In 1994 I was assigned to the CIA’s newly reorganized Counterintelligence Center (CIC). My position was in the recently created internal counterintelligence investigations branch. The Aldrich Ames espionage case had recently occurred and the Agency was still reeling from the long-term effects of the damage Ames had caused to the CIA and US intelligence. It was our job to ferret out any other “moles” in the Agency.
During my tour in CIC, I was assigned the case of a high level Agency employee who had failed the polygraph question on concealing contact with a foreign intelligence service. The employee was belligerent and uncooperative during interviews designed to determine why he was reacting to a counterintelligence question. Because of my recent successes in handling employees who were upset by becoming a case in CIC, the case was assigned to me. During the interview with the individual, we established a good rapport and I convinced him to go back and take a subsequent polygraph on the same subject. He did so, and failed the test a second time.
After further interviews, CIC became convinced the employee had engaged in espionage. Information that had come in through other sources indicated there was a second mole in the organization. After my last interview with him, the case was briefed to the President of the United States. As soon as the case appeared to be another Ames, CIC officers, who previously were disinterested in the case, jumped on the bandwagon.
The Deputy Chief of the Counter Espionage Group (CEG), when he saw the case could be another historical one, came to me and advised he was taking over the case. This was fine with me; I could see the case was going to be a significant mess. The officer under suspicion had friends in high places in the CIA and they were beginning to assault CIC for investigating his activities.
Just a few months later, amidst a storm of resistance from the Directorate of Operations (DO), new information surfaced indicating the officer under investigation was not a potential mole at all. In fact, the CIC had moved too quickly on the case, without examining all the information. The individual was eventually cleared of being a spy. The DO now demanded justice and recompense for CIC’s mishandling of the case. A high level meeting was arranged with DO senior management to confront the CIC. As soon as these events unfolded, the Deputy Chief of CEG came back to me and ordered me to take the case from there. I smelled a rat. It turned out I was right.
The Deputy Chief of CEG was supposed to represent CIC to the upper management of the DO in the upcoming meeting. He directed me to attend as well. Five minutes before the meeting, he called and advised another meeting had come up and he could not go with me. He directed me to represent CIC at the “meeting.” The meeting turned out to be a frontal assault by DO management on CIC for bungling the investigation and DO management confronted me about the handling of the case. Knowing I had been set up by the cowardice of the Deputy Chief, I calmly represented the facts of the case I had gathered before CIC management took it over and related that actions after that period were out of my hands.
In the place of CEG management, I was ordered to deliver a letter of apology to DO management, which I dutifully did. Frankly, this did not bother me at all and I understood the DO’s frustration over the matter. Personally, I was always glad when an Agency officer was cleared of counterintelligence issues. However, I had seen first-hand the kind of cowardice, displayed by the Deputy Chief of CEG, which was beginning to run rampant in the CIA.
The new CIC was instituted based on the recommendation of the Security Commission, created to address the damage Ames had done, develop new measures that would locate any existing moles within the CIA, and institute practices that would prevent such a thing from ever occurring again. The final recommendation of the Security Commission was the creation of the Counter Espionage Group (CEG), which co-located CIA counterintelligence officers with FBI counterintelligence agents. This was the first time these two competitive and sometimes opposing organizations were forced to work together, whether they liked it or not. Many FBI agents and CIA officers abhorred the idea.
My experience in CEG revealed to me that international counterintelligence and espionage are part of a dark underworld, teeming with thousands of agents operating for multiple countries, with a constant undercurrent of covert activity taking place in the shadows of every society. Most of this culture’s operators are void of any ethics or morals, their identity is derived from what they do. This underworld involves billions of dollars flowing through international economies at a constant rate. Operations are hidden from public view, in the invisible world of espionage and counterintelligence.
On February 21, 1994, a cadre of FBI agents moved in and arrested Aldrich Ames as he drove his Jaguar from his home. He was imprisoned in the Alexandria county jail. As noted in a previous chapter, investigation revealed Ames had been spying on behalf of the Russians for a shocking nine years.
Ames, a disgruntled alcoholic with a long-term poor performance record, had actually been promoted by his CIA managers to the position of Chief of Counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The culture of the Agency at the time was to shuffle poor performing high level officers off to other assignments, just to get rid of them and not have to go through the pain and paperwork of official sanctions. Despite Ames’ problems, he was never held accountable; he was just moved from office to office. Eventually, Ames was given access to CIA files on every agent spying for the US in the Soviet Union.
In 1985, under the guise of his position, Ames met with a Soviet intelligence officer from the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. For $50,000 he provided this Soviet agent the names of Soviet citizens who were working for the CIA. At a later meeting he provided the name of every agent he knew who was secretly working for the CIA. One by one the CIA spies in the Soviet Union were rounded up, arrested, tried for treason and executed. The CIA had betrayed its deepest agents.
