© 2014 Robert David Booth All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies Brown Books Publishing Group
16250 Knoll Trail Drive, Suite 205
Dallas, Texas 75248
www.BrownBooks.com
(972) 381-0009
A New Era in Publishing™
ISBN 978-1-61254-237-9
LCCN 2014949310
Printed in the United States 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For more information or to contact the author, please go to www.LeaksSpiesAndLies.com
To Maria, my mother;
Lori, my wife;
and
Chloe, my daughter.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART 1
A DECIDEDLY CUBAN CONNECTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
PART 2
TAIWANESE FEMME FATALE
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
PART 3
LEAKS AND LOSSES
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
PART 4
INSIDE THE CASTLE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY
SOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Introduction
Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.
—HENRY L. STIMSON
Secretary of State, 1929
Counterintelligence Then and Now
In August 1914, as President Woodrow Wilson publicly pledged to maintain US neutrality, the opening salvos of a world war erupted across Europe. German secret agents had already traveled to America to sabotage industrial targets, foment labor strikes at munitions plants, and promote pacifistic propaganda in the news media. Wholly one-third of the American population was foreign born or of foreign parentage—a ready-made army of fifth columnists, or so the German high command hoped. One audacious scheme called for German agents to operate a biological warfare laboratory secretly in the outskirts of Washington, DC. Its purpose was to produce anthrax delivery systems to infect American horses and mules heading to the battlefields of northern France. Other disinformation campaigns, sabotage plots, and cases of espionage, while less ambitious, were more successful.
Imperial Germany’s secret operatives needed genuine US passports that could be easily altered to cross the Atlantic successfully and operate clandestinely in the United States.
Authentic-looking travel documentation was absolutely essential in escaping detection by the British security services and America’s fledgling counterintelligence agencies. At the time, the United States and its military lacked an organized, cohesive counterintelligence program. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) didn’t exist, and other federal agencies were ill-prepared to deal with the phenomenon of passport fraud tied to espionage. Moreover America had no federal statutes on the books to arrest and convict foreign spies operating in the country. Those would come later in the form of the Espionage Act of 1917.
By 1916, it was clear that the Kaiser’s General Staff Political Section was actively engaged in numerous schemes to target unwary US citizens, both in the United States and Germany, to obtain US passports for its spies. To combat the new threat, Secretary of State Robert Lansing created the Secret Intelligence Bureau in order to investigate and identify individuals who were residing in the United States under false claims of US citizenship.
Joseph “Bill” Nye was appointed the first chief special agent of the Department of State, and his mission was to assist the secretary of state on all intelligence and security matters relating to the department. With a small staff of special agents and secretaries, Nye implemented changes that injected safeguards into the passport issuance program by requiring more extensive proof of US citizenship, including photographs. Secretary Lansing also authorized Agent Nye to wiretap the German ambassador’s telephone line to provide daily transcripts. Two field offices were opened: one in Washington, DC, and the other in New York City, since the Secret Intelligence Bureau agents had to work closely with their US Secret Service and Postal Inspection Service counterparts monitoring the activities of German diplomats and suspected spies.
By the mid-1920s, the Secret Intelligence Bureau, now commonly called “the Force,” was capitalizing on its investigative expertise in dealing with German passport fraud. It collaborated with the newly created FBI to identify and deport Russian NKVD agents who attempted to enter the United States illegally to engage in espionage. The US government was so worried about Bolshevik subversive activities that for many years American communists were denied passports. The US government feared that if American citizens traveled to Russia for revolutionary training and willingly turned over their valid passports to NKVD agents, those same passports would be used by Russian agents to enter the United States under the original owner’s identity. Secret Intelligence Bureau agents also conducted background investigations for applicants seeking employment with the department and were responsible for the protection of official guests of the United States and distinguished visitors attending international conferences on American soil, a responsibility shared with the US Secret Service.
In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson uttered his now famous statement: “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” With that, he disbanded the cryptanalytic branch, the code breaking unit of the State Department. In 1919, at the conclusion of World War I, the League of Nations had been created to prevent future wars through collective security, disarmament, and settling international disputes by arbitration—a gentlemen’s club of good old boys and square shooters, or so it thought. However, the League did not foresee the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, who refused to play by the rules despite the fact they were members in good standing. The League closed its doors in failure in 1933 during the run-up to World War II when there were more than a couple of dubious gentlemen acting in bad faith on the world stage.
