National Security Intelligence

by Loch K. Johnson

  The FISA Court has been made more effective by reforms adopted in 2013 by the Obama Administration – at congressional insistence through its enactment of the USA Freedom Act – such as requiring the presence of a public-interest attorney to raise objections against questionable arguments made by the intelligence agencies before the FIS Court, and preventing the NSA from storing telephone and social media logs regarding the communications patterns of American citizens. When the Bush Administration decided that the FISA law requiring wiretap warrants needed improvements to meet the requirements of counterterrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, then the proper remedy would have been for the President to ask Congress to amend the law. Instead, in secret the White House simply bypassed the law, without allowing SSCI and HPSCI an opportunity to fully review the ramped-up use of questionable NSA eavesdropping capabilities.

  In the instances when secret agencies have overreached in their counterintelligence operations, the nation has been reminded again of James Madison's warning, now etched in marble on the walls of the Library of Congress: “Power, lodged as it must be in the hands of human beings, is ever liable to abuse.” A free society cannot remain free for long without a reliable counterintelligence capability; yet, nor can it remain free for long without effective accountability over CI operations. Democracies are no longer democracies when a kid with the picket sign or the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate becomes, in the distorted vision of overzealous CI specialists, equivalent to a kid with a bomb.

  Notes

  1 Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 133.

  2 FBI counterintelligence officer, testimony, Huston Plan Hearings, Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (hereafter, Church Committee), U.S. Senate, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. (September 25, 1975), p. 137.

  3 Author's interview with William C. Sullivan, Boston, MA (June 10, 1975); the quote is from C. D. Brennan of the FBI Counterintelligence Branch to William C. Sullivan, memorandum (June 20, 1969), cited in the Huston Plan Hearings, Church Committee, Exhibit 6, p. 23.

  4 Presidential Talking Paper, prepared by Tom Charles Huston and used by President Richard Nixon, Oval Office (June 5, 1970), Church Committee files (February 2, 1975).

  5 White, Breach of Faith, p. 133.

  6 Tom Charles Huston, Memorandum to H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff (July 1970 – the precise day is unknown, but during the first two weeks of the month), Huston Plan Hearings, Church Committee, Exhibit 2, p. 2. Mail cover refers to an examination of the external contexts of a letter, such as the address and the date of postage – a first step before an intelligence agency decides to open a suspect's letter and read its contents.

  7 Huston, Memorandum to H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, p. 3.

  8 Richard M. Nixon, answer to Church Committee interrogatory No. 17 (March 3, 1976).

  9 For a more detailed account, see Loch K. Johnson, America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 133–56.

  10 Testimony of Tom Charles Huston, Huston Plan Hearings, Church Committee, p. 45.

  11 Executive Order 12333, Sec. 3.5, as amended on July 31, 2008.

  12 Mary Anne Weaver, “The Stranger,” The New Yorker (November 13, 1995), pp. 59–72.

  13 See Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). This crime was never solved.

  14 Jo Thomas, “Letter by McVeigh Told of Mind-Set,” New York Times (May 9, 1977), p. A1.

  15 For an account, see Stuart A. Wright, Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  16 In 2007, researcher Stuart A. Wright, drawing on a 2003 Associated Press investigation, charged that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had an informant inside the McVeigh camp who provided advanced warning about the Oklahoma City attack, but was ignored (Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing, p. 183).

  17 See An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence, Staff Report, Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate, S. Prt. 103–90, 103rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, November 1, 1994); David Wise, Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); and David Wise, Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (New York: Random House, 2003).

  18 Loch K. Johnson, The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America's Search for Security after the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  19 See Paul J. Redmond, “The Challenges of Counterintelligence,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 537–54, quote at p. 541.

  20 Report on Terrorism in the United States, Counterterrorism Center, Central Intelligence Agency, Langley, VA (July 1995), provided to the Aspin–Brown Commission in unclassified form (August 1995).

  21 See Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Amy B. Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  22 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 237.

  23 John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, with translations by Philip Redko and Steven Shabad, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). See also Timothy Gibbs, “Catching an Atom Spy: MI5 and the Investigation of Klaus Fuchs,” in Johnson, ed., Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, pp. 555–68.

  24 See, for example, Cleveland C. Cram, “Of Moles and Molehunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature, 1977–92,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, Report No. CSI 93–002 (October 1993).

  25 See David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); and John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, rev. edn (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

  26 Redmond, “The Challenges of Counterintelligence.”

  27 For profiles of Kampiles and many of the other traitors mentioned here, see the useful compilation by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, eds., The Encyclopedia of Espionage (New York: Gramercy Books, 1997).

  28 See David Wise, The Spy Who Got Away: The Inside Story of Edward Lee Howard (New York: Random House, 1988).

  29 See Seymour M. Hersh, “The Traitor,” The New Yorker (January 18, 1999), pp. 26–33.

  30 See David Johnston and Tim Weiner, “On the Trail of a C.I.A. Official, From Asia Travel to Bank Files,” New York Times (November 21, 1996), p. A1; and Walter Pincus and Roberto Suro, “Rooting Out the ‘Sour Apples’ Inside the CIA,” Washington Post, National Weekly Edition (November 25–December 1, 1996), p. 30.

