National Security Intelligence

by Loch K. Johnson

  For Ames, the motivation for treason had been chiefly financial; an earlier divorce settlement had drained his bank account. Moreover, the challenge of evading detection became something of a fascinating game for him. The money wasn't bad: the Soviets and, after the Cold War, the Russians paid him more than $4.6 million for his handiwork. Redmond, the CI investigator, provided the Aspin–Brown commissioners with details about the painstaking detective work that finally exposed the Soviet mole (“walking back the cat,” in counterintelligence terminology). It was an example of the CIA and the FBI effectively working together, which is not always the case. The damage assessment of Ames's spying revealed substantial setbacks for the United States. His sale of secrets to the KGB and its successor, the SVR, had led to the murder of at least ten Agency assets operating inside the government in Moscow. Further, the SVR's counterintelligence unit succeeded in rolling up more than 200 Agency intelligence operations against the Kremlin, based in part on Ames's tipoffs.

  No one in Washington knew at the time that while the Aspin–Brown Commission was investigating the Ames case, his foul work was being complemented by another major Soviet asset inside the U.S. government: FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who had been working off and on for the KGB and the SVR throughout the previous two decades. Not until 2001 was the Bureau able to track down this Russian mole – thanks to a CIA agent inside the SVR who helped tag Hanssen and Ames (neither of whom knew about this particular Agency asset in Moscow). With a job high up in the FBI's Soviet counterintelligence division, Hanssen – like Ames – was well placed to inform the Kremlin about U.S. espionage activities against the Soviet Union and, subsequently, Russia. He reinforced many of the secrets that Ames had provided to his spymasters in Moscow; together, Hanssen and Ames managed to finger almost all of the CIA and FBI assets working against the Soviet and Russian targets. In addition, Hanssen told the SVR precisely where the Bureau had planted listening devices within the new Russian embassy (on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown) as it was being constructed; and he revealed to his handlers top secret information about exactly how American officials planned to continue emergency governance if a nuclear war broke out with Russia, as well as key information about U.S. underwater sigint capabilities for tracking enemy submarines.19

  In Hanssen's case, the motivation for treason was less financial than had been the case with Ames, although Hanssen did request some payment in gems that were valued at $1.4 million (about a fourth of the payoff to Ames). Hanssen lavished these profits on a friend, an attractive stripper in DC, whom he had met at a bar. Professing to be a deeply religious Catholic, he spent little of these ill-gotten gains on himself and seemed primarily interested in a game of counterintelligence cat-and-mouse (could he evade his FBI and CIA counterintelligence colleagues?), as well as attempting to “save” his new-found barroom friend from her wayward life.

  Sloppy tradecraft on both their parts, coupled with clues from the CIA's mole in Moscow, eventually gave Ames and Hanssen away, and now they are serving life sentences in U.S. federal penitentiaries.

  The 9/11 attacks

  The greatest counterintelligence failure in American history, though, came within the domain of counterterrorism – namely, the inability to stop Al Qaeda terrorists from striking the U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001. Certainly opportunities presented themselves for blocking the attacks. As early as 1995, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) warned the White House and other government officials that “aerial terrorism” could strike inside the United States, with terrorists hijacking commercial aircraft and flying them into skyscrapers20 – precisely what happened that heart-wrenching September morning. Recall from Chapter 2, though, that missing in this warning were any specifics about when and where such an event might occur – that is, actionable intelligence. Moreover, the warning about this danger was inserted into a list of many other threats, including chemical or biological attacks against urban areas by terrorists piloting crop-duster airplanes with anthrax or disease agents in their spray tanks; the contamination of U.S. water supplies with toxins; and the bombing of America's nuclear reactors.

  The litany of dangers seemed to have the effect of paralyzing officials, preventing them from doing anything about any of the unsettling possibilities – although one would have thought the Clinton Administration would at least have shared this warning with the Department of Transportation (responsible for airport security) and the American Pilots Association. Another obstacle to action was no doubt the costs involved for defending against the eventuality of aerial terrorism, such as strengthening airport security, sealing cockpit doors, and hiring sky marshals – although each of these measures summed to a minuscule expense compared to dealing with the loss of life and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Wishful thinking that aerial terrorism would never happen inside the United States trumped the political risks of advocating the spending of finite resources on events that might never take place. So did the press of daily events and the numbing effect that accompanied the thought of a wide range of other possible attacks – all expensive to deter.