Perhaps Secretary Stimson simply could not deign to believe that gentlemen could be so unprincipled. In any event, the work of the department’s cryptanalytic branch was assumed by the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. While never part of the Secret Intelligence Bureau, the cryptanalytic branch’s demise eliminated an important intelligence resource for the department.
Following the end of World War II, the Secret Intelligence Bureau was renamed the Office of Security (SY). A small number of its agents were assigned to manage the security operations of the larger European embassies while their domestic colleagues continued to investigate passport and visa fraud, protect visiting foreign dignitaries, and conduct pre-employment investigations.
Given espionage concerns, the Office of Security created a counterintelligence arm to combat foreign spies, especially those of the NKVD. Department officials, including Alger Hiss, Noel Field, Laurence Duggan, and Michael Straight, were investigated in the mid to late 1940s on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union. From 1960 to 1975, SY expanded its presence through security officers assigned to our embassies and assumed the dignitary protection responsibilities for foreign heads of state visiting the United States, all the while vigorou
sly conducting counterintelligence investigations. In the late eighties and early nineties, three State Department officials were investigated for spying for a foreign power. Steven Lalas was convicted of spying for Greece, and Geneva Jones was convicted of passing classified information to an African journalist. The third, Felix Bloch, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Vienna, escaped prosecution after being warned by the Russian KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti—Committee for State Security)* via a coded telephone conversation to cease his clandestine activities. Bloch’s protector was none other than the notorious FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, who alerted the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) to the intelligence community’s interest in Bloch.
The department’s Office of Security changed its name in 1985 to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The special agents of the bureau were properly part of the Diplomatic Security Service, a subset of professionals in the bureau, but the names were often used interchangeably. The letters DS or Diplomatic Security were commonly used as shorthand for anything or anyone associated with either organization.
DS now has over eighteen hundred special agents and many more civil service employees and contractors who are responsible for the physical, operational, and personal protection of department employees assigned to the department’s 285 diplomatic facilities overseas, including our diplomatic facilities in war-torn Baghdad and Kabul, as well as its domestic offices and operations throughout the US, including passport offices, Foreign Missions offices, and its own twenty-five field offices.
Today the DS Counterintelligence Division (DS/CI) conducts a robust counterintelligence program designed to deter, detect, and neutralize the efforts of foreign intelligence services targeting Department of State personnel, facilities, and diplomatic missions worldwide. It conducts aggressive counterintelligence inquiries and counterespionage investigations with other US government agencies. All counterespionage investigations are conducted in close coordination with the FBI in accordance with its statutory mandate to prosecute instances or allegations of suspected espionage. The division also provides counterintelligence and security awareness briefing sessions for US government personnel traveling overseas, including Cabinet level officials and their staffs on official visits to foreign countries. Most recently, the division has provided support to the US embassy in Baghdad in a highly successful effort to identify attempts to infiltrate the US embassy with workers affiliated with terrorist groups and foreign intelligence agencies.
In addition, the division relies on a cadre of security engineers to mitigate attempts by foreign intelligence services to technically penetrate Department of State office buildings and certain residences. These efforts range from detecting a simple listening device in a wall to countering the most sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices and systems. To this end, audio countermeasures inspections are routinely conducted by the engineers in controlled access areas and other sensitive working spaces within department facilities worldwide.
One DS mission that has not changed over the past ninety or so years is the protection of classified foreign affairs information from unauthorized disclosures by its own employees.
Unlike espionage, leaks to media organizations are fairly common events and are most often used as vehicles for promoting opposing policy views in and outside the department. For whatever motives and rationales, the employees disclosing such information have violated both their oaths of office and nondisclosure agreements. These unauthorized disclosures are rarely treated as criminal offenses but rather as administrative inquiries involving a breach of regulations subject to disciplinary action
Make no mistake, the State Department and its employees working in the US and abroad continue to remain a coveted target for many foreign intelligence services. The end of the Cold War has not changed this dynamic. As long as other countries attempt to secure advantage by discovering and stymieing America’s sensitive foreign relations, there will be an ever-present risk to our national security. While the Information Age with its sophisticated technology has opened up new methods of acquiring secrets, the human spy is still the best source of a nation’s plans and intentions. The human agent provides critical perspective, context, and sense to things.
The twelve Russian “sleeper” spies deported back to Russia in the summer of 2010 serve only to remind Americans of the continuing intelligence threat in the United States. What is not well known is the number of State Department employees who had “casual” contact with those twelve “sleepers.” And there’s no shortage of these characters knocking on the State Department’s door. Regrettably, we’ve opened it too often and let them inside.
