Is MI5 referring to the spies, or The Evening Standard? Sheesh.

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.

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.”

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.