Nov 9

Nov 9 It’s open season on America’s Secrets: The case of the CIA's vanishing spies By James Bruno

“One week day a decade ago, a contingent of Chinese security officers entered a government office, pulled one of its employees out into the building’s courtyard and summarily shot him dead, reported the New York Times in 2017, citing three former U.S. officials. The chilling execution was meant as a warning to others who might think of betraying their country.”

So begins my upcoming article on the state of U.S. counterintelligence in the Washington Monthly this week. CIA’s loss of at least 30 Chinese informants a few years ago, plus brazen cyberattacks from Russia, China, North Korea and other malefactors, and a seemingly non-stop parade of Americans with top secret clearances and an eagerness to sell secrets to our enemies led me to write an article on the state of the government’s counterintelligence operations and the ability, or lack thereof, of the United States to protect its official secrets and espionage operations.

A former senior counterintelligence official told me that the Chinese roll-up of the CIA’s spy networks could be attributed to an insider mole or, more likely, penetration of CIA secure communications.

An indication of just how serious America’s foreign intelligence vulnerabilities are, as reported in the New York Times, can be found in a top secret cable last month from CIA headquarters to all stations citing major losses of overseas informants and calling on case officers to place more emphasis on security and vetting when recruiting informants.

In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not myself spilling official secrets. As an ex-fed, I must submit my drafts to the State Department for security review prior to publishing. So, Woodward & Bernstein I am not. But I am able to cover the broad parameters of policies and programs with little interference. My purpose is always to call attention to problem areas needing improvement, thereby calling policymakers’ attention to act.

Some of my best friends are, or were, spies. My hat is always off to them for the exceedingly tough career they chose involving living lies, working anonymously in the shadows, purloining secrets by getting foreigners to betray their country, and risking their safety and lives in doing so. And I love trading war stories with them.

One of my own involves my Russian KGB doppelganger in a communist country where I was posted early on in my career. Same age, same build, similar facial features, even the same style mustache. People confused us all the time, much to my consternation. A likeable and socially engaging young man, Yevgeniy’s job was to spot, assess, cultivate and recruit what spies call agents, or assets—foreigners who do their bidding. Yevgeniy made a run at me, but gave up after it was clear to him that I had his number. He was forced to go into defensive mode after I alerted many naïve and unsuspecting expats what he was actually up to, doing my best to make my Russian doppelganger a local pariah. That testy chapter didn’t close upon completion of our respective assignments. Our paths crossed again twenty years later in another city.

So, dispel from your mind images of real-life James Bonds.

“What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives,” LeCarré’s Alec Leamus said in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

In my quarter-century-long government career, few of the spies I knew were charismatic swashbucklers. The vast majority were family men and women, with a liberal sprinkling of alcoholics, sex-addicted, and mildly nutso characters. Most worried about making their mortgage payments and getting their kids into the gifted program just like the rest of us. And most complained about the straitjacket of red tape that ties up the professional lives of all government functionaries.

Serious spies work hard and laboriously at their tradecraft. Ex-CIA officer Valerie Plame is an example of a serious, sober professional who built a knowledge base on nuclear proliferation brick by brick while serving for years under deep “nonofficial cover” until the vice president and his evil minions outed her. Russian SVR “illegal” Anna Chapman, on the other hand, comported herself like a Gen-X party girl with tradecraft more attuned to a three-ring circus than to the gray world of spies.

A recently retired senior CIA case officer told me, “Espionage is a very unforgiving business.” Recruiting and protecting informants is high risk and failures are common, a cost of doing business in the spy vs spy realm. “There’s no substitute for agent meetings. We must look an agent directly in the eye. With counterintel technology, it’s gotten harder. We must tighten up and get better,” he added. This includes retraining those many officers with recent service in war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq and making a “psychological shift” from the way things were done in conflict zones to how they are carried out in stable countries.

And counterintelligence, the job of foiling adversary spies and protecting secrets, is equally as difficult, but also considered less sexy and career-enhancing in the spy agencies.

The Russians and the Chinese have ramped up their spying operations against the U.S. in recent years. Microsoft reports some 23,000 hacks from Russia alone in recent months – in contrast with 20,500 attacks from “all nation-state actors” over the previous three years. Meanwhile, Beijing has launched a veritable human wave of spying ops against us. Over the past 22 months, there have been 22 publicly reported cases of Chinese espionage. In their OPM hack, they even got hold of my personnel data.

Another retired senior U.S. intelligence officer, and expert on Chinese espionage, Nicholas Eftimiades, holds a less than sanguine view regarding America’s domestic counterintelligence capabilities. “Considering the volume that’s going on, how many times has the FBI gotten them? Precious few. There’s no way you can staff up to be able to contend with this type of onslaught,” he told The New York Times.

And the CIA’s loss of its informant network in China remains unresolved. One hopes that fear of compromise of security doesn’t turn into paranoia, as it did under the outsized power of James Jesus Angleton, counterintelligence chief for two decades from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, who paralyzed the Agency with witch hunts to ferret out mostly imaginary moles.

The bottom line is that we have a serious counterintelligence problem, one that must be addressed smartly and with the requisite resources. The public perception now is that it’s open season on America’s secrets. Our adversaries must be shown that we can fully protect our national security and that there is a price to pay for trying to crack it.

As for Yevgeniy, he turned up two decades later as SVR rezident (station chief) in another capital where I also served. Thirty pounds heavier and not treated kindly by age, he was no longer my doppelganger. When I approached him at a reception to reintroduce myself, his face betrayed recognition, but he feigned no recollection of our testy encounters at a posting long ago. I then proceeded methodically to discreetly brief allied diplomats on who Yevgeniy really was and what he was up to—just like old times.

James Bruno (@JamesLBruno) served as a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for 23 years and is currently a member of the Diplomatic Readiness Reserve. An author and journalist, Bruno has been featured on CNN, NBC’s Today Show, Fox News, Sirius XM Radio, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post, and other national and international media.