Bona Fides with a Little Braggadocio
On October 7, 1974, as I took my oath of allegiance and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, I never expected to investigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information. As a newly minted, twenty-one- year-old special agent with the State Department’s Office of Security, I envisioned protecting foreign dignitaries, conducting criminal investigations, and serving as a security officer at one of many diplomatic posts overseas.
After an initial ten-month orientation tour in the Washington Field Office, I spent the next six years as a security officer in our diplomatic facilities in Beijing, Geneva, and Tokyo. The assignments offered unique experiences. For example, while serving in the People’s Republic of China, I was the first US government official to debrief one of the twenty-two US servicemen who defected to North Korea after our first post-WWII conflict in Asia. The former serviceman had settled in China, worked in a small factory, and married a Chinese citizen. He’d come to the US mission to obtain a passport to visit his mother in the United States.
In Switzerland, I oversaw the investigation into the theft of the US Marine Corps Ball funds stolen from a locked safe inside the US Mission’s Marines’ very own office. In Japan, I assisted my CIA colleagues in clandestinely ex-filtrating an SVR clandestine intelligence officer operating under Russian journalist cover back to the United States before the Soviets realized he had defected. All of these experiences, as well as routine security duties, helped shape my professional life.
After I returned to the United States in 1980, I was assigned to the protective security details for secretaries of state Edmund Muskie and Alexander Haig and began a non-eventful eighteen-month tour as a glorified bodyguard for two totally different and interesting men. I wouldn’t suggest the assignment was boring, but I could now count the number of angels dancing on the head of that pin with my eyes closed, which they were much of the time. But my routine professional life was about to change.
From 1982 to 1986, I was assigned to the Special Investigations Branch (SIB), where I participated in numerous investigations involving leaks of information, losses of classified materials, and suspected instances of espionage. By 1985, I discovered the overlooked or otherwise hidden fifty-year history of how classified State Department documents had been disclosed to the media, purportedly lost inside foreign embassies, planes, trains, and hotels or compromised by foreign intelligence services. In some instances, secrets were compromised by design; in others, by accident. But all cases shared a common denominator: the culpable State Department officer always attempted to conceal his or her guilt with a web of lies. The incidences of convenient amnesia and prevarication in the department were especially high when employees were confronted with their sins. The long-forgotten names of those State Department employees implicated in these cases were detailed in newspaper clippings buried in the official investigative files. The files also revealed that State Department secrets were being lost and betrayed with little, if any, negative repercussions for the offending officers.
During my tour in SIB, I witnessed firsthand how aggressively the US media pursued department staffers and seniors alike in search of a sexy foreign affairs story, an exclusive sprinkled with heretofore secret i
nformation. I saw how articles published by the Wall Street Journal had a negative impact on our foreign relations with a particular South American country. I led an investigation into why an article from the May 1983 edition of the Atlantic contained sentences lifted verbatim from secret State Department cables, which earned one of our embassies a verbal rebuke from a country’s ministry of foreign affairs. I attempted to determine which government official had slipped columnist Robert Novak a sensitive department document, which he used as a basis for his 1984 “Evans and Novak” article, affectionately dubbed the “Dear Misha” letter. (Novak later gained notoriety by using sensitive information leaked by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for his July 2003 article outing Valerie Plame as a CIA employee.)
Over the course of my tour as a regional security officer in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from 1986 to 1987, I investigated the murder of Paul Alexander, an American doctor working in Haiti, the stabbing of a US embassy political officer’s spouse inside the consular section’s parking lot, the rape of a young Peace Corps volunteer near Jacmel, the wounding of a Peace Corps volunteer in the leg, the stabbing death of one of our residential guards, and three specific death threats made against embassy officers by local Haitians. These incidents were in addition to a heavy workload of passport and visa fraud violations, personnel security investigations, and the ever-present threat of civil disorder with consequences for the safety of the embassy and its staff. I even supervised a protective detail of three DS agents for Ambassador McKinley for 120 days after he received a death threat from the “Haitian Liberation Organization”—a fun and exciting assignment!
As a result of my tour in Haiti, background in overseas training, and fluency in French, I returned to Port-au-Prince in February 1997 to help supervise US security agents contracted to protect Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and train Haitian security officers in assuming their future role as protectors of their nation’s leaders—a department ghost of Christmas future in Baghdad, Monrovia, Kabul, and elsewhere.
State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies Page 1