Ames also revealed the names of many of his CIA co-workers and their operational positions in the CIA. The damage done by the compromise of CIA intelligence operations, revelation of the identities of covert CIA personnel and penetration agents in the Soviet Union was of nightmarish proportions.
In 1994 a Security Commission was created by Congress to address the future of the CIA. Among the horrible discoveries made by the Commission was the CIA knew its Soviet operations were being compromised, but ignored the fact for eight years, and even deliberately concealed these compromises from the President and the NSC. Simply put, senior CIA officials lied to the President of the United States about information that was compromising US security and costing agents their lives.
Previously noted was the recommendation of the Commission to overhaul CIA counterintelligence, collocating it with FBI counterintelligence in a new office in CIA headquarters. CIA officers were now taking directions from the FBI. Internal investigations of Agency employees exploded. Hundreds of CIA employees at all levels became the subject of investigation. Careers were being ruined at an alarming rate. An atmosphere of distrust existed between FBI agents and CIA officers in the newly created CEG. The case loads of internal espionage investigations were almost impossible for counterintelligence officers and FBI agents to keep up with. Most graduates of the FBI academy shunned counterintelligence work, seeing it as a career dead-end. Many of the agents were new and inexperienced in the field. Most seasoned FBI agents wanted to make their careers by catching criminals and in one agent’s words, “go after bank robbers.”
I interacted well with most of the FBI agents I worked with and found them to be men and women of honor. The heated animosity existed at the FBI and CIA management levels. The FBI routinely reminded CIA officers that the Agency could no longer conduct adequate investigations and had botched the ones it handled in the past. It also bragged the FBI had never had a mole and an FBI agent had never engaged in high treason. The FBI was, essentially, a superior organization. Memos were written after meetings documenting what was said, so neither organization could misrepresent any actions on an internal case. On at least one occasion, someone in the FBI leaked a case it had botched to the press, blaming the mistakes on the CIA. I knew the case well. It was handled by one of my fellow officers who had done a thorough job.
On February 18, 2001 the unthinkable happened. The FBI learned one of its own high level agents had been spying for the Soviets; for years. Robert Hanssen was arrested at a park in the Virginia suburb of Vienna. Hanssen was caught secretly hiding a package containing highly classified national security information at a “dead drop” site, to be retrieved by his Russian intelligence handlers. Hanssen was charged with espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage. These charges could possibly carry with them the death penalty.
Beginning in 1985, while he was assigned to the FBI as a supervisor in the intelligence division of the FBI New York field office, Hanssen had volunteered to provide KGB intelligence officers, assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., with highly classified information. Hanssen provided the KGB and its post-Cold War successor, the Russian SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki), with dozens of classified US government documents, to include “Top Secret” and “Codeword” information, via placement at “dead drop” sites - on twenty different occasions.
He compromised several covert human intelligence sources, resulting in the execution of US penetration agents in the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., when they returned to Moscow, and provided information on extraordinarily sensitive technical operations being conducted by the US Intelligence Community. Hanssen also provided over two dozen computer disks, containing huge amounts of classified information. He turned over information on FBI counterintelligence operational techniques, operational sources and methods, and compromised the FBI’s ongoing espionage investigation of Department of State foreign service officer Felix Bloch. In total, Hanssen turned over more than six thousand pages of some of the US government’s most sensitive information, especially information involved in targeting Russian intelligence. In exchange, Hanssen received diamonds and six thousand dollars in cash.
During the period Hanssen was engaged in espionage against the US, he was assigned to New York and Washington, D.C., where he held high level counterintelligence positions. Hanssen had direct, unrestricted access to massive amounts of classified information on US intelligence programs and operations.
Hanssen was able to cover his activities using his FBI training, experience and expertise as an FBI counterintelligence agent, to prevent detection by the FBI or the CIA. This included withholding his true identity from his Russian handlers and avoiding the use of “tradecraft” that would have been detected by his peers or the Russians themselves. Computer forensic analysis techniques, extensive covert counterintelligence surveillance, authorized searches and operational techniques documented Hanssen had regularly accessed classified FBI records, copied those records and provided them to Russian intelligence.
Because of his assignments to national security positions, Hanssen had been given full access to the most sensitive information regarding the former Soviet Union and Russia. FBI Director Louis Free called Hanssen’s actions “the most serious violations of law and threat to national security.” That was no exaggeration. The damage to US national security and counterintelligence operations was at the highest level, and described by Free as “exceptionally grave.” “Grave” is the highest classification of damage to US national security.
