The Double Agent
The double agent is another standard method of infiltration, whereby an individual pretends to spy for the intelligence service of his or her own country, but in fact is working all along for the adversary. This approach is costly and time-consuming (some genuine documents need to be given to the agent for passage to the adversary, as a means for supporting his or her bona fides), as well as risky because the loyalty of the agent is often ambiguous and double-crosses are commonplace. Is the double agent really working for the United States or still for the other side? Or perhaps playing both sides for twice the profit? Further complicating matters in the double-agent business is the fact that they can become triple agents. Welcome to Angleton's dizzying maze of mirrors.
The Defector
Almost as good as the agent-in-place, and less troublesome to manage than the double agent, is the defector who can bring with him or her a deep knowledge of an enemy's intelligence service or the internal operations of a terrorist group. An agent-in-place is ultimately preferable to the defector, though, because of the former's continuing access to useful information from inside the enemy's camp about the latest plans and capabilities; however, quite often, the agent-in-place is reluctant to stay in place too long, for fear of being caught. This is especially true in nations like Iran and North Korea. or the ISIS terrorist group, where security in each case is sophisticated and the execution of traitors is swift and often brutal. At some point, most agents-in-place plead for exfiltration, as their nightmares increase about the cold barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of their skull by a local counterintelligence officer or, in the case of ISIS, the awaiting vat of acid.
At times in the United States, the avowed credentials of a defector have remained in dispute for years – sometimes forever – and from time to time this has poisoned relations between the CIA and the FBI. During the 1960s, for example, a disagreement over whether a Soviet defector was genuine or a “false defector” led to the exchange of sharp rebukes between counterintelligence officers in the two agencies. Even DCI Richard Helms and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to talk to one another for many months as a result of the bad feelings that arose between their organizations. Four decades later, DCI George Tenet referred to poor CIA–FBI relations as the most serious weakness in the U.S. counterintelligence shield in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.59
Many of the best assets acquired by the United States, such as Oleg Penkovsky, have been agents-in-place; others have been genuine defectors who initially contacted a U.S. embassy overseas as “walk-ins.” They either literally walk into the embassy and volunteer as spies, or perhaps toss classified documents over an embassy wall to make contact (as did Penkovsky, though as an agent-in-place, not a defector). Then, if the CIA accepts their candidacies as spies for America (recall how Penkovsky was rejected at first by the Americans, but not the British), they may be relocated to the United States for debriefing and a new identity, if a defector, or remain inside their original espionage organizations as agents-in-place (the Penkovsky model – which he eventually regretted, no doubt, when he was discovered and executed by the KGB).
Soon after the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA granted asylum to a Soviet defector by the name of Yuri Nosenko, who offered a central message in his debriefings once inside the United States: the Soviets had nothing to do with the assassination of the President – even though the accused murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had temporarily defected to the USSR before the assassination. After an extensive questioning of Nosenko, the FBI concluded that his story was true and signed off on his bona fides; however, James Angleton, the Agency's CI Chief, refused to side with the Bureau's judgment after extensive interrogation sessions with Nosenko at the Agency's training facility in rural Virginia (conducted by the Agency's Office of Security, not Angleton – although he was kept closely informed). The Office of Security held Nosenko for 1,277 days at the facility, in Spartan conditions. Eventually, most of the Intelligence Community – including most of his Agency interrogators – accepted Nosenko as a dependable ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. He resettled in the Washington, DC area and served as a CIA consultant. Angleton never believed in him, though, or in his core message.
Deception and Disinformation
Another CE method is to give the enemy a false impression about something, causing him to take actions contrary to his own best interests. As Jervis observes: “Counterintelligence and deception are closely intertwined. Most obviously, the state must fear that the other side is using its agents to convey a false picture. The other side of this coin is that the state can use the other's intelligence service in order to propagate its own deceptions.”60 More mirrors with multiple images and reflections.
Fooling the Germans into believing that D-Day landings would occur in the Pas de Calais, rather than at Normandy, is a classic example of a successful joint American and British deception operation during a turning point of the Second World War. Jervis emphasizes the potential importance of this deception: “Had [Hitler] known that the landings were coming at Normandy or had he released his reserve divisions as soon as the Allied troops hit the beaches, he could have pushed the invaders into the sea.”61
Surreptitious Surveillance and Provocations
Counterespionage practitioners are expert as well in tracking suspected moles through the use of audio, mail, physical, and “optical” (photographic, imint, or geoint) surveillance techniques. In 1975, a local terrorist group known as September 17th gunned down a CIA chief of station in Athens, Greece. When his body was flown home for burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Eastern European “diplomats” (actually counterintelligence officers) slipped into the throng of media attending the service and began taking pictures of CIA officers in attendance, as well as recording their automobile license plate numbers.