  31 Tim Weiner, “Former South Korean Pleads Guilty in Spying Case,” New York Times (May 8, 1997), p. A16.

  32 Frederick L. Wettering, “Counterintelligence: The Broken Triad,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 13 (Fall 2000), pp. 265–99, quote at p. 276.

  33 For examples, see Percy Cradock, Know Your Enemy (London: John Murray, 2002); Michael S. Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Ranelagh, The Agency; and Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002).

  34 Scott Shane, “A Spy's Motivation: For Love of Another Country,” New York Times (April 20, 2008), p. WK 3.

  35 Stan A. Taylor and Daniel Snow, “Cold War Spies: Why They Spied and How They Got Caught,” Intelligence and National Security 12 (April 1997), pp. 101–25.

  36 Reported by Shane, “A Spy's Motivation.”

  37 On Angleton, see Seymour M. Hersh, “The Angleton Story,” New York Times Magazine (June 25, 1978), pp. 13ff.; William Hood, James Nolan, and Samuel Halpern, “Myths
Surrounding James Angleton: Lessons for American Counterintelligence,” Working Group on Intelligence Reform, Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (Washington, DC, 1994); Loch K. Johnson, “James Angleton and the Church Committee,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15 (Fall 2013), pp. 128–47; Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); and Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New York: Morrow, 1987), pp. 322–438.

  38 On Angleton's early suspicions about Philby, see Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 151.

  39 See the argument in Redmond, “The Challenges of Counterintelligence,” pp. 540, 547.

  40 Hersh, “The Angleton Story.”

  41 Henry Brandon, “The Spy Who Came and Then Told,” Washington Post, National Weekly Edition (August 24, 1987), p. 36.

  42 Robert Jervis, “Intelligence, Counterintelligence, Perception, and Deception,” in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber, eds., Vaults, Mirrors, and Masks: Rediscovering U.S. Counterintelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), pp. 69–79, quote at p. 75.

  43 The phrase comes from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem, “Gerontion” (1920).

  44 Redmond, “The Challenges of Counterintelligence,” p. 539.

  45 Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (the Silberman–Robb or WMD Commission), Report to the President of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2005), p. 490.

  46 Canadian intelligence scholar Wesley Warks notes in a similar vein: “Treason perpetually beckons and those with access to secrets will, on occasion, succumb to the temptations of leading a double life, and of the banalities of greed and folly”: “For Love of Money,” Ottawa Citizen (February 7, 2009), p. A16.

  47 J. H. Plumb, The Italian Renaissance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), pp. 102–3.

  48 See Edward Jay Epstein, “The Spy War,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, sec. 6 (September 28, 1980), p. 108.

  49 Communication to the author (April 15, 2010).

  50 See Mark Mazzetti, “Officer Failed to Warn CIA Before Attack,” New York Times (October 20, 2010), p. A1.

  51 Quoted by Ken Dilanian, “U.S. Counter-Terrorism Agents Still Hamstrung by Data-Sharing Failures,” Los Angeles Times (October 5, 2010), p. A1.

  52 Redmond, remarks to the Aspin–Brown Commission. Clapper offered similar observations several times in public statements, as he began to stress the cyber threat as early as 2013; see, for example, Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, “Spy Chief Calls Cyberattacks Top Threat to the U.S.,” New York Times (March 13, 213), p. A1. One example of the cyber threat: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has launched cyberattacks against dozens of U.S. banks and even attempted to take control of a small dam in a New York suburb: see David Sanger, “U.S. Indicts 7 Tied to Iranian Unit in Cyberattacks,” New York Times (March 25, 2016), p. A3. An important ethical issue is how far the democracies should go in using highly aggressive cyberattacks against rivals. Reportedly, U.S. intelligence agencies, operating in a joint effort with Israeli intelligence, inserted a Stuxnet virus into key Iranian computers as a means for sabotaging Tehran's nuclear weapons program. The operation is said to have wiped out about 20 percent of that nation's nuclear centrifuges: see Isabel Kershner, “Meir Dagan, Israeli Who Disrupted Iranian Nuclear Program, Dies at 81,” New York Times (March 18, 2016), p. B15; and David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012).

  53 For the China quote (from James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington), see Seymour M. Hersh, “The Online Threat,” The New Yorker (November 1, 2010), pp. 44–55, quote at p. 49. The data on cyber-espionage come from Bill Gertz, “Chinese Espionage and Intelligence Activities At All Time High, Experts Say,” Asia Times, Hong Kong (June 14, 2016); and Joseph Menn and Jim Finkle, “Chinese Economic Cyber-Espionage Plummets in U.S.,” Reuters (June 20, 2016). On the Russian front, a recent report based on osint imagery indicates that its Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has expanded dramatically in the past ten years, as displayed in a doubling of its floor space and a quadrupling of its parking capacity; based on data compiled by Allen Thomson and published in Secrecy News (July 13, 2016), p. 2. In 2016, U.S. counterintelligence accused Russian spies of hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee during the presidential election. Some knowledgeable observers believed that Russia's President, Vladimir V. Putin, had ordered the cyberattack as a means for finding information that would embarrass the Democratic Party and advance the fortunes of his preferred candidate, the GOP nominee Donald Trump. If true, the attack represented a serious and reckless attempt to manipulate an American presidential election; see David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russians Hacked D.N.C.,” New York Times (July 27, 2016), p. A1.