  The nation's experience with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 points to a comparable scenario. If the political leaders and citizens of New Orleans had been willing to pay the billions of dollars necessary to strengthen the surrounding levees to withstand a Level 5 hurricane, the people of that great city would have been spared the catastrophic flooding that occurred, along with the immense costs and tragic deaths that came with the crisis. Both the 9/11 attacks and the Katrina event point to a vexing public policy challenge: what should political leaders do when it comes to high-cost, low-probability contingencies?

  With respect to the 9/11 attacks, better surveillance in California against two of the nineteen terrorists who hijacked the airplanes might have unraveled the plot as well. Instead, both the CIA and the FBI fumbled this assignment and worked together with all the good will and camaraderie of Kilkenny cats. The Bureau's headquarters personnel failed, as well, to respond to alerts from their own agents that suspicious flight-training activity was taking place in Phoenix, Arizona, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the context of the aerial terrorism report on 1995, these agent field reports should have set off multiple alarms at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in downtown Washington – especially the case of the suspicious figure in Minneapolis, Zacarias Moussaoui, who had known connections to terrorists abroad.21 Further, on the Hill, lawmakers on SSCI and HPSCI sat on their hands from 1995 to 2001, holding few hearings on terrorism, counterintelligence, or CIA–FBI surveillance cooperation.

  Then, when, in January 2001, the Clinton Administration's chief of counterterrorism, Richard A. Clarke, warned the new National Security Adviser of the Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, that the NSC should act immediately to guard against an Al Qaeda attack aimed at the United States, it took Rice until September 4, 2001, to convene the first Council meeting of principals on this topic.22 The counterintelligence errors seemed to metastasize like a terrible cancer in the decade preceding the attacks. Above all, the U.S. intelligence agencies lacked a mole inside the Al Qaeda organization, or even much historical understanding among its analysts of this terrorist organization.

  A parade of traitors

  While these cases are the most well known of the major counterintelligence and counterterrorism setbacks for the United States in recent years, they are hardly the only ones. Even during World War II, the United States was dealing with Soviet moles in the Manhattan Project. As Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev report, a British scientist by the name of Klaus Fuchs, affiliated with the Manhattan Project, worked secretly for the Soviets and managed to steal enough secrets about the construction of nuclear weaponry to save the Kremlin years of delay and millions of rubles in acquiring the atomic bomb – which it managed to do much more quickly than anticipated by the CIA.23 The Soviets had other atomic spies, including David Greenglass, Russell McNutt, and Ethel Rosenberg – all part of the Julius Rosenberg spy ring. In the collection
discipline of signals intelligence, the Soviets also recruited William Weisband, a sigint officer who informed the Soviets about America's ability to eavesdrop on their military communications (the Venona program). According to Haynes and his co-authors, the KGB was successful in suborning the influential left-leaning journalist I.F. Stone, too; and, according to most experts (although not all), Soviet military intelligence – the GRU – most likely recruited the senior State Department official Alger Hiss as a well-placed agent.

  From the end of World War II through the 1950s, Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev calculate that the Soviets were able to entice some 500 Americans to spy on their behalf – chiefly private-sector engineers, not government officials. Many of these “spies” caused little damage to U.S. security and probably fooled their Kremlin handlers into thinking they were more valuable than they really were (a chronic problem for those in the business of recruiting agents for counterintelligence or intelligence collection). Clearly, though, a few individuals – like Fuchs and Weisband – were significant Soviet penetrations.

