traitor—then the present definition has been rendered fairly meaningless. The situation has deteriorated to the point that the most outrageous political views are often considered compatible with employment in America’s intelligence institutions. I strongly recommend the reading of Scott W. Carmichael’s True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy. This traitorous woman took full advantage of the stupidity of our “elites.”
March 11th, 2008 at 1:36 PM
I suspect too much reliance is being placed on the polygraph, rather than on old fashioned background investigation legwork. Take a look at some recent spies (Prouty, Aragoncillo and others) and you’ll find that they most of them passed polygraphs (Hanssen is an exception–he was never given a polygraph). What’s being lost is face to face contact with former associates, employers, references, etc.
March 11th, 2008 at 8:53 PM
What’s also lost is the obvious– if the person is of Islamic origin, you might want to use a little extra caution, do a little more research.
Instead, political correctness causes us to pay LESS attention to those people, lest we offend. It is a suicidal urge the left manifests, and as the left is the majority in most bureaucracies, we are somewhat helpless- barring a purge that will NEVER happen.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:45 PM
“The Evening Standard reports that ‘four police officers in Britain’s top force are reportedly under close secret service surveillance after being identified as Al Qaeda spies.’ MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, believes their function was to alert al Qaeda of pending anti-terror raids.”
Is MI5 referring to the spies, or The Evening Standard? Sheesh.
March 14th, 2008 at 10:51 AM
One more bureaucracy unconstrained by this administration. President George W. Bush seemingly never made the effort to straighten out the CIA or State Department, for example. He sends people to run these organizations who are too timid or who have bought into the madness themselves.