  54 On the spy ring, see Clifford J. Levy, “Turncoat Aided in Thwarted Russian Spies, Article Says,” New York Times (November 12, 2010), p. A6. On the relationship between cops and spies in the United States, see James E. Baker, In the Common Defense: National Security Law for Perilous Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  55 Redmond, “The Challenges of Counterintelligence,” p. 540.

  56 See the essays on counterintelligence in the following “handbooks”: Johnson, ed., Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence.; Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence, Vol. 4: Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism, Defending the National against Hostile Forces (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007); and Loch K. Johnson, ed., Handbook of Intelligence Studies (New York: Routledge, 2007). See also Raymond J. Batvinis, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); and Theoharis, Chasing Spies.

  57 Declassified CIA memorandum, Church Committee, p. 167.

  58 Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, “Success Against al-Qaeda Cited,” Washington Post (September 30, 2009), p. 1A.

  59 George Tenet, public testimony, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission), April 14, 2004, p. 5, cited by Zegart, Spying Blind, p. 113.

  60 Jervis, “Intelligence, Counterintelligence, Perception, and Deception,” p. 71.

  61 Jervis, “Intelligence, Counterintelligence, Perception, and Deception,” p. 77; see also Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War (New York: Scribner, 2004).

  62 See Mayer, The Dark Side.

  63 Duncan Campbell, “Afghan Prisoners Beaten to Death,” Guardian (March 7, 2003), p. 1.

  64 For arguments that harsh interrogation is inappropriate and yields poor results, see Loch K. Johnson, “Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art,” Studies in Intelligence 51 (December 2007), pp. 43–6; William R. Johnson, “Tricks of the Trade: Counterintelligence Interrogation,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 1 (1986), pp. 103–33; Mayer, The Dark Side; and Ali H. Soufan (an FBI interrogator), “What Torture Never Told Us,” New York Times (September 6, 2009), p. WK 9, who refers to this approach as “ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive.”

  65 Quoted by Toby Harden, “CIA ‘Pressure’ on Al Qaeda Chief,” Washington Post (March 6, 2003), p. A1.

  66 Letter written by George Washington in 1777, private collection, Walter Pforzheimer, Washington, DC, reprinted in the Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal (December 1983), p. 7.

  67 Quoted in Paisley Dodds, “Chief of Britain's MI6 Takes Unusual Public Stand to Defend Spies’ Work,” Washington Post (October 29, 2010), p. A11.

  68 Testimony, Hearings, Joint Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (the Inouye–Hamilton Committee), U.S. Congress (July 1987), p. 159.

  69 Bill Moyers, “Moyers: The Secret Government, the Constitution in Crisis,” Public Affairs Television (November 4, 1987).

  70 Quoted in the New York Times (February 26, 197
6), p. A1.

  71 Raoul Berger, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 7.

  72 See, for instance, the commentary by Senator (and former astronaut) John H. Glenn (D, Ohio), “The Mini-Hiroshima Near Cincinnati,” New York Times (January 24, 1989), p. A27.

  73 Berger, Executive Privilege, p. 14.

  74 403 U.S. 713, 91 S.Ct. 2140, 29 L. Ed. 2nd 822 (1971); emphasis added.

  75 See the series of New York Times articles published on October 24, 2010, especially pp. A1, A11.

  76 For example, in a remark to the author, Athens, GA (July 4, 1983).

  77 Author's interview with Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho), Washington, DC (October 16, 1976); see also his “Which Secrets Should Be Kept Secret?” Washington Post (March 14, 1977), p. A27. The Agee book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was published by Penguin (Harmondsworth, UK) in 1975 and made the author a pariah in the United States and many European democracies.

  78 Quoted in Alistair Buchan, “Questions about Vietnam,” in Richard Falk, ed., The Vietnam War and International War, Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 345. With respect to not even the White House knowing about some intelligence activities, Clark Clifford (the author of the National Security Act of 1947 and an advisor to several presidents) has noted: “I believe on a number of occasions, a plan for covert action has been presented to the NSC and authority is requested for the CIA to proceed from point A to point B. The authority will be given and the action will be launched. When point B is reached, the persons in charge feel it is necessary to go to point C, and they assume that the original authorization gives them such a right. From point C, they go to D and possibly E, and even further”; testimony to the Church Committee, Hearings on Covert Action, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC (December 4, 1975), quoted in Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry Revisited: The Church Committee Confronts America's Spy Agencies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015), p. 148.