  In another example of successful spying by the Soviet Union against the United States later in the Cold War, the Walker family pedaled U.S. Navy communications intelligence to Moscow during the 1960s. Among the items sold by the Walkers to the KGB was top-secret information about the U.S. Intelligence Community's underwater listening grid in the Atlantic Ocean that was able to track the movement of Soviet submarines. The Walkers also provided their handlers in Moscow with data on the firing codes for U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), which in time of war would have given the Kremlin an opportunity to neutralize this important sea leg of America's nuclear deterrence. Had war erupted between the superpowers, the espionage carried out by the Walker family would have had much greater consequences than even the documents turned over to Moscow by Ames and Hanssen. In 1985, Barbara Walker, divorced and vengeful after being denied alimony payments, finally blew the whistle to the FBI on her former husband John, the leader of the spy ring.

  The types of people who turn against their own country, and their motives, have varied over the years.24 Some of the more prominent additional examples of betrayal by American intelligence officers and outside contractors include the following:

  Jack E. Dunlap worked at the NSA in the 1960s and spied for the Soviet Union, turning over to Moscow reams of useful sigint data.25

  Clyde Conrad, a U.S. Army non-commissioned officer, gave the KGB (via Czech and Hungarian “cut-out” – or intermediary – agents) information from 1975 to 1985 about Army operational plans and communications procedures, if war were to break out between the United States and the Soviet Union on the battlefields of Western Europe.26

  William Kampiles, a first-year CIA officer, sold the Soviets a manual on U.S. surveillance satellites for a pittance in 1977, hoping evidently – with wild reasoning (or simply a dumb excuse) – that the Agency would then use him as a double agent once he had developed his Soviet contacts.27

  William Bell, who worked for a defense contractor, tried to sell data on sensitive technologies to a Polish intelligence officer in 1981 and, instead, found himself in FBI handcuffs.

  Edward Lee Howard of the CIA signed up with the KGB in 1983 (a year before Ames) to sell secrets about the Agency's Moscow operations, then escaped to the Soviet Union when the FBI attempted to nab him.28

  Jonathan Jay Pollard and his wife, uncovered in 1985, gave U.S. Navy intelligence data to the Israeli government, because of their attraction to Zionism (although they didn't turn down the $30,000 yearly stipend they were provided by Israel for their ongoing kindnesses).29

  Ron Pelton, an NSA intelligence officer, gave highly classified sigint documents to the Soviets from 1980 to 1985, when he was finally arrested.

  Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, a scientist with a defense contractor, offered the Soviets information on advanced U.S. radar capabilities and was grabbed immediately by the FBI in 1985.

  James Hall III, an Army communications specialist, sold secrets to the KGB about U.S. sigint operations in Eastern Europe, until apprehended by counterintelligence investigators in 1988.

  A guard at the American embassy in Moscow, Corporal Clayton J. Lonetree (the first and only Marine ever convicted of espionage), was caught in a sexual entrapment – a “honey trap,” in Soviet lingo – arranged by the KGB, which provided him and a few of his fellow guards access to beautiful Russian women (“swallows”) in exchange for secret documents from the embassy's vaults, a relationship the guilt-ridden Lonetree finally confessed to in 1986.

  Harold J. Nicolson, the highest ranking CIA officer ever to be charged with treason, was busy spying for the Russians at the same time as Ames, Howard, and Hanssen, until he was caught in 1996 – thanks in part to the new, post-Ames procedures that required intelligence officers to disclose information to their supervisors at Langley about their personal finances.30

  Earl Pitts, an FBI agent spying for the Russians, was detected in 1997.

  Robert C. Kim pled guilty to spying on behalf of South Korea in 1997.31

  Brian P. Regan, an Air Force master sergeant assigned as an analyst to the NRO, attempted to sell surveillance satellite data to the Iraqis, Libyans, and Chinese, but was discovered and sentenced to life in prison in 2003.

  A spate of American citizens of Chinese birth have either spied or offered to spy for China, including Larry Wu-tai Chin, a “sleeper agent” at the CIA – a mole-in-waiting, biding his time before he began to steal secrets for China (and who, like Ames, passed his polygraph tests) – caught in 1985; and Dongfan (Greg) Chung and Chi Mak, both California engineers working for defense contractors. Chung was arrested in 1979, and Mak in 2005.