Since the focus of offensive counterintelligence is the disruption of the enemy service, provocation operations can be an important element of counterespionage. Here the objective is to harass an adversary, perhaps by suppressing or jamming broadcasts emitting from enemy radio and television stations, or by interrupting social media communications. Other methods involve the public disclosure of the names of an enemy's agents or by sending a trouble-making false defector – a “dangle” – into an adversary's midst, someone who is in reality an agent provocateur on a short-term mission to sow confusion and dissension, then escape. Some counterintelligence specialists thought this was exactly the mission of SVR Colonel Vitaliy Sergeyevich Yurchenko, who “defected” to the United States in 1995, only three months later to spring from his table while at a Georgetown restaurant with his CIA handler and race up Wisconsin Avenue to the Russian embassy, where he re-defected (as do about half of all defectors). Postmortems on this case remain torn over whether Yurchenko was a dangle all along, or if he became fearful that Russian intelligence officers would harm his family in Russia and thus decided to return home and cooperate with authorities. The fact that Yurchenko was never killed, or even imprisoned, by the Russians lends credence to the hypothesis that he was a false defector engaged in finding out what he could about Agency CI methods (although while in the hands of the CIA he did give up some useful information about Russian spy operations against the United States).
Another case involving a defector, this time from Iran, which was reported in the New York Times in August 2016, demonstrates what often happens to defectors who change their minds and return to their homes. In 2009, the CIA recruited a young Iranian nuclear scientist by the name of Shahram Amiri to spy as an agent-in-place on his country's burgeoning WMD program and especially its efforts to build an atomic bomb. When Agency officials grew concerned that Iranian intelligence was on to Amiri, they relocated him in Tucson (and gave him a $5 million bonus). But from the start, Amiri found himself missing his son, who had remained in Iran with the scientist's estranged wife, to such an extent that he took the risky step of returning to Tehran (despite CIA warnings
to him of the danger). Once back in Tehran in 2010, he told Iranian counterintelligence officials that he had refused to cooperate in any meaningful way with the Americans and wanted to resume life with his son in Iran. A different outcome awaited Amiri than that enjoyed by Yurchenko. In 2015, a spokesman for Iran's Justice Ministry announced in Tehran that, after spending five years in prison for espionage, Amiri had been hanged “for revealing the country's top secrets to the enemy.”
Renditions and Interrogations
Perhaps the most controversial forms of counterintelligence tradecraft since the Huston Plan have been the use of extraordinary renditions and harsh interrogations by the CIA. During the Administration of President George W. Bush, it came to light that the Agency had rendered (kidnaped) suspected terrorists in Europe and flown them in CIA aircraft to places – Cairo was a favorite or the Agency's own secret prisons (“black sites”) in Central Europe and elsewhere – where they could be interrogated, and sometimes tortured, in an attempt to learn more about the activities of Al Qaeda. These renditions were ordered by the Bush Administration and loose guidelines from the Justice Department led to excesses.62 By allowing detainees to be taken to another country that had no concerns about the niceties of U.S. constitutional protections, government officials somehow deluded themselves into believing that the United States had thereby evaded responsibility for any unethical activities that might occur during the interrogations. After all, it was not the Agency itself applying electrodes to the bodies of the victims. Sometimes mistaken identities led to the rendering of the wrong individuals; other times, victims told their tormentors whatever they thought they wanted to hear – anything to stop the pain – then they later recanted.
In 2003, for instance, the CIA captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (given the acronym KSM for short by Agency handlers) in Pakistan. He was the suspected, and later confirmed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. When KSM was captured, the media speculated that he might be mistreated, even tortured, by his Agency interrogators. Officials at Langley responded that no brutal force would be used, not least because psychological pressure was considered more effective than physical pain. He might be subjected to sleep deprivation, perhaps; but, if he cooperated, he would be given rewards: good food, cigarettes, books, rest, a television set. Agency officials conceded, though, that the captured terrorist might be forced to sit or stand in stressful positions for hours at a time – but there would be no stretching on the rack. Only subsequently did it become known that KSM was waterboarded more than 130 times, a form of torture that simulates drowning.
Another top Al Qaeda operative, also captured in Pakistan, Abu Zubaydah, was on painkillers because of a pistol shot to the groin. Until he began to cooperate, interrogators held back his full medication. The report on torture issued by SSCI's Democratic staff in 2015 indicates, further, that Al Qaeda members were chained, naked and hooded, to the ceiling of interrogation rooms; routinely kicked to keep them awake; and shackled so tightly that blood flow to their limbs was halted. Most alarming are charges that two prisoners identified as Al Qaeda members were killed during interrogations at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, beaten to death with blunt instruments.63 It remains a matter of dispute as to whether such methods produced valuable intelligence gains (most experts say no), but one conclusion is widely accepted: in the court of world opinion, the use of torture has harmed American's reputation for fair play and ethical behavior – a significant attribute in the global contest for the allegiance of other nations and their citizens.64
The line between acceptable and abject CI interrogation techniques was poorly defined during the second Bush Administration and, in light of the barbaric 9/11 attacks, this line was likely smudged further by interrogators angry about 9/11 and anxious about the possibility of sudden new strikes against the United States. Intelligence had to be extracted quickly from the subject, according to this “ticking time-bomb” scenario. In the wake of the terrorist attacks against the United States, Cofer Black, the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), declared: “There was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off.”65 Yet when the gloves come off, all too often the Constitution is thrown out of the window.