The only positive aspect of the Hanssen case was the revelation that Hanssen was discovered when the FBI was able to obtain Russian documents detailing an American spy, who matched the description of Robert Hanssen, was operating within US intelligence. The uncovering of this information and the eventual arrest of Hanssen was the direct result of the joint FBI, CIA counterintelligence effort working to identify penetrations of the CIA and other agencies of the US Intelligence Community. The FBI conducted the entire investigation with the direct assistance of the CIA. The identification of Hanssen, the ensuing investigation and his eventual arrest were the direct result of the new joint FBI, CIA relationship and the Counter Espionage Group (CEG). The Security Commission’s recommendation and the collocation of FBI agents and CIA officers in the new Counterintelligence Center were working. It remains a model of the success of FBI and CIA cooperation.
The climate in the CEG had changed. The FBI had just uncovered the most destructive and far reaching espionage case in US history. It was one of its own internal agents; a mole in the FBI. FBI agents in CEG were now deeply embarrassed and displayed shock and dismay. It was the largest piece of professional humble pie ever delivered. Those of us who were CIA officers were in total disbelief it could happen again. We knew the agony you feel when a trusted insider betrays his co-workers, his agency and his country. We had been there. We felt sympathy for the embarrassment caused to the FBI, a valuable and honorable organization.
The damage to national security caused by Hanssen made Aldrich Ames look like a Sunday school teacher. To this day, the American public is not aware of the colossal and far-reaching damage to US intelligence caused by Robert Hanson.
Counterintelligence Strategy
Counterintelligence is not to be confused with counterespionage. Counterespionage is narrowly concerned with stopping foreign governments from stealing US secrets. Counterintelligence has several more aspects of its function. Counterintelligence, or CI, is concerned with gaining accurate and extensive knowledge of foreign intelligence service procedures and operations and developing sources and methods to neutralize them.
Counterintelligence as a US mission was instituted by President Ronald Reagan in Executive Order 12333. This order was far reaching in its definition of the CI mission. The purpose of US CI operations was to meet the goals of the 2005 “National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States.” The objective of the strategy was to protect intelligence collection and analysis from foreign intelligence penetration, denial, influence and/or manipulation, ensure the effective execution of US intelligence operations, safeguard the nation’s vital national security secrets, protect emerging technologies and sensitive assets from theft and exploitation by foreign governments, and to identify, analyze, exploit and neutralize the intelligence activities of foreign powers and terrorist organizations that seek to damage the US.
The creation of a national counterintelligence strategy was a necessity, not just a case of political forward thinking. The CIA, FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence and several other US security organizations had been penetrated by Soviet, Chinese, Israeli, North Korean and Cuban intelligence services. Espionage cases had abounded, involving the treasonous activities of internal employees within these US intelligence services.
Counterintelligence operations are designed to collect information regarding foreign intelligence and security services. The data is collected and analyzed; much like the intelligence cycle described in the previous chapter, and is used to conduct operations to neutralize the activities of these entities. The material collected in counterintelligence operations includes information on foreign leaders, members of the intelligence organizations and their operations worldwide, how they communicate their activities and details regarding the targets of their operations.
As discussed previously, defectors have played a significant role in US counterintelligence operations. High ranking intelligence officers who have defected to America from the Soviet Union, China and Cuba have provided US intelligence with significant intelligence information and revealed counterintelligence operations that have been of high value to US intelligence. Much of the information provided from debriefings of these defectors involves counterintelligence information on the structure and function of their intelligence services, enabling the CIA to develop programs to neutralize those activities.
The vetting and interviewing of these defectors has been an extremely sensitive part of US counterintelligence operations. The defector’s information has to be analyzed and corroborated to ensure the defector is who he or she says they are and the person truly has the access they claim. In the past, defectors have deceived their US handlers by providing false information to gain asylum and money, or by providing disinformation designed to direct US intelligence operations away from the legitimate target.
The CIA Counterintelligence Center is the primary member of the US Intelligence Community tasked with collecting and analyzing information on foreign intelligence services. One recent revelation by the CIA is the discovery of the sophistication and active operations of the Iranian intelligence service, spying on Americans and American facilities.
I am convinced much of the operational expertise of the Iranian service has been shared with anti-American terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda. Counterintelligence reporting on Al Qaeda has indicated the organization is quite sophisticated in its intelligence and surveillance activities.
The CIA and the DIA also run double-agent operations against foreign intelligence services that have approached Americans as a target of recruitment. These double agents are tasked with providing seemingly valuable, but false information with the goal of interrupting the foreign services operations and leading their efforts in the wrong direction.
The overall, wide ranging and complex role of counterintelligence in protecting US national security information is critical. A robust counterintelligence effort is the best defense against foreign espionage efforts and aids in the protection of critical US secrets, operations and personnel.
Aldrich Ames, CIA officer convicted of committing espionage.
Harold Nicholson, CIA officer convicted of committing espionage.
Robert Hanssen, FBI agent convicted of committing espionage.