  Several of these traitors, along with a number of other minor miscreants, were discovered during the 1980s, and that is why this period is often referred to as “The Decade of the Spy.” A high point in the number of captured moles in the United States during that decade was 1985, remembered by experts as “The Year of the Spy.”

  This rogues gallery sums to a depressing list of counterintelligence setbacks, leading a former CIA counterintelligence officer to concede that “the overall record of United States counterintelligence at catching spies is not good.”32 America, however, has hardly been alone in CI setbacks. Though of small comfort, Great Britain, France, and Germany suffered Soviet penetrations at even higher levels of government than occurred during the Cold War in Washington. Of greater succor perhaps is the fact that the West had its share of penetration successes against the Soviet empire.33 Moreover, it should be underscored that these American traitors account for only a tiny fraction from among the millions of federal employees who have held sensitive positions in government over the years and have honored the public trust placed in them.

  The motivations for treason

  A central counterintelligence question is: why do citizens betray their country? Journalist Scott Shane has noted that the mnemonic MICE – for money, ideology, compromise (that is, being blackmailed after one is caught in a compromising circumstance), and ego (an “I can beat the system” mentality, exhibited by Ames and Hanssen, among others) – sums up the standard answers from experts. He suggests that this rule of thumb should be updated with a new mnemonic: MINCES, adding to the mix that a deep-seated sense among some immigrants of a continuing devotion to their place of birth (“N” for nationalism) can lead them to spy for the “old country,” plus “S” for the lure of sex.34 For political scientists Stan Taylor and Daniel Snow, the reasons for treason by Americans during the Cold War can be broken down into several categories.35 Greed (money) tops their list at 53.4 percent, followed by ideology at 23.7 percent. Much further down this hierarchy of motivations is ingratiation (5.8 percent), that is, efforts to fulfill a friendship or love obligation, impress a superior, or seduce a sexual partner; and disgruntlement (2.9 percent) – typically on-the-job anger over failure to advance in one's career. A final “other” category accounted for 12.2 percent and includes individuals
who fantasized about possible James Bond escapades that might come from flirting with the KGB/SVR or some other foreign intelligence service (the “E” or ego group in MICE).

  The capture of several American citizens of Chinese heritage acting for Beijing as moles points to a change in motivations for treason in the United States, at least as discerned in a study authored by Katherine L. Herbig, a Defense Department contractor.36 Ideological causes were the driving influence for most traitors in the 1940s and during the early stages of the Cold War, according to her analysis. For example, with astounding naïveté about the intent of Joseph Stalin, Klaus Fuchs thought the Soviets would be able to advance world peace more effectively if the U.S.S.R. could match the United States in atomic weaponry. After the atomic spy cases of the 1940s and 1950s, though, Herbig (like Taylor and Snow) discovered that greed began to dominate the explanations for treachery until the end of the Cold War. In more recent years, she (like journalist Scott Shane) detects a trend toward naturalized Americans spying for their previous place of citizenship (China or South Korea, for example) out of a sense of devotion to their heritage. Many of these individuals have proclaimed loyalty to America, but to their nation of heritage as well – a duality that is obviously unacceptable when it leads to the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive national security information from the vaults of spy agencies in the United States.

  Catching spies

  Catching spies is not easy. Even super sleuth James Angleton, Chief of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, was taken in by the Soviets in at least one significant instance.37 A British MI6 liaison officer, Harold A. R. “Kim” Philby, befriended him in Washington while stationed there in the 1960s. The two met frequently for George­town lunches and other social events, and often compared notes on their counterintelligence experiences in battling the Soviet Union. Both were well educated (Yale and Harvard for Angleton, Cambridge for Philby), cultured and debonair, and seasoned CI specialists. Yet, all along, Philby was a Soviet mole, working with a number of other well-placed British intelligence officers who had been students with him at university (the so-called “Cambridge Spy Ring”) and elected to spy against their own country. When investigators came close to uncovering his true loyalties, Philby fled to Moscow. Angleton had already begun to have suspicions about his British lunch-mate and was starting his own inquiries; nonetheless, his long ties with the MI6 officer were clearly an embarrassment to the Agency's CI Chief when Philby's true allegiances became known.38