Secrecy and the state
Among the responsibilities of counterintelligence officers is the protection of state secrets from leaks, either intentional or inadvertent. Early in the history of the Republic, none other than General George Washington commented on the importance of secrecy during the Revolutionary War:
The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged. All that remains for me to add is that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible, for upon Secrecy Success depends in most enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well-planned or promising of favorable issue.66
Recently, in an unprecedented public speech, MI6 chief John Sawers in London commented on the importance of secrecy in the democracies: “Secrecy is not a dirty word. Secrecy is not there as a cover-up. Without secrecy there would be no intelligence services, or indeed other national assets like our special forces. Our nation would be more exposed as a result.”67 An ongoing challenge for the open societies is to protect good secrets from the enemies of democracy without hiding bad secrets – improper government activities – from the public.
Good secrets and bad
The democracies have secrets that are legitimate, which must be kept even from their own citizens for fear that adversaries would also be informed. These secrets include such matters as the sailing dates and destinations of troop ships during time of war; the sophisticated technology of advanced weapons systems, such as the radar-elusive Stealth bombers; the sensitive technology associated with techint, whether sigint listening methodology or the specifics of geoint resolution; the names of humint assets overseas; and the bargaining positions of U.S. negotiators at trade or arms control talks.
Yet the argument for secrecy frequently rests on less firm grounds. Officials in the executive branch sometimes prefer to conduct their activities in secret simply to avoid the necessity for defending their policies before lawmakers, judges, the media, and the American people. National Security Adviser Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter testified during the Iran–contra inquiry that he avoided keeping Congress informed about covert actions in Iran and Nicaragua because he “did not want any outside interference.” In response, the co-chairman of the investigative committee, Lee H. Hamilton (D, Indiana), said: “You compartmentalized not only the President's senior advisers [neither Secretary of State George P. Shultz nor Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger knew of “The Enterprise”], but, in effect, you locked the President out of the process.”68
Lawmakers and the people they represent have become wary of secrecy claims, because of the many instances when they have been misled by officials: President Johnson's often contradictory reports on the progress of war in Indochina; President Nixon's lies about the Watergate break-in; the revelations of intelligence intrigues abroad, and even at home, disclosed by the Rockefeller, Pike, and Church panels in 1975–76; more lies about the Iran–contra affair in 1986–87; and, recently, revelations about secret CIA prisons abroad, the use of torture and rendition, and the second Bush Administration's bypassing of the warrant requirement for national security wiretaps (revealed by Snowden – a subject taken up in the next chapter). Over the years, open debate – the very anchor of democracy – has often been abandoned. As the thoughtful television commentator and author Bill Moyers observed during the Cold War, the abandonment of traditional American values,
out of fear, to imitate the foe [communism] in order to defeat him, is to shred the distinction that makes us different. In the end, not only our values but our methods separate us from the enemies of freedom in the world. The decisions we make are inherent in the methods that produce them. An open society cannot survive a secret government.69
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sp; Regardless of the lessons drawn from recent scandals and the strong democratic arguments in favor of openness (with the exceptions mentioned above), secrecy continues to hold an almost irresistible temptation for officials in the executive branch. An example is the frequent evocation of the “executive privilege doctrine” by a series of White Houses.
Executive privilege
In the eyes of executive branch officials, a central attraction of America's secret agencies is the opportunity they afford to chart a foreign policy course with little or no public debate. In its covert shipment of arms to Iran during 1985–6, for example, the Reagan Administration carried the goal of exclusion to an extreme, not only refusing to inform the Congress but keeping the operation strictly within the limited confines of a few NSC staffers, some field operatives, and a narrow slice of the CIA – beyond the purview of even the President and the NSC's other principal members.
Often this goal of exclusion is achieved through the proclamation of executive privilege – an assertion by the President of constitutional authority to withhold information from the legislative and judicial branches of government. Appearing before the Ervin Committee, established by the Senate in 1973 to investigate the Watergate scandal and chaired by Sam Ervin, Jr. (D, North Carolina), President Nixon's Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, claimed that “the constitutional authority of the President in his discretion” allowed the White House to withhold information in the President's possession “or in the possession of the executive branch” if the President concluded that disclosure “would impair the proper exercise of his constitutional functions.” This implied that Congress could be prohibited from speaking to any of the millions of employees in the executive